Mary Meeker and Liang Wu of the venture capital firm KPCB recently shared an eye-opening presentation on Internet trends and the future of mobile at the recent D11 conference in Rancho Palos Verdes. The data show what many who follow this blog will already know: mobile is only getting more and more popular and important, all around the world.
Mobile’s increasing share of traffic
Mobile devices account for 15% of all global Internet traffic, as of this writing. If the trendline holds, it will reach 30% by 2015. For reference, at this same point just four years ago, it was less than 1%.
Due to this increase, Groupon sees almost half of its transactions take place on mobile. And Facebook has also seen huge effects from the trend:
• 30% of last year’s ad revenue growth came from mobile users
• The total number of mobile Facebook users grew by more than 50% last year.
• While desktop ad revenue per user (ARPU) is declining, mobile ARPU is growing fast enough to offset the losses.
Smartphone sales are surging
In fact, they were up 30% globally last year, and there’s great potential for this to continue, especially when you consider that, of the 6 billion mobile devices out there, only about 25% are smartphones. And as smartphone prices decline, they may come to replace the simpler mobiles in the hands of many users. Potentially, this could mean billions of new smartphone users in the coming years.
What mobile devices are people using?
As for manufacturers, the worldwide market share breakdown looks like this:
• Apple: 22%
• Samsung: 29%
• Other: 49%
Tablets, however, are growing even faster than smartphones, led by the iPad. Total units sold worldwide for tablets are now more than even PCs or notebooks.
What are users doing with devices?
By number of uses per day:
• 23 (use instances for) Messaging
• 22 Voice calls
• 18 Checking the time
• 14 Other
• 13 Listening to music
• 12 Gaming
• 9 Social media
• 8 Camera
• 8 Alarm function
• 6 News and alerts
• 5 Calendar
• 3 Web
• 3 Search
Obviously, mobile devices are becoming increasingly more integrated into all of our lives. As each new function and app is rolled out, the trend gains more and more momentum. And as we spend more and more hours using our mobiles, our comfort with them and dependence on them increases. For businesses, the message is clear:
Mobile is the fastest-growing and most important business arena around.
