Meeker: Mobile Ad Growth Is Rising

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner Mary Meeker delivered her annual download on the biggest Internet trends at Recode’s Code Conference. Here are a few of Meeker’s key findings:

Mobile advertising growth is increasing: Mobile advertising growth increased 22% from 20% in 2015. Internet ad spend in the U.S. reached $73 billion, with nearly $43 million coming from mobile. Spending on desktop ads decreased a bit -- this has fluctuated between $30 million and $38 million for the last five to six years.

Smartphone sales are slowing: While mobile ad growth may be rising, smartphone sales are sluggish. Meeker noted that from 2015 to 2016, overall shipments of smartphones grew by just 3%, down from 10% from 2014 to 2015. In addition, smartphone user-base growth slowed, growing just 12% in 2016 compared with 25% the year prior. As of 2016, around 2.8 billion people owned smartphones.

Digital media usage continues to grow: The amount of time adults spent with digital media in 2016 grew year-over-year, with the average time increasing to 5.6 hours a day—up from 5.4 hours in 2015. Of that, mobile accounted for 3.1 hours (increasing from 2.8 in 2015) while desktop usage remained flat at 2.2 hours.

Internet ad spend eclipsed TV ad spend: Meeker found that global ad spend in 2016 for both the Internet and TV hit about $180 billion, with internet spending expected to grow faster than TV in 2017. Google and Facebook accounting for 85% of all growth in internet ad spend in the U.S.

Voice-activated devices are popular: The total number of consumers using voice-enabled assistants such as the Amazon Echo suite is growing. In Q4 2016, Echo had more than 8 million users, a figure that increased to 11 million in Q1 2017.

Incentive-based ads vs. preroll: Incentive-based and skippable ads were favored by consumers over other formats, with mobile-app pop-ups and pre-roll ads being the least desirable.

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