21 Internet trends from the annual KPCB trends report
For anybody that doesn’t know, Mary Meeker is rightly famed for her intelligent selection and presentation of the key trends of digital business, so today we’re sharing a summary of her latest report with what we’ve jumped out to us from a marketing perspective - it's hot off the press this week. The full deck is 164 slides, I found I needed two coffees...
Our summary
Mobile, mobile, mobile. We're all going mobile in a hurry. This is where Meeker's report has focused for the last few years. The Internet as a whole is growing, led by developing countries of course, and mobile is growing faster.
Video is growing in power for brands who seize it. Television viewers are evolving to embrace the second screen for interactive content, while also ditching TV for online video content.
Outside of mobile and video, cybersecurity is a key issue for business, and China is fast becoming a tech superpower. Equally, any ‘tech bubble’ that exists hasn’t swelled anywhere near as big as the one that caused the dot com crash in 2000, so we can all breathe a sigh of relief there.
Here's the full deck in all its glory:
- Internet Access Growth Slowing, But Not On Mobile: The total number of Internet users is growing less than 10% a year, outside of countries such as India and Nigeria.
- 30% Of All Mobile Users Are Now Smartphone Users: So if you only worry about the web, you’re in trouble. There’s also a 81% rise in mobile data traffic with video as a strong driver for that.
- Tablet Shipments Increased 53% In 2013: People are still rabidly buying up tablets with no sense of slowing just yet.
- Mobile Now Accounts For 25% Of All Web Usage: That’s up from 14% a year ago. In Europe mobile is 16% of all web usage, up from 8% last year, whereas in North America, mobile is 19% of all usage up from 11% last year.
- 20% Of Consumer Media Time Is On Mobile: But mobile gets just 4% of ad spend, leaving a big opportunity for mobile ad spend growth. Print ad spend will decrease to balance out, as it gets 19% of spend but accounts for just 5% of media consumption time. And this is despite the fact that data costs are still very high, what happens when they come down?
- Internet Advertising Grew 16% This Year: Mobile grew 47% yet only makes up 11% of the total - lots of room for mobile advertising to grow. Google’s average revenue per user is now 6X Facebook’s, and Facebook’s is 2X Twitter’s.
- Mobile Apps Rule: They make up 68% of money made on mobile whilst advertising makes up 32% of mobile monetisation. Is it easier to get users to pay 69p than make them stick around to see 69p worth of ads? Users want quick, straight-forward apps that nail a single purpose, avoid bloated features that bury important functionality. Is this why tech giants are buying or building standalone apps?
- Cybersecurity Threats Are Intensifying: Huge breaches like eBay recently show us that all businesses need to take this seriously. The world is changing.
- Social Networking Is Changing: From broadcast to private sharing, we’d increasingly rather not share a little with a lot of people, we’re sharing a lot with a few close friends. See the rise of giant messaging apps.
- Facebook Leads Social Traffic Referrals with 21%: Pinterest contributes 7% and Twitter 1% of total social referral traffic to other sites. BuzzFeed and Huffington Post dominate on Facebook, while the BBC and New York Times rule Twitter. Hard news appears to fare better on Twitter, while human interest stories and memes win on Facebook.
- BuzzFeed Is Here: Unique visitors are up 3X in the last year to 130 million monthlies thanks to careful headline optimisation and relatable content.
- User Generated And Shared Content: Photo sharing is up 50% Over 2013 so far in 2014, driven in large by growth in WhatsApp and Snapchat.We upload a lot including fitness data and events.
- More And Leaner Startups: It costs less to get a business off the ground than ever before. In large due to the phenomenal fall of cloud computing costs.
- Mobile Interfaces Are Changing Everything: From hailing a taxi (Uber), finding local businesses (Yelp), booking a hotel room (Airbnb) or listening to music (Spotify) — it’s all seemingly mobile now.
- Businesses Are Mining Data: But only analysing a fraction of it. Brands can’t understand the data fast enough.
- Screens Are Proliferating: Thanks to the rapid adoption of smartphones and tablets, there’s almost always a glowing rectangle in sight.
- The Second Screen Era Has Arrived: This opens big opportunities for companion content. It also helps us avoid commercials, after all, why watch untargeted TV commercials when you can tweet, post, comment or share?
- TV Channels vs YouTube: TV channels are growing as fast as apps and so changing the broadcast model to one of interactive content. Yet at the same time don’t underestimate YouTube’s huge audience. Niche content creators are finding legions of fans, becoming the new movie stars. Social media stars are finding brands willing to pay them to produce branded content.
- Mobile’s Share Of Online Video Viewing Grew 2X: Mobile viewing time is up sharply year-on-year, users are watching longer format content on the small screen too.
- Smartphone Penetration Grew Around 17% In Top Markets Like USA (59%) And UK (68%): At the same time mobile traffic’s percentage of total Internet traffic is growing 1.5X per year, and it’s expected to keep growing that fast or faster. Our world is going mobile fast.
- Finally One for UKIP (in-joke in the UK): Immigrants Build American Tech Companies: Does this indicate that countries need to reform their student and high-skilled immigration policies if they want to grow their economies?
