Mary Meeker’s 2013 Internet Trends: Mobile Makes Up 15% Of All Internet Traffic, With 1.5B Users Worldwide

Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers partner Mary Meeker unveiled her annual Internet Trends report for 2013 today at the D11 Conference, showing robust growth in the number of broadband and mobile users. All that said, there’s still a huge opportunity for smartphone adoption and mobile ad spend.

There were more than 2.4 billion Internet users worldwide by the end of 2012, up 8 percent from the previous year. But more astounding than that was the growth in mobile users. There are about 1.5 billion global subscribers, up from 1.1 billion a year before. That represents about 30 percent growth.

There’s also been intense growth in the number of smartphones over the past year. According to Meeker, there were fewer than a billion smartphone subscribers, but that grew to 1.5 billion by 2012. But with more than 5 billion mobile phone subscribers in the world, smartphone adoption still has a lot of growth ahead. Mobile usage continued to grow, making up about 15 percent of all Internet traffic, compared with 10 percent a year before.

But there’s still upside for mobile ad spend. Total Internet ad spend was $37 billion, while mobile ad spend was only about $4 billion. Meanwhile, people spent about 12 percent of their time on mobile devices, which accounted for just 3 percent of ad spend. That compares to the 26 percent of time spent on the Internet, accounting for 22 percent of ad spend.

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