Trends

Mary Meeker's epic "Internet Trends Report" has victims: Google & Facebook

Snacks / Wednesday, June 12, 2019

Stop what you're doing... We've got trends to report. Mary Meeker, aka Queen of the Internet, just dropped her 333-slide "Internet Trends Report." The hugely successful tech investor's annual deck is read across the venture capital community to find the next "BLANK of BLANK." We read it for you.

It comes down to 3 key trends... (but here's the full deck for your reading pleasure).

  • Internet growth worldwide is slowing: The number of www users grew just 6% (the slowest growth ever) in the past year to 3.8B people.
  • Online ads are growing in an interesting way: 22% more bucks were spent on online ads, and that growth is rising. But targeted ads (aka the ones that freakishly know you clicked a blue shirt, so keep offering you blue shirts) are getting hit by regulation like Europe's GDPR. And Amazon & Twitter are winning ad market share from Facebook and Google.
  • Americans are disturbingly online all the time: Time spent on the internet rose from 5.9 hours/day to 6.3 this year. 26% of US adults say they're "almost constantly online."

This hurts Google and Facebook the hardest... Big Tech was already on the defense everywhere. Now two of its leaders can add "Internet Trends" to the list of things they have to fight against:

  • Congress held a hearing yesterday to see if the pair's online advertising dominance was killing news (and thereby threatening our democracy).
  • The Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice just added them to their radars for antitrust worries (aka are they monopolies that should be regulated).
  • Apple is religiously positioning itself as a privacy god compared to Google and Facebook (see its new "Sign in with Apple").

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