I get it; no one likes Powerpoint. It’s a terrible format for communicating anything truly important, an awful source for disseminating real knowledge.
But…
Every year, Mary Meeker, a former Wall Street securities analyst now working as a Silicon Valley venture capitalist with Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, releases this highly-anticipated Powerpoint deck: her annual analysis of internet trends. This year’s version weighs in at a staggering 355 pages. I won’t pretend that I’ve read through it all, but I plan to. And you should too; download a pdf of it here.
The sad reality of our modern age is that the sheer volume of information exceeds our available time. And social media’s propensity for short term distraction is overwhelming (are you taking the day off to watch Comey’s testimony?). Still, as today’s rate of change approaches the exponential, we must make a point of keeping up or our knowledge base will quickly become the intellectual equivalent of the steam engine.
So because none of us have enough time, here are three key points from her deck (admittedly, all of these came from the first 50 slides):
- Facebook and Google are surging way ahead. Thanks to the power of search and social, Facebook ad revenue grew 62% in 2016 and Google’s grew 20%. Others averaged a more modest 9% YOY. What’s more, Facebook’s newly acquired apps—WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger—are all growing more quickly than Facebook did.
- Today’s consumers demand choice and curation. Spotify earns 20 percent of global music industry revenue, fueling music’s first growth period after 16 consecutive down years. Users listen to 41 new artists each week, with 40 percent of those sessions coming from recommendation data. Similarly, Netflix accounts for more than 30 percent of home entertainment dollars. And gamers as a demographic have exploded from 100 million in 1995 to 2.6 billion today, with Asia accounting for 47% of this $100 billion market.
- Mobile ad dollars now exceed desktop. While total online ad spend continues to increase, mobile dominates spend just as it does usage time…yet mobile ad spends continues to lag.
There is much, much more to be gleaned from this deck, so dig through it. I certainly plan to, just as soon as I finish bingeing on “House of Cards.”
