
Mary Meeker’s 2019 internet trends report [pdf] - RmDen
https://www.bondcap.com/pdf/190611_Internet_Trends_2019.pdf
======
ketzo
From page 29, average customer acquisition cost has risen by ~33% in _just the
last two years_... they make the point on the next slide that having customer
acquisition costs exceed a customer's lifetime value can't really succeed for
long.

I think this, specifically, is what will spell the doom of Uber and Lyft, and
potentially many of the food delivery companies -- they rely on insane growth
curves to generate new investment, and customer acquisition is just so
unbelievably competitive/expensive, it's an arms race that (IMO) has to
collapse at some point.

~~~
mevile
> will spell the doom of Uber and Lyft

Car sharing isn't going anywhere. It's too convenient. The prices will rise,
the number of drivers and passengers will fall and the companies will shrink,
but they'll still be around. I have trouble seeing suddenly seeing a day when
there's no car share service because they all finally went belly up.

~~~
tptacek
I don't think car sharing will go extinct either, but be careful with your
analyses. Uber and Lyft are precariously balanced on a system of (
_substantial_ ) low-income demand, high-income demand, and subsidy. If prices
rise, low-income demand plummets, ending subsidies. High-income pricing could
rise significantly higher than you might expect, at which point you no longer
have "ride sharing" so much as you have private car services with app hailing
instead of phone hailing, and, like NYC in the 1990s, so expensive that most
people will only use it to get to the airport.

~~~
ghaff
It seems pretty reasonable to assume that equilibrium looks like taxis and
private cars with app hailing. Personally, it wouldn't affect my usage much; I
just use these services when I'm traveling because they're better experiences
for the most part than taking a cab.

But, anecdotally, a fair number of urbanites regularly use Uber/Lyft instead
of public transit or just because they don't want to drive. Presumably,
significantly increasing prices would lose casual users who are using these
services because they're a bit more convenient.

~~~
tptacek
I think it's important to remember that a big part of the value prop of these
services is that when you open the app to hail a car, you're pretty much
assured of getting that car within 15 minutes or so. Change the current
equilibrium much and that benefit might go away. I could hail a cab by phone
before Uber, but, in Chicago, where we have pretty reasonable cab service
(certainly light years better than SFBA's), it would often take multiple
attempts and involve a 30+ minute wait. You could reliably get a private car
in NYC, but, as I recall from all the times I worked in NYC, you weren't
getting that car in 15 minutes.

~~~
kortilla
You’re overestimating how good the cab systems are outside of Chicago and the
coasts. There is a lot of value in just having a reliable hailing system with
a review system and tracking of where your pickup is, even if there is a 30
min delay.

The state of the art of cabs in smaller cities is getting hung up on, ghosted,
or massively delayed when given a different ETA if you don’t book the cab
hours in advance.

~~~
tptacek
I think I'm doing the opposite, and saying that on-demand hailing of cabs
without subsidy was and, when subsidies collapse, likely will be a _lot_ worse
than people think they'll be.

------
skybrian
"With which company would you share your health data?"

[https://www.bondcap.com/report/itr19/#view/287](https://www.bondcap.com/report/itr19/#view/287)

This certainly isn't what you'd guess from reading comments on HN.

~~~
ogirginc
This is quite shocking. :/

~~~
throwaway0220
Yeah. Who would think that almost half would share their data with... Samsung.

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leshokunin
As the years go by, I feel more and more underwhelmed by these. It feels very
surface level, handwavy. How would one execute anything but decisions based on
confirmation bias using this information?

~~~
jblow
It's not supposed to help you execute anything; it's an advertisement.

~~~
dredmorbius
Explain?

~~~
vmurthy
Not the OP but I dug a little into _which company_ published this. The link
takes you to "Bond Cap" which seems to be an offshoot of Kleiner Perkins [1] .
Bond Cap is another VC fund according to their webpage [2]. Putting 2 and 2
together: if you were a prospective investor and are considering two firms A
and B and A happens to publish a report every year that seems to indicate that
they know the internet landscape very well, who would you invest with ( other
things being equal of course )?

[1] Wikipedia says that Ms Meeker works for Kleiner
Perkins.[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Meeker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Meeker)

[2]
[https://www.bondcap.com/#investments](https://www.bondcap.com/#investments)

~~~
dredmorbius
That's fairly much as I'd suspected (though it'd be nice to hear OP's
rationale).

I'm coming to the conclusion that much publishing is really a highly-ornate
calling card or advertisement.

~~~
vmurthy
If you follow a16z podcasts or their blogs, you’ll see they too doing quite a
bit of this :-)

[https://a16z.com/posts/](https://a16z.com/posts/)

------
hn_throwaway_99
Wow, just kind of crazy how virtually all the top 20 Internet companies are US
and China. The only other country represented is Japan with Recruit Holdings,
and a huge part of that (maybe majority?) is due to them owning Indeed, which
was founded in Austin.

------
aloer
slide 94:

nearly 4.2 million people streamed in december 2018 at least once on twitch

that seems incredibly high. I wonder how many of those are streaming games vs.
talk/conversation vs. travel/outside social etc.

I also wonder what the cost of all of this is. How many of them will actually
be unprofitable for twitch due to not having any viewers. The streaming
infrastructure must be more expensive than say a yt vid that no one watches,
no?

~~~
Advaith
I'd argue against this solely based on the deflationary costs within
computing. Factor that in, and the outlook for twitch looks great.

Article readers -> Video consumers(YouTube, Facebook etc)-> livestream
(initially games and now anything)

Streaming games might be the first high value use case but I can def. see
twitch gain traction in other niches.

------
chaostheory
The only thing that I had doubts on was the 'Video Watching Daily Minutes'
portion Page 49. ISPs like Comcast game their cable numbers. How? They provide
incentives to customers where it's actually cheaper to have a basic cable plan
bundled with internet vs just internet. Guess what plan customers are going to
pick regardless of whether or not they really watch cable TV? Assuming seniors
aren't disproportionately consuming video vs everyone else, it's probably
closer to 40 / 60 - television vs digital respectively. Unless Comcast and
other operators with similar practices provide their DAU, television watching
statistics will be inaccurate.

------
pwinnski
50% of the world with access to the internet, that's staggering. Slide 10
shows that there's still a lot of room for growth in Asia Pacific and Africa &
Middle East regions, but clearly there are bigger issues involved there.

~~~
karthikb
80% the world has never been on an an airplane, either.

Many of what we take for granted in the developed world, and even in
India/China, have barely been introduced to the vast majority of people.

~~~
umeshunni
To be fair, in almost all parts of the world, the cost of getting on a plane
are significantly higher than the cost of internet connectivity AND there are
cheaper alternatives to air travel.

~~~
karthikb
Oh, absolutely. My point was more that huge swaths of the world are
underserved by things that we take for granted and would otherwise assume
"everyone" has been exposed to. And so, there's still a ton of headroom to
grow.

------
tschellenbach
Correction: Booking is founded by a Dutch guy (slide 260):
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booking.com](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booking.com)

~~~
shaki-dora
That's a pretty amazing slide even with that error(? see below). 15 of the top
25 tech companies had 1st or 2nd gen immigrant (co-)founders.

As to booking.com: from reading the Wikipedia entry I gather the original
dutch-founded booking.com was at some point acquired by Priceline Group (which
had an American founder), which later changed its name back to booking.com. It
seems the slide is (technically) correct, and any attempt to capture such
cases in a workable definition would be complicated.

------
jsf01
How do you view this on a phone? It says tap to begin. Then what?

~~~
avip
Reading the report is left as an exercise for the reader.

------
vmurthy
For those of you who want a quick skim :

A great summary on (of all the things :-)) Twitter :
[https://twitter.com/investing_city/status/113854955878977945...](https://twitter.com/investing_city/status/1138549558789779458)

------
mrandish
Did anyone else start picturing the first two slides (the ones labeled
"Context") in a Star Wars-movie opening crawl? Something about the voice it's
written in totally had me seeing it in yellow text perspective scrolling off
into the background.

------
floatboth
huh, _Atlassian_ is on the huge company list?

~~~
naistran
The list only includes internet companies.

------
diebeforei485
Please link to the PDF[1] if possible.

[1]
[https://www.bondcap.com/pdf/190611_Internet_Trends_2019.pdf](https://www.bondcap.com/pdf/190611_Internet_Trends_2019.pdf)

~~~
zemo
I kinda like the slideshow, it lets me send someone a link to a specific
slide.

~~~
neogodless
Maybe it's just me, but I didn't understand the (slideshow) interface. I saw
"click to begin" and I saw a down arrow, so I put the two together and clicked
"down" to begin. Then I saw a list of archives, and if I continued down, it
ended. I assumed I had to click 2019, so I did that and I was back where I
began. It took me trying that twice before I realized I had to click...
anything except the arrow.

~~~
parf02
Took me way longer than it should to figure it out. Then the slideshow took
over my browser history :(

~~~
bredren
It's poorly done for a high profile report about the internet.

------
bilal4hmed
What took me by surprise was that telegram had more users than whatsapp or
iMessage

~~~
coalbin
I think you misinterpreted the graph, telegram has significantly fewer monthly
active users than any of the other messaging services listed on the graph.

~~~
bilal4hmed
doh sorry about that, I did read it incorrectly.

------
B1FF_PSUVM
If anyone else is wondering about the 'bondcap.com' URL, it seems a Kleiner
Perkins brand.

~~~
r10i
no. It's Mary Meeker's new fund (a lot of them are from the KP growth team)
but separate fund now

------
russellbeattie
Dear Mary,

Social Security is not an entitlement in anything but the strictest sense of
the word. Every year you put it in your report and group it in like it's some
sort of handout by the federal government, but it's not. And every year, you
put up a few slides pushing your politically-motivated world view of cutting
"expenses", but never bother to note what USA Inc. could do to increase
_revenues_ like raising taxes on the insanely wealthy back to 1950's levels:
91 percent top marginal tax rate would go a long way to balancing USA Inc's
books.

Also, it's amazing how many slides you dedicated to the national debt during
Obama's presidency, and yet now it barely gets a mention, and definitely no
dire predictions of ruin and destruction for all. I wonder why?

Every year I point this stuff out in HN, because I want to make sure the bias
is well and truly noted in case others missed it. It makes me question how
much irrational partiality infects the rest of the report - quite a lot I
suspect.

~~~
dang
Please don't take HN threads on generic political tangents. Your points may be
good but this is clearly a step into generic flamewar and therefore the wrong
direction for HN.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
mrunkel
I am usually 100% behind you on your attempts to moderate, but I'm not sure I
follow you here. But thank you for doing what you do!

In this case it doesn't seem to be a generic political tangent, but
specifically addressing what appears to be bias in the report.

I found the post informative and adding context, but then, I'm probably
politically aligned with the GP. Which certainly colors my view. :)

~~~
dang
There may be such a bias. But the question from our point of view is which
exerts the stronger gravitational pull: details of how such bias affects this
analysis? or a generic political flamewar about "entitlements"? Since the
latter topic has far more mass and charge, it's going to win every time. Does
that make sense?

The dynamics of introducing hot controversies into a discussion are
predictable. If a comment is to avoid having that effect, it needs to include
information specific to the topic at hand and eliminate any traces of
flamebait.

