Every year since the Internet was a toddler Mary Meeker has published her take on the state of the online union. Incredibly helpful, insightful and interesting, here is the 2016 version.

Since 2016 will all too soon come to an end (said no one, ever), we decided to look back through Meeker's report for some end of year highlights.

General Trends

The internet is really big. 42% of all humans on Earth are connected to the internet. That's 3 billion people.

As phones and internet become more common, everywhere – it also means growth is slowing, and easy growth is pretty much over.

China is a definite global leader on most major metrics.

Ads & Brands

Google & Facebook's advertising revenue continues to dramatically grow.

There's lots of room to grow in mobile ad space, $22bn opportunity. A lot of users find video ads annoying though, and the use of adblocker has grown exponentially.

Some video ads do work though, but they need to be carefully crafted. Example of good ones are in-context or brief, Snapchat works well – since the videos need to be made to fit the platform.

Different Generations

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Millennials Coming of Age

They're the current largest generation. Their spending power will rise dramatically over the next couple of decades.

They bring with them an increase in online retail. But retail is no longer just retail, as the lines between product, brand, retail, online and offline are no longer just blurred – but also extremely fluid.

Well targeted ads are extremely effective, and there's examples of $100 in ad-spend being worth $1,000 in sales.

Communication, Includes Both Humans & Computers

Then there's Gen Z

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Messaging

People are moving to making business transactions within a messaging platform. The younger generations would much rather receive support from a business through chat or social media than via phone, which older generations prefer.

Voice Command

It's finally good enough to be usable by everyone.

Everything is a Computer

Cars and watches are just the beginning.

Data

Data is becoming easier to collect and cheaper to store – so everything now does. Data security is a major concern.