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.

Connected TV (CTV) and other forms of OTT video were an advertising bright spot despite last year's recession. Alison Levin, vice president of global ad revenue and marketing solutions at Roku, joins eMarketer principal analyst Nicole Perrin and forecasting analyst at Insider Intelligence Eric Haggstrom to discuss what advertisers want from CTV, how they're accessing OTT video inventory, and where ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) fits into the 2021 media ecosystem.

Marketers shift their strategies to focus on CTV—that includes those that take advantage of CTV’s better targeting and measurement. But even though linear TV is on the decline, it’s still massive, and marketers need to balance their strategy shifts accordingly.