The Internet in 2018: How It All Affects Digital Marketing

The internet is a vast and ever-changing beast, with a whole host of services and sites constantly growing and expanding. As a marketer, it is often hard to keep up with the ever changing trends and regulations of this vast landscape that is the internet. In her annual Internet Trends Report at Recode’s Code Conference, Mary Meeker highlighted major trends, changes, and unusual stagnation across the internet as a whole. Here are 5 of our biggest takeaways:

1. Time Spent Online

People have been and continue to increase the amount of time per day that they spend online. In 2017 adults spent on average 5.6 hours online, whereas in 2018 that number has gone up to 5.9 hours per day. This information is coupled with the fact that mobile is the largest chunk of that time, with 3.3 hours spent online on mobile devices per day.

2. Voice Controlled Products

Products like the Amazon Echo and Google Home are becoming more and more popular. Echos alone grew to more than 30 million units sin the fourth quarter of last year. With all of this considered it has become official, the Internet of Things is here to stay with connected and voice controlled devices becoming more and more popular.

3. Ecommerce

Ecommerce has been and continues to be one of the biggest growth sectors globally, growing 16% in the U.S in 2017 and 14% in 2016. One of the notable increases is of course with Amazon, who took home 28% of last year’s eCommerce sales. Partnered with this, physical retailers continue to falter and drop in sales.

4. Big Tech is Growing

The biggest tech companies are getting stronger and more robust by expanding their net of specialties. For example, Google is now expanding into the commerce world with their introduction of Google Home Ordering and Amazon is now expanding to include advertising. These expansions open up previously untapped markets for these tech giants, allowing for even greater control over information dissemination and ad costs.

5. China is Catching Up

China now is home to nine of the world’s 20 largest internet companies by market cap compared to the U.S.’s 11. Comparatively, just a brief five years ago China only had two whereas the U.S. had nine. This trend is not surprising as China has actively been trying to attract companies with an eager workforce and lenient taxation plans.

Some of these trends have been expected for a long time, after all, it is no surprise that Ecommerce is alive and well and that we as a culture have become attached at the hip to our phones (Literally). But in a digital landscape it is immensely important to stay up to date to the day on most recent trends so that we as marketers can garner the best results for our clients. In this day and age, analytics and numbers rule all, and it has never been easier to track success, so staying up to date is crucial.