What does 2026 have in store and what can we learn from 2025?
New challenges – and channels – for traffic generation; new payment tools; new markets; and even new business models for network operators – this is what the year ahead means for the telemedia sector.
The news and features that have flowed out the telemedia industry across the Christmas and New Year period are a sharp reflection of how much the industry has changed in 2025 and very much sets the scene for the year ahead.
And these changes – and challenges – cut right across the whole value chain, from the content that will be popular to how it is paid for and how it is put in front of consumers. So, let’s dive into what we think will be happening in 2026 and hinting at what we will be looking at in the conference sessions around our four live events this year at Telemedia Barcelona, Telemedia Dubai, Telemedia Johannesburg and Telemedia Marbella.
Traffic generation: finding those eyeballs
One of the themes of telemedia events and our online coverage across 2025 has been the marked change in how traffic is generated. The established model of affiliate marketing had come under pressure from Google across 2024 and 2025, with the search giant establishing itself as the main traffic source in many markets. Other more regionally focussed search engines elsewhere also came to prominence.
However, this search ad hegemony shifted in 2025, with social media marketing becoming an ever-more powerful traffic generator – it is after all where most of the younger consumer base is these days.
As we report, according to Top Marketing Agency TikTok is overtaking traditional search behaviours and is changing what Gen Z in particular is looking for. Meanwhile, a 2025 WARC report finds that 86% of Gen Z internet users search on TikTok weekly, nearly matching traditional search engines. Among these users who search on TikTok, 38% start on traditional platforms before moving to TikTok, while 34% begin on TikTok before switching to traditional search engines.
Gen Z respondents to the WARC study prefer social and video platforms over traditional search in almost every category. For example, they prefer looking up beauty and fashion advice 26% more on TikTok than on traditional search platforms.
Campaigns that include TikTok Search Ads are driving measurable results, with activations in the US and Canada achieving twice the purchase lift compared to mid-funnel campaigns without search. For enterprise advertisers, the lift climbed to 2.2x, while enterprise retail campaigns saw a 1.9x purchase lift and stronger incremental ROAS.
Google isn’t dead for traffic, but the mix of where content leads are drawn from is changing and will continue to evolve in 2026. AI discovery is of course going to upset all this again, adding a third marketing dimension to search ads and social ads for service providers to also consider.
For example, AI-driven summaries are rapidly changing how users interact with Google search results. Nearly 20% of searches in the UK now feature AI-generated overviews, providing concise answers at the top of the page and often pushing traditional organic results below the fold. Analysts predict this could rise to 30–35% by 2026, particularly for informational queries.
Digital Marketing Strategist Andrew Witts of Studio 36 Digital believes that brands now must – and can – make their content “AI-friendly”, maintain relevance and potentially capture attention in a SERP environment where AI increasingly acts as the first point of contact for users.
Messaging: a new traffic generator?
Interestingly, as these digital marketing channels battle it out, yet more traffic gen competition is likely to arrive from an unlikely quarter: messaging.
A study out in early January suggests that, in the broader ecommerce market, consumers in the US now prefer redeeming offers and buying goods from brands’ SMS, MMS and even RCS messaging, surpassing email for the first time.
The survey from US-based engagement platform Vibes, suggests that consumers now prefer redeeming offers via text message more than email and apps, with 41% preferring text, 39% email and only 20% via a brand’s mobile app.
The survey finds that 78% of consumers say they have made a direct purchase from a brand’s SMS or MMS text message, up from 75% last year – some 65% having done so within the past year. Interestingly, 81% of consumers showed a marked preference for RCS messaging over SMS.
This is the first time in Vibes’ nine annual surveys that text messaging has surpassed email, says the company.
The move towards AI as a discovery tool also plays into the hand of messaging. As we reported in the most recent issue of Telemedia Magazine, the rise of agentic commerce is going to be a boon for messaging apps.
Why? Agentic commerce is going to radically reshape how consumers find and buy things, but it is also going to reshape the messaging market. Think about it: agentic commerce basically means AI agents that can find, compare and buy things on behalf of the user – often via chat. That’s directly in the slipstream of RCS and WhatsApp, which are already the main “commerce chat” channels.
Data from Salesforce finds that 66% of online adults prefer messaging apps like WhatsApp to talk to businesses, while data from Infobip find RCS catching up. In fact, RCS is an agent-native channel with more than a billion users and, with Vibes showing that RCS is already hot in ecommerce, 2026 will see all these channels combine. If this is where consumers are heading for general ecommerce, then you can bet the farm that it will soon be a force in telemedia traffic generation.
Payments: shift to super apps
We’ve seen how consumers will find services, but how will they be paying for them? Globally, the telemedia sector has continued to be underpinned by DCB and that will be a strong feature of 2026 too. However, DCB is set to be just one way to pay in many markets – presenting both an opportunity and a challenge to the industry.
As with traffic generation and ecommerce, payments is rapidly changing for consumers. Convenience is key and the rise of wallets such as Apple Pay, Google Pay and more is seeing a distinct shift towards creating card flows for telemedia services, even in markets that have traditionally been viewed as being ‘low banked’. You can’t keep the kids off Apple Pay in our house and that seems to be an increasingly universal truth.
What is interesting is that in these markets things are changing the most rapidly. DCB dominates, but services such as M-PESA have inculcated a love of mobile money in some key markets that has led to many others looking at how to use wallets.
While it may not be the card-wallet axis seen in the developed world – although this too is reshaping payments and services in these markets – it is creating something even more: super apps.
Now, we have been predicting the rise of super apps for several years, and now seems to be their time. Where highly banked markets are seeing wallets as an easy way to pay, in developing regions wallets are seen to be supporting “cards + mobile money + bank transfers + more”. Why? Digital wallets bring the kind of ease, tokenisation-based security and flexibility that appeals to consumers across all income levels and even in parts of the world where traditional banking remains patchy.
Data from Capital One’s Shopping Research suggest a steady rise in wallet usage across MENA and Africa, with the report finding that digital wallets were used in 27% of online payments in the Middle East and Africa in 2024, versus 22% for debit cards. While that still leaves space for improvement, the trend is clear and paint a compelling case for telemedia gateways to integrate cards into wallets rather than rely solely on DCB. And once that has been done, other services are likely to be added that sit around discovery and payments and, lo, a super app is born – the one that does the most being the one that wins out in what is set to be a highly competitive market.
Content: video at volume
Against the backdrop of these relatively seismic changes in traffic generation and payments, the content side of the telemedia market looks somewhat static. It will all be video led, but rather than radical developments, it is set to see ‘more of’, rather than deep change in content type.
The biggest trend in content will be the sheer volume required to keep pace with demand. The somewhat unforeseen consequence of the rise of shorts is that refresh has to be on the scale of days rather than weeks.
Luckily, AI has the mass production side of things covered, however fresh content types within this are going to be needed – and that is still likely to remain (for the short term at least) driven by humans on both the demand and supply sides.
We have already seen the rise of microdramas that have their own click bait built in and we expect to see more of this across all markets in the coming months. There is also going to be continued growth in wellbeing and educational content, as well as increasingly regionalised offerings around sports, esports, games, music and more.
The rise of mainstream streaming will also help shape the kinds of adjacent content that is seen across telemedia, with immersive add-ons to all genres akin to what we have already seen with sports.
The key thing is that what we will see if as a vast increase in the volume of video content and, as AI perfects making it, higher quality, mass-produced, AI-generated material – slop it is not.
New opportunities emerge everywhere
As a result of all of these changes and trends, established markets globally are set for strong growth, and many new markets are also set to emerge.
We have already seen something of a renaissance in Europe of telemedia services, with many now paid for by cards and bank transfers. The hunger for content and the volume at which AI can produce it is feeding this here as much as it is in other more emergent markets.
The rising cost of living in developed markets is also helping to drive the micro-billed segment of telemedia in developed markets. Expect more of this in 2026.
However, it is across MENA and Africa where we shall see significant development. The roll out of 5G in a raft of MENA countries – not least in Algeria at the tail end of 2025 – bodes well for the region. Markets such as Algeria are joined by Morocco and Iraq, which also both welcomes 5G, are joined by Jordan, Oman, Bahrain and Kuwait, all of which offer considerable opportunity for telemedia players in the region in the coming months and years.
The total addressable mVAS/telemedia revenue in these countries alone is likely to exceed $2 billion a year by 2030, based on conservative shares of their telecom and digital-transformation spend.
Youth demographics, high data/4G use, early 5G rollout, strong government digital programmes and under-served demand for Arabic content, gaming and fintech are all driving these markets and the players able to plug into carrier billing and wallets, localise content and navigate each regulator’s rules – often via regional aggregators and API platforms like Zain’s Dizlee and others. Expect to learn more about this in the run up to Telemedia Dubai in April 2026.
Africa too is blossoming. As we reported in December 2025, Burak Akinci, CEO : MTN Digital Services told delegates at AfricaCom that “Africa is not waiting for the future we are building it.”
This is reflected in the slew of stories from the continent, where telcos, services providers, billers and content creators are often at the forefront of next gen services. Leveraging Starlink, revamping telco operations, conneceting to international fibre backbones, Africa’s telcos and SPs are all over it and Telemedia Johannesburg will be the place to see this vibrant market it action.
The markets of LatAm, Asia and South Asia are also seeing growth and expansion and it is likely that as this grows and develops, we are going to be seeing more of these regions in Telemedia News and at our Telemedia events in 2026. So, happy new year to you all – exciting times lie ahead.
