Internet adoption in India is growing but still a long road ahead: Mary Meeker report

The spreading wings of India in the Web world are once again in focus with the Mary Meeker Internet Trends 2017 report. Kleiner Perkins venture partner Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends report is essentially the state of the union for the technology industry giving us insights about Internet adoption, new areas of focus and what future holds.

While, last year the focus of the report was China, this year, its world's fastest growing economy India that has taken the centre stage. Internet user count grew 28 percent to 355 million, second behind China. This should be seen against the global Internet users growth rate that remained flat at 10 percent.

One of the biggest driving force behind this growth rate is obviously the declining data cost that has dropped from 3 percent to 1.3 percent since 2015. Though the adoption rates are going up, however, with Internet Penetration at 27 percent, there is a long road ahead, the report notes.

The wireless data costs have declined significantly to more affordable levels. The data prices have tripped over 48 percent over the last year, following the entry of Reliance Jio and incumbent telecom operators joining the rat race for low pricing.

The dip in data costs led to an exponential 9x jump in the data consumption in the country.

The rise in Internet adoption rate is directly reflected in the growing usage of social media apps. WhatsApp is the top downloaded Android app followed by Messenger. Notably, four of Facebook-owned apps are currently among the top 10 Android apps in India. Jio TV jumped to ninth position from 301st position, likely registering the highest jump in terms of rankings over the past year.

If you want to check last year's report, click here.