Here are a few of the highlights that are of interest to ISPs:
Internet Growth. Worldwide Internet growth is still at about 10% annually with over 350 million new Internet users expected this year. At the end of 2016 there was 3.4 billion Internet subscribers, a global penetration rate of 46%. The worldwide industry has exploded since having 1.6 billion Internet subscribers in 2009.
Internet Usage. In the US the average Internet usage is now 5.6 hours per day per person, up from 5.4 hours in 2015. This includes 3.1 hours of mobile usage, 2.2 hours of desktop usage and 0.4 hours on other devices.
Netflix Growth. Netflix now earns 30% of the home video entertainment dollars in the US. The company had almost 94 million worldwide customers at the end of 2016 and is adding around 6 million new subscribers per quarter.
Interactive Gaming is Huge. There were 2.8 billion worldwide interactive gamers in 2016, up from 100 million in 1995. This is driving a huge amount of Internet bandwidth. The average age of a gamer in the US is 35.
Streaming Music. Streaming music now drives 52% of the revenue in the music industry. Less than a quarter of the industry revenues comes from physical media like CDs.
Smartphone Growth is Slowing. The growth of smartphones sales in 2016 was down sharply and only grew worldwide at 3%, down from 10% in 2015. With that said there were still over 1.4 billion phones sold in 2016 and there are 2.8 billion total smartphone users in the world, up 300 million since 2015. The industry has seen tremendous growth and there were only 300 million smartphone users in 2009. Around 84% of smartphones use Android.
Internet Shopping Continues to Grow. Online shopping is still growing at a torrid pace. Parcel deliveries in the US from Internet shopping were at 10 billion in 2016, up 9% over 2015 and up from 7 billion in 2010. It’s predicted that 7,000 retail outlets will close in 2017.
Online Advertising. In the US the amount of online advertising was $73 billion in 2016, up 22% from 2015. The amount of mobile advertising now equals the amount of desktop advertising. Desktop advertising has dropped by over $2 billion annually since 2015. Google and Facebook dominate US web advertising with the two companies getting 85% of ad revenues in 2016. Google earned over $35 billion in ad revenues for the year.
Voice Used for Queries. Voice is replacing typing and 20% of all queries made through smartphones are now done using voice instead of typing. It’s reported that the accuracy rate of voice recognition is now at 95%, up from 76% in 2013. It’s expected for voice interface to grow rapidly in homes and businesses due to voice recognition devices – Amazon Echo has sold over 10.5 million Echo devices by the end of 1Q 2017.
Social Media Changing Customer Loyalty. Over 82% of customers stopped doing business with a company after a bad experience. This is up from 76% in 2014, with the difference credited to the feedback from social media.
Immigrants and Tech. I’m not sure what this means, but 60% of the most highly valued US tech companies were founded by first or second-generation Americans including Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook.