This article by RAIN CEO Jennifer Lane was originally published on her Audio4cast blog.
Mary Meeker updated her yearly Internet Trends report at the ReCode conference yesterday. Meeker’s a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and she’s an expert at seeing the next big thing. In 2011 she predicted that online audio was the ‘next big thing.’
Her presentation was some 180 slides long, full of meaty charts and graphs. I recommend a look at the full deck, which you can find here. The thing could be the basis of a college course — no, maybe an entire degree — it’s so chock full of past trends, current data and future predictions.
My favorite slide is some personal wisdom she passed on in closing, about effective decision making. The best decisions, she says, are often made by diverse groups of people. “Saying or hearing these words is magic: ‘That’s really interesting. I had never thought of it that way before. Thank you.’”
Meeker is talking all about mobile again this year, focused on the significant penetration of smartphones, and the growth of mobile video, which is also known as ‘vertical video’ because of the way people hold their phones. Vertical viewing is 29% of video versus 5% five years ago. In case you were scratching your head about Spotify’s jump to incorporate video, announced this week, it’s trends like this that are the impetus.
Millenials continue to drive mobile usage – 87% say their phone never leaves their side, and 60% think it’s all going to happen on devices within five years. Meeker’s next big thing this year is buy buttons, which she says are coming soon and seamlessly to wherever you spend your time online.
I’m thinking hard about online audio as enhanced mobile platforms, rather than a standalone media these days. Factoring in vertical screens and buy buttons to that equation seems like a significant value proposition to both consumers and advertisers. I had never thought of that before…