Not the OP but I dug a little into which company published this. The link takes you to "Bond Cap" which seems to be an offshoot of Kleiner Perkins [1] . Bond Cap is another VC fund according to their webpage [2]. Putting 2 and 2 together: if you were a prospective investor and are considering two firms A and B and A happens to publish a report every year that seems to indicate that they know the internet landscape very well, who would you invest with ( other things being equal of course )?

[1] Wikipedia says that Ms Meeker works for Kleiner Perkins.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Meeker

[2] https://www.bondcap.com/#investments

Thanks for sharing your findings! I've been reading Mary Meeker's annual Internet Trends Report for a while now, and I've found it informative. But it does make sense that the motivation behind it might be marketing/advertisement for a VC firm. The reports are a kind of proof that they do thorough research and have domain expertise.

That's fairly much as I'd suspected (though it'd be nice to hear OP's rationale).

I'm coming to the conclusion that much publishing is really a highly-ornate calling card or advertisement.

If you follow a16z podcasts or their blogs, you’ll see they too doing quite a bit of this :-)

https://a16z.com/posts/