Humanity Goes Digital: The Latest Trends
Bond partner Mary Meeker presented her annual Internet Trends report at the recent Code 2019 conference — this is a key report for anyone working in innovation, customer engagement, digital marketing, Insurtech, cyber risk, A.I., IoT, and other tech-related fields.
Some of the key highlights for me:
Internet for the people (well, 51% of the people)
At 3.8 billion users, more than half (and rising) of humanity’s on the internet, up from 24% in 2009. And while the speed and scale of internet adoption are impressive, it’s also remarkable that half the global population isn’t using the internet in 2019 — that’s why initiatives like SpaceX’s Starlink are so important.
The geographic distribution of internet users is somewhat aligned with population size: China has 21% of the global internet-user population, followed by India at 12%, and the U.S. at 8%.
In 2019, U.S. companies continue to dominate the internet market, led by Microsoft with a market cap of just over a trillion U.S. dollars, followed by Amazon, Apple, Alphabet (aka Google) and Facebook. China’s Alibaba and Tencent are close behind in sixth and seventh place (respectively), while Australia’s Atlassian also made the top 30.
Better customer engagement = hyper growth
In the U.S., adults spend around 6 hours online every day on digital media, with over half the time spent on their mobiles. In 2018, around 26% of adults were ‘almost constantly’ online compared with 21% in 2015, increasing to 39% for people in the 18–29 age group.
Shipments of new smartphones fell by 4% in 2018 (compared with 0% year-on-year), while wearables adoption doubled (to 52 million users) over the four years to 2018. Smart speaker adoption (specifically, the Amazon Echo) also doubled within a year, reaching 47 million (U.S.) by Q4–18. Around 90,000 Amazon Echo (Alexa) skills are available so far.
Still in the U.S., the number of consumers engaging with on-demand products and services also doubled in two years, while a recent survey found 91% of retail customers prefer brands that deliver personalized recommendations and offers, 83% are willing to passively share personal data in return for personalized services, and 74% are happy to actively share personal data.
In China, Alibaba’s developed the most comprehensive ecosystem of e-commerce platforms, including its payments platform Alipay, which doubled its active users to over a billion globally within two years.
Freemium’s growing fast, enabled by the cloud and digital payments
E-commerce now reflects 15% of total retail sales in the U.S., but its growth is slowing. E-commerce was up around 12% percent in Q1–19, compared with 2% growth in traditional retail. Also, customer acquisition costs are increasing in highly competitive and capitalized sectors.
Freemium business models are also growing and scaling rapidly — for the uninitiated, think Spotify, where you can listen to music for ‘free’ if you’re happy to listen to a bunch of ads every now and then. If you’re not a fan of ads, you could upgrade to Spotify’s ‘premium’ ad-free service for a monthly subscription fee (this is a typical freemium model).
Revenue from efficient digital payments (>50% of daily transactions globally) and cloud deployments (up 58% year-on-year) was identified as key enablers of freemium’s growth. Today, more data is stored in the cloud than enterprise servers or consumer devices, which is why several firms are upskilling their staff on cloud computing, including insurer IAG which has already delivered training to hundreds of staff through its very own Cloud Academy.
As the gig economy grows, remote work lags
The gig economy’s growing, with 6.6 million on-demand workers in the U.S. in 2018, up 22% year-on-year. According to a recent U.S. survey, 47% of on-demand workers were previously unemployed, and 27% were underemployed. Remote work’s still uncommon in the U.S. but also growing (albeit slowly), with around 5% of Americans working remotely today, compared with 3% in 2000.
WhatsApp and Instagram are driving growth @ Facebook
Facebook’s still the most popular social media app, with 30% of global internet users logging in at least once a day, followed by YouTube at 27% and WhatsApp at 25%.
WhatsApp and Instagram (both Facebook-owned) are gaining the newest adopters, with the latter boasting a billion monthly active users. This isn’t surprising, as more people are using images and videos to communicate and tell stories on social media and other channels — case in point:
Interest in podcasts also doubled over four years to 70 million (U.S.) listeners. That said, overall social media use fell by 1% in 2018, compared with a 6% drop in 2017. Also, a 2017 survey of British teens found social networks helped improve several (psycho-social) health-related factors, especially self-expression and self-identity, but also made others worse, led by reduced sleep quality and duration, FOMO, and increased bullying.
Interactive games are the ‘new social media’
Interactive gaming is growing, with around 2.4 billion gamers in 2018.
Online games like Fortnite are becoming the ‘new social media’ for many people around the world, by allowing them to connect and interact with others in shared digital environments.
Interactive games are also becoming increasingly relevant communication tools, and are also scaling rapidly thanks to the freemium business model (à la Fortnite).
Digital healthcare is expanding
In the U.S., healthcare costs continue to rise for the government and consumers while healthcare-preventable deaths are still the highest relative to other advanced economies, including NZ, the U.K., and Germany. That’s partly why healthcare continues to steadily digitalize in the U.S. and globally, driven by rapid consumer adoption of digital health tools designed to scale up the delivery of affordable, personalized healthcare to more patients, including people in remote regions, to help improve individual and population health outcomes.
The democratization of healthcare is another key digital health trend. For example, Apple’s data-rich ResearchKit and CareKit are enabling researchers and developers to create new digital tools for a growing range of health conditions.
Another key trend is the growth of ‘intelligent’ A.I.-enabled healthcare, such as Google’s DeepMind Streams A.I. assistant, which analyses patients’ data and delivers personalized clinical insights to their healthcare providers.
Privacy concerns are still high, but ‘moderating’
In the U.S., 88% of people believe the internet’s been ‘mostly good’ for them personally, and 70% believe it’s been ‘mostly good’ for society. Data privacy concerns are still high, but starting to moderate as regulators and businesses increase their efforts to improve consumers’ data privacy.
The use of encrypted messaging is also growing, with 87% of web traffic encrypted by Q1–19, compared with 53% three years ago.
Cyber threats are growing and evolving
It’s just as well encrypted messaging’s more popular, with cyber-attacks continuing to rise as internet-connected systems get more sophisticated, data-rich and mission critical. This includes state-sponsored attacks or ‘cyberwarfare’, large-scale attacks against data providers, and extortion attacks.
Cyber attackers are increasingly focussing on sensitive customer data, and they’re ‘following’ this data to the cloud as more businesses adopt cloud services.
The attack-to-detection ‘dwell time’ (time it takes to detect and remove a system threat) continues to fall and averaged 78 days in 2018, which is still plenty of time for a threat to wreak havoc on unsuspecting businesses and customers’ data privacy, highlighting the importance of relevant risk mitigants (including cyber insurance).
Like I said at the start, this was my attempt at extracting some of the key insights from Meeker’s expansive report — you can check out the full (334-page!) deck if you’d like to delve deeper into the above and other digital trends.
About the author:
Aamer Fattah is a scientist, innovation leader and deep tech expert.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any agency, organization, employer or company.
