Mary Meeker’s 2017 internet trends report [pdf]
kpcb.com
kpcb.com
That's almost 20% of a waking day. Staggering. I wonder if it actually replaced anything or if it's predominantly multitasking, like watching tv became tv + phone, or people listening to Spotify/Pandora/podcasts instead of the radio.
Face time sessions are fairly frequent for the kids, 30 minutes at a shot.
I mean if I'm watching netflix on web/mobile that should count as TV watching time not as internet/smartphone time. Because who (with acces to on-demand video) even watches broadcast TV anymore?
A lot of people (obviously), myself included. Usually as a time wasting activity. Unfortunately no on demand service really competes with the channel surfing use case yet.
Check the sources, they're mostly investment bank and accountancy consultancy sales documents. They aren't audited and apparently there are no adverse consequences for lying like a rug in such things,
While true, these are usually the only estimates that exist. Maybe once every ten years Pew or someone will do a study, but not often. Even though I don't put much faith in these numbers, it's at least nice to be able to read through the original decks and see what the claims are.
Following the dotcom bomb, the press went looking for heads & Mary Meeker was certainly amongst the ones they sought, but to my knowledge there wasn't an evidence of wrong doing, nor has she been found to have shared bad data?
Over the years I've always been fascinated to read her internet trends report, and this is the first time it feels tired. Important to understand the trends in China for sure, but few surprises overall.
I think that the author's most powerful point is his final one: "The U.S. economy’s creative-destruction engine is broken." People aren't moving around to where the jobs are as much as they used to. They're not moving between jobs as much as they used to. They're not creating many new businesses, and they're certainly not creating new industries.
Technology holds so much promise, but there's an extremely severe dearth of capital. And I say that at a time when investors are supposedly looking high and low for places to invest their money.
Well, I say that this is what happens when you consolidate too much; there's nothing left to invest in, and no way for new players to enter unless one of the bloated, festering incumbent market-shoggoths finally bites it. That's where we're headed if we don't start to break up our economy's local behemoths. Or at least if we don't start empowering individuals more. If people made enough money and had the legal freedom to pursue their dreams in their off hours, more of them would probably be inclined to do so.
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/so-wher...
In my observation that notion gets thrown around in large batches about every 3 to 5 years consistently over the last 20+ years re the Internet & Web. Then crypto currencies take off. Or mobile via smartphones hits. Or ecommerce takes off. Or social takes off. Or search gets drastically better and good content becomes easier to find, spurring a boom in its creation. Or SaaS takes over. Or streaming media starts crushing old media in tv, movies, music, etc. - ten years ago Netflix was a $1 billion market cap DVD distributor and Spotify barely existed. Or cloud computing - and thousands of follow-on services - finally becomes cost effective & accessible, then everyone moves to adopt it. And then AI becomes cheap, accessible, and distributed everywhere. And then...
Internet & mobile innovation is in fact about to accelerate.
Come on! Theres 350+ slides with a lot of good data points. Just some quick things I made a mental note of:
- half the world is on the internet. Thats incredible - and the implications are huge now and will be even more so as we get to full coverage...
- ad blockers are popular everywhere and growing. Mobile ad blocker usage is >50% in Malaysia. Why? Also China mobile > 10%
- The USA Income Statement was a nice visual. USA has been running a net deficit on the order of 18% for the last 25 years. Is it sustainable?
~ 30% of "revenue" comes from individual income taxes. Only 9% from corporations. Is that fair?
There's also data about WhatsApp popularity and usage.
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2015/511/
Presumably there's something similar on Android.
They would have no reason not to sell the feature of "better user experience" from blocking ads / trackers.
I use https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/purify-block-ads-and-trackin...
I use AdBlock Fast, but I say "use" casually since it's just an app you install and you're done with it. I never actually opened it after installing it months ago.
No more ads ever on mobile.
The bandwidth caps at my grandparents' Delhi house being super-draconian (they're about as upper-middle/upper-class as you'd expect). Though I guess their cap (a couple GB) is in this middle range where it seems low from the perspective of video streaming etc (and I don't even really watch TV) but is high enough that ads aren't really presenting much of a problem. This would be in contrast to the presumably much-tinier caps (and correspondingly higher incentive to block ads) that mobile users are presented with.
At any rate, thanks for the explanations!
Disclaimer - I led the India section of this report.
Is that on mobile only, desktop only, or both? From your last sentence about Jio, looks like it is for mobile.
So they will get more aggressive (we already can barely distinguish an ad from a post on most websites) and more annoying and more manipulative. And they'll keep crossing lines that will cause shit storms and ad-blockers will get more aggressive and more clever and more political.
Personally, I have big hopes for new models emerging where you pay a fixed, reasonable flat-rate sum once a month ($10 or $15) to access "premium" content across multiple sites. The reality is, from most higher quality sources, I read maybe 0 to 3 articles a month but there's dozens of them. I won't pay $10 to each of them, monthly, but I'd pay $10 to access them all. The question is just how to split the money. Most views? That would almost cause the same clickbait problem we have now. Some quality measurement (likes, upvotes, etc)? Would lead to pandering. If some company could come up with a smart way to solve this and convince a few sites to jump on board with premium content, I'd be in. It's a hard problem. Kinda like search engines...
Even if you're a paying customer.
I don't remember ever seeing ads mixed in with the main content. I think it was general practice to section them off somewhere else or put them in the classifieds.
Compare with: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2016/...
Then check out the parties sending js to your browser behind the scene. Apples and oranges IMO.
https://js.washingtonpost.com/wp-stat/rum/wprum.min.js
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-stat/ad/zeus/wp-ad.min.js
Looking at the output from the browser's console log on this page has me feeling like advertisers and analytics are a pretty gropey bunch. No means no, stop trying to touch my local storage!
I did product demonstration and sales for a couple years, travelling around to different venues and stores to sell a great product. As a result, I now have a nightmare scenario in my head based on the fact that if, while in the sales cycle (feature -> benefit -> emotional benefit), someone like me had a device giving "suggested" points to tailor my pitch based on the personal device of the person(s) being pitched (like for health: "cancer", "weight", "diabetes"; similar products purchased, hobbies, or really anything that allows a higher chance of emotional connection like insecurities, pride points, value system, all things that can be gleaned via content consumption and posting on the internet), my sales and closing percentage would be through the roof.
I might be suffering from something similar to Slothrop's anti-paranoia[1], but to me it seems like this sort of vision is where the current "advertising"-based model of the internet is heading and why a saner subscription model will not dominate without clear legislation.
[1] http://jtls.shirazu.ac.ir/article_201_cefaf62f0af6aa172e2b36...
Ad-blocking had already won. I haven't (involuntary) seen ads for several years now. There were a few regressions here and there, but they were all fixed extremely fast. The new fancy ad-block detectors were defeated in a matter of days.
26% ad-blocking is a nice start, but the real fun begins when it is at +96%, and Google/Facebook/InsertNameHere lose their main source of income.
I think a very strong and concerted push to outlaw ad-blocking is almost inevitable, but ultimately it will be as futile as trying to outlaw the BitTorrent protocol.
Will the ad-supported crap-manufacturing eyeball factory that is the modern Internet crash and burn, leaving only Patreon to stand atop the pile of ruins?
We can but hope.
It doesn't need to be eradicated, just kept underground to limit adoption. Millions use torrent, yes, but many more do not and the movie studios are still raking in money.
Is there any indication for such a push? What might get outlawed is paid unblocking, because that is arguably extortion, but free, non-commercial, browser based ad blockers will never be outlawed.
I think what will happen once advertising growth can no longer outrun ad blocking is one or both of these two things:
a) Commercial content producers move to unblockable platforms, i.e off the open web.
b) Google et al come up with a server side solution that creates trust between advertisers, ad networks and websites so that browsers no longer need to make blockable requests to third party sites in order to retrieve ads and send clicks. That would force any ad blockers to become a lot more resource intensive because they would have to analyse the content itself, which would slow down the page massively.
You don't really think it'll ever get anywhere near that percentage, right? When the major players start devoting time and resources to defeating ad blockers that's when the real fun will begin.
This would be an amazing development. 99.9% of the providers who switch to paid subscription will go out of business, because their content is toxic garbage that people will never click if it cost them money. The remaining will be those who care about quality and consider the viewers to be their customers, not their product.
Serious question. No intention to insult.
You are on the Internet, not sitting in a pub with no wi-fi. Instead of writing "if I remembered it right", why not spend 2 minutes googling, to find out how AdBlock Plus actually operates?
I totally get that podcasts have to earn money somehow, so I'm not mad or upset, but it has been an effective way of evading my usage of Ghostery and ublock / disassociation from social media.
I am not even American and I can also remember every single sponsor and product they've ever advertised.
Depends how long you've been listening to podcasts. There are lots of shows I listened to regularly for 3-5 years that I've completely stopped listening to because of the sheer volume of advertising (plus the fact that every week/day/episode the advertising is exactly the same). All TWiT Network shows for example are unsubscribed for me despite listening to about 10 of them and not missing an episode for years. So, in some older shows, saturation has definitely been reached. I think a lot of it is to do with necessary spending.
Podcasts are so simple to make yet people put together networks that have these high-end studios and camera systems when all they really needed was some guests, a few $100 mics and Skype.
Source: page 33 [1] here https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/20170331_alphabet_10Q.pdf
[1] Page 33 in terms of PDF document, if you are looking at the printed page numbers then it is page 31.
Or use uBlock Origin, which supposedly has it integrated (I'm not sure, as I'm using AdBlock Plus)
Are you saying that there are ad-blockers based on image recognition?
Same with the Google search app.
> So ad-blocking still wins.
FB is losing all the way to the bank at the moment.
My point is that with adblocking tools being adopted by more users, ad platforms will perhaps begin to use this new format.
2013 $57 billion
2014 $66 billion
2015 $74 billion
2016 $90 billion
Facebook Revenue:
2013 $8 billion
2014 $12 billion
2015 $18 billion
2016 $27 billion
If ad blocking has already won, I'm sure Google and Facebook will be happy to continue losing.
But in the end if more blocking does not the ones that are not blocked just become more valuable so does not change really anything? I mean advertising is going to continue to grow no matter what.
Here is a first non-paywall link from 2001 on Mary Meeker and dotcoms. Make your own conclusions.
http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive...
Maybe she knew what she was doing?
I'd say many of the things she points out are valid for big cities and tech centers, but less so elsewhere. For example, restaurants built around delivery is a big deal around NYC, but not such a big deal in Albany or Scranton.
What do you think of the current report?
https://www.slideshare.net/kleinerperkins/kpcb-internet-tren...
I just went through them, the trouble is that most of the trends are so vague (e.g. "Advertising - Lookin' Good") that you can't really grade them on their predictive accuracy. It's not even clear to me whether she's calling out economic drivers (since she's an investor) or if she's just picking 10 trends at random cross sections. I don't know what her intent is with these, but I judged them on the rubric that "if her 2011 report was perfect, her 2017 report would be an exact copy with updated numbers", admittedly not knowing if that was her rubric.
She does consistently mention tech globalization (mostly regarding China/India) and the US's increasingly large debt, the economic trends seem pretty consistently and accurate. But she misses out on some huge industry trends like the critical role that data plays today or the overtaking of traditional industries over the last ten years via "software eating the world" (even up to 2014).* She's also consistent and mostly correct about mobile being a dominant trend (up until now), but everything else like "Re-imagining Messaging" and "Content Creation - Changed Forever" sounds like it was just the flavor of the year.
1. What percentage of the population uses crypto currency on a regular basis (maybe once a month)
2. What percentage of vendors use it.
That is a B2C view of the world, and might not be correct.
But of course they don't live up to a B2C trend and so you might be right thats why they aren't in the report.
- Voice: Twenty percent of mobile queries were made via voice in 2016. Alexa is leading the way into voice commerce. - India and China are the only 2 countries that get a full section each - China is the benchmark for FinTech. $5T plus in mobile payments 90% of that driven by 2 companies. Lowest txn rates in the world
- 355 M internet users in India second only to China in size. Digital initiatives focused by govt. India is leapfrogging in Mobile, Identity, Bandwidth and Payments.
"94% of all cloud apps are not enterprise-ready per Netskope" (p190)
What does that even mean? Apparently that you should pay Netskope lots of money to fix that right up for you: https://www.netskope.com/resources/netskope-cci-audit/
That said, the overall report lacks in several respects.
(1) It has an agenda e.g. on the positive value of immigrants (I'm an immigrant and strongly believe in the value of immigration but her "analysis" is selective data to prove a pre-existing point).
(2) Relying on industry data. I saw numerous slides purporting to the future of advertising, supplied by firms who stand to benefit from these changes, e.g. Pinterest and Google. These ideas may be right but we should at least admit that they are not objective.
(3) 355 slides is an absurd volume and suggests that she could not, or would not, refine to what's actually important. The net effect is that her best points will get lost in a sea of nonsense.
(4) I'd rather she went over past year's reports to see where her trends did not hold up and why so we can understand other forces at work and all be smarter for it.
Yeah. Similarly, slide 190 showing 90+% of cloud applications in use not being "enterprise ready", per Netskope: a company that exists to sell SaaS security software.
but nope, any companies we mention usually are there because they're doing something actually interesting or leading in their field tbh...whether they're small companies (allbirds), public (amzn) or somewhere in between (unity, etc)
She has done this for a long time, it comes out every year.