eMarketer principal analysts Mark Dolliver and Nicole Perrin and junior analyst Blake Droesch discuss how moderation plays into online communities, analyze Snapchat’s Q3 results and shed light on how streaming services are gearing up for the next front in the streaming wars.

Facebook’s move last year to discourage passive consumption of content, especially videos, has impacted engagement. Average daily time spent on the platform by US adult users fell by 3 minutes in 2018. And that time will remain unchanged this year, per the latest eMarketer forecast on US time spent with media. In fact, we have reduced our forecast for Facebook compared with the previous figures released in Q3 2018.

Social commerce only drives a fraction of ecommerce sales, but it's picking up speed. Between 2016 and 2018, social networks as a last-touch channel have doubled in visit share to US retail sites, according to Q3 2018 data from Adobe.

Although Netflix missed its own targets in Q3 2019, it showed enough promise at the time to momentarily appease investors. In Q3 2019, Netflix reported 60.6 million US paid subscribers, up from 57.0 million in Q3 2018. International growth was more pronounced. In Q3 2019, Netflix reported that international revenues accounted for 53.4% of its total revenues worldwide, up from 50.4% in Q3 2018.

By the end of Q3 2020, it was the most downloaded app worldwide, per Sensor Tower. According to GlobalWebIndex, the percentage of internet users worldwide (not including China) who reported visiting TikTok on a computer or mobile device in the past month rose by 72% between Q3 2019 and Q2 2020.

Q3 Earnings, Libra, Threads and Political Advertising

Facebook released strong Q3 earnings, despite the news spotlight on the company over concerns regarding its stance on political ads and legislative scrutiny over Libra. Its ad revenues increased 29% year over year, and the number of monthly active users rose 8%.