The Future Of The Internet Business

Over the past two days. Business Insider held its annual IGNITION: Future of Digital conference in New York.

We had many amazing speakers, including LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, Google VP Brad Horowitz, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, and Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes.

Conferences like these are a good opportunity to step back and look at the big trends shaping the industry. So our BI Intelligence research team and I put together a slide deck that illustrates these trends in simple charts.

I’ll include a link to the deck below. In the meantime, here are some of the key points:

• Nearly one-third of the world’s population is now online (which leaves about two-thirds to go)
• The one-third of humans who are online earn about 85% of the world’s income.So the commercial opportunity is more mature than you think.
• A profound thing happened last year: Sales of smartphones and tablets blew past sales of PCs. Most of the future growth of the industry will be via mobile devices.
• There’s plenty of growth left in mobile, but many developed markets have already hit the halfway point. Once markets hit 50% penetration, growth usually slows.
• Contrary to the common wisdom of a few years ago, consumers are very willing to pay for quality content. Digital content revenues are exploding.
• Digital advertising is also still growing, and it’s now only slightly smaller than TV advertising. But most of the growth is going to Google and Facebook.
• Mobile seems like a huge advertising opportunity, but keep your expectations in check: There are some good reasons why mobile ad spending is so small.
• Contrary to the common wisdom of two years ago, social media seems to be competely ineffective at driving commerce sales. Almost no referrals to ecommerce sites come from social-media sites.
• Google remains a much better advertising platform than Facebook. Why? Because Google is like advertising at a store. Facebook is like advertising at a party.
• The Internet has already demolished the newspaper business. The question now is whether TV is next.

There’s a lot more in the deck, which we’ve published on Business Insider at the link below.  Thanks in advance for any feedback.

Source:  Linked In

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