It's that time of year again: venture capitalist Mary Meeker this week returned to Code Conference with another edition of her annual Internet Trends Report.
Meeker's title is different (she left her longtime post at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers to found a new firm called Bond Capital), but the rapid-fire 300+ slide presentation is the same. We read the whole thing so you don't have to.
Meeker's report includes just about every internet-related buzzword and emerging tech category, from advertising and streaming to social media, cybersecurity, and a lot more. We picked out 10 of the biggest themes from this year's presentation, which you can check out below.
1.
Privacy Is a Key Selling Point
The prolonged public reckoning over how Facebook and other social media platforms handle data has, at long last, made
privacy a core feature requirement for consumers. Facebook is
pivoting toward privacy, Apple continues to thumb its nose at competitors by touting the privacy features of its hardware and software products, and the rollout of GDPR has necessitated greater privacy controls on a global scale. Meeker projects that Facebook's revenue growth will continue to decelerate amid these concerns, and that more consumers care about privacy than a year ago amid greater consumer privacy pushes from regulators everywhere from the
California to the EU.
2.
Too Many Streaming Services
The explosion in online subscription services, from music and video streaming to cloud-based software and e-commerce, has dramatically weakened the consumer value proposition of subscribing to just one or a handful of services that can meet your needs. Meeker said the reality is that customer acquisition cost (CAC) can't exceed lifetime value (LTV) for very long.
Looking at the glut of available and impending content streaming apps, the 2019 Internet Trends Report states that the availability of a free trial or tier is the most important factor in trying a new service. Even as players spend billions bankrolling movies and shows for their services, content libraries and exclusives aren't as important to users as value and affordability.
3.
Tech Giants Keep Eating More of the Ad Market
Facebook and Google's
share of the digital advertising market continues to grow, other tech and social media corporations are gaining steam, and everyone else is left with an increasingly smaller slice of what's left. Meeker found that Google's ad revenue raised 1.4x in 2018, Facebook's ballooned by 1.9x, and the combination of Amazon, Twitter, Snap, and Pinterest's ad revenue grew 2.6x. Advertising is how a lot of Big Tech
makes its money, and this complete disruption of the ad market has wrought collateral damage across industries, most notably in
digital media.
4.
Image and Video Sharing Is Skyrocketing
Images and videos are becoming many online users' primary form of communication. Meeker said this is owed to a combination of factors including better smartphone cameras and batteries, faster cellular data and Wi-Fi, and the popularity of image-sharing apps headlined by
Instagram. The annual number of new photos taken globally has eclipsed a trillion, and image sharing has skyrocketed as IG's monthly active user base has swelled. The trend has been buoyed not just by Instagram, but on a much heavier focus on images, video, and ephemeral messaging such as Stories across Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, and beyond.
5.
Drinking From the Data Firehose
One of Meeker's slides quotes Looker CEO Frank Bien, who said "data is the new application." Business Intelligence (BI) company Looker was
recently acquired by Google Cloud, less than a week before
Salesforce dropped $15.7 billion on BI leader Tableau. Meeker said that businesses, consumers, and even regulators are all "drinking from the data fire hose" as more data is collected, stored in the cloud, optimized, and analyzed by AI to streamline processes, target products, and improve customer satisfaction. No matter where you look, data is king.
6.
The Rise of Digital Healthcare
An entire section of the Internet Trends Report is dedicated to digital healthcare. As healthcare and insurance costs continue to rise in the US, the industry is slowly digitizing more routine medical tasks to make things cheaper and more convenient. Online health information, online provider reviews, mobile tracking, wearables tracking vitals like the
Apple Watch Series 4, on-demand drug deliveryy, and live video telemedicine appointments are all on the rise. Hospitals and medical practices still have a long way to go with electronic health records (EHRs), predictive analytics for diagnosis, and other data-driven AI healthcare technology, but it's all trending upwards. Not to mention the growing database of genetic data owed to the rise in
DNA testing kits.
7.
We Can't Put Down Our Devices
Even as global smartphone shipments continue to decline, internet use around the world remains on a steady incline. The report found that 26 percent of adults say there are online "almost constantly," up from 21 percent three years ago. Users are also taking more actions to
reduce smartphone and social media usage, both among adults as well as parents setting stricter boundaries with their children. Apple, Google, Facebook, and YouTube have all released their own apps or features to help
fight tech addiction, even if it took growing public and shareholder backlash to force them to roll out basic usage monitoring and time tracking tools and compromise Silicon Valley's hunger for "engagement" at all costs.
9.
Cyber Attacks Grow In Scope, Sophistication
In an era where
cyber warfare can influence elections and take entire countries offline, the scope and sophistication of cyberattacks are only getting more widespread and advanced. Meeker talked about a rise in not only state-sponsored attacks, but large-scale data provider attacks, and crypto extortion and
ransomware; and the attacks are all getting faster and more targeted toward sensitive data. Attackers hone in on
lax security practices and system vulnerabilities, and often it's the consumers and citizens that suffer for a catastrophic data breach,
not the corporations.
10.
Global Internet Freedom Is Decreasing
Even as more of the planet becomes connected,
internet freedom is declining in many areas of the globe. The report talks about how highly regulated internet laws
taking a page out of China's book can favor state control and censorship, with more and more countries adopting policies that censor political, social, or religious content, increase surveillance practices, block social media and messaging platforms, in more authoritarian countries even disconnect the internet for political reasons. Meeker also touches on how the growth of AI has brought with it
implict algorithmic biases, and the report covers how more people are calling for an "algorithmic bill of rights."
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