Continuing the annual tradition, Mary Meeker has released the much-anticipated Internet Trends 2016 report. It’s a staggering 213 pages long, and was released at the Code Conference 2016. Full slide deck in PDF is here.

To save you time, energy and battery, I went through the report and picked some of the most fascinating and mind-blowing statistics and graphs from the report. They are presented in the order they appear in. I will add my own commentary where I can and link to additional resources if it helps.

I’d also be interested in hearing your thoughts on the report, or my choices. Tweet at me (@karangoel), and we’ll start a friendly, work-safe conversation*.

* GIFs may or may not be involved.

Global internet

Global internet growth was flat at 9% year-over-year, and actually decelerating excluding India. Speaking of India, the subcontinent led the pack at 40% growth and became the second biggest internet market after China.

Global smartphone market

Mobile is hot, but slowly cooling off. Global smartphone shipments went from 28% to 10% - a staggering slowing. Number of iPhone shipments went down by 7% and Android devices went up by 11%.

Global economy

The factors that drove the economic growth and now at inflection point, and making to harder to sustain growth.

Online advertising

Even though adblocking is increasing, advertising revenues are only going up. Biggest contributor to this growth is mobile, which grew by 66% compared to desktop advertising growth of 5%.

Millennials

Millennials are the biggest, most diverse generation with people who are willing to try new things. And as their incomes and buying power increases, so do marketing campaigns targeting them!

Visual communication

The rise of photo and video apps has fueled the growth of visual consumption of information instead of textual. Snapchat, Instagram and Pinterest lead the charge here. Video is also evolving to be real-time and more authentic.

Messaging

Facebook is killing in the messaging space with three of the six top properties. Messenger continues to keep accelerating its growth thanks, because it adjusting to evolving needs for self-expression - emojis, stickers, GIFs etc.

Voice

Users continue to use voice assistants more and more, mainly because of advances in machine learning and natural language processing. This marks the evolution of a more accessible and intuitive interface beyond the keyboard. Google has also reported that 20% of its queries are now voice queries.

UberPOOL

In just two years, Uber has completed over 100M UberPOOL rides. Also see Travis Kalanick’s TED talk.

China

The leader in internet population with 668M users is China. With increasing disposable income and buying power, mobile ecommerce is hot. 31% of WeChat users have purchased something on WeChat - more than doubling from the number in 2015.

Public and private companies

The biggest internet companies have loads of cash and richer-than-ever market caps (or valuations).