• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, May 30, 2018

After about seven years of declining growth, global smartphone shipments completely stagnated in 2017. 

That’s according to the latest web trends report from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner Mary Meeker, who largely attributed the stalled growth to maturing mobile markets.

At the expense of aspiring operating systems, Android and iOS have come to totally dominate the mobile space. Worldwide, there are now about 3.6 billion people online, which works out to just over half of humanity.

On average, people the world over now spend nearly six hours a day consuming digital media -- about half of which is devoted to mobile channels.

Continuing to grow year-over-year, U.S. ecommerce sales approached $4.5 billion in 2017, while ecommerce approached 14% of total retail sales.

Among social networks, Facebook continues to dominate product discovery (at 78%), while Instagram and Pinterest were tied for second place (at 59%). 

Asked what they consider to be the most important ad spending optimization metric, marketers’ most common response was “customer lifetime value” (27%), followed by impressions (19%), and brand lift (18%).  

Among other positive signs for Amazon, the install base for its Echo smart speaker increased from 20 million in third quarter 2017 to 30 million in the fourth quarter of that year.

Amazon also increased its share of domestic ecommerce sales to 28% in 2017, which represented a year-over-year gain of 16%.