GREG SWAN

Mary Meeker’s famous annual Internet Trends presentation was yesterday.

Although never presented very clearly (in a creative sense), this is one of the most important milestones of aggregating trend data in our industry each year.

In the next week you will see countless digital and advertising trades recutting and summarizing this data in their coverage. And insights held in this presentation will serve as a reference point throughout the rest of 2017.

Some key takeaways from a quick skim (summarized from Recode/TechCrunch/Adweek):

• Almost everyone who wants or needs a smartphone now has one.
• Voice is beginning to replace typing in online queries. Twenty percent of mobile queries were made via voice in 2016, while accuracy is now about 95 percent.
• In 10 years, Netflix went from 0 to more than 30 percent of home entertainment revenue in the U.S. This is happening while TV viewership continues to decline.
• Global interactive gaming is becoming mainstream, with 2.6 billion gamers in 2017 versus 100 million in 1995.
• Wearables are gaining adoption with about 25 percent of Americans owning one, up 12 percent from 2016.
• Ad spend on Internet will soon surpass TV, but there’s a gap in mobile ad spending that’s a $16B opportunity
• Ad blocking, especially on mobile, continues to increase, with nearly 400 million devices using ad blockers last year. But desktop ad blocking seems to have slowed—around 240 million devices are using similar software
• Incentive-based and skippable ads were preferred over other formats, with mobile-app pop ups and preroll ads being the least desirable.
• User-generated ad content often performs better than branded content (up to 6.9x higher engagement)
• YouTube is losing mobile video share, as Facebook and Snap’s short-form and vertical-video content grows

See all 355 slides in their ugly glory here.