31 TECH MACRO TRENDS What Marketers Need to Know in 2014
INTRODUCTION In the last four years, we ve seen tremendous upheavals in how we communicate through social channels and mobile devices, and seen how software has spread into every facet of our personal and professional lives. Technology is reshaping marketing, the enterprise, and the world. For marketers, these changes represent a massive opportunity to reach a bigger audience with more relevant messages than ever before. But in order to capitalize on these shifts, we must first understand them. In this report, Percolate covers today s biggest technology macro trends and offer our perspective on what they mean for marketers in 2014 and beyond.
TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Global the staggering adoption of mobile and internet technology across the planet. 2. Mobile why the smartphones and tablet revolution is still just beginning. 3. Social a look at the scale of modern social platforms and how they re being used. 4. Software Eating the World how new apps are transforming every industry & sector. 5. TV & Video how streaming content is the new center of our media consumption.
Global
Global internet users reached 2.6B in 2013 but growth has slowed to 9% from 11% in 2012. 1 United Nations / International Telecommunications Union, US Census Bureau, Euromonitor International.
WHY IT MATTERS About 40% of the global population now has some level of Internet connection, with most of that coming from developed nations. The opportunity ahead is going to be in emerging markets.
China boasts 550M internet users, with 80% of those connected on mobile. 2 China Internet Network Information Center
WHY IT MATTERS Marketers and technologists are scrambling to figure out Chinese social media and internet usage as it s grown rapidly and now represents the largest smartphone user base for any individual nation.
From Jan-13 to Mar-14, US ownership of the 10 globally most trafficked Internet properties fell 33% 3 comscore: 1/13 and 3/14
WHY IT MATTERS While the US still controls #1-4 Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Wikipedia, China now owns #6-9: Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, Sohu, up from just one site in 2013 (Tencent ). The growth of China continues.
Storage costs fell 99.8% and bandwidth costs dropped 98.4% from 1999-2014 4 John Hagel, Deloitte,
WHY IT MATTERS The infrastructure of the internet is in computing costs, bandwidth and storage. It s difficult to appreciate how much cheaper it is to send and store data. What changes when bandwidth and storage are effectively zero?
Venture financing in both number and dollar amount is over 50% below the 2000 peak. 5 Thomson ONE. Funding per Financing ($MM) calculated as total venture financing per year divided by number of deals.
WHY IT MATTERS With high profile IPO s and enormous valuations, it s reasonable to wonder if we re actually in another bubble. The aggregate funding for startups in 2000 was $101B vs $24B in 2013, which shows we re actually far from the first dot-com boom.
Mobile
70% of mobile phone users do NOT have a smartphone. 6 Mary Meeker & KPCB Internet Trends 2014
WHY IT MATTERS While a staggering 1.1B smartphones were shipped in 2013, many were replacements. Only 1.6B of the 5.2B mobile phone users have smartphones.
Tablets are shipping twice as many units as Desktop PC s globally. 7 Morgan Stanley Research
WHY IT MATTERS Tablets are a young technology but gaining adoption at a fast clip, with 80M units shipped in Q4 of 2013 alone.
Tablet users represent 28% of smartphone users and only 8% of TV users globally. 8 KPCB estimates based on Morgan Stanley Research and ITU data
WHY IT MATTERS The accelerated adoption of tablets still has plenty of room to grow: lots of people still haven t acquired even their first tablet yet.
In Asia and Africa, mobile usage is already 37% of total web usage. 9 StatCounter, 5/14
WHY IT MATTERS Compared to North American and Europe (19% and 16% respectively) Asia and Africa are truly mobilefirst continents, where a significant portion of Internet traffic going through smartphones.
Mobile is the most consumed medium (over TV) in Italy, Japan, Canada, India, Germany, UK, China, USA, Nigeria, Indonesia, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia. 10 Milward Brown AdReaction, 2014
WHY IT MATTERS TV is not going away, but the game has changed and marketers still don t spend as much time on mobile as is warranted by the time consumers spend on it.
97% of global smartphone operating systems (Android, ios, Windows) are built by companies with US headquarters. 11 IDC, 2013
WHY IT MATTERS While there has been significant growth across the globe in internet users and internet companies, the core technology powering one of the most important internet devices (smartphones and tablets) are still owned by the US.
Google s Average Revenue Per User ($45/yr) is 6x Facebook and 12x Twitter. 12 SEC Filings & Comscore. ARPU = Average Revenue per User, defined as annualized revenue per Monthly Active User (MAU). Google ARPU is calculated using Google s gross revenue & Comscore unique visitors.
WHY IT MATTERS While platforms are not all created equal, the fact that Google makes so much per user bodes well for still maturing Internet Giants like Facebook and Twitter.
Americans spend 4x more time on mobile devices (20% of total media consumption) compared to newspapers and magazines. 13 Advertising spend based on IAB data for full year 2013.
WHY IT MATTERS Despite the incredible time spent on mobile devices, print pulls 19% of total ad revenue, vs 4% for mobile. That s a $30B gap that Mary Meeker of KPCB believes will eventually get closed.
Mobile apps generated $26B in 2013, more than 2x the revenue of mobile ads. 14 Global Mobile App revenue per Strategy Analytics; Global Mobile Advertising revenue per PWC
WHY IT MATTERS Given the fact that mobile continues to struggle to convert time spent into ad dollars, it s possible that revenue from subscriptions, virtual goods, and downloads is where the most opportunity is for mobile.
Social
There are 1.8B images shared every single day on just 5 platforms (FB, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Flickr). 15 KPCB estimates based on publicly disclosed company data, 2014 YTD data per latest as of 5/14
WHY IT MATTERS Visual content are coming to dominate our digital experiences, which means that high quality image are going to key part of every marketer s arsenal.
The social referral half-life of a tweet is 6.5 hours, a Facebook post: 9 hours. 16 Shareaholic, 3/14. SimpleReach, 5/14.
WHY IT MATTERS There is always more content in the stream. Your content has to stand out and it probably needs to be reshared multiple times to get its full reach.
Top Twitter news publishers are BBC and NYTimes while top Facebook news publishers are BuzzFeed and Huffington Post. 17 NewsWhip - Spike, 4/14
WHY IT MATTERS Nothing shows the differences between platforms than what kinds of content is popular there. The audience on Facebook prefers more consumer/lifestyle content while Twitter users prefer more professional / important news.
6 global mobile messaging services (WhatsApp, Line, WeChat, KakaoTalk, Snapchat and Viber) now total over 1B users in less than 5 years 18 Publicly disclosed company data for 2013. Note: Snapchat messages / day = # of snaps sent and #
WHY IT MATTERS Compared to North American and Europe (19% and 16% respectively) Asia and Africa are truly mobilefirst continents, where a significant portion of Internet traffic going through smartphones.
Software Eating the World
Only 1.3B music tracks were sold in 2013, versus 118B tracks streamed. 19 Nielsen & Billboard 2013 US Music Report, 1/14
WHY IT MATTERS This the first year on record where digital music track sales have fallen. Spotify, Pandora, and other music streaming services have completely taken over digital music.
Bitcoin wallets grew by 800% in 2013 to reach 5M globally by March 2014. 20 CoinDesk
WHY IT MATTERS Cryptocurrency is a real thing and only getting bigger. Those wallets are split across five major companies.
70% of 4-year college grads had to borrow money, with the average debt around $30k/ 21 The Institute for 25 College Access & Success, 2014. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Voice of the Graduate, McKinsey / Chegg.
WHY IT MATTERS Post-secondary education is expensive and underperforming. 33% of grads don t feel their their education prepared them well for employment. Can you imagine a product that put you into 5 figure debt with such a low rating?
Education technology companies Coursera, Khan Academy, and Duolingo boast userbases of 7M, 10M, and 25M respectively. 22 Duolingo, Coursera, Kahn Academy Company Data
WHY IT MATTERS Major educational platforms are emerging as the poor ROI on college pushes students to seek new opportunities to learn and prepare for the job market.
Eventbrite sold over 58M tickets to 1M events (60% growth) in 2013. 23 Eventbrite Company Data
WHY IT MATTERS Traditional ticketing companies like Live Nation have stalled out, selling just under 150M tickets each year for the past 3 years. Technology driven companies like Eventbrite are hot on their tails.
Grubhub had 39M meal orders to just 29k restaurants in 2013. 24 Grubhub Company Data
WHY IT MATTERS Not only is online food ordering a totally commonplace thing, but the amount of leverage marketplace companies hold over their suppliers can be immense (1345 : 1 ratio of meals to restaurants)
The iphone 5s (2013) contains five sensors. The Galaxy 5s (2014) contains ten. 25 Publicly available data from Apple & Samsung, and third party reviews
WHY IT MATTERS While wearables get a lot of the attention when it comes to realtime, personal analytics, we can t forget that smartphones are actually the most prevalent and powerful sensors today.
AppDynamics, an app performance monitoring company, has tracked 500B web/ mobile transactions 26 AppDynamics Company Data
WHY IT MATTERS We ve been generating tons of data, but most of it hasn t been analyzed. Data mining and organization tools are growing quickly to help businesses and consumers make sense of their data.
Nest has helped consumers save 2B Kilowatt hours via smart thermostat controls since 2011. 27 Based on Nest comparison of actual schedules and set points to a hypothetical (holding constant temperature)
WHY IT MATTERS The data analytics can be tied directly into responsiveness resulting in seriously powerful outcomes.
TV & Video
YouTube s top six stars have between 6M and 26M subscribers and all have seen 50%+ Y/Y growth. 28 YouTube, 5/14
WHY IT MATTERS New mediums produce new stars despite the unfair advantage existing players have because the context, style, and audience is different.
Spectator Gaming is a new genre of video, with the leader, Twitch, reporting 12B minutes of video game footage watched by 45M users in April 2014. 29 Twitch Company Data. Qwilt, 4/14
WHY IT MATTERS Video games are not a massive medium in of itself, but as with most popular things, watching people perform signals the cultural significance (and marketing opportunity) in video games spectators.
TV viewers who simultaneously use Twitter have up to 100% higher rates of ad recall, brand favorability, and purchase intent. 30 Twitter x TV Study, Millward Brown Digital, 12/13
WHY IT MATTERS It doesn t have to be either or. Television is still an important medium that can be enhanced via integrated social campaigns on mobile platforms.
Millennials spend 3x as much time watching Online TV compared to non Millenials. 31 Verizon Digital Media Study, 3/14
WHY IT MATTERS TV producers and networks have to adapt to the fact that Millenials want far more control over the content they consume and the way they consume it.
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