“Queen of the Internet” Mary Meeker—one of the most powerful women in Silicon Valley by all metrics—has released her annual internet trends report.
Since 1995, Mary has held the tech world captive as she summarises her highly anticipated and revered internet trends reports. At the time of her first report, she was one of the most highly respected internet analysts on Wall Street.
“No one forced me to focus on technology, she told Wired in 2012. “I just did it because I had a passion for it. When I started, there weren’t a lot of women role models. It was Carol Bartz, Judy Estrin. I think there’s been a lot of progress since then, and I think that if women have a passion and really want to succeed, they can.”
This year’s 333-page presentation of slides, data and charts will help guide the decisions of entrepreneurs, investors, and tech enthusiasts throughout the year.
“We use data to tell stories of business-related trends we focus on,” states the report. “We hope others take the ideas, build on them & make them better.”
Staying true to her no-nonsense presentation style, she needed a mere 30 minutes to deliver the most pertinent points of her report.
“If it feels like we’re all drinking from a data firehose, it’s because we are,” Mary told the audience at Code Conference 2019 during her speech.
Following are some of the highlights from the presentation:
- Over half of the world’s population uses the internet, compared to 48 percent last year.
- China makes up 21 percent of the world’s internet users, whereas the US only comprises about 8 percent. India makes up 12 percent.
- Customer acquisition costs are increasing and, in some cases, surpasses the revenue the customers will bring to the business over the long-term. Mary suggested free trials and unpaid tiers as inexpensive ways to acquire new customers.
- Internet ad spending is increasing, and 62 percent of all digital display ad purchases is for programmatic ads.
- Images are increasingly being used as a way to communicate.
- Interactive gaming innovation is rising across all platforms.
- Freemium business models are growing and scaling.
- Seven out of 10 of the world’s most valuable companies by market cap are tech companies: Microsoft (1), Amazon (2), Apple (3), Alphabet (4), Facebook (6), Alibaba (7) and Tencent (8)
- Health care is becoming more digitised.
- Sixty percent of the top 25 most valuable tech companies were founded by first- or second-generation immigrants.
- Concerns about privacy are increasing, “but they’re moderating.”
- Problematic content is another concern (bullying, political extremism, harassment), and it’s becoming challenging to moderate as internet usage increases.
Since her last internet trends report, Mary left Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and raised $1.25 billion dollars for Bond Capital, her debut growth fund. Bond Capital is the first billion-dollar venture capital firm founded by a woman.
The entire report is available below, and an archive of Mary’s previous reports is available at Bond Capital.
Internet Trends 2019 by on Scribd
