Every year Mary Meeker, one of the top researchers covering the digital eco-system, publishes an immense volume of statistics that folks like us here at Lima Consulting Group use in providing our recommendations to digital marketing visionaries.
It was only in the past 12 months, we finally reached a point where more than 50% of the world population have access to the internet. As we generally keep our cell phones within arms reach for most of the day, I would argue that we’re turning into cyborgs; that is, computers are handy extensions of our daily life. Think of the last time you had a question and were able to win a bet about the name of the album of your favorite group with an uninformed friend!
That means that the next creative geniuses will be coming from places where we may not have considered in the past. Places like Sao Paulo, where there are at least 3 incubators with over 100 startups each, places like Recife, Brazil in their Digital Port, and places like Indonesia where Hacktiv8 is running coding boot camps in Jakarta.
The growth of e-commerce as a percentage of retail sales continues to grow at 15% of sales. And Internet Ad Spending is still growing at 22%.
Mary goes deep to explain why Instagram is the fastest growing social media platform, why companies like UnReal (makers of Fortnight) are defining what social gaming is all about, and why the Freemium models work in gaming, in enterprise software sales, and for consumers.
We were delighted to see so many of our technology partners like Snowflake, Adobe, Google, Salesforce, Microsoft and others mentioned in the reporting. Areas to watch include artificial intelligence and computational creativity to augment the ability to create personalized experiences using machine-generated content.
- More than 50% of the world’s population has access to the internet, and it’s getting harder to reach new users.
- Global smartphone shipments fell by 4% in 2018, compared to 0% the prior year.
- 53% of the world’s internet users are located in the Asia-Pacific region, with China being the largest single internet market in the world, with about 0.8 billion internet users in the country.
- Seven of the top 10 companies in the world by market capitalization are technology companies, and four of the top six are US-based.
- E-commerce sales are up 12.4% over the prior year, which ticked up slightly over the 12.1% growth rate seen in 2017, but physical retail is also still growing, although only at about 2% in 2018 from the year prior.
- E-commerce also accounts for about 15% of the share of US retail sales now.
- Mobile advertising now accounts for 33% of advertisers’ ad purchases, up from 0.5% in 2010. Spending on print, TV, and radio ads have fallen as consumers spend far more time on mobile.
- Google and Facebook still account for the majority of online ad revenue, but the growth of US advertising platforms like Amazon, Twitter, Snapchat, and Pinterest is outstripping the big players: Google’s ad revenue grew 1.4 times over the past nine quarters and Facebook’s grew 1.9 times, while the combined group of new players grew 2.6 times.
- The average US adult spends 6.3 hours each day with digital media, over half of which is spent on their mobiles.
- Roughly 70 million people globally listen to podcasts in the US, a figure that’s doubled in about four years.
- 47 million people have installed Amazon Echoes, which has doubled in the last year.
- There are now about 2.4 billion interactive game players in the world, a jump of about 6% over the prior year. Fortnite alone has 250 million users, as does the gaming social network Discord.
- Cloud services revenues of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are collectively closing in on $14 billion, a jump of about 58% year-over-year.
- More data is now stored in the cloud than on private enterprise servers or consumer devices.
to download the full report from Bond, Mary’s new company go here.
