For marketers, it’s like Christmas in July! The 2019 Mary Meeker Internet Trends Report recently published.

For 20-plus years, this industry-defining report has captured how consumers in the U.S. and across the globe are using the internet and interacting with media.

Don’t worry! We broke down the 300-plus-page report into an easy-to-scan list with the insights you need to make informed marketing decisions for the rest of 2019.

Internet and Smartphone Usage

  • More than half of the world’s population (3.8 billion people) are on the internet, compared to just 24% 10 years ago.
  • Global smartphone shipments are not growing. In fact, shipments fell by 4% compared to last year. That’s the first time the year-over-year (YoY) trend has been negative.
  • 63% of adults are trying to limit the personal time they spend on their smartphones, up from 47% the year before.
  • 26% of adults are almost constantly online, up 5% from three years ago.
  • People around the globe now take nearly 1.4 trillion photos a year.

Advertising

  • For years, there was a major opportunity on mobile for advertisers: more people were spending time on mobile than businesses were investing in it. But that’s over. Companies have caught up and are spending 33% of their ad budget there, which works out perfectly since consumers spend 33% of their media time there.
  • On the flip side, people are now spending 12% of their daily media time listening to the radio, and businesses are only spending 8% of their ad spend there. That aligns with other reports this year that show audio (and specifically podcasts) show promise for businesses.
  • Internet ad spending keeps rising, growing more than 20% YoY, but the revenue those digital ads drive started declining in 2018.
  • Using digital software that programmatically buys digital ads (instead of real-time bidding) is driving up the cost of ads.
  • Cost of customer acquisition (CAC) in ads is also rising in highly competitive sectors. The report predicts that CAC can’t exceed the lifetime value (LTV) for very long.
  • Effective and efficient marketing, such as free trials/freemium models or affiliate/referral marketing, may be the way to combat the above trend.

Media Trends

  • People are spending 7% more time interacting with digital media each day. In 2018, they spent 6 hours and 18 minutes compared to 5 hours and 54 minutes in 2017. While people have been spending the majority of that time on mobile since 2014, this was the first year that the time they spent on computers fell.
  • 2019 is predicted to be the first time that people will spend more time each day on their phones than they do watching television.
  • People now watch two times as many digital videos as they did five years ago. Now, people spend more than a quarter (28%) of their video time watching digital videos instead of TV.
  • 70 million people in the U.S. now listen to a podcast a month. That’s twice as many people compared to four years ago.
  • Smart speaker usage is growing faster than the podcast market but isn’t quite as large (yet). Currently, 47 million U.S. adults have an Amazon Echo installed. That’s about double YoY growth.

Social Media

  • Facebook still has the largest percentage of internet users who use the platform at least once a day, clocking in at 30%.
  • YouTube attracts 27% of internet users every day, making it a close No. 2. YouTube and Instagram are gaining the most new users right now.
  • After Facebook and Instagram, WhatsApp has 25% of internet users check it daily while WeChat has 23%. Again, messaging apps are a significant trend in the social space and are here to stay.
  • Nearly two times as many people are watching short-form videos (aka Stories) on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp than they were a year ago. That accounts for 1.5 billion daily active users on Stories.
  • Local is another big trend in social. NextDoor, which connects you with local neighbors and businesses, has grown 71% YoY and now has 29 million users.
  • Social media use is decelerating, growing at only 1% YoY. Previously, it had grown at 6%.