Digital trends in April 2019

This article is a snapshot of Simon Kemp's report on global digital trends in 2019
Issued on 25 April 2019
https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2019-q2-global-digital-statshot

Please follow the link above to read the full report including all the slides.
Bellow is a short extract highlighting the main trends.

1 - The growing role of voice as an interface
obvious in India and China, much less so in japan
2 - The continuing rise of social medias
with Facebook still leading the pack
3 - An analysis of Facebook and the impact of the recent changes

Essential headlines

Global internet users grew by 8.6 percent over the past 12 months, with 350 million new users contributing to an overall total of 4.437 billion by the start of April 2019.

• Social media user numbers have also registered solid growth, increasing by more than 200 million since this time last year to reach almost 3.5 billion by the time of publication. However, recent changes in Facebook’s reporting methodology mean that actual growth was probably even higher, as I’ll explain below.
• There are now more than 5.1 billion people around the world using a mobile phone – a year-on-year increase of 2.7 percent – with smartphones accounting for more than two-thirds of all devices in use today.
• Roughly 98 percent of the world’s social media users – more than 3.4 billion people – access social platforms via mobile devices.  

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Internet use in April 2019

The latest reported figures suggest that an average of almost 1 million people came online for the first time each day over the past year, continuing the strong growth that we saw in our recent Digital 2019 reports.

India accounted for the greatest share of growth in internet users in the first quarter of 2019, with data from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India showing that the country added more than 44 million new internet subscribers in the first three months of the year.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the vast majority of the world’s internet users now go online via mobile devices, with data from GlobalWebIndex indicating that more than 9 in 10 internet users connect using a mobile phone.

The growing role of voice

GlobalWebIndex’s latest data show that more than 4 in 10 internet users made use of voice commands and voice search in the past 30 days, but that adoption of these tools varies considerably around the world.

Perhaps most tellingly, the use of voice is most common in India, China, and Indonesia – countries that already have some of the world’s largest internet populations, but that are also experiencing some of the greatest increases in new internet users.

What’s more, despite Western media’s fixation on smart speakers like Amazon’s Echo devices, it’s important to stress that the majority of voice users are making use of voice functionality for everyday activities on their mobile phones.

This is particularly true of younger users, many of whom have not yet developed ‘fixed’ habits when it comes to using digital devices and services. Indeed, the latest data from GlobalWebIndex shows that almost half of all internet users aged 16 to 24 already use voice, compared to less than 30 percent of users aged 45 and above.

It’s also important to recognise that voice is more of a necessity than a novelty for people in many of the world’s emerging economies. 

In particular, for people with lower levels of literacy, and for people who speak languages with character sets that aren’t yet available as smartphone keypads, voice is the default interface for almost all of their digital activities. 

Considering that a disproportionate share of the people coming online for the first time today fall into these two groups, it’s likely that we’ll see voice adoption accelerate in the coming months.

Meanwhile, the desire to achieve economies of scale means that the trend towards increasing adoption of voice in the world’s largest internet populations will likely translate into an imperative for developers to move voice functionality to the centre of the experience for all users around the world – even in developed nations.

Social media use in April 2019

The number of people around the world using social media continues to increase, but – as we noted above – some important changes in platform reporting definitions and methodologies mean that growth figures look a bit softer than they have done in previous quarters. 

However, it’s important to stress that this softness is purely due to those changes in reporting, and it should not be interpreted as an actual slowdown in user growth.

Almost 3.5 billion people around the world now use social media, with roughly 98 percent of them accessing social platforms via mobile devices.

 

Overall, Facebook Inc.’s portfolio of services continues to dominate the global social landscape, while Tencent has further consolidated its lead position in Mainland China.

Facebook

Facebook recently made some fundamental changes to the ways in which it reports advertising audience numbers across its various platforms.

As Facebook states in its Ad Help Center:

“Estimated potential reach is now based on how many people have been shown an ad on a Facebook Product in the past 30 days. We previously based estimates on people who were active users in the past 30 days.” [shortened for clarity]

However, these changes are actually quite helpful: firstly, they enable advertisers to build a clearer picture of the number of people they’re able to reach with ads on each of Facebook’s platforms, and secondly, they provide investors with a better understanding of how well Facebook is ‘monetising’ its platforms’ users.

This second point is a good place to start our analysis, because the new figures reveal some interesting insights into Facebook’s performance as a business.

In its Q4 2018 earnings announcement back in January, Facebook reported a total monthly active user base of 2.320 billion users on the core Facebook platform – i.e. not including figures for Instagram and WhatsApp.

Meanwhile, the latest figures the company is reporting in its self-serve advertising tools suggest that Facebook showed adverts to 1.887 billion of these users in the past 30 days.

That means that Facebook is monetising roughly 81 percent of its total active user base.

However, there are a number of reasons why Facebook cannot monetise all of its monthly active users. In particular, Facebook has a sizeable active user base in various countries where it is unable to sell advertising due to international sanctions, such as Iran, Syria, and Cuba.

But the good news for Facebook is that these changes in reporting appear to have improved the company’s story when it comes to user activity on the platform.

Whereas the company’s Insights tools had been showing steady declines in users’ median number of ad clicks over the past three quarters, the latest data show much healthier figures.

However, changes in audience definitions and reporting methodology mean that these figures can’t be compared on a like-for-like basis to previous reports, so these healthier figures do not necessarily mean that people have actually been clicking on more ads, nor can we be sure whether people have been sharing or commenting on Facebook posts more frequently.

Indeed, the latest insights from Locowise reveal that engagement with Facebook Page posts continues to decline, with the average post now garnering a response rate of just 3.6 percent – a relative drop of 3.4 percent in just the past three months.

Meanwhile, organic reach for Facebook Page posts also continues its relentless downward trajectory, with Locowise reporting that barely 1 in 18 of a Page’s fans now see posts without paid media support – a relative decline of almost six percent in just the past three months.

What’s more, the figures I’ve quoted above are the averages for all kinds of pages and page sizes. Once we focus in on pages with 100,000 fans or more, the figures for organic reach and engagement are even lower still.

However, it seems that Facebook’s decision to throttle organic reach continues to drive the platform’s commercial success, with more and more pages turning to promoted posts to make up for these declines.

Locowise reports that more than a quarter of the Pages that it tracks invest in some form of paid promotion, which would indicate that – globally – more than 20 million businesses now invest in Facebook’s paid media products.