entire industry grew out of the seemingly limitless potential of the web. The “dot-com bubble” refers to this period, from roughly 1997 through 2000, during which startup companies with entirely Internet-based businesses were formed and received venture capital, intending to change the world by ushering in a new renaissance – one in which we would all have golden toilets and hovercraft and a soda fountain in our kitchen…
Oh.
So it wasn’t limitless, but the companies that could survive did; and despite a one-year slowdown, PC sales continued to grow. Along with them, new browsers entered the market and gained popularity. Microsoft launched Internet Explorer, Mac had Safari, along with open-source projects such as Firefox and Opera. More recently Google Chrome has taken the lion’s share of the market. Figure 1-2 shows the amount of PCs sold annually from 1995 through 2007.
Figure 1-2: PC sales from 1995–2007
During this time, it turns out we weren’t all in such awe of PCs and the Internet that we decided to stop making other technological advances. Cell phones were evolving from simple green-screened boxes, to sophisticated full-color screens used to play Snake, to machines that began to reach the web.
In the meantime, the web itself continued to grow and evolve. The basic timeline of web markup advances can be simplified to the graph shown in Figure 1-3.
You may have noticed that Figure 1-2 ends at 2007. Of course, the Internet didn’t end that year. The diagram stops there because something transformational emerged that year: the iPhone (see Figure 1-4).
From this point forward, mobile phones began to look and act much smarter, hence their new name “smartphone.” With these little pieces of glass, we could now interact with not just a subset of the web, or some web-like features, but the entire web.
Figure 1-3: Overview of mobile-related web markup languages
Figure 1-4: The iPhone: a game-changer
As shown in Figure 1-5, which illustrates the phenomenal trajectory of sales of these devices, we really wanted to do that.
Figure 1-5: PC sales and mobile device sales from 1995–2013
As you can see, mobile device sales beginning in 2007 had a few good years, and then several great years. We’re still in that great category. Mobile device sales have skyrocketed and, as of yet, show no sign of slowing.
In 2011, mobile device sales actually surpassed PC sales (see Figure 1-6). A market already saturated with smartphones received a further sales acceleration with the introduction of a third class of devices: tablets.
According to a Pew Internet survey (www.pewinternet.org/2012/06/26/cell-internet-use-2012/), 55 % of Americans said they had used a mobile device to access the Internet in 2012. More shocking than that, 31 % of these mobile users said that those devices are the primary way in which they access the web.
An absolutely ludicrous misconception (that I hear nearly daily) about mobile devices is that it is totally fine for them to offer only a subset of the desktop version’s content. Misinformed product managers make the argument that users only need quick, focused tools on their phones. To determine whether this reasoning has any merit, we can look at numbers from some of the top-visited websites in the world.
Figure 1-6: In 2011, yearly mobile device sales outpaced PC sales.
In 2009, less than two years after the mobile tipping point, Facebook’s mobile users accounted for roughly 13 % of its total traffic (20M of 150M). Even in that short time frame, that is not a negligible number. However, by mid-2012, mobile users accounted for more than 50 % of Facebook’s traffic. As of summer 2015, a staggering 78 % of monthly U.S. Facebook traffic comes from mobile devices (newsroom.fb.com/company-info/#statistics). The other social media giant, Twitter, asserts that 80 % of its entire user base is primarily using mobile devices (https://about.twitter.com/company).
Outside of social networking, move than half of all YouTube views now come from mobile devices (www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html). In 2015, year over year mobile revenue on YouTube is up 100 %.
Pew Research has reported that 50 % of teenage (13–17) smartphone owners use the Internet mostly or exclusively on that device (www.pewinternet.org/2015/04/09/teens-social-media-technology-2015/). Similarly, 45 % of adults between the ages of 18–29 mostly use the Internet on their mobile devices.
“But wait,” you may be thinking, “those are only multi-billion-dollar social networks that changed the way we interact on a daily basis. What about e-commerce?” Here’s the thing:
In 2011, $4 billion of eBay’s gross sales came from mobile shoppers. In 2012, this number grew to $13B. In a rather ballsy fashion, eBay expected this trend to hold, and projected that 2013 sales from mobile would reach $20B (techcrunch.com/2013/01/16/ebay-and-paypal-expect-to-do-20-billion-each-in-2013-mobile-commerce/, techcrunch.com/2011/10/09/ebay-vp-steve-yankovich-en-route-to-4b-in-gross-mobile-sales-tctv/). They were pleasantly surprised by an extra $2B in mobile sales on top of that.
Moreover, not only were sales from mobile browsing astronomical, 36 million of eBay’s incremental accounts and users registered on mobile, accounting for 40 % of new users (www.mobilecommercedaily.com/ebay-downplays-offline-retail-play-as-mobile-volume-swells). In 2013, I couldn’t name a single person who hadn’t either
● had an eBay account for at least five years, or
● decided they were never going to need one.
A property then owned by eBay, PayPal, experienced a similar surprise. They, too, projected mobile sales volume to reach the $20B mark in 2013. Actual sales numbers, however, were comfortably at $27B (http://bankinnovation.net/2014/01/paypal-processed-27-billion-in-mobile-payments-in-2013/) instead. PayPal takes 2.9 % of each sale, plus 30 cents. If we estimate the average transaction amount of these sales at a conservative $25, that means that PayPal made a surprise extra $287M off of those $7B in mobile sales that outpaced their own projections.
In
