Mary Meeker's 2012 Internet Trends Report Bares All: Ads, Mobile, Social, 3G & More

Mary Meeker, who used to be called “Queen of the Net” when she was an analyst at Morgan Stanley, is out with her annual report on the state of the internet called “2012 Internet Trends.”  This is being discussed at the D: All Things D conference and it has many issues ranging from mobile to Facebook, Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) to advertising to mobile to social.  The report is actually by Mary Meeker and Liang Wu and they are both under the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers.

On the broad economy, Meeker’s view is mixed trends with a negative bias, but the report also says that in the U.S. there a lot to be excited about in tech (and a lot to worry about elsewhere).  Perhaps most important is that this addresses whether or not there is a bubble or not.

Rapid mobile adoption is in the early phases with 1.1 billion global mobile 3G subscribers globally.  The iPad from Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) is called as leaving “#siblings” in the dust but noted that Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) has seen Android adoption ramping at 4-times that of the iPhone. Meeker shows that as of January some 29% of US adults own a tablet or eReader.

Through May of 2012, global mobile internet traffic is 10% of all internet traffic, up from 4% in December of 2010 and up from just 1% in December 2009.  Mobile is now 8% of US e-commerce and mobile monetization is growing rapidly with 71% from Apps and 29% from ads.  India has now seen mobile internet usage pass up desktop internet usage. Now the bad news… eCPMs are five times lower and average revenue per user is 1.7-times to 5-times lower on mobile than on desktops.

Unfortunately, Meeker also hinted that her venture capital employer has laid low on investing new fund assets in many of the new web and tech companies due to valuation.  The rest of the slide show can be seen here.

http://www.kpcb.com/insights/2012-internet-trends

JON C. OGG