Smartphone growth is slowing down, voice searches are set to replace typing requests, e-sports viewing is growing exponentially, and Netflix now owns a large chunk of the entertainment industry. These are some of the takeaways from the Internet Trends Report released this week.
Every year, former Wall Street analyst-turned-technology-venture-capitalist Mary Meeker releases a lengthy report that is widely accepted as a look into the state of the Web for that year.
Meeker, who is a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, delivered the report at the annual Code Conference, which is currently taking place in Silicon Valley.
The first major insight looked at global smartphone growth. It showed that in 2016, global smartphone shipments only grew by 3% as opposed to 10% the previous year and 28% in 2014. This while the global Internet user base had a flat growth rate of 10%. There are now 3.5 billion people connected to the Internet.
Meeker noted that people are spending more and more time on their mobile devices; the average American now spends more than three hours per day staring at their phone. This time was less than an hour five years ago. In the last five years, the amount of time per day on average spent in front of a computer or on a laptop has been two hours.
Mobile online advertising is accelerating while desktop advertising is decreasing slightly. In the US, $73 billion was spent altogether on online advertising as opposed to $23 billion in 2009 — of the $73b, $37 billion was mobile ad spend.
Meeker says there is a $16 billion opportunity in the US for mobile ad spend as the amount of time users spend on mobile far outweighs how many adverts are appearing there. Radio, TV and desktop roughly equal how much time is spent on the mediums versus…