LinkedIn joins the race against Clubhouse: The platform is the latest to announce its own live social audio feature. It could stand out in the audio wars by focusing more heavily on structured events like conferences and webinars, which would also help it attract B2B marketers.

Digital audio has undoubtedly benefited from the UK lockdowns. Even with reduced commuting likely eating into their time spent with mobile audio, UK listeners still tuned in to digital audio elsewhere and will continue doing so.

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.

Early in the pandemic, digital audio took a huge hit in user engagement and in the amount of time listeners were spending with the medium. Many observers, including us, predicted dire results in the short term. However, the rest of the year played out very differently than those early weeks, and we ultimately revised our 2020 estimate from a 1.0% decline in the time US adults spent with digital audio to 8.3% growth, for a total of 1 hour, 29 minutes (1:29) per day.

This report reviews our final 2020 numbers and new 2021 forecast for US time spent with media, highlighting pre- and post-pandemic estimates and expectations. Special attention is paid to TV, connected TV, OTT, digital audio, and social media.

eMarketer principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson and junior analyst at Insider Intelligence Blake Droesch discuss how Twitter's Q3 earnings should be evaluated. They then talk about whether social audio will be the next big thing, TikTok's new partnership with Shopify, and if 2020 has been the year of live shopping.