12 things Mary Meeker wants you to know about the Internet, 2016 edition (part 2)

In a post published earlier this week, I distilled six important insights from Mary Meeker’s “Internet Trends” slide deck. Today’s post offers six more nuggets of wisdom, this time focusing on trends in advertising, social networks, and new fault lines that are emerging on the Internet as a whole.

Advertising isn’t the only way to make money on the Internet — sales of goods and services offer an alternate source of revenue, and the Internet continues to grow as a retail channel. While the Internet garnered 2 percent of retail sales in the US in 2000, it’s now up to 10 percent, with a year-over-year growth rate of more than 20 percent. Unlike advertising, which is intensely concentrated in Google and a few young sisters, retail offers a healthy mix of traditional stores and startups.

The most interesting developments are in customized goods and ad hoc services that couldn’t be monetized before the Internet. We can buy personally fitted clothing without ever seeing a tailor, hail rides from cars that don’t have taxi medallions, and spend the night in rooms that aren’t parts of hotels. And, by the way, the leading US retailer in sales per square foot — apart from gas stations — is Apple, at an impressive $5,546.

The Internet is great for retailers whose products can be upgraded and enhanced, and Internet retailing is made to work with personalized ads tailored to known or expected buying preferences. When merchants can virtualize the most concrete part of the shopping experience — the examination of physical goods — the rationale for brick and mortar stores to serve as anything but warehouses is sharply reduced.

 
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12 things Mary Meeker wants you to know about the Internet, 2016 edition (part 2)

 
Πηγή: TechPolicyDaily.com