Another year, another banner “State-of-the-Internet” presentation from Mary Meeker. There are some bits that we thought would be of particular interest to the restructuring community.

• For all we hear about Amazon and e-commerce destroying retail, e-commerce growth is slowing. It constitutes 15% of retail versus 14% a year ago.

• There is a stark shift in time spent on various forms of media and, by extension, the use of ad budgets. This chart ought to frighten the sh*t out of print and radio content producers. Time spent on print and radio is down BIG. Even more disconcerting for print? All of the other mediums appear to have reached an equilibrium between time spent and ad spend but print, however, still enjoys a disproportionate amount of ad dollars. Said another way, print media outlets may still have some pain heading their way.

We’ve made recent mention of rising customer acquisition costs and how that might derail many retailers’ business plans. To reduce CAC, many streaming services (e.g., Zoom, Spotify) use free tiers at the top of their funnel to get potential customers in the door and familiar with their products and then focus primarily on making those potential customers happy instead of otherwise deploying effort to market wholesale (PETITION Note: similarly, this is what we do). That said, CACs are indeed increasing. Ms. Meeker has a chart for this:

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