TikTok reconfigures its social commerce strategy: As western consumers fail to embrace livestream shopping en masse, the social media platform is forced to dial back expansion plans.

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.

How should businesses view these global trends and events? How are behaviors and spending changing? In this report, Insider Intelligence analysts weigh in on the questions they’re being asked by both clients and the media about the shifting landscape in key areas like digital advertising, retail and ecommerce, and financial services.

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.

Communities, creators, and connection are the keys to success for brands looking to generate sales on TikTok in 2022.

Asia-Pacific will no longer produce huge increases in new social network users, but the sheer scale of the region means it should remain front and center for social media marketers. Facebook will remain on top, but TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat are making waves.

TikTok is now the third-largest worldwide social network, according to our inaugural forecast. It will have 60% more users than Snapchat and twice as many as Twitter this 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.

In 2022, China’s tech sector will continue dealing with a new regulatory climate, resulting in some new winners and a few familiar losers. Short-form video will make gains with commerce, and the metaverse will rear its head.

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.

TikTok’s Shopping tab marks a big but necessary shift: The feature will let select Shopify merchants add product catalogs to their profiles, likely the first of many interface changes to facilitate ecommerce on the TikTok.

China continues to lead the world in all things ecommerce, including innovation. Social commerce livestreaming is just one of many new stories for 2021 and beyond.

Though virtually unknown outside of China, a new crop of local direct-to-consumer brands are making a name for themselves at home—and even outperforming some of the major foreign players.

When social buying in China will boom

How TikTok shopping would change the app: TikTok is testing a shopping tab, which would make ecommerce more prominent on the app, strengthen its performance marketing options, and maybe get marketers to stop seeing it as just an experimental platform.

“Women hold up half the sky,” former Chinese leader Mao Zedong famously said. More than fifty years on, women in China are doing so online, driving digital trends and fast becoming a cohort that marketers ignore at their peril.