全球已有51%的人口成为网民，不过增长幅度已经放缓

风投资本家玛丽·米克尔在上周二发布的互联网趋势年度报告中指出，虽然花了几十年的时间，不过全球如今已有一半的人口成为了网民。

不过，覆盖面巨大的互联网也放缓了扩张的步伐。去年的互联网活跃用户数增长了6%，达到38亿人，占全球总人口的51%。2017年的网民数量和比例分别是36亿人和49%。

在风险投资公司Kleiner Perkins工作了八年之后，米克尔于去年秋天离职，在今年春天为成长基金Bond Cap LLC融资了12.5亿美元。自1995年米克尔还在摩根士丹利（Morgan Stanley）担任分析师起，她就开始发布详尽的科技趋势年度报告，追踪关键的增长指标。

在第一份年度报告中，米尔克估计1.5亿个人计算机用户里只有1,000万活跃的互联网用户。她当时写道：“简而言之，有很大的增长空间。”

近四分之一个世纪之后，科技巨头发现如今很难维持推动互联网早期发展的增长率了。米克尔的报告指出，智能手机让许多国家普及了网络访问，其出货量继2017年维持平稳之后，在2018年下滑了4%。

其他领域依旧涨势强劲，但增长率与近年相比仍有下滑。如今占据零售业销售额15%的电商销售在2019年第一季度上涨12.4%，较前几年的15%至20%已有回落。尽管如此，它仍比传统零售业2%的涨速要高出几倍。

与此同时，美国各大平台的互联网广告收入在2019年第一季度增长20%，低于去年同期的37%。大部分广告收入都流向了网络广告巨头Facebook和谷歌（Google），不过亚马逊（Amazon）、推特（Twitter）、Snap和Pinterest也出现了强势增长。（财富中文网）

译者：严匡正

It’s taken several decades, but half of the world’s population is now on the Internet, an annual report on internet trends by venture capitalist Mary Meeker said last Tuesday.

But along with the vast scale of the Internet’s reach comes a slowdown in its growth. The number of people active online last year grew by 6% to about $3.8 billion, or 51% of the world’s total population. In 2017, there were 3.6 billion people online, or 49% of the population.

Meeker, who spun out from Kleiner Perkins last fall after eight years at the VC firm, raised this spring $1.25 billion in capital commitments for a growth fund at Bond Cap LLC. Since 1995, when she was an analyst at Morgan Stanley, Meeker has issued an exhaustive annual report on tech trends that tracked key growth benchmarks.

In her first annual report, Meeker estimated that only 10 million of the 150 million owners of personal computers were active Internet users. “In short, there’s lots of upside,” she wrote then.

Nearly a quarter of a century later, tech giants are finding it hard to maintain the growth rates that helped spur on the Internet’s early growth. Smartphones, which brought online access to many countries, saw unit shipments fall 4% last year after being flat in 2018, Meeker’s report said.

Other areas saw growth that remained strong if below the growth pace of recent years. E-commerce sales, which now make up 15% of total retail sales, rose 12.4% in the first quarter of 2019, down from the 15%-to-20% rate of previous years. Nonetheless, it’s several times faster than the 2% growth for traditional retail sales.

Meanwhile, Internet ad revenue for the leading U.S. platforms decelerated to 20% growth in the first quarter of 2019, down from a 37% growth rate on year ago. Most of that ad revenue is going to online-ad giants Facebook and Google, although other companies like Amazon, Twitter, Snap and Pinterest are seeing strong growth as well.