Image courtesy of KPCB, Tumbler and the New Yorker
Mary Meeker of Kleiner, Perkins Caufield and Byers has released her latest Internet Trends Report. Meeker is a long-time technology analyst who made her name during the early years of explosive Internet growth. I wrote about her 2012 Trends report late last year.
This year the presentation has grown to 117 pages. Since I doubt many readers will devote that much time to the slideshare preso below, I highlight below some of the more interesting findings to me.
One thing that struck me was despite the humorous graphic above, there isn’t a word about online privacy in the report. I’ve written many times here that advertisers need to become more transparent about how consumers are tracked online and the services they get in exchange. Otherwise the advertising opportunities promoted by Meeker might not materialize.
She leads off with advertising, no doubt since that is what currently supports the commercial Internet ecosystem:
- There remains a large gap in the amount of consumer time spent vs. advertising spend for online advertising compared to traditional advertising, especially in mobile. This is a $20 billion opportunity according to Meeker.
- The Internet is driving globalization — no surprise but the data used to validate is interesting. Most of the top Internet properties are “made in America,” but 81 percent of Internet traffic is outside the U.S.
- We’re living in a golden age of content development — increasingly consumers create content, not just, well, consume it. (Maybe we need a new name?) There was a 9X increase in content digitally created and shared from 2007 — 2011. Much of this growth is in the form of “win-win” services like Waze and Yelp – you contribute to a service you benefit from the service.
- Explosive adoption of tablets — growing at 3x the rate the iPhone did when first released.
- Unlike the move from desktop to notebook computing, a different set of vendors are poised to reap the benefits of tablet and smartphone adoption, led by Apple and Samsung
- The adoption cycle for consumer technology is accelerating. Smartphones and tablets are still growing exponentially, and the next product form, “Wearables,” is already emerging.
- Meeker devotes a lot of space to immigration policy, making the case that turning away skilled immigrants in the STEM fields hurts the American technology industry.
That’s my take of the takeaways — here’s the slideshare presentation if you’d like to decide for yourself.