Internet trends in 2019

Publication date: 16 Jun 2019

Every year, Mary Meeker, a former Morgan Stanley internet analyst and famous venture capitalist, releases a report on the state of the internet. This year, her report says that the internet continues its slow growth, as more users come online, especially with mobile devices.

2019 key internet trends

• Over 50% of the world’s population has access to the internet, and it’s getting harder to reach new users.
• In 2018, global smartphone shipments fell by 4%; no fall was recorded in the prior year.
• 53% of the world’s internet users are located in the Asia-Pacific region. China is the largest single internet market in the world with 0.8 billion internet users.
• E-commerce sales rose by 12.4% year-on-year slightly overcoming a 12.1% growth seen in 2017. Physical retail sales are also still growing though there was only a 2% year-on-year increase in 2018.
• E-commerce accounts for about 15% of the share of US retail sales.
• Mobile advertising accounts for 33% of ad purchases (it accounted for only 0.5% in 2010). Spending on print, TV, and radio ads have fallen as consumers spend far more time on mobile devices.
• Google and Facebook still own the major part of online ad revenue, but the growth of other US advertising platforms like Amazon, Twitter, Snapchat, and Pinterest is gradually putting the big players under pressure: Google’s and Facebook’s ad revenue grew, respectively, 1.4 and 1.9 times over the past nine quarters, while the new players increased their collective revenue 2.6 times.
• The average US adult spends 6.3 hours each day on digital media, and over half of the time (s)he uses mobile devices.
• There are now about 2.4 billion interactive game players in the world that is a 6% increase since last year. Fortnite alone has 250 million users so does the gaming social network Discord.
• Cloud services of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have collective revenue of $14 billion, 58% more than they had last year.
• More data is now stored in the cloud than on private enterprise servers or consumer devices.
• 26% of US adults say they are online “almost constantly”. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, the same was said by 39% of respondents.