The UK is a nation of digitally advanced consumers. However, it lags behind many other countries we track when it comes to proximity mobile payments. No other country comes remotely close to China’s rate of penetration among smartphone users—81.1% vs. just 19.1% in the UK. But whereas the UK tends to come somewhere toward the top of most lists of digital adoption, in this case it falls toward the bottom of the “moderate adoption” bucket according to our adoption categorizations, below the likes of Indonesia and Italy.

The number of sub OTT video service users is now akin to the number of YouTube viewers, Facebook users, and total worldwide ecommerce shoppers. Very few digital services or activities draw in multibillions of users, but Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, and a multitude of others have put the sub OTT industry at that level.

We estimate digitally native brands’ D2C ecommerce US sales growth to slow to 18.2% this year, a marked decline from 40.0% just two years ago. More on this: Pandemic-related developments have driven both trends. Supply chain disruptions spurred large brands to find the most productive, profitable means of selling the finite number of products they could produce.

Retail ecommerce ad spending is challenging the global duopoly. Alibaba and Amazon form an ecommerce twosome that will collectively draw in 14.5% of worldwide digital ad spending this year, leaving them at least marginally within sight of Google and Facebook. As new social commerce ad players emerge in the US and China, this challenge will intensify.

In the US, the audience for virtual goods and services, including NFTs, skews highly young and male, but even within these demographics, a significant share has either no interest in NFTs or doesn’t know what they are, according to the most recent Insider Intelligence Ecommerce Survey conducted by Bizrate Insights in February 2022. Awareness of NFTs has risen substantially over the past year, however.

The number of sub OTT video service users is now akin to the number of YouTube viewers, Facebook users, and total worldwide ecommerce shoppers. Very few digital services or activities draw in multibillions of users, but platforms like Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, and a multitude of others have put the sub OTT industry at that level.

It’s in “late stage” talks with prospective collaborators to roll out in Vietnam and Indonesia. The opportunity: YouTrip has a good shot at adding SMB customers due to the large size of the market and its plans to provide a multi-currency card for businesses that operate in more than one country.

This year, internet user growth in the region will be highest in Indonesia (3.9%) and Thailand (3.2%). The overall growth rate in the region will level off to 1.4% by 2026. Internet adoption varies widely across countries in Southeast Asia. Internet penetration among the population ranges from around 75% in the more mature economies to about 60% in the less developed ones.

How should businesses view these global trends and events? How are behaviors and spending changing? In this report, Insider Intelligence analysts weigh in on the questions they’re being asked by both clients and the media about the shifting landscape in key areas like digital advertising, retail and ecommerce, and financial services.

But will they book a 10-day trip to Indonesia when they see a picture online? Absolutely not, because they have to check their holidays, they have to check their finances, they have to see whether somebody's interested in going with them.” —Oneika Raymond, an Instagram creator focusing on travel. Driving sales can be a delicate subject. “I would say it comes up about 50% of the time.