Meeker: As Internet User Growth Slows, the Real Driver Is Mobile Usage

Mary Meeker, the late-stage investor at Kleiner Perkins and longtime Internet analyst, presented the 2014 edition of her annual trends report at the Code Conference today.

She observed that while huge growth spurts in people getting online and using smartphones may be ending, people really love to use the Internet from their phones, and that’s only growing faster.

According to data from various sources gathered by Meeker and her team, the total number of Internet users in the world is growing less than 10 percent per year and slowing. The number of smartphone users is growing 20 percent per year but also slowing.

But here’s a category where growth is just exploding: Mobile data traffic. It’s up 81 percent with accelerating growth, driven in part by video.

Meeker observed that the percent of page views coming from mobile phones in May 2014 was 25 percent, compared to 14 percent in May 2013, according to StatCounter.

And according to data from video platform Ooyala, the mobile share of online video time spent is now 22 percent, double what it was the year before.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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