You Might Be Interested in Technologies of 2017

There are a lot of tech predictions at the beginning of each year. Scientists, engineers, and industrialists trying to sum up results of the past year and identify trends for the new.

But as it happens, opinions or forecasts even from famous experts worth nothing. So I think that we can trust only data for figuring out what is going on in the world.

Therefore I want to share with you the most incredible facts and numbers from 2017 which were helping me understand our sophisticated technologies. All of them was published in my Telegram channel “Groks” and this article is like the digest of them.

Big Five

HowMuch

• Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook have gained almost $900 billion in market capitalization over the past year (CNBC).
• 80% of referral traffic comes from just those two companies, from Google and Facebook (Business Insider).
• Apple has booked $246 billion offshore (ITEP).
• More than half million people are working at Amazon (GeekWire).
• iOS drives 75% of Google’s mobile advertising revenue (Apple Insider).
• $3 billion is estimated cost for Google to remain the default search engine on iOS devices. And this amount is 5% of Apple’s total operating profits this year (CNBC).

Advertising

• More than 80% of the ad revenue is concentrated in a relatively small segment of users — typically less than 20%. The Pareto principle works for ad revenue (Soomla).
• 615 million devices now use adblock or 11% of the global internet population is blocking ads on the web (Pagefair).
• Dismal 0.06% of viewers click to the average banner ad and roughly 50% of those clicks are accidental (Google RMG).
• 20% of total global ad spend accounts on Google and Facebook (CNBC).
• $100 million is digital ads budget that P&G cut and didn’t notice changes. “the best case of careful performance marketing” (WSJ).
• U.S. and Canada generate $21.20 per person in advertising revenue for the Facebook, while those in the Asia-Pacific region generate only $2.27 each (Business Insider).

E-commerce & Retail

Business Insider

• More than 6,400 store closings have been announced in 2017 (Business Insider).
• Between 6 million and 7,5 million retail industry jobs are vulnerable to automation within ten years (Fortune).
• Amazon has captured nearly 50% of e-commerce, its share of the overall retail market is about 5% (Business Insider).
• 50% of millennials not only go to physical stores, they prefer going to them as a primary means of shopping (AdWeek).
• One million people who have used the AR features in the Houzz app were 11 times more likely to purchase and spent 2.7 times more time in the app (TechCrunch).

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Voice Tech

• One in six Americans, or around 39 million people now own a smart speaker. That’s up 128% from year ago (TechCrunch).
• 26% of regular voice tech users say they have had a sexual fantasy about their voice assistant (MindShare).
• 3% is the average second-week retention rate for voice application (Voicelabs).
• 20% of mobile searches on Android are by voice (MindShare).
• Amazon to control 70 percent of the voice-controlled speaker market this year (TechCrunch).

China

• China’s mobile payments hit $5.5 trillion, roughly 50 times the size of America’s $112 billion market (NYT).
• WeBank’s (WeChat) small consumer-loans served more than 60 million people in 549 cities in China (China Daily).
• Alibaba passes $1 billion in sales in first 3 minutes of Singles Day (TheNextWeb).
• $19 billion is a total transaction volume on JD for the #SinglesDay period (TechCrunch).
• Online insurer Zhong An had written more than 4 billion policies to more than 400 million customers (WJS).
• Toutiao (news app) has 700 million monthly active users. Avg. time spent — 74 minutes! A million content creators produce 20 million pieces of new content per day (TechNode).
• For 5 minutes Chinese blogger Becky Li sold 100 MINI Coopers via the WeChat (ChinaChannel).
• Zhang Dayi, one of China’s well-known cyber-celebrities, reportedly helped sell goods worth more than 100 million yuan ($15M) during the first half-hour on Nov 11.

Media

Reuters Institute

• Only 5% of web-using U.S. adults have a lot of trust in the information they get from social media (Pew Research Center).
• 16% of people in US pay for news. Most of those new payments have come from the young. The Financial Times surpasses 900,000 paid-for readers (Reuters Institute).
• About 112 million Americans (12+) who have listened to a podcast. And this number continue to growing. The New York Times’s daily audio news report, has been downloaded more than 100 million times (Business Insider).
• BuzzFeed says its morning news show ‘AM to DM’ is reaching 1M daily viewers. For comparison, the largest cable news network Fox News have 1,465 million daily viewers (TechCrunch).
• Apple & Facebook to spend $1 billion on original video content. Hulu $2.5 billion. Google, $4.5 billion. Netflix $6 billion. Amazon, $4.5 billion.

Cryptocurrency

• Cryptocurrency mining affects over 500 million people and they have no idea it is happening (AdGuard).
• Bitcoin mining utilizes an average of 215 kilowatt hours (kWh) per transaction (Vice Motherboard).
• Bitcoin mining now consuming more electricity than 159 individual countries. More than Ireland or Nigeria (Powercompare).
• If the number of Bitcoin transactions equal those processed by Visa, then more than US$ 1.5 trillion per year would be required. Just to sustain the Bitcoin network (FreeCodeCamp).
• Only ~1.8% of Bitcoins are circulating on the network. The remaining 98.2% are lying in accounts in anticipation of growth (FreeCodeCamp).
• Just over 30 minutes into the sale, the Filecoin team had garnered a total of $252 million by ICO (CoinDesk).
• Longfin shares are up more than 1,000% to a market value above $3 billion after announcing Friday it was buying a company focused on the blockchain technology behind bitcoin with zero revenue (CNBS).
• About 40% of bitcoin is held by 1,000 users (Bloomberg).
• 84 of 100 largest ICO projects have no product or service. But they have gathered about $2.7 billion, and nearly a half has fallen to the share of the top ten (RBC).

Misc

• $100.000 is amount on advertising in Facebook, which supposedly can affect to elections in a country where both president campaigns raised more than $1 billion (Facebook Newsroom).
• India Aadhaar digital IDs have broad coverage 82% of population (1.1B People). That was zero 6 years ago (KMPG).
• By 0.02% Android overtook Windows for first time in terms of internet usage at 3rd April (Statcounter).
• $12.3 billion assets under management at Man Group controlled by incorporating AI (Bloomberg).
• Only 27% of eligible iPhone owners have ever used Apple Pay and only 8% use it every week (First Annapolis).
• 70% of US teens use iMessage, 50% — Snapchat and 50% — Facebook Messenger (Hackernoon).
• More than 90% of Model S and Model X vehicles have defects after assembly (Reuters).

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