In a Q4 2020 survey by GlobalWebIndex, for instance, 22% of US and UK social livestreamers said having a “buy” button available during a livestream session would be a top purchase driver, compared with 13% of social network users who said the same for social media content overall.

Snap Inc. Thrive Analytics.

The pandemic led to many upward revisions of our UK digital user forecasts. Some changes (podcast listeners) will be permanent, while others will be temporary (digital gamers). Our social network user numbers, meanwhile, didn’t change much at all.

The ad market in the UK suffered during 2020, but the decline in spending was only marginal as digital investment took up much of the slack. Indeed, the resilience of digital formats has been palpable amid the pandemic.

eMarketer principal analyst Mark Dolliver, junior analyst Blake Droesch, vice president of content studio Paul Verna, and senior analyst at Insider Intelligence Sara M. Watson discuss how social media might (actually) be regulated, social commerce, the ceiling for Disney+, Snapchat rolling out TikTok competitor "Spotlight," Spotify testing Snapchat-like Stories, Facebook paying UK publishers for news in 2021, why you should never trust a raven, and more.

Companies like Snapchat and Pinterest that already used AR pre-pandemic have begun ramping up their use of the technology for social commerce. Others like Facebook and Apple are investing heavily in the hardware. Amazon itself also experimented with AR during lockdowns, launching an AR tool for furniture shopping in August 2020. It even experimented with a lipstick try-on feature with L’Oréal in 2019.

Snapchat will have 16.1 million monthly UK users, a 3.4% YoY increase. That’s actually slightly lower than our previous forecast, in which we expected Snapchat’s UK user base to rise by 3.8% to 16.2 million, due in part to TikTok’s strong growth. Snapchat’s UK user growth rate among 18- to 24-year-olds will be stronger than in the US, at 2.0%.

There is an exodus from Snapchat in the UK. For the first time since its inception, the social network’s user base will begin to decline in 2019, according to eMarketer’s latest UK social usage forecast. Since last year’s redesign of the platform, users are leaving in favor of Instagram and other competitors.