Mobile gaming wins big in China. All digital gaming saw a boost during lockdowns, but mobile's accessibility and lack of additional hardware helped it grow faster than PC and console gaming in 2020.
Advertiser demand for video impressions has always outstripped supply, but supply has gotten a big boost as consumers started adopting streaming video viewing in larger numbers—especially on CTV devices—and more of those impressions have been made available programmatically.
Despite a challenging year for retail in 2020, we estimate that worldwide retail ecommerce sales posted a 27.6% growth rate for the year, with sales reaching well over $4 trillion. This represents a substantial uptick from our mid-pandemic assessment that global ecommerce would decelerate to 16.5% growth and demonstrates the remarkable extent to which consumers transitioned to ecommerce last year.
Given 2020’s unprecedented stay-at-home public health crisis and the resulting spike in social network usage and time spent, Snapchat should have seen enormous user growth in Europe last year (as it did in several other regions). However, it looks like TikTok is drinking Snapchat’s milkshake across the Atlantic.
Pandemic accelerates livestreaming growth in China: The format will grow rapidly at 10.6% in 2021, driven by social apps and ecommerce livestreams.
Snap acquired location data startup StreetCred this week, a move expected to help fuel its push into local commerce through Snap Maps and other location-based features.
The eMarketer team deliberated extensively to select the 10 key digital trends to watch in 2021 from a list of 43. Which trends narrowly missed the cut? Here’s our first in a series of additional transformative developments that ought to be on your radar in the year ahead.