Online Trends 2019

You have probably heard about the annual Internet Trends analytical reports from the “Queen of the Internet” Mary Meeker . Each of them is a storehouse of useful information with a lot of interesting figures and forecasts. In the last 334 slide. I recommend to get acquainted with all, but for the format of the article on Habré, I present my interpretation of the main theses from this document .

• Internet access is already at 51% of the inhabitants of the Earth - at 3.8 billion people, but the growth in the number of Internet users continues to slow down. In connection with this phenomenon, the global smartphone market is shrinking.
• Electronic commerce accounts for 15% of all retail in the United States. Since 2017, the growth of e-commerce has declined sharply, but it is still significantly ahead of that offline in percentage terms and slightly in absolute terms.
• With the decrease in the rate of spread of the Internet, competition for existing users becomes more complicated. So the cost of attracting a single user (CAC) in FINTECH is now at $ 40 and this is about 30% more than 2 years ago. Realizing this, the venture interest in fintech seems excessive.
• The share of expenses on advertising in mobile services and on desktops was equalized with a fraction of the time that users spend in them. Total advertising spending grew by 22%
• Over the past 4 years, the audience of podcast listeners in the United States has doubled and currently has more than 70 million people. Joe Rogan beat almost all media in this format, except for the podcast from The New York Times.
• The average American spends 6.3 hours a day on the Internet. More than ever. At the same time, the number of people trying to limit the time spent with a smartphone in their hands increased from 47% to 63% over the year. They try to do it themselves, and 57% of parents use the restriction functions for children - almost 3 times more than in 2015.
• The pace of increase in spending time in social networks fell 6 times (slide 164). At the same time, the report has a graph reflecting the impressive growth of traffic from Facebook and Twitter for most publications (slide 177), although this graph is based on data from 2010 to 2016.
• In the current work of Mary, there is not a word about “fake news”, which is strange, because in the past, much was said about distrust of social networks as a source of information. However, Internet Trends 2019 mentioned that news from YouTube began to notice 2 times more people. Why then talk about the importance of Facebook and Twitter for media, arguing that with old data?
• The likelihood of cyber attacks increases. Among the 900 data centers in 2017, 25% of the total number of downtime cases were reported, in 2018 already 31%. But reinforcement learning is more difficult for protein neuroses than machine ones. Since 2014, the share of sites with two-factor authorization has not only not increased, but also decreased.
• 5% of Americans work remotely. Since 2000, with such incredible progress in the development of the Internet, environment and tools, this value has grown by only 2%. Now all the articles about the absence of the need for a physical presence seem to me exaggerated.
• US student tuition debts exceed a trillion dollars! Just the other day I read about Fintech a student lending start-up, which attracted an impressive amount of capital and only now I understand why.
• The number of people in the world who are concerned about data privacy issues has dropped from 64% to 52% over the year. It turns out that the public flogging of Zuckerberg, California State, the European GDPR and other principles of state control satisfy the wishes of certain groups of the population.

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