The popularity of sharing photos on the internet is skyrocketing, along with the mobile web in general, according to Mary Meeker's Internet Trends report for 2013 today at the AllThingsD D11 conference. If that doesn't sound surprising, here's the kicker - according to Meeker, the number of photos we're sharing each day is going to double by the end of 2013, and the exploding popularity of Snapchat is the primary reason.
Everyday last year, over 350 million photos were shared across social media like Instagram, Snapchat, Flickr, and the most substantial network, of course, Facebook. That's a lot. But the number of photos shared per day for 2013 so far is much, much larger. Meeker puts the year-to-date average number of photos uploaded and shared per day at over 500 million for the year 2013. "It looks like we are going to double in 2013," said Meeker, "the major driver of that is SnapChat, but Instagram and Facebook are also rising nicely."
Mobile and temporary are the key words when it comes to the rapid increase of photo sharing popularity. Facebook - which has been optimizing its platform for the mobile web with products like Facebook Home - is still the largest photo-sharing platform. And Facebook-owned Instagram, which is native to mobile devices, is growing nicely as well (taking pictures of your food hasn't quite gone out of style yet, apparently). But SnapChat has been rising so quickly that it overtook Instagram in its first full year of existence, and you can now imagine it eventually taking Facebook's number one spot. As you see below, in only three months, from February 2013 to April 2013, the number of daily snaps on SnapChat has more than doubled to about 150 million per day.
It's the temporary nature of SnapChat - along with the younger demographic that those temporary snaps attract - that has the still relatively new service rising beyond its rivals. All Things D previously reported that the app's primary demographics are from 13 years to 25 years old. The app allows you to share photos, like photos taken of yourself with the front-facing camera of smartphones called "selfies," and control how long the recipient can view the photo - from one second to a maximum of 10 seconds. (While the service ostensibly auto-destructs the photos after that, reportedly those images can still be retrieved by experts.)
A few other trends are notable in Mary Meeker's presentation of Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers Internet Trends 2013. Mobile internet traffic, as a percentage of the global total, has increased by about one and a half times per year. It is now at 15 percent of total internet traffic, and will likely keep growing as the smartphone market continues to grow. Also, the total number hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute will blow your mind. It has increased over the last five years to the point where, in May of 2013, about 100 hours per minute of video is added to YouTube, which means that in the five minutes it took for you to read this article, 21 days worth of video just went up on the site!
Check out Mary Meeker's full slide-show presentation below for more thought-provoking internet trends.
(Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers via All Things D)
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