Growth of total retail sales in Southeast Asia is set to accelerate in 2022, bucking the global slowdown trend and roaring past its pre-pandemic rates. Singapore will shine exceptionally bright by leading the region in ecommerce growth.

This year, TikTok will surpass YouTube in terms of time spent by their respective adult users in the US. The short-video app will see 45.8 minutes per day from its average adult user, edging out YouTube, at 45.6 minutes.

ByteDance properties Douyin and TikTok have been making waves inside and outside China for several years. Their combined spectacular growth will result in ad revenues of more than $30 billion for their parent company in 2022, leaving ByteDance in fifth place among ad publishers worldwide.

China’s total media ad spending and digital ad spending will both grow at their lowest rates since we began tracking them in 2012, but the ad industry is nonetheless set for an eventful year in the world’s second-largest market.

Nearly every country in the world will see slower growth in total ad spending and digital ad spending than it did last year, but the comparison is an unfair one because 2021 was abnormal. The outlook is mostly bright.

The metaverse is expected to be a major disruptor across industries, but it's still early days for the emerging realm. In this report, we look at how different markets are embarking on their own metaverse business models.

Ad revenues for short-video-sharing app TikTok and Chinese sister app Douyin will hit $31.66 billion this year to account for 5.3% of the global digital ad market.

TikTok’s ecommerce priorities are clear with expansion into Southeast Asia: Parent company ByteDance hopes to turn social media users into social commerce adopters.

TikTok and Instagram were once again the top US social networking apps of 2021, downloaded 94.0 million and 64.0 million times that year, respectively. Snapchat took third place with a 10% jump in downloads, leapfrogging Facebook, whose downloads fell by 11%.

Chinese companies can learn much about metaverse from US counterparts: Heavy tech regulations in the country have slowed tech firm’s ventures into the virtual world.

TikTok was the No. 1 mobile app in the US last year, with 94.0 million downloads, a 6% increase over 2020. Runners-up Instagram and Snapchat reached 64.0 million downloads and 56.0 million downloads, respectively, meaning the three most downloaded apps in the US were all photo- and video-sharing platforms.

China deems personalized recommendations discriminatory and harmful to user well-being: The new law could discourage users from spending time—and money—on retail and social media platforms.

TikTok's success has renewed social platforms' interest in algorithms: Instagram, Snap, YouTube, and Twitter have all begun implementing algorithmically-recommended content over the past year.

AirAsia, one of the world’s largest budget airlines, is on a mission to build a regional super app. While it follows in the footsteps of titans like WeChat in China and Gojek in Southeast Asia, if AirAsia succeeds, it will blaze a path for travel and other industries not endemic to the mobile space.

Every national market in the world will finish this year with more ad spending than in 2020. In most categories, worldwide growth records will be shattered. But 2021 was a very unusual year, following a very unusual 2020.

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.

Singles’ Day, the online shopping festival invented by Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba and held on November 11, is widely known in the West. Now, a series of similar “double-digit” shopping festivals from digital powerhouses Lazada and Shopee are driving ecommerce growth in Southeast Asia.

China catches up in data privacy: Its new laws give consumers similar levels of data protection in the private sector as the EU's GDPR, which could help streamline data usage guidelines worldwide.

Creator economy crescendo: Amazon is quickly building out areas of its business that center on influencers, as the walls between social media and ecommerce erode and creators' roles in those spaces start to blend together.