A few takeaways from Mary Meeker's 2014 Internet Trends

Every year Mary Meeker presents her report of the last and coming year’s Internet Trends. It’s always an influential report, and if you have any kind of career in digital, you should really pay attention. This year’s is no different, and KPCB has gone so far as to create a nice page for the presentation on their website.

Here are a few immediate takeaways that are of interest to our segment of the digital sphere, and my own personal interest. View the full report for much, much more interesting information.

Smartphone Operating Systems

Over the last three years, Android has eclipsed iOS by quite a bit. Gone are the days of developing and testing for iOS only. Also, the quickness in which BlackBerry lost practically all market share should be a lesson for anyone stuck in the past.

Mobile Ad Spend Growth

As you can see here, there is tremendous opportunity for growth in mobile advertising. Mobile occupies 20% of our media consumption time, but only takes in 4% of advertising spend. Something is wrong here. Also, as you can see, print media is skewed in the opposite direction. Print is in a dangerous place right now, but there is room to shine in mobile advertising and marketing if you’re doing it right.

Education Realities

If 1/3 of college graduates feel their education is not preparing them well for employment, but leaving them with $30,000 in debt. We’re doing something wrong, folks.

Healthcare

Waste in healthcare cost amounts to 27% of it’s total. Costs are still rising, and behavior is still the root cause of many of our health problems. However, the second slide speaks to the change that digital technology and consumerization of healthcare can bring. If we demand and more tools to help us fix the healthcare mess, we can make it happen.

Music Consumption

We love streaming services. Spotify, SoundCloud, Pandora, etc are all hitting digital and physical music sales hard. I’d be interested to see if has had an effect on illegal downloading as well.

Money

Bitcoin is growing exponentially, and is a technology that should be taken seriously. I feel like it has the capacity to be here quicker than we anticipate, if they can get their ducks in a row with security and bad PR.

Photos

Betty White once said, “Facebook just sounds like a drag. In my day, seeing pictures of people’s vacations was considered a punishment.” This may still be true, but that’s not stopping us from sharing those photos.

User Interface

User Interface and User Experience are the new golden children of the digital age, for good reason. It used to be “make it work”, now it’s “make it work, then make it better.”

Video Ads

There are enough clever folks creating digital video ads right now that it’s not completely annoying. This seems like both an opportunity and a threat to me. As long as we keep it short and delightful, we’ll win. When the crap comes flowing in it will devastate that segment of online advertising.

Don’t forget to check out the entire report. This is less than 10% of the slides, and my synopsis isn’t nearly thorough enough.