Digital commerce platforms help merchants of all sizes sell online, making them an increasingly big factor in ecommerce payments. This creates new opportunities for processors, gateways, and other payments stakeholders to reach merchants—but also complicates their relationship.

Social media platforms are betting on social audio as part of the creator economy: Live audio is becoming less about the platforms that started the trend as more big firms launch creator-focused features.

A financial planning platform for students will offer valuable tools to 17- to 24-year-olds and may win their long-term loyalty and retention.

Twitter’s Super Follows isn’t to attract new creators—it’s to keep the ones it has: As the platform slowly sheds US users, new monetization options and better anti-harassment features are the least it can do.

Growth in programmatic display ad spending was resilient in 2020, thanks in large part to the shift from brick-and-mortar to digital retail. Rajeev Goel, co-founder and CEO at supply-side platform PubMatic, joins eMarketer principal analyst at Insider Intelligence Nicole Perrin for the last episode of The Ad Platform to discuss which industries are increasing ad spending fastest, how advertisers are reacting to less Identifier for Advertisers availability, and why momentum in connected TV is exciting.

The explosion in vertical video is creating both opportunities and challenges for the Story format. Stories are evolving quickly on Instagram and remain a top venue for influencer activations. But Twitter’s decision to kill off Fleets shows they aren’t popular on all platforms.

Fintechs can boost platform trading activity with tokenization: Republic raised $150M to add digital securities to its investing platform. These divide expensive assets into more liquid blockchain tokens.

Is TikTok ready to take on Amazon? ByteDance wants to launch an international ecommerce platform; whether it rolls out as a TikTok integration, or as a standalone app, will be a litmus test for the strength of the US social commerce market.

Roku is helping Shopify merchants deploy CTV ad campaigns: The move will increase the total addressable market of Roku’s ad platform, while also increasing accessibility for SMBs.

YouTube is carving into social commerce and TV measurement: The platform is leveraging both its deep pool of creators and large TV-based audience to get a leg up on competitors.

TikTok’s new marketing tools focus on customization and commerce: It’s taking steps to make advertisers feel comfortable on the platform and heavily push social commerce.

Twitch’s deal with the National Music Publishers’ Association must be the first of many: The platform will need to ink deals that actually let streamers use copyrighted music in order to fend off competitors and support its growing music community.

Though HBO Max did not come close to reaching 100 million US viewers over the period of our previous forecast, we now project the streaming platform will cross that threshold in 2023.

YouTube is the most popular platform for non-TV video content in the US, with 65% of the country’s short-form video viewers using the service to watch user-generated content, video game livestreams, and the like.