Mary Meeker’s annual Internet trends report is a great way to know what is happening in the world around you (or at least online). The Morgan Stanley analyst turned venture capitalist offers a new report every year walking people through how consumer habits are changing, and what that will mean for businesses around the world.
Also read: Do Only 52 Million Adults Watch Original Shows on Netflix and YouTube?
If you get the chance to look at the full slideshow, please do so at the bottom of this post. In case you do not want to read through 144 slides, here are the cliff notes.
The Pain for Print Newspapers and Magazines Is Not Over. Advertisers are spending 19 percent of their media budget on print newspapers when consumers are only spending five percent of their media time reading them. That imbalance will have to correct itself, and you can guess where the money is headed: mobile devices.
Another Tech Bubble Is Not Upon Us. When Facebook paid $19 billion for WhatsApp and SnapChat rejected a $3 billion bid from Facebook, people began talking about a second tech bubble. Meeker offered strong evidence that it isn’t happening. The number of tech companies going public is a fraction of what it was back in 1999 and 2000 – the time of the first big bubble. Moreover, while a few companies have scored incomprehensible valuations, the value of all those companies going public is also much smaller than it was back then. The year 2012 was a notable exception. Thanks Facebook.
Glenn Beck is almost as popular on Facebook as the New York Times. Meeker ranked different organizations based on how many interactions they stimulate on Facebook and Twitter. While the New York Times is the second biggest on Twitter, behind the BBC, it comes in at number eight in terms of Facebook (at least out of this crowd). Who is number nine? The Blaze, Beck’s news organization.
People Aren’t Buying As Much Music Online (aka Why Apple Bought Beats). Music streams increased 32 percent in 2013. Digital Music sales fell six percent. Hey, at least they did not fall as far as physical sales.
Young People Watch More TV Live Than Online. That might seem like good news for the TV industry, but it’s not because the overall trend is working against it. While “Non-Millennials” watch 59 percent of their TV live, “Millennials” watch more than 50 percent of their TV online, via DVR or on-demand. The case is even more dire overseas, where a growing number of people are using smartphones and tablets, especially in the world’s largest countries (like China, Brazil and Indonesia.) If TV networks want to be relevant in the future, they need to respond to viewing habits (and quickly).
