So over the past 6 years average daily time spent on mobile devices went from <30 minutes --> 3+ hours a day while laptop/desktop/other connected devices remained flat.
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.
Does that mean in a few years we'll stop looking at "time on devices" because it's a useless metric and have "what do on devices" buckets?
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?
>> 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.
I remember Ms Meeker from dot-com-bomb v1.0. The most likely answer to your question is Ms Meeker's numbers continue to be as evidently fraudulent as ever. Some people just fail upwards. Anyone believing such information and using it to buy something is the fool who fully deserves to be parted from their money.
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,
Can you cite an example of her sharing fraudulent numbers?
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?
> Check the sources, they're mostly investment bank and accountancy consultancy sales documents.
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.
This presentation has little interesting information, maybe internet and mobile innovation have peaked?
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.
Y'know, it's weird. I was just reading an article about how our economy is investing strangely little amounts of capital in innovation, R&D, etc etc. Instead, employment is fairly healthy and productivity increases are starting to be eclipsed by wage growth. What is going on?[1]
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.
> maybe internet and mobile innovation have peaked?
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.
AI is about to accelerate, and applying technology in the physical world. Internet and mobile are now taken-for-granted infrastructure like the power grid.
Would say the exact opposite. This deck is great and like how they focus on how things are changing. One of the most interesting slides was which tech company most trusted with health data.
She mentioned that users don't like having their data collected for advertising. Apparently you did a word search but didn't actually read the material.
Global internet ad spend superseding global TV ad spend finally. Ad-blocking as high as 26% in some countries (Germany) and rising. Looks like there is a battle for attention being waged, I wonder who will win...
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?
Some companies are evading it by sponsoring content. It's kind of ridiculous, but now I know companies like Square Cash, Me Undies, Parachute Sheets, Blue Apron, The Great Courses Plus, and Casper Mattress by heart because they keep sponsoring a bunch of podcasts I listen to.
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.
Only because it's new and relatively unsaturated...every new medium was the same way. When radio, TV and the internet each started running ads you could say the same thing.
>> Only because it's new and relatively unsaturated
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.
Well ad blockers dont work with native apps right? A huge number of people use facebook/googles native iOS/Android apps so this most likely won't kill their business.
At least on iOS ad blockers are integrated into Safari so any native app using the Safari View Controller will use configured content blockers. That's why Facebook and others will continue to use the legacy web view.
Yeah which Facebook doesn't use for rendering newsfeed ads. I'd imagine that google does the same thing for its native adverts. Also, I'd imagine that all banner adverts displayed in third party apps are native as well. Disclosure, I worked on the main Facebook app.
Ad-blocking won in a sense that it seems to be unbeatable. It is not widespread enough yet to damage Google/Facebook revenue. However, the usage of ad-blocking continues to rise exponentially, so the next few years are going to be interesting.
Ad blocking is unbeatable? Can you explain? Seems to me ad blocking could be stopped if they wanted to and just not enough.
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.
As long as it's recognizable as an ad, it can be blocked. If it's not, then can you even call it an ad, really? It will be, I suppose, a very sophisticated product-placement. Certainly not something you can do automatically across millions of websites. So ad-blocking still wins.
Yes, I agree. Technically, with text classification/image recognition we can block all forms of ads, but you risk throwing out the baby with the bath water, and from my own experience, these 'plug' ads are not so repugnant, can even add an element of surprise to the content sometimes.
My point is that with adblocking tools being adopted by more users, ad platforms will perhaps begin to use this new format.
Google's ads are as links, served along with their regular search results, and marked as ads. The only way to block those would be to remove all the links marked as ads, and the predictable response would be to stop marking them. So, no, I don't see adblockers hurting Google (at least, not their main business).
>but the real fun begins when it is at +96%, and Google/Facebook/InsertNameHere lose their main source of income.
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.
>If the % of ad blockers is high enough, the content providers just switch over to paid subscriptions. E.g. Youtube Red.
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.
Especially when the ad-blockers are running on the browsers (Chrome), which are controlled by the ad platforms (Google). If I remembered it right, reportedly Google had struck a deal with AdBlock Plus to whitelist Google ads.
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 think a very strong and concerted push to outlaw ad-blocking is almost inevitable
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.
> as futile as trying to outlaw the BitTorrent protocol
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.
>Ad-blocking as high as 26% in some countries (Germany) and rising.
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...
This is a really tough problem, particularly because advertising revenue has become a metonym/euphemism for online surveillance and tracking. IMO, the only way to fix this is very clear legislation about tracking, data-aggregation, "targeted ads" and privacy rights concerning internet activity and information. Otherwise the internet will continue to evolve down the most profitable path, which is the one we're on. The personal data being accrued on individuals is not only easier to achieve than convincing the average internet user to pay for a service, but it's also something that will only gain more value as the aggregating entities learn trickier and trickier ways to use the data they're taking.
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.
The problem is - even on sites where you pay to see content (nyt, wsj, etc), they still show you ads, to a paying logged in subscriber, which is completely ridiculous.
Is it ridiculous though? People buy newspapers (nyt, wsj, etc) and they always had ads in them since time immemorial. The same goes for magazines and cable/satellite TV.
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.
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!
Isn't this basically what we have now with the cable TV industry? There, many complain because they're paying for content (channels) that they never watch and don't want.
I think that's a bad analogy, because cable companies actually pay per-subscriber fees to channel providers. I think a better analogy is Spotify premium, where songs are paid based on listening rates (even though I think how Spotify divvies up the money is still pretty unfair to less popular musicians).
I realize the ad revenue is a big part of online businesses, and I don't mind that. But, what most people mind is being bombarded by non-stop ads. There are a few popular sites I refuse to visit because of this. Pages constantly scrolling because of new ads loading from every angle.
In India, most of the new users arriving on the internet via mobile are from tier-2/3 cities. Which implies limited bandwidth due to infrastructure as well as being price conscious. So the majority of mobile users are very paranoid about data consumption, to the extent that they toggle the data just to check FB/WA. Upshot of this is one of the first thing they do on a new phone is install ad-blocker
Two reasons I can think of, again specific to India. Desktops are typically connected to wired broadband which is way cheaper and also desktop users are usually better off than mobile only users. And only a fraction of new users are coming from desktop. Infact India is one of those countries where cinsumers leapfrogged desktops to go from no computer to smartphones.
Yea, I was more or less aware of all this, but I was thinking more of people like my grandparents/cousins in Delhi. I could understand them and people like them not using ad blockers for the same reason as people don't in the US (lack of awareness), but it's tough for me to do so when every person with a phone seems to be familiar with it (though this is belied by the explanation elsewhere on this thread that the popular browser in use has it built-in).
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.
This is a good question, and there are very few n=large enough surveys to point to any single cause, but the biggest one is that almost 50% of Internet traffic in India is on UC Browser (from Alibaba) that has very robust ad blocking (which consumes less data than Chrome while browsing). You should expect this to change as Jio becomes more widespread.
Disclaimer - I led the India section of this report.
Is there maybe an ambiguity between "blocking mobile ads in apps" and "blocking web ads in a mobile browser"? The former might require lower-level tampering, while the latter might just require using a mobile browser that blocks ads or can run extensions.
On the iPhone you can block ads on non-rooted phones! It's awesome.
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.
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.
Well they're not really predictions so much as a phenomenal data set tracking the industry and consumer behavior in relevant markets. Draw your own hypotheses / conclusions :P
First, as others have said, these reports are more about the recent past than the future. It is tempting to extrapolate though.
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.
If I recall correctly she was one of the analysts pumping the internet stocks during the dotcom boom and bust. IIRC (and I might not) she was also advising select clients to sell in the early stages of the bust as she publicly kept issuing strong buy recommendations on the same stocks for general audience. Thus I tend to view her analysis with a lot of salt.
Here is a first non-paywall link from 2001 on Mary Meeker and dotcoms. Make your own conclusions.
"Among the stocks she has never downgraded are Priceline, Amazon, Yahoo, and FreeMarkets--all of which have declined between 85% and 97% from their peak."
I've been trying to understand Ethereum, but I was somewhat disturbed to see how heavily it was being pushed on 4chan's biz forum. That can't be a good sign can it?
speculation is running rampant, so market caps don't tell you that much. What is more interesting are transactions (e.g. of the non-speculative type), end user products that solve actual problems. I agree that there's a lot of promise in these various Blockchain technologies, but real world impact remains minimal.
I agree about the hype but the technology is based on solid grounds, revolutionary, and evolving beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum. Just look at new stuff like DFINITY [1] and the cryptographic primitives behind it. Since the barrier of entry is null there will be a lot of scams, no doubt about this, but we will see interesting projects arising. Good projects with good leadership have new ways of funding.
They are indeed global trends by the very definition. You would be hard pressed to find an area besides AI that's experienced more growth than this area, relatively of course.
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.
It actually begs the question: what does enterprise ready actually mean? The "enterprise" can mean many different things: HIPAA, PCI, etc, depending on industry/functionality.
Meeker's reports have, over the years, made several simple yet powerful conclusions such as when I first read the mismatch of % time spent by device vs. % of ad spend on device. I don't know if she was the first to observe this but it made an impact.
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.
> 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.
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.
lol maybe we should have charged given the sheer time/energy it takes to put this together...
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)
why would I be joking? you realize not everyone on the internet knows about all the things everyone else knows about right? this is my first introduction to this report.
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.