Mary Meeker is a venture capitalist whose work focuses primarily on the internet and new technologies. Each year she produces a report about internet trends - both looking back and looking forward. It is always highly anticipated you can check out this year’s here. Below are some of my key takeaways after reading:
- Rising cost in user acquistion (33%) - its becoming more expensive to acquire users and it is unsustainable to keep maintaining customer acquisition costs that are higher than lifetime value.
- Growth is slowing
- Internet
- Ecommerce
- Ad Revenue
- Online platforms (especially facebook)
- except youtube and instagram
- India and China have about half their population not online
- Mobile advertising has surpassed desktop advertising.
- Programmatic ad buying is driving down the price of ads across the board and this trend continues
- Mobile usage is starting to exceed TV usage
- Image creation and sharing is huge and continues to grow.
- Freemium business models outside of gaming are just getting started (Spotify, Zoom etc.) Anticipate innovation and growth in this approach.
- Great Y/Y growth in cloud
- Those doing well are frequently using more and more data to make decisions and drive business.
- From consumers there is a growing concern about privacy as well as too much device usage.
- On demand services are growing rapidly (e.g. Doordash, solv, telehealth).
- There is a slight uptick in remote workers.
- Rapid growth in online learning - Universities and traditional learning is set for disruption.