Key takeaways from Mary Meeker's Internet trends report 2018

1: Have a good internet connection: With thousands of people using the website, it is important for a user to have access to a fast internet connection.

On Thursday, the Mary Meeker Internet Trends 2018 Report was released at a Re-Code technology conference in the United States. Meeker is a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In the report comprising 294 slides, she has covered everything from smartphone behaviour in the US to the rise of the gig economy and changes in consumption patterns on the Internet.

Interestingly, there was very little to no India specific data in the report this year.

• At 3.6 billion, the number of Internet users has surpassed half the world population
• The smartphone unit shipment did not grow at all in 2017.
• Globally, the daily hours spent with digital media per user rose to 5.9 hours a day from 5.6 hours a day last year. Of this, the time spent on mobile and other connected devices rose to 3.9 from 3.5 hours while the time spent on desktop or laptop fell marginally to 2.1 hours.
• Google machine learning word accuracy reached 95 percent, which is close to the threshold for human accuracy.
• Mobile video viewing is expected to rise to over 35 minutes in a day in 2018, driven in large part by new video formats emerging across the world.
• E-commerce related advertising revenue is rising at tech giants Google, Amazon and Facebook, and social media is driving product discovery and purchases online.
• There has also been a shift in user preferences from buying content towards subscribing to content.
• Netflix, Amazon, Spotify, Sony PlayStation, The New York Times, Dropbox, all showed healthy double digit rise in subscribers in 2017.
• Immigration is an important aspect for not just Indian, but also US-based tech companies. As much as 56 percent of the most highly valued tech companies in the US are founded by first- or second-generation immigrants. Uber, Tesla and WeWork are amongst those who have first-generation founders.
• Freelance work grew three times faster than the total workforce, reinforcing the observations that the gig economy is here to stay.
• The privacy paradox is also clear from the numbers in the report. While users are increasingly paranoid about big technology companies misusing their data, 79 percent US-based consumers were willing to share personal data for “clear personal benefit”. Over 66 percent were willing to share online data with friends and family.
• Among the actions people take to protect their privacy, 64 percent people surveyed in the US deleted or avoided certain apps, 47 percent adjusted their mobile privacy settings, 28 percent disabled cookies, and 27 percent didn’t visit or closed certain website.
• In the artificial intelligence arena, China is fast gaining momentum as a contender, with a focus on building not just enterprise, but also government and military level AI systems.