Internet Trends Point to Huge Upside of Mobile Internet

There is so much market information available today that sometimes it can obscure the bigger picture, rather than illuminate. Not so with former securities analyst and current venture capitalist Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends report, released this week. Meeker was present at the creation of the modern day Internet while at Morgan Stanley in the 1990s, and became famous by seeing very early the transformative power of online connectivity.

Now at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, she continues to publish reports looking at macro Internet trends. Eloqua’s All About Revenue blog does a nice job of pulling out four slides especially interesting to Internet marketers in the latest year end update.

Mostly these slides document an increasingly rapid move to mobile. The most fundamental one to me is shown above. KPCB is predicting that 2013 will be the year that the global number of  smartphones and tablets will exceed desktops and notebooks. Very soon the majority of Internet sessions will be done from a mobile device, and the pace of this move to the mobile Internet has been amazing.

The other slide that surprised me somewhat showed a disconnect between eyeballs and mobile advertising. This data is U.S. only and compares time spent by consumers using particular media vs. the percentage of ad dollars devoted to that media. For example, consumers spent 43 percent of their media time watching television in 2011, and television received 42 percent of total ad spending in 2011. Makes sense and seems right in synch.

However, according to the slide Americans spent 10 percent of their media time on mobile devices, and mobile received only 1 percent of total ad spending. That’s a disconnect that we can expect is wider this year, and suggests a big untapped potential for mobile advertising.

This potential is why I just received an old fashioned letter from Google, offering me a $50 credit to give mobile advertising a try. All I need to do is go to google/ads/get50 to get started.

In addition to Internet trends, Meeker evaluates the United States using the metrics of a business. She calls this “USA, Inc.” and finds a lot to be worried about. See below for her entire presentation — long but time well spent.