Renowned Silicon Valley venture capitalist Mary Meeker unveiled her latest “Internet Trends” report at the Code Conference in Ranchos Palos Verdes, California on Wednesday — and according to the data, Americans are using their smartphones more than ever.
Americans are consuming 5.9 hours of digital media each day, which is a record amount, and a 4 percent increase year-over-year. In addition to that, users are viewing digital media on their phones more than ever, spending 3.3 hours each day on their phones. That figure is up from 6 percent from last year’s report.
Mobile video continues to increase as well, with the global average for watching content on smartphones nearly hitting 30 minutes per day — a 300 percent increase from the less-than 10 minutes average from 2012.
Interestingly, 2017 was the first year of flat growth for smartphone shipments globally. There was also a dip in the rate of new internet users for the year, with a 7 percent increase in internet users for 2017, compared to 12 percent in 2016. The report points to about half of the world — 3.6 billion people — being online already as the reason for slowing user growth.
Here are a few other takeaways from the 294-page report:
— Amazon’s Echo is growing rapidly. Its success highlights the overall growth of the budding voice-controlled speaker market, with 30 million Echoes in use at the end of Q4 2017. That was a jump of 10 million devices since the previous quarter for Amazon.
— Subscription services had a banner year in 2017. Netflix hit 118M users, a 25 percent year-over-year increase, while Spotify jumped 48 percent to 71M subscribers. The New York Times, perhaps receiving a bit of a “Trump bump,” hit 3 million subscribers, representing a 43 percent increase from the year before.
— E-Commerce keeps gaining market share on in-store purchases, with 13 percent of retail sales now happening online. That’s up from about 5 percent a decade ago, and 12 percent a year prior.
You can download and view the full report from Kleiner Perkins here.