2013 Internet Trends
The latest edition of the annual Internet Trends report finds continued robust online growth. There are now 2.4 billion Internet users around the world, and the total continues to grow apace. Mobile usage is expanding rapidly, while the mobile advertising opportunity remains largely untapped.
Context & Ripple Effects
Mary Meeker's annual Kleiner Perkins deck arrives two years after AllThingsD asked whether the web itself was shrinking, and it answers with scale rather than contraction: 2.4 billion people online, up from the roughly one billion counted when the milestone was first tallied back in 2005. The pickup across eight outlets — AllThingsD, NYT Bits, Fortune, ZDNet, Business Insider and others running the same-day story — confirms the report's status as the industry's de facto state-of-the-internet address.
The analytical core this year is a mismatch: mobile usage is expanding rapidly while the mobile advertising opportunity 'remains largely untapped,' with NYT Bits flagging the report's attention to wearables and Facebook alongside the headline user count. That gap between attention and monetization is what makes the 2013 edition more than a victory lap.
First-order effects
- Mobile-heavy platforms such as Facebook — named directly in the report's social-and-wearables outlook — carry surging mobile usage without proportional ad revenue, putting immediate pressure on their mobile monetization roadmaps.
- Advertisers and planners get a quantified arbitrage: with the mobile ad opportunity officially undersupplied relative to usage, mobile inventory is positioned as the cheapest incremental reach in the 2013 buying cycle.
Second-order effects
- Ad networks and exchanges race to close the gap with mobile-native formats and targeting, competing to set pricing norms for small screens before desktop-style rate cards simply port over.
- Publishers who acted on the 2011 'web is shrinking' thesis by pushing app-first strategies gain fresh ammunition for investors, since Meeker's curves make mobile-first distribution the default growth narrative to underwrite.
Third-order effects
- If the usage-versus-monetization imbalance persists, cross-screen audience measurement becomes the contested infrastructure everyone needs — an industry fight over who gets to count mobile attention and at what price.
- The report's annual cadence hardens into the industry's shared scoreboard, meaning capital allocation increasingly keys off Meeker's user-growth curves rather than any single company's disclosures.
The trend: Meeker's Internet Trends report functions as the industry's yearly scoreboard for the desktop-to-mobile handoff, with each edition's user count and monetization gap resetting where investors expect growth to sit next.