Mary Meeker’s 2019 internet trends report [pdf]

[ketzo]

From page 29, average customer acquisition cost has risen by ~33% in just the last two years... they make the point on the next slide that having customer acquisition costs exceed a customer's lifetime value can't really succeed for long.

I think this, specifically, is what will spell the doom of Uber and Lyft, and potentially many of the food delivery companies -- they rely on insane growth curves to generate new investment, and customer acquisition is just so unbelievably competitive/expensive, it's an arms race that (IMO) has to collapse at some point.

[mevile]

> will spell the doom of Uber and Lyft

Car sharing isn't going anywhere. It's too convenient. The prices will rise, the number of drivers and passengers will fall and the companies will shrink, but they'll still be around. I have trouble seeing suddenly seeing a day when there's no car share service because they all finally went belly up.

[PeterStuer]

In a civilized world those companies should be doomed by labor laws and regulation dodging anyways.

[lil-scamp]

While margins in on-demand are usually pretty slim, companies can get pretty creative about opening up revenue streams: ad-serving, corp partnerships, enterprise pricing, licensing out tech).

None of these are a silver bullet, but they open up new growth that isn't tied to the standard hockey stick growth curve people use to get funding.

[clairity]

my understanding is that driver acquisition (and retention) is much more costly for uber and lyft (at least on a unit basis, and probably overall).

in late majority markets like ride-hailing, (1) awareness is not really a problem on either side of the marketplace as most folks have at least heard of uber and lyft, and (2) inertia is mainly due to uncertainty and risk aversion (for both sides of the market).

so then, the primary friction on the user side is downloading the app and then entering a credit card.

on the driver side, it's considering whether to buy/replace a car, entering personal info and answering intrusive questions, getting a background check, getting your car inspected, and being interviewed and trained. more costly and risky than signing up to be a user.

[skybrian]

"With which company would you share your health data?"

https://www.bondcap.com/report/itr19/#view/287

This certainly isn't what you'd guess from reading comments on HN.

[peterjussi]

Rephrase it as "Which companies do you asses have the security practices necessary to adequately protect your health data?" and this makes sense.

Adding: To be fair, it probably more strongly correlates with "Which technology companies have you heard of?"

[vmurthy]

The fine print says this: n = 4000. This question was only asked to the 11% of total respondents who answered "Yes" to whether they'd share their health data with a tech company

So.. HN might be right , after all :-). Knowing nothing about how they chose their sample respondents, I doubt we can either agree or disagree!

[ogirginc]

This is quite shocking. :/

[holy_city]

Google probably has it from reading your Gmail anyway if your provider emails you any information.

[tetrisgm]

As the years go by, I feel more and more underwhelmed by these. It feels very surface level, handwavy. How would one execute anything but decisions based on confirmation bias using this information?

[jblow]

It's not supposed to help you execute anything; it's an advertisement.

[decebalus1]

do you think they would have anything to gain by disclosing the actual nitty gritty business intelligence?

[hn_throwaway_99]

Wow, just kind of crazy how virtually all the top 20 Internet companies are US and China. The only other country represented is Japan with Recruit Holdings, and a huge part of that (maybe majority?) is due to them owning Indeed, which was founded in Austin.

[aloer]

slide 94:

nearly 4.2 million people streamed in december 2018 at least once on twitch

that seems incredibly high. I wonder how many of those are streaming games vs. talk/conversation vs. travel/outside social etc.

I also wonder what the cost of all of this is. How many of them will actually be unprofitable for twitch due to not having any viewers. The streaming infrastructure must be more expensive than say a yt vid that no one watches, no?

[Advaith]

I'd argue against this solely based on the deflationary costs within computing. Factor that in, and the outlook for twitch looks great.

Article readers -> Video consumers(YouTube, Facebook etc)-> livestream (initially games and now anything)

Streaming games might be the first high value use case but I can def. see twitch gain traction in other niches.

[chaostheory]

The only thing that I had doubts on was the 'Video Watching Daily Minutes' portion Page 49. ISPs like Comcast game their cable numbers. How? They provide incentives to customers where it's actually cheaper to have a basic cable plan bundled with internet vs just internet. Guess what plan customers are going to pick regardless of whether or not they really watch cable TV? Assuming seniors aren't disproportionately consuming video vs everyone else, it's probably closer to 40 / 60 - television vs digital respectively. Unless Comcast and other operators with similar practices provide their DAU, television watching statistics will be inaccurate.

[pwinnski]

50% of the world with access to the internet, that's staggering. Slide 10 shows that there's still a lot of room for growth in Asia Pacific and Africa & Middle East regions, but clearly there are bigger issues involved there.

[karthikb]

80% the world has never been on an an airplane, either.

Many of what we take for granted in the developed world, and even in India/China, have barely been introduced to the vast majority of people.

[tschellenbach]

Correction: Booking is founded by a Dutch guy (slide 260): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booking.com

[shaki-dora]

That's a pretty amazing slide even with that error(? see below). 15 of the top 25 tech companies had 1st or 2nd gen immigrant (co-)founders.

As to booking.com: from reading the Wikipedia entry I gather the original dutch-founded booking.com was at some point acquired by Priceline Group (which had an American founder), which later changed its name back to booking.com. It seems the slide is (technically) correct, and any attempt to capture such cases in a workable definition would be complicated.

[avocado4]

I think it's using owning entity's headquarter location (as opposed to founder ethnicity or pre-acquisition roots). Priceline is headquartered in CT.

[vanderburgt]

But does/did he qualify as an immigrant founder?

[jsf01]

How do you view this on a phone? It says tap to begin. Then what?

[avip]

Reading the report is left as an exercise for the reader.

[cadlin]

The document is left to right. Tapping down goes to a cover(?) page.

[vmurthy]

For those of you who want a quick skim :

A great summary on (of all the things :-)) Twitter : https://twitter.com/investing_city/status/113854955878977945...

[mrandish]

Did anyone else start picturing the first two slides (the ones labeled "Context") in a Star Wars-movie opening crawl? Something about the voice it's written in totally had me seeing it in yellow text perspective scrolling off into the background.

[floatboth]

huh, Atlassian is on the huge company list?

[naistran]

The list only includes internet companies.

[diebeforei485]

Please link to the PDF[1] if possible.

[1] https://www.bondcap.com/pdf/190611_Internet_Trends_2019.pdf

[dang]

Thanks! Changed from https://www.bondcap.com/report/itr19/.

(pdf links aren't the first choice, but that slide interface was confusing, as others have pointed out.)

[zemo]

I kinda like the slideshow, it lets me send someone a link to a specific slide.

[RmDen]

How do I change the URL? It won't let me...

[bilal4hmed]

What took me by surprise was that telegram had more users than whatsapp or iMessage

[coalbin]

I think you misinterpreted the graph, telegram has significantly fewer monthly active users than any of the other messaging services listed on the graph.

[B1FF_PSUVM]

If anyone else is wondering about the 'bondcap.com' URL, it seems a Kleiner Perkins brand.

[r10i]

no. It's Mary Meeker's new fund (a lot of them are from the KP growth team) but separate fund now

[russellbeattie]

Dear Mary,

Social Security is not an entitlement in anything but the strictest sense of the word. Every year you put it in your report and group it in like it's some sort of handout by the federal government, but it's not. And every year, you put up a few slides pushing your politically-motivated world view of cutting "expenses", but never bother to note what USA Inc. could do to increase revenues like raising taxes on the insanely wealthy back to 1950's levels: 91 percent top marginal tax rate would go a long way to balancing USA Inc's books.

Also, it's amazing how many slides you dedicated to the national debt during Obama's presidency, and yet now it barely gets a mention, and definitely no dire predictions of ruin and destruction for all. I wonder why?

Every year I point this stuff out in HN, because I want to make sure the bias is well and truly noted in case others missed it. It makes me question how much irrational partiality infects the rest of the report - quite a lot I suspect.

[dang]

Please don't take HN threads on generic political tangents. Your points may be good but this is clearly a step into generic flamewar and therefore the wrong direction for HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[jblow]

A 91% top marginal tax rate would be a net negative on taxes, because most of the rich people would leave the country.

There's a fine art to setting the tax rate at a level that people dislike, but not strongly enough to do something about it, because the other benefits of being here outweigh.

[CharlesW]

Thank you for noting that.

[skybrian]

Why do you believe Social Security isn't an entitlement?