Alibaba’s retail ecommerce sales in China were nearly twice that of Amazon’s worldwide in 2022, at $1.229 trillion compared with about $657 billion, per our estimates. Latin American competitor Mercado Libre had significantly less ecommerce sales, at nearly $35 billion.

Pinterest was seen as the safest social media platform in the US last year, though the percentage of users who held that view declined from 2020 (51% versus 41%), according to our “US Digital Trust Benchmark 2022” report. Meanwhile, Facebook was where the lowest percentage of users felt safe, down to just 26% in 2022.

US consumers spent $497 billion on tech last year, according to the Consumer Technology Association. That’s a $15 billion drop from 2021. This year, spending will decline again, by $12 billion.

Subscription OTT video is chasing linear TV in terms of time spent in the US. We estimate adults still spend significantly more time per day watching TV, but that figure is decreasing and will fall below 3 hours this year. Meanwhile, for subscription OTT video, time spent will surpass an hour and a half per day. But ad spend on these platforms is not proportional to time spent.

Click-to-door time was as low as 4.4 days in July 2022 for non-Amazon digital retailers in the US, according to NielsenIQ. But Amazon has them beat by a lot, with an average click-to-door speed of 1.9 days.

Nearly three-quarters of US adult internet users agreed it will take them a while to understand how to use and join the virtual world, according to an October 2022 Sitecore survey. That’s not great news considering 64% said they won’t engage in the metaverse if it’s hard to figure out or use.

The top priority among US mobile banking users is knowing that their information is safe, according to our latest benchmark study of this banking channel. More than half (56%) said being notified of a Social Security number breach was “extremely valuable” to them, while 51% said the same of alerts for unusual account activity.

Instacart will retain its status as grocery delivery king this year, capturing 73.0% of US digital grocery sales among third-party delivery services, per our forecast. However, competitors such as DoorDash and Uber will continue to eat away at its dominance.

A quarter of US adults pay the most attention to TV commercials, making them the top ad format, followed closely by online ads, per CivicScience. Magazine and newspaper ads rank near the bottom, with only 4% and 5% paying them the most attention, respectively.

Social buyer penetration is climbing rapidly at TikTok. In the US, the app has already outpaced Pinterest by this metric, per our forecast. By the end of 2023, it will beat Instagram and tie with Facebook.

In 2022, both YouTube and TikTok captured 46 minutes of their adult US users’ attention each day, per our estimates. Netflix reigned supreme at 60 minutes daily. Time spent with TikTok will tick up every year through 2024, when it will reach 48 minutes per day, but it won’t pass Netflix anytime soon.

The leading reason consumers in the UK and US return online purchases is due to fit, size, or color, according to Coveo. Damage, defects, and poor quality are other top reasons. Some 18% of UK and US consumers make returns because they order multiple sizes with the intent of keeping only those that fit.

Ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) viewing will reach more than half of the US population in 2026, up from 41.8% this year, per our forecast.

In 2023, 58.5% of Meta’s $121.90 billion of ad revenues worldwide will come from Facebook, per our forecast. The remaining 41.5% will come from Instagram, whose ad revenues are growing faster than Facebook’s, which will decline in 2022. For the next two years, Instagram will continue to outpace Facebook by this measure.

While most US consumers are more likely to buy from brands with good loyalty programs, according to Bond, 58% of those ages 18 and older told Dynata they’re less loyal to brands due to rising costs. And 65% of consumers had recently canceled memberships to cut costs as of Q1 2022, per PYMNTS.com and sticky.io.

Privacy is the top challenge of data clean rooms, cited by nearly half of marketers and publishers worldwide who use them, per Lotame. For 41% of marketers and 37% of publishers, the tech is too expensive. Other concerns include issues with emails, scale, and partner overlap.

We cut $5.51 billion from our US digital ad spending forecast for 2023, due to the fallout from Apple’s privacy changes, Google’s deprecation of third-party cookies, and a stricter regulatory environment. Along with inflation and a potential recession, these challenges will depress spending until 2025, when it should return to previously projected levels.

Amazon will account for 38.2% of all US ecommerce sales this year, per our estimates. In addition to dominating the books, music, and video category, Amazon will capture 50.3% of computer and consumer electronics ecommerce sales and 47.0% of office equipment and supplies ecommerce sales in the US.

Our latest forecast shows the global monthly Twitter user base will shrink 3.9% next year and 5.1% in 2024. “Users will start to leave the platform next year as they grow frustrated with technical issues and the proliferation of hateful or other unsavory content,” said our principal analyst Jasmine Enberg.

Time spent with cable and broadcast TV is decreasing, a trend that’s been particularly pronounced over the past year. Streaming accounted for 36.9% of US time spent with TV as of September 2022, up from 27.7% in the same month in 2021, according to Nielsen. Streaming stole share from all other TV categories.