Not all attention is created equal, a good print publisher will tell you, and she's right. If the typical American looks at his phone 150 times a day for 15 seconds, that's about 40 minutes spent on a mobile device. But what's more valuable: 40 minutes divided into infinitesimally tiny slivers on a three-inch screen, or 40 minutes reading an Atlantic cover story in a beautiful print layout? (The latter, obviously.) But print advertising as a category buys a tiny amount of our attention at a high price. Leading us to the final conclusion...

3. Mobile Is Devouring Attention, but Not Ads (Yet)

Eyes move faster than ads. It was true for TV: In 1941, when the first television ads appeared with local baseball games, radio and print dominated the media advertising market. Now it's true for mobile, which is practically a glass appendage attached to working Americans and commands more attention than radio and print combined, even though it only commands 1/20th of US ad spending. Google and Facebook own the future of mobile advertising, for now. But the present of mobile monetization isn't ads. It's apps...

Mobile is an app business

The second chart that really struck me from the Meeker report shows the growth of the mobile biz since 2008, which has exploded from $2 billion to $38 billion. I never would have guessed that two-thirds of the mobile business comes from paid apps rather than advertising. It's an interesting reversal from the desktop ecosystem, where just about every Internet property I use is free and supported with third-party advertising. When you combine this graph (basically: Mobile is an app industry, with a side of ads) and the previous graph (basically: The future of attention is mobile), you begin to see just how important it is for media companies to promote high-quality apps for their stuff.

Asia and Africa are the future

If you think mobile is big in America, consider that its share of Internet usage is two times higher in Asia and Africa. There are a lot of countries that simply skipped the laptop generation and went straight to Internet-connected phones. This is one reason why some African countries are much further ahead of the U.S. in mobile payments.

Google and Apple are the future

It's a familiar story, but a powerful one. Eight years ago, Google and Apple didn't have a phone business. Now they make the operating system that powers just about every single phone shipped around the world.

This raises a larger point about Google. Android OS powers about 75 percent of new units shipped. Google's mobile ads account for about half the global market, which is doubling next year. Google powers the world's phones and dominates the market of selling attention within those phones.

Photos are the future

If you're wondering why Facebook spent a bajillion dollars on WhatsApp and Instagram (and offered more bajillions to Snapchat), just look at this graph for a split-second. The Internet as you know is essentially a series of tubes optimized for facilitating the distribution of photos. Although Facebook's share of that photo market isn't growing, WhatsApp and Snapchat have exploded. This feeds into a larger point that Meeker makes in the presentation, which is that the mobile Internet has been a boon for discrete, simple functions. WhatsApp is simple. Snapchat is simple. Timelines are simple. Simple actions and interfaces are thriving on mobile, more than services like Facebook which offer a more complex suite of functions.