Mary Meeker, the prestigious net analyst, posted her annual “Internet Trends” in June. The 2019 edition is a 333-slide presentation full of insights and inconvenient truths approximately the present and destiny of the networked world.

All severe traders should examine it.

We all continuously devour news on the net and experiment with social media feeds. And we probably all trust we understand the significant, vital tendencies.

Unfortunately, our ideas are often formed via uninformed critiques. This means it’s too smooth to brush aside giant, investable traits as the hype. Meanwhile, much of what we assume we know approximately the era, and the net isn’t genuine.

Meeker has been setting out a web tendencies report due to the fact of 1995. Back then, she became an analyst at Morgan Stanley, and it became early days for Amazon.com and Google, a kooky search engine business that would evolve into Alphabet.

In a technology-rich with naysayers, she noticed the more significant developments growing in ecommerce and search. Later, she also predicted the Chinese internet’s upward push, mobile and video game tradition.

Meeker is now a primary at Bond, a $1.25 billion venture capital company. She earned her “Queen of the Internet” nickname by searching past opinions and sifting thru mounds of information to get the significant trends right.

One of the more significant takeaways from her 2019 report is the idea that massive generation organizations are still riding huge, crucial virtual developments like online marketing and cloud computing.

Digital advertising is the lifeblood of Alphabet and Facebook. Contrary to popular opinion, sales extended 22% inside the United States in 2018. And programmatic advert placement, part of the market ruled through Trade Desk, now commands sixty-two % of the market.

While privacy-demanding situations are developing, investors are missing a dominant fashion if they believe virtual adverting is doomed as an enterprise model.

Eventually, the massive majority of ads could be virtual because their effectiveness is extra measurable, and purchasers have grown to accept commercials.

This attractiveness permits freemium commercial enterprise fashions to emerge. Meeker notes that there are 2. Four billion interactive gamers worldwide, a parent that grew 6% in 2018. Fortnite, an online gaming phenomenon, has 250 million energetic customers. They are attracted to the loose-to-play platform because they can play, build groups, and engage with other game enthusiasts in real time.

Epic Games, the publisher of Fortnite, makes money by selling V-Bucks, which may be used to buy virtual items like dance movements, more lives, and avatar skins. Players also can purchase struggle passes that unencumber diverse parts of the game.

LendEDU, an online scholar lending outfit, surveyed Fortnite game enthusiasts in 2018. Researchers discovered that 69% of players made in-recreation purchases, spending a median of $84.67 consistent with yr. And 25% additionally subscribed to Twitch, a streaming carrier owned using Amazon.Com, in which they uploaded and watched gameplay.

According to a TechCrunch story posted in January, selling digital trinkets and passes allowed Epic to generate $3 billion in earnings at some point in 2018.

This isn’t the primary time a corporation struck gold by giving its product freely. A fee equivalent to the Microsoft Office productivity suite, Google Documents became wildly popular with college students and small businesses when officially released a decade ago. Users grew to greater than 1 billion.

Today, G Suite, the employer model, has extra than five million paid customers. It’s a commercial enterprise version being successfully emulated with Zoom and Slack, two smaller employer communications corporations. The aim is to find a target audience with an intuitive user revel in, then entice patrons to pay to release more features.

These new freemium organizations are constructed around software that lives in the cloud. Moving workloads to the cloud is a persistent subject in Meeker’s paintings. She notes that 22% of organization workloads have migrated to the cloud, a 2x development over five years ago. And the trend is accelerating as more fabulous digital gear like system learning and statistics analytics are developed to decorate client reviews.

Cloud infrastructure is ruled via Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google Cloud. This can be the most important and maximum chronic net trend: Three big organizations have emerged as the constructing blocks for the future of trade and commercial interplay.

Managers at those companies recognize the panorama. They see the more significant trends while the maximum is brushing off tectonic shifts as the hype.

Amazon bowled over analysts and enterprise watchers in 2014 while managers paid $970 million to purchase Twitch. The three-12 months-old streaming website had the most effective fifty-five million users and generally catered to those who watched others play video games.

The shape of ecommerce escaped maximum observers. Bidding for Twitch changed into hotly contested. Google and Yahoo! Have been additionally within the mix before losing out in the long run.

What Amazon managers noticed then is the more significant fashion Meeker is explaining today: Gaming is the natural evolution of sport for a generation raised with PlayStation and Xbox consoles. It’s additionally the only virtual revel ripe for transformative commercial enterprise fashions constructed inside the cloud.

In the weeks in advance, there may be plenty of naysaying approximately the destiny of those online behemoths. Some will warn that breaking apart large tech will smash synergies and shareholder prices.

Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft trade at 48x, 20x, and 26x ahead earnings. While that can appear high-priced, the first-class part of their business enlargement continues as organizations pass greater workloads to the cloud.

Investors should consider using any close-to-term weak point for Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Trade Desk to build long-term positions. Digital transformation of our commercial enterprise and social worlds remains a significant trend that has many miles to move before its entire.