Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report 2014
The 2014 edition of the “Internet Trends Report” from venture firm KPCB is out and for those of you interested in what they unveiled on Mobile, I’ve picked below the most interesting slides. The smartphone market has a lot of room to grow, smartphones representing only 30% of a 5.2 billion mobile users, with around 315 million units delivered in Q4 2013.
Tablets are growing faster than PCs ever did, with 52% increase in 2013. There are at the moment 439 million tablet users and compared with other devices like laptops, desktops, we see there’s great potential for growth.
Mobile usage represents now 25% of global web usage. Based on previous numbers of users generated by each computing cycle, KPCB estimates that the Mobile Internet will be accessed by 10 billion devices, ranging from smartphones, tablets to car dashboards and house appliances.
Mobile app revenue represents 68% of mobile monetization, the rest belonging to mobile advertising.
The report looked then at the evolution of apps, from multipurpose apps to single purpose apps, the trend we’re seeing nowadays with Facebook that created an app for Messenger or more recently with Google on iOS that split the Google Drive app into Sheets and Docs. Another new trend is apps that open only when they have something specific to say to you based on contextual signals.
The amount of sharable and findable data that is uploaded every day explodes, fueled by mobile devices packed with sensors, 8 billion of them. There are 1,8 billion photos uploaded daily through apps like Snapchat, Facebook, Whatsapp or Instagram.
Smartphone costs continue to decline at a 5% rate every year, while the cloud storage usage increases and gets cheaper. In just 10 years smartphones and tablets grew 5 times bigger than TV & PC. They are the most view screen currently, people spending between between 1 and 3 hours every day on them.
Surfing the web, shopping, checking sport scores, looking up additional information on certain people are the preferred activities of mobile owners while watching TV.
Apps are replacing channels, as the number of smart tv’s grows every year. In 2013 they represented 39% of all shipments.
People are spending 22% of online video time on mobile devices.
There are 500 million mobile users in China now, 80% of China’s Internet users, and there are some Chinese apps with large userbases, heavily engaged in shopping activities. Some examples are WeChat (400 MM users) or DidiTaxi (100 MM users and 5 MM daily rides).
The biggest smartphone markets are US, Japan, UK, Germany, Korea and and top 15 markets having 588 MMs users out of a total of 1786 MMs. In developing markets there’s still a lot of room to grow, here 23% of population owning a smartphone compared with 65% on average in developed markets.
