An Indian student checks her mobile phone in Mumbai. NDRANIL MUKHERJEE/AFP/Getty Images
Mary Meeker, the world-renowned analyst — formerly of Morgan Stanley and now with venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers — unveiled her much-anticipated presentation on 2015′s internet trends in a conference sponsored by Re/Code in Rancho Palos Verdes, California on Wednesday. Meeker’s annual presentations on the state of the internet and trends that have emerged over the last year — often including looks at the past two decades — are seen as markers for how the web has transformed in terms of reach, impact, and how people are using it. In a look-back at trends from the past three years, Meeker showed how internet penetration is still increasing, but at a declining rate.
She displayed that the number of global web users increased 8% last year, compared to 10% in 2013 and 11% three years ago. Yet India’s internet user growth rate increased 33%. And smartphone subscription growth also has been slowing, except India is at the forefront again here with a 55% growth rate. These types of figures show that the last 20 years of the internet and mobile explosions have staved off in countries with high rates of web penetration, but in places like India — where the internet is making its way around the country slowly — many users are glomming onto mobile devices as cheaper ways to access the web.
While internet penetration in the U.S. may seem like it has reached the saturation point, that does not convey the actual impact and reach of the internet on the various sectors of the American economy. One of Meeker’s slides shows that the consumer sector has been 100% impacted by the internet, but the business, security, education, healthcare, and government sectors still have a long way to go in terms of feeling the impact of the web. Unsurprisingly, the government is the last body to be impacted by the internet, but that is attributable to a few things, including regulatory obstacles.
And, while consumers are the ones currently most impacted by the internet, they are increasingly driving its content generation. Meeker showed that user-generated shared and curated videos, audio, and written communications including reviews such as on sites like AirBnB are rising rapidly in production. Content on the internet is increasingly produced by users themselves, and people aged 12 to 24 are the ones driving much of this content. Highly popular content production apps like Instagram and other social apps are the favored channels for users in that age range.
But the applications that dominate global usage are messaging apps. South Korea-based KakaoTalk, U.S.-based WhatsApp, and China-based WeChat are the messaging apps with the most number of sessions, and six of the top 10 most used apps overall are messaging apps including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Japan’s LINE, Cyprus-based Viber, KakaoTalk, and WeChat. Whatsapp now has 800 million active mobile users, Facebook Messenger has 600 million and WeChat has 549 million. For comparison, Snapchat has 100 million daily active users.
Overall, Meeker’s presentations are always solid barometers for how internet adoption is progressing, and through what hardware and software it is accessed. For now, there is still much work left to be done to get the next billion users onto the web, and government still has yet to feel the broad effects of these tech transformations. But, communication is what users have shown to be the most popular capability, and there is room for growth in many markets on that front.
