5 Things the Future Holds, According to the World's Most Elite Superforecasters What'll happen to the price of advertising? Will more female founders get funded? We had Good Judgment's superforecasters answer these questions and more.

You may have read our story about the forecasting company Good Judgment and its worldwide team of superforecasters. Now it's time to put them to the test.

Their crystal ball is pretty fancy, based on science and a system that has helped them outpredict competitors for 10 years. But posing questions to them requires finesse. That's because in the land of forecasting, language really matters.

Good Judgment's CEO, Warren Hatch, remembers the time his team was asked, Will North Korea launch a new multistage missile? "As it turned out, Kim Jong Il pressed the button and it exploded on the pad," he says. "So did it launch? Well, if you're a policy or political analyst looking for attempts, yeah. If you're a defense analyst looking for capability, it did not. So getting the question right, so that you're forecasting the same thing, is critical."

Entrepreneur submitted five questions. Hatch's team helped rewrite them for specificity, and then posted them on Good Judgment Open — a free platform where superforecasters and anyone else can mingle and forecast the future. (You can even try it yourself! Visit gjopen.com.) Our questions prompted immediate debate, and forecasters tinkered with their answers as new information came in. On the following pages, we've compiled the results (with some insightful number crunching from Good Judgment's data scientists).

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Here, in the best estimates of some of the world's top forecasters, is how things will play out.

Will more startups launch in 2022, or fewer?

The answer is both up and down: It'll be more than 2020 but fewer than 2021.

Here's how we phrased the question to the superforecasters: How many business applications will be made in the U.S. in 2022? This allowed the team to drill into the specific trends of business applications, and 85 percent of the forecasters concluded that there will be more than 4.8 million new applications.

Let's put that into context. The pandemic turbocharged entrepreneurship, and nearly 4.5 million applications were filed in 2020 — a 24 percent jump from the previous year. The numbers aren't in for 2021 as we write this, but the forecasters almost unanimously (98 percent) believe applications will have spiked to 5.5 million or more. In 2022, however, they believe that number will fall back down a little.

What drove the forecast? The team considered whether, as the country reopens, more job opportunities will reduce the pressure for people to start their own businesses. But of course, that may not prove true. There were tons of unfilled jobs in America this year because people didn't want them. The quit rate in August was the highest it has ever been, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

If those trends cancel each other out, forecasters make another point: The Census numbers, based on business applications filed, don't necessarily capture all the solopreneurs who are gigging it and essentially running their own thing. But even just looking at the official count, our forecasters' prediction suggests that 2020 was not a freak year; it's essentially the new normal. Good news for entrepreneurs.

Will more VC funding finally go to women founders, or less?

Although women have always had a hard time raising funds, 2020 was dismal. Investments in startups with female-only founders dropped to only 2.3 percent of overall venture capital. And then, as the economy began to look up again this year, the number slipped even further. In September, Crunchbase reported it had withered to 2.2 percent. Having a man on board as a cofounder helped — those startups got 12 percent of the pie — but it's not a great picture for women entrepreneurs.

Considering all the coverage by the press and calls for moving the needle, you might expect to see a significant change next year. But Good Judgment's forecasters weren't optimistic. In fact, a sizable percentage of them — nearly a third! — think sole female founders won't fare any better in 2022; possibly, they'll do worse. Collectively, though, the forecast is that women will get at least 2.5 percent of total VC funding and as much as 3.5 percent.

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Why is there a gender gap? There has been a lot of talk about the scarcity of women VCs who make funding decisions and the tendency for investors in general to favor entrepreneurs who look like themselves. But for this forecast, Good Judgment's crew put a lot of weight on childcare. The impact of having kids at home during 2020 meant mothers were less able to think about starting a business and trying to raise money in the first place. "And those effects will likely linger for some time," one forecaster says. "Even if a woman starts working on a side hustle now that kids are back to school, she is not likely to raise capital before the end of 2022."

Will online advertising prices go up, or down?

After years of steady declines, the price of posting an ad online started growing like a cornstalk in the summer of 2020. Much of this is driven by the tech giants, as their inventory got crunched. Amazon's ad rates jumped more than 50 percent this spring from a year earlier.

Good Judgment put it to the forecasters this way: What will the U.S. producer price index for internet advertising sales be in June 2022? But we'll translate the results out of econ-talk. In short, Good Judgment's forecasters don't have great news. The majority said the price of online advertising will go up from what it was in September 2021 until at least June 2022.

"The driver behind the turn upward in July 2020 is probably losing some steam," wrote one forecaster, "as more and more places open back up and people aren't as captive to their phones and computers as they were before." He thinks prices are near the top and will gradually start sliding back down. But it won't happen fast.

Will office vacancy rates continue to go up, or down?

With the massive adoption of remote work, are whole downtowns going to sit empty? The forecasters predict some stabilization — but not a wave of grand reopenings.

Midway this year, the vacancy rate for office space was at nearly 15 percent, which is up from 11.4 percent before the pandemic. According to Colliers, which collects this data, in the second quarter of 2021 alone, empty offices increased in seven out of the top 10 markets.

"If vacancies are still rising rapidly after vaccine rollout and lower case counts," one forecaster wrote, it suggests "structural change that is not going to reverse." Another puts it this way: "Many businesses that survived 2020 and thus far in 2021 based on programs like PPP are facing new obstacles like supply chain issues, reluctant workers, and significantly higher energy costs. I think it's more likely than not that we haven't seen the peak yet." Once that passes, he continues, "I do not see office space vacancies falling as quickly as they rose like we saw with unemployment."

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Overall, Good Judgment forecasters predict that by the end of 2022, the percent of vacant offices will sit between 12.5 and 15.5 percent. But within that range, most say it will start to come down from where it is at the end of 2021 (at 14.7 percent).

The one caveat is, how many tenants are stuck in leases and are just waiting to leave when they expire? That could lead to an unexpected uptick in vacancies. Hatch points out, too, that any companies going to hybrid models may downsize when their lease comes up for renewal — or even switch to a coworking space. "This is the great hope for WeWork, if they haven't blown it," he says.

Will people shop more online in 2022, or less?

The pandemic clearly drove a surge in online shopping in the U.S. But as stores have reopened this year and vaccines are available, how much of the click-to-buy trend will stick around? We're not out of the COVID-19 woods yet, with Delta and its possible cousins lurking who knows where. So Good Judgment asked forecasters, What percentage of U.S. retail sales will be made online in the fourth quarter of 2022?

The prediction: With 81 percent of the team on board, the forecast is for more than 13.5 percent of all sales to be made on the internet by the end of next year. That's roughly where things stood at the end of 2020. In other words, no change from COVID-19 times.

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The commenters debated about people's natural instinct to socialize, and how much they're busting to get back into stores. But the numbers over time tell a compelling story. Since 2015, online shopping has been inching up about 1 percent a year, except in 2020, when it spiked. "With additional business moving to digital sales and the recent digital trade agreement with Japan," says one commenter, referring to the 2019 deal that promotes e-commerce between the countries, "the percentage of online retail sales will increase near the standard [around 1 percent] annual levels. Unless there are additional restrictions imposed on the population, similar to COVID, it is not likely that the numbers will exceed 15 percent prior to 2023."

In other words, digital shopping is not going away. But it's also not going bonkers.