風投資本家瑪麗·米克爾在上周二發布的互聯網趨勢年度報告中指出，雖然花了幾十年的時間，不過全球如今已有一半的人口成為了網民。

不過，覆蓋面巨大的互聯網也放緩了擴張的步伐。去年的互聯網活躍用戶數增長了6%，達到38億人，占全球總人口的51%。2017年的網民數量和比例分別是36億人和49%。

在風險投資公司Kleiner Perkins工作了八年之后，米克爾于去年秋天離職，在今年春天為成長基金Bond Cap LLC融資了12.5億美元。自1995年米克爾還在摩根士丹利（Morgan Stanley）擔任分析師起，她就開始發布詳盡的科技趨勢年度報告，追蹤關鍵的增長指標。

在第一份年度報告中，米爾克估計1.5億個人計算機用戶里只有1,000萬活躍的互聯網用戶。她當時寫道：“簡而言之，有很大的增長空間。”

近四分之一個世紀之后，科技巨頭發現如今很難維持推動互聯網早期發展的增長率了。米克爾的報告指出，智能手機讓許多國家普及了網絡訪問，其出貨量繼2017年維持平穩之后，在2018年下滑了4%。

其他領域依舊漲勢強勁，但增長率與近年相比仍有下滑。如今占據零售業銷售額15%的電商銷售在2019年第一季度上漲12.4%，較前幾年的15%至20%已有回落。盡管如此，它仍比傳統零售業2%的漲速要高出幾倍。

與此同時，美國各大平臺的互聯網廣告收入在2019年第一季度增長20%，低于去年同期的37%。大部分廣告收入都流向了網絡廣告巨頭Facebook和谷歌（Google），不過亞馬遜（Amazon）、推特（Twitter）、Snap和Pinterest也出現了強勢增長。（財富中文網）

譯者：嚴匡正

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.