
Mary Meeker’s 2017 internet trends report [pdf] - uptown
http://www.kpcb.com/internet-trends
======
JauntTrooper
So over the past 6 years average daily time spent on mobile devices went from
<30 minutes --> 3+ hours a day while laptop/desktop/other connected devices
remained flat.

That's almost 20% of a waking day. Staggering. I wonder if it actually
replaced anything or if it's predominantly multitasking, like watching tv
became tv + phone, or people listening to Spotify/Pandora/podcasts instead of
the radio.

~~~
harry8
I remember Ms Meeker from dot-com-bomb v1.0. The most likely answer to your
question is Ms Meeker's numbers continue to be as evidently fraudulent as
ever. Some people just fail upwards. Anyone believing such information and
using it to buy something is the fool who fully deserves to be parted from
their money.

Check the sources, they're mostly investment bank and accountancy consultancy
sales documents. They aren't audited and apparently there are no adverse
consequences for lying like a rug in such things,

~~~
wdr1
Can you cite an example of her sharing fraudulent numbers?

Following the dotcom bomb, the press went looking for heads & Mary Meeker was
certainly amongst the ones they sought, but to my knowledge there wasn't an
evidence of wrong doing, nor has she been found to have shared bad data?

------
paulsutter
This presentation has little interesting information, maybe internet and
mobile innovation have peaked?

Over the years I've always been fascinated to read her internet trends report,
and this is the first time it feels tired. Important to understand the trends
in China for sure, but few surprises overall.

~~~
adventured
> maybe internet and mobile innovation have peaked?

In my observation that notion gets thrown around in large batches about every
3 to 5 years consistently over the last 20+ years re the Internet & Web. Then
crypto currencies take off. Or mobile via smartphones hits. Or ecommerce takes
off. Or social takes off. Or search gets drastically better and good content
becomes easier to find, spurring a boom in its creation. Or SaaS takes over.
Or streaming media starts crushing old media in tv, movies, music, etc. - ten
years ago Netflix was a $1 billion market cap DVD distributor and Spotify
barely existed. Or cloud computing - and thousands of follow-on services -
finally becomes cost effective & accessible, then everyone moves to adopt it.
And then AI becomes cheap, accessible, and distributed everywhere. And then...

Internet & mobile innovation is in fact about to accelerate.

~~~
paulsutter
AI is about to accelerate, and applying technology in the physical world.
Internet and mobile are now taken-for-granted infrastructure like the power
grid.

------
phkamp
Did anybody but me notice that neither the word "privacy" nor "encryption" or
"cryptography" appear in the 350-some slides?

~~~
traek
I don't see why you would've expected it, it's not like any of those things
are particularly trendy.

~~~
jacquesm
I believe that was the point.

------
have_faith
Global internet ad spend superseding global TV ad spend finally. Ad-blocking
as high as 26% in some countries (Germany) and rising. Looks like there is a
battle for attention being waged, I wonder who will win...

~~~
Eerie
>I wonder who will win...

Ad-blocking had already won. I haven't (involuntary) seen ads for several
years now. There were a few regressions here and there, but they were all
fixed extremely fast. The new fancy ad-block detectors were defeated in a
matter of days.

26% ad-blocking is a nice start, but the real fun begins when it is at +96%,
and Google/Facebook/InsertNameHere lose their main source of income.

I think a very strong and concerted push to outlaw ad-blocking is almost
inevitable, but ultimately it will be as futile as trying to outlaw the
BitTorrent protocol.

Will the ad-supported crap-manufacturing eyeball factory that is the modern
Internet crash and burn, leaving only Patreon to stand atop the pile of ruins?

We can but hope.

~~~
bitmapbrother
>but the real fun begins when it is at +96%, and
Google/Facebook/InsertNameHere lose their main source of income.

You don't really think it'll ever get anywhere near that percentage, right?
When the major players start devoting time and resources to defeating ad
blockers that's when the real fun will begin.

~~~
AJ007
If the % of ad blockers is high enough, the content providers just switch over
to paid subscriptions. E.g. Youtube Red.

~~~
Eerie
>If the % of ad blockers is high enough, the content providers just switch
over to paid subscriptions. E.g. Youtube Red.

This would be an amazing development. 99.9% of the providers who switch to
paid subscription will go out of business, because their content is toxic
garbage that people will never click if it cost them money. The remaining will
be those who care about quality and consider the viewers to be their
customers, not their product.

------
erehweb
These have been coming out for a while now. Has anyone ever gone back and saw
how previous predictions held up?

~~~
ptero
If I recall correctly she was one of the analysts pumping the internet stocks
during the dotcom boom and bust. IIRC (and I might not) she was also advising
select clients to sell in the early stages of the bust as she publicly kept
issuing strong buy recommendations on the same stocks for general audience.
Thus I tend to view her analysis with a lot of salt.

Here is a first non-paywall link from 2001 on Mary Meeker and dotcoms. Make
your own conclusions.

[http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive...](http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2001/05/14/302981/index.htm)

~~~
palakchokshi
"Among the stocks she has never downgraded are Priceline, Amazon, Yahoo, and
FreeMarkets--all of which have declined between 85% and 97% from their peak."

Maybe she knew what she was doing?

~~~
fensterblick
Amazon is still up almost 10x from its peak!

------
pdog
Over three hundred pages and no mention of Bitcoin, Ethereum, or the Initial
Coin Offering (ICO) phenomenon in this report.

~~~
Eerie
These are not global trends, but marginal developments.

~~~
bredren
What is the milestone for crypto currencies that allows them to cross from
marginal development to internet trend?

~~~
wiremine
Good question. One way to vet this would be to count two things:

1\. What percentage of the population uses crypto currency on a regular basis
(maybe once a month)

2\. What percentage of vendors use it.

That is a B2C view of the world, and might not be correct.

------
sandGorgon
Interesting facts:

\- Voice: Twenty percent of mobile queries were made via voice in 2016. Alexa
is leading the way into voice commerce. \- India and China are the only 2
countries that get a full section each \- China is the benchmark for FinTech.
$5T plus in mobile payments 90% of that driven by 2 companies. Lowest txn
rates in the world

\- 355 M internet users in India second only to China in size. Digital
initiatives focused by govt. India is leapfrogging in Mobile, Identity,
Bandwidth and Payments.

------
jpatokal
These used to be a highlight of the year, but this year's kinda falls flat.
Even some of the stats are absurd:

"94% of all cloud apps are not enterprise-ready per Netskope" (p190)

What does that even mean? Apparently that you should pay Netskope lots of
money to fix that right up for you:
[https://www.netskope.com/resources/netskope-cci-
audit/](https://www.netskope.com/resources/netskope-cci-audit/)

~~~
briandear
It actually begs the question: what does enterprise ready actually mean? The
"enterprise" can mean many different things: HIPAA, PCI, etc, depending on
industry/functionality.

------
brentis
Not so much as a mention of bitcoin or virtual currency.

------
amoorthy
Meeker's reports have, over the years, made several simple yet powerful
conclusions such as when I first read the mismatch of % time spent by device
vs. % of ad spend on device. I don't know if she was the first to observe this
but it made an impact.

That said, the overall report lacks in several respects.

(1) It has an agenda e.g. on the positive value of immigrants (I'm an
immigrant and strongly believe in the value of immigration but her "analysis"
is selective data to prove a pre-existing point).

(2) Relying on industry data. I saw numerous slides purporting to the future
of advertising, supplied by firms who stand to benefit from these changes,
e.g. Pinterest and Google. These ideas may be right but we should at least
admit that they are not objective.

(3) 355 slides is an absurd volume and suggests that she could not, or would
not, refine to what's actually important. The net effect is that her best
points will get lost in a sea of nonsense.

(4) I'd rather she went over past year's reports to see where her trends did
not hold up and why so we can understand other forces at work and all be
smarter for it.

~~~
moduspol
> I saw numerous slides purporting to the future of advertising, supplied by
> firms who stand to benefit from these changes, e.g. Pinterest and Google.

Yeah. Similarly, slide 190 showing 90+% of cloud applications in use not being
"enterprise ready", per Netskope: a company that exists to sell SaaS security
software.

------
jasonsync
Mary meeker sold out? The report is padded with (paid?) name drops.

~~~
anjneymidha
lol maybe we should have charged given the sheer time/energy it takes to put
this together...

but nope, any companies we mention usually are there because they're doing
something actually interesting or leading in their field tbh...whether they're
small companies (allbirds), public (amzn) or somewhere in between (unity, etc)

------
ice109
these are presumably slides from a talk. is the talk available?

~~~
funwithjustin
Are you joking?

~~~
ice109
why would I be joking? you realize not everyone on the internet knows about
all the things everyone else knows about right? this is my first introduction
to this report.

------
dang
We changed the url from
[https://dq756f9pzlyr3.cloudfront.net/file/Internet+Trends+20...](https://dq756f9pzlyr3.cloudfront.net/file/Internet+Trends+2017+Report.pdf)
to what looks like the canonical source.

