
The Mary Meeker Internet Trends 2015 Report - andrewljohnson
http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/27/the-mary-meeker-internet-trends-2015-report/
======
throwaway1979
Maybe it was just me, but I found the data to be a bit depressing. I'm a
GenXer and there are days when the tech industry seems to be run by a
generation I have trouble identifying with. The data in this reports suggests
I'm not just being paranoid (more millennials in workforce than other named
generations).

I was also shocked by the % of people who think they can get a new online gig
in < 24 hours. The slides pointed at Upwork and ThumbTack. The first seems to
be a renaming of oDesk. It seems to be dominated by workers from outside North
America (at least for tech work).

This also raises the larger issue of career for GenXers. I was at a conference
recently and spoke to some other people my age. The collective feeling I got
was there is no defined career track anymore. Apparently, you just move from
one interesting gig to another. While this is something millennials may be
totally comfortable with, this particular GenXer is not. I'm also reading a
book (interesting and depressing) called "Company of One" that seems to
suggest that the overall trend is not restricted to millennials but the
economy as a whole.

~~~
snowwrestler
GenXer here. For me the question is whether the web/Internet industry will age
with me.

A lot of industries started out as the domain of young risk-takers, but grew
to accept and welcome older workers and managers. Railroads, print publishing,
and air travel come to mind.

So the question is whether the Internet industry will follow the same path. I
think it will, and I (selfishly) hope it will, because I'm not getting any
younger.

I feel like lower "layers" of the computing industry have already made this
transition. I don't get the feeling that a person needs to be under 30 to get
a job at Intel, Oracle, Cisco, HP, etc. But I still get that feeling about a
lot of hosted software companies, even big ones like Google or Facebook.

~~~
binxbolling
Job postings and job pages can reinforce/hint at this age bias as well. Since
they can't outright discriminate, over time I've gotten a lot better at
reading between the lines to see if the company has any room for people over
30.

~~~
pinewurst
What hints do you look for?

------
L_Rahman
My key takeaways:

1\. Global mobile penetration:

5.2 bn active mobile subscribers worldwide, but only 40% have smartphones.
Given the apparent ubiquity of smartphones in India and China, this was
surprising to me.

This is a fairly significant opportunity. Even if you were to assume mobile
penetration ends today, there are still 1.5x as many new smartphone users that
will come on to the market over the next decade.

Each additional smartphone user however will have decreasing disposable income
because this is what prevented them from acquiring the device sooner in the
first place. This means that they'll also be nearly impossible to monetize as
customers for a very long time.

The moonshot ISP plays Google and Facebook are making in poorer parts of the
world make a lot of sense viewed through this lens. Neither of them have any
need to make money of these users immediately. But capturing these users and
waiting for their disposable incomes to grow could prove to be a valuable
strategy in the long term.

2\. Kakaotalk and other messaging platforms

Kakaotalk has 48 mn MAUs, flat year-on-year user growth, and generates $853 mn
in revenue / year.

The messaging app with next highest rates of engagement? WhatsApp with 800 mn
MAU and 60% year-on-year user growth. That $19 bn USD play Facebook made looks
like a bargain.

3\. E-Commerce makes up only 9% of retail sales in the United States.

Next time you sneer at yet another e-commerce company launching, remember this
metric. The majority of retail transactions can be carried out over the
internet. Niche-specific e-commerce platforms simply have to figure out how to
sufficiently lower the transaction friction. Some of this ground will be
captured by incumbents, but there's a lot of room for startups.

4\. Mobile device management = critical in preventing breaches

Enterprise grade MDM turns out be relatively difficult to implement on off-
the-shelf consumer mobile devices with any amount of stability or reliability.
There's room for someone to step in and offer custom mobile devices for
enterprise (good thing we're already working on this and am happy to chat
about it if you're curious)

Mod request: Would it make more sense to change the URL and point it to the
report itself? Direct URL from KPCB here:

[http://kpcbweb2.s3.amazonaws.com/files/90/Internet_Trends_20...](http://kpcbweb2.s3.amazonaws.com/files/90/Internet_Trends_2015.pdf?1432738078)

------
andrewljohnson
And the PDF presentation too:
[http://kpcbweb2.s3.amazonaws.com/files/90/Internet_Trends_20...](http://kpcbweb2.s3.amazonaws.com/files/90/Internet_Trends_2015.pdf?1432738078)

~~~
chdir
Thank you. Very useful for a report this size, that you want to reference back
& forth. Slideshare sucks on modest bandwidth, doesn't cache well.

------
jackgavigan
I dunno if it's just me (or perhaps I'm the wrong audience) but I've always
found Meeker's presentations to be long on data (lots of graphs and numbers
about trends that anyone who's at all interested in the Internet is already
well aware of), and short on insight ("So what?").

This one's no different. There are exactly 15 slides (out of 190+) that I
found interesting (16, 20, 50/51, 68, 99, 110, 141, 145, 146, 151, 153, 169,
172, and 184), and I find it very strange that there's precisely zero mention
of FinTech or Bitcoin/Blockchain.

~~~
michaelpinto
Something to keep in mind is that she's presenting the data and trends from
the point of VC rather than a startup. So you can reverse engineer it as to
what will get on an investors screen for this minute (well at least some
investors).

But my problem is if you're a startup you tend to think along the lines of
solving a problem rather than catching a trend. Another thing is that chasing
trends doesn't always produce innovation. For example would Steve Jobs have
gone ahead with the iPhone based on a presentation like this from say 2005?

We tend to like data because it gives us the illusion of control, and that's a
very wall street way of thinking to make investors feel secure.

~~~
jackgavigan
_> Something to keep in mind is that she's presenting the data and trends from
the point of VC rather than a startup._

I first encountered her when she and I were both working (separately) at
Morgan Stanley back in 2002, and I thought the exact same thing back then.

------
melling
Prior submissions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9612574](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9612574)
19hrs ago

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9612438](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9612438)
20hrs ago

HN submissions occur so fast that stories often don't gain traction if
submitted during peak times.

~~~
frandroid
One of the problems is that if a story has multiple URLs, this dilutes the
traffic. In this case, many people hesitate to link to a PDF, so that
scattered the pointers. If multiple people submit the same URL, they get
redirected to the original post that they can then vote up, increasing the
story's velocity.

------
jeffreyrogers
This should probably link here instead: [http://www.kpcb.com/internet-
trends](http://www.kpcb.com/internet-trends)

------
dctoedt
The slides immediately brought to mind the "Why PowerPoint Should Be Banned"
article from a day or two ago [1].

Looking at them strengthened my tentative view that:

(1) Most slides should contain a short, complete sentence and optionally a
picture -- no more.

(2) Each "chunk" of information should get its own slide.

[ADDED:]

(3) When using slides with information-dense graphs, charts, etc., slides with
one-sentence summaries and explanations should be interspersed. Meeker's deck
has some of that but could use more.

(4) Title slides should be more prominent than in Meeker's deck.

(5) Pictures are nice but shouldn't dominate a slide.

The above are just personal preferences, of course. I do a lot of teaching in
which I use slides, and will be experimenting more along these lines.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9606345](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9606345)

~~~
andrewljohnson
Presentation slides should be as you describe... but slides that will be
consumed by every media org and denizen of the internet need to be denser.

~~~
dctoedt
> _slides that will be consumed by every media org and denizen of the internet
> need to be denser._

Dual use could be achieved by interspersing one-sentence explanations and
summaries among the information-dense graphs, charts, etc. Meeker's deck has
some of that, but could have used more.

------
whysonot
(a) Mobile usage > 50% of total internet usage (b) Mobile advertising ~ 25% of
total internet advertising

Gap between (a) and (b) represents a ~$25B+ opportunity (slide 16).

Last few years, mobile ads have been propped up by VC funded companies buying
installs. This means the opportunity is primarily for brands.

Why do you think it has been so slow? There seem to be enough mobile platforms
to advertise on. Are the ad units too expensive for brand awareness campaigns?
Or maybe that's wrong and inventory is limited and the platforms aren't
charging enough? Maybe large companies are just slow?

I guess I'm trying to understand what shape this opportunity takes. Is it for
new platforms to emerge? Existing platforms to sign more customers or charge
more for their ad units? Novel ad exchanges to make it easier for companies to
advertise on mobile?

~~~
imjk
"Are the ad units too expensive for brand awareness campaigns?"

Yes and No. No, in the sense that they're not too expensive relative to
tradition desktop display rates, but yes, in the sense that they don't perform
to the same same standards as desktop ads. The exception would be things that
are native to mobile like app installs, which are also often incentivized
through the various platforms they're advertised on. My theory is that mobile
ad rates have to come down significantly to match the performance rates of
desktop ads to meet the performance across all sectors, but native specific
products like apps are keeping the prices higher in part through better
performance but also because they're in a sector that's particularly over-
funded right now and can afford the higher acquisition costs while cash is
flush.

------
peter303
I like the part on the trends in China, mainly 150-163. They are the largest
part of the InterNet now. They are starting to do innovate projects. In
contrast India is still in the copy-America stage, but could become more
innovative at some time.

------
alberthartman
Great as always telling us where we are. Not so great telling us where we're
going, where the big financial bets are (she's a VC and should know), what are
the significant new technology themes. I was hoping for an opportunity roadmap
as seen by KPCB. Just got more ads, more smartphones, more retail. No bitcoin,
VR, drones, bioinformatics, energy, or US financials as in years past.

~~~
Everhusk
Slide 82 mentions how drone shipments are rising rapidly. Expected to be 3
million this year.

------
pinaceae
Love how the definitions of Millenials have different age groups - I am either
a GenXer or a Millenial. Based on the stats in there, this has a massive
effect on my attitudes.

Social Science -_( __)_-

~~~
eterm
I also find it weird that someone born 1980 who was an adult when the web was
first really exploding is a "millenial" and bucked with people born 2000 who
will have grown up with the internet permanently connected.

~~~
ghaff
More like a college student or equivalent age in the late 1990s. Of course
these generations are always a bit arbitrary, especially at the boundaries.
There's obviously not a big overall generational difference between someone
born in, say, 1978 and someone born in 1982. But, on average, I expect there
are a lot of differences in attitude, on average, between someone born in 1970
and someone born in 1990.

------
gadders
My key takeway - Newspapers are in trouble... (Slide 16)

~~~
Joeri
Well, they'll go digital or they'll go bankrupt, same as with encyclopedias.
It's just shocking how far they still have to go before they hit bottom ad
spend.

~~~
gadders
Yeah. They seem to be getting a lot more than they deserve for historical
reasons.

