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Mary Meeker's 2016 Internet Trends Report: Messaging Apps Could Rival Home Screen (techcrunch.com)
Mary Meeker, a former Morgan Stanley internet analyst and now partner at venture-capital fund Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, has delivered her annual report that offers critical stats and trends about how technology is evolving. TechCrunch has highlighted the takeaways from the report: 1) The global internet adoption rate was flat year-over-year at 9%, reaching 3 billion users or 42% of the world's population.
2) Smartphone adoption's growth is slowing, while Android increases marketshare despite a shrinking average selling price.
3) Video viewership is exploding, with Snapchat and Facebook Live showing the way, though video ads aren't always effective.
4) Messaging is dominated by Facebook and WeChat, it's growing rapidly, and evolving from simple text communication to become our new home screen with options for vivid self-expression and commerce.
5) US advertising is growing, with Google and Facebook controlling 76% of the market and rising, but advertisers still spend too much on legacy media rather than new media where the audience has shifted.
6) Meeker predicts the rise of voice interfaces because they're fast, easy, personalized, hands-free, and cheap, with Google on Android now seeing 20% of searches from voice, and Amazon Echo sales growing as iPhone sales slow.
2) Smartphone adoption's growth is slowing, while Android increases marketshare despite a shrinking average selling price.
3) Video viewership is exploding, with Snapchat and Facebook Live showing the way, though video ads aren't always effective.
4) Messaging is dominated by Facebook and WeChat, it's growing rapidly, and evolving from simple text communication to become our new home screen with options for vivid self-expression and commerce.
5) US advertising is growing, with Google and Facebook controlling 76% of the market and rising, but advertisers still spend too much on legacy media rather than new media where the audience has shifted.
6) Meeker predicts the rise of voice interfaces because they're fast, easy, personalized, hands-free, and cheap, with Google on Android now seeing 20% of searches from voice, and Amazon Echo sales growing as iPhone sales slow.
Computer? Computer? A keyboard. How quaint. -Scotty, Star Trek IV
I guess I'm finally there. I'm on my lawn and yelling at the kids, because I have no idea what the fuck that statement is supposed to mean.
Yes, I'm facebook. Yes, I use it to chat with friends. But never once would I have ever used "vivid" to describe those conversations. Maybe the report means the use of emoji and "stickers". In my experience those get in the way of meaning more than they add to it. Yes I can eventually understand what is meant, but it takes more time than simply typing out the meaning(s) in the first place. Maybe if you've used them for a long time you can translate faster, but that doesn't begin to explain why you'd want to begin using them in the first place.
Using chat to buy things strikes me as an idiot's way of losing money hand over fist.
Please listen! Move to new media and leave us luddites who dont use facebook or smartphones to rot in our land of no advertising! Pitty us! for we shall soon be as forgotten as a "Target Market" just like those poor usenet souls!
I'll just have to find some way to carry on without advertising, somehow....
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If you think Facebook controls this market, you have to be all of 14 years old.
But you and your coworkers are less valuable than 14 year-olds
There are, however, things you can do to become temporarily more valuable. You can get a new job. You can move to a new city. You can have your first baby. These things make you interesting, because life-disrupting events are opportunities to disrupt existing habits and establish new ones. First-time parents who've never darkened the doorstep of a Target store will be lured in with deals on baby equipment, then kept coming in with diaper coupons until going to Target becomes a mindless habit.
And in the list of life-disrupting events, adolescence is one of the largest and longest-running. Not only is there the direct buying power of the 14 year-olds themselves, there's their influence on others' behavior ("Mom, will you drive me to Target?"). What's more when they're finally and definitively out of adolesence they emerge as newly fledged independent adults with incomes and autonomy and literally no stuff in their lives. They have to buy everything: pots and pans for the kitchen, grown-up clothes for work, sporting goods to rot away in their closets. The value to a vendor of having a foothold at the start of that orgy of acquisition that is young adulthood is immense.
So it's a fair bet that neither you nor your colleagues will never enjoy the consumer-economy prominence of a 14 year-old ever again.
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