Even as total worldwide retail sales declined by 3.0% in 2020, retail ecommerce growth boomed to 27.6%. Ecommerce growth will decelerate substantially in 2021 to 14.3% as brick-and-mortar sales recover.

In 2020, Instagram’s total number of monthly users will hit 1.00 billion for the first time, thanks to a worldwide user growth rate more than double what we had predicted before the pandemic.

As with other social networks, Twitter’s user base grew unexpectedly this year as pandemic-driven stay-at-home orders drove up social media usage overall.

Our new forecast for global mobile messaging app users shows that the pandemic has accelerated adoption of OTT messaging services, though not in every country nor to the same degree for every app.

Snapchat will have 347.3 million users this year, up 16.1% year over year. Emerging markets, particularly India, will fuel these gains, while growth in core regions will be more modest.

The pandemic has fueled greater social media usage worldwide and prompted revisions to our earlier forecasts. We now expect the total number of social network users to rise 8.1% in 2020, to 3.23 billion—equivalent to 80.7% of all internet users.

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.

In 2020, Facebook’s worldwide user base will grow 8.7%, nearly double the rate we had forecast before the global pandemic began.

Worldwide revenues for big data analytics is forecast to grow by nearly 450% to reach $68.09 billion in revenues by 2025.