Should you anticipated 2025 to be full of espresso-headed ballerinas and sequential numeric memes, nicely, I don’t imagine you. Predicting the longer term is an inexact science, particularly when the web’s risky tradition turns into a part of the equation.
That stated, there are data-driven types of divination which can be a bit extra exact than palmistry or tea leaves — and that’s the method Whatnot is taking. The digital public sale home checked out its fastest-growing classes to make some guesses in regards to the path the stay buying ecosystem will take within the 12 months to return.
Whatnot, which just lately introduced its second nine-digit funding spherical of 2025, retains its customers glued to its shoppable stay streams for a mean of 80 minutes per day. That watch time supplies Whatnot with a deep trove of information, which the corporate mined to supply its 2026 insights.Subscribe to get the most recent creator newsSubscribe
The primary pattern talked about within the ensuing report is a phenomenon that has grown all through 2025: Curiosity in girls’s sports activities is on the rise. Whatnot famous that the proportion of feminine customers on its platform has doubled year-over-year, and buying and selling playing cards that includes WNBA gamers have turn out to be a preferred public sale merchandise for customers of all genders. In 2025, search visitors for these playing cards elevated 3 times sooner than for NBA buying and selling playing cards. On the high of the pyramid, a Caitlin Clark rookie card broke data by fetching a $660,000 value on Whatnot.
Historic cash additionally loved a glow-up in 2025, and Whatnot expects that uptick to hold into 2026. Neglect NFTs — the new new types of different foreign money are outdated types of fee made out of gold, silver, and platinum. All of these components noticed their Whatnot search visitors greater than double this 12 months.
A few of Whatnot’s 2026 predictions align with elemental sides of web tradition. Nostalgia, for instance, has all the time been a giant deal on-line, however Whatnot expects subsequent 12 months’s consumers to retreat additional into the previous by revisiting traditional toys like Furbies and Beanie Infants. I don’t know what’s inflicting the sudden surge of early 2000s nostalgia, however I’m going in charge all of these Joey episodes that made it to YouTube.
However the web of the longer term received’t simply repeat the latest previous. Whatnot, for instance, is seeing a transparent pivot to louder style selections like patterned shirts and daring make-up. So if we are saying goodbye to the “clear woman aesthetic” in 2026, don’t say that Whatnot didn’t warn you.
Whatnot is just not the primary platform to aim any such clairvoyance. Final 12 months, for instance, Pinterest guessed that pickles and boho outfits would spike in 2025. Whereas we’re nonetheless ready for a few of these predictions to return true (the place is all of the cream soda content material I used to be promised?), research like these take the temperature of latest social media tradition. Even the largest stay buying success story of 2025 can’t view the subsequent 12 months with excellent accuracy, but when we spend the subsequent 12 months speaking about drachmas, skills, and items of eight, I for one might be happy.
