Meeker unveils Internet trends
Global usage is slowing, annual report shows.
RANCHO PALOS VERDES, Calif. – Internet usage worldwide is slowing while smartphone sales have hit a wall. But people are spending more online, talking to smart speakers more and shelling out more for subscriptions.
Those are the headlines from Mary Meeker’s annual Internet trends survey, which was revealed at the Code conference here Wednesday morning. Meeker is an executive with venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The stack of slides, which act as a touchstone for the industry, is based on an aggregation of several data sources.
There are 3.6 billion users of the global Internet, but growth is beginning to cool, up 7% last year vs. 12% the year before.
“Growth is harder to find after hitting 50% penetration” of the world’s population, she said.
Voice computing has evolved to record usage after years of so-so quality. Now, Google has a 95% accuracy rate for “learning word accuracy,” from just less than 80% in 2013. The Amazon Echo smart speaker is now in more than 30 million homes, she added.
She also touched on the recent scrutiny of how Internet companies use consumer data for targeting that jumped in the wake of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica data scandal.
“Many usability improvements are based on data - collected during the taps / clicks / movements of mobile device users. This creates a privacy paradox,” she wrote in the introduction.
E-commerce usage rose 16% in 2017 vs. 14% the previous year, now representing 13% of total retail sales.
Meeker says that when researching product purchases, 49% of shoppers begin with searches on Amazon.com, followed with 36% on search engines. Additionally, social media referrals to ecommerce purchases rose 6%.
Netflix represents the largest subscription service, with 117 million subscribers, compared to 100 million for Amazon Prime and 75 million for the Spotify music service, she estimates.
As for the sharing economy: Her research shows ride-hailing service Uber’s 900,000 U.S. drivers making an average hourly rate of $21, higher than some surveys and much steeper than a disputed academic analysis.
Airbnb has 600,000 U.S. hosts, who make an average of $6,100, the report estimated.