The Internet Is Continuing To Grow As More Users Come Online

According to Mary Meeker’s 2019 Internet Trends report, adults spend more than 6 hours each day with digital media, over half of which is spent on their mobiles.

Since Mary Meeker, a former Morgan Stanley internet analyst and longtime venture capitalist, first delivered her Internet Trends report in 1995, it has become Silicon Valley’s favorite slide deck of technology statistics and trends on changing consumer behaviours in the internet.

At this year’s Code Conference in Arizona on June 11, she delivered her latest 333-page report, highlighting the following trends:

More than 50% of the world’s population has access to the internet, and it’s getting harder to reach new users.
Global smartphone shipments fell by 4% in 2018, compared to 0% the prior year.
53% of the world’s internet users are located in the Asia-Pacific region, with China being the largest single internet market in the world, with about 0.8 billion internet users in the country.
Seven of the top 10 companies in the world by market capitalization are technology companies, and four of the top six are US-based.
E-commerce sales are up 12.4% over the prior year, which ticked up slightly over the 12.1% growth rate seen in 2017, but physical retail is also still growing, although only at about 2% in 2018 from the year prior.
E-commerce also accounts for about 15% of the share of US retail sales now.
Mobile advertising now accounts for 33% of advertisers’ ad purchases, up from 0.5% in 2010. Spending on print, TV, and radio ads have fallen as consumers spend far more time on mobile.
Google and Facebook still account for the majority of online ad revenue, but the growth of US advertising platforms like Amazon, Twitter, Snapchat, and Pinterest is outstripping the big players: Google’s ad revenue grew 1.4 times over the past nine quarters and Facebook’s grew 1.9 times, while the combined group of new players grew 2.6 times.
The average US adult spends 6.3 hours each day with digital media, over half of which is spent on their mobiles.
Roughly 70 million people globally listen to podcasts in the US, a figure that’s doubled in about four years.
47 million people have installed Amazon Echoes, which has doubled in the last year.
There are nowabout 2.4 billion interactive game players in the world, a jump of about 6% over the prior year. Fortnite alone has 250 million users, as does the gaming social network Discord.
Cloud services revenues of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are collectively closing in on $14 billion, a jump of about 58% year-over-year.
More data is now stored in the cloud than on private enterprise servers or consumer devices.
26% of US adults consider themselves online “almost constantly.” That number jumps to 39% for 18 to 29 year-olds surveyed.