society | Bradley Howard's Blog

Mary Meeker’s latest annual Internet trends report has been released, and it’s as insightful as always.

New sections for this year include:

A new section on the ethics of data usage and regulation
Interesting sections on healthcare (expenditure by country, and their focus on preventable deaths); and China (the move from manufacturing, and the totally different user experiences, such as live streaming for ecommerce)
New section on education – US university enrolments falling, with online increasing

Here are my highlights (aka abbreviated research notes):

Slide 25: [USA-based] advertising purchasing is moving to Amazon/ Twitter/ Pinterest (basically, moving from Facebook or Google at a quicker amount than they are growing)
Slide 28 & 29: Balancing Customer acquisition cost with Life Time Value!!
Slide 32: Drive conversion from freemium (Spotify & Zoom), rather than seeking new customers
#51: Echo devices doubled last year to 47M. There are now 90,000+ skills for Alexa. Why? How are they promoted?

In the UK, 5.5 million homes (around 20% of all homes) now possess a voice activated assistant.
20 per cent of 3-5-year-olds now own their own iPad.
Google and Facebook have more than a fifth of the world’s advertising spending (they have 50-60 per cent of digital advertising spend).
The terms and conditions for Amazon’s Kindle are 73,198 words long and would take around 9 hours to read. I checked this out (link) and the terms are made up from 20 documents, plus the privacy notice.
Compared to the 400 deaths per year from terrorism, more Europeans drown in their own bathtubs, and ten times more die from falling down the stairs.

Bradley Howard's Blog