After a year of rumors, Facebook confirmed its plans to create a financial system based off a new cryptocurrency called Libra. While the company derives a majority of its revenues from advertising, it’s clear that it’s been trying to diversify its income, and this new digital currency—along with its new digital wallet feature Calibra—is the next step in executing this strategy.

Mary Meeker, “queen of the internet” and venture capitalist at Bond Capital, released her highly anticipated annual “Internet Trends Report” and touched on everything from digital media usage in the US to consumer confidence in China in the 333-slide presentation she gave at the Recode Code Conference earlier this month.

We forecast that US retail ecommerce sales of health, personal care and beauty products will surpass $53 billion this year, up 18.6% from 2018, making it the second-fastest growing category among those we track—slightly slower than food and beverage.

US advertisers are committing more dollars upfront for linear TV and digital video, however the percentage of digital video ads being sold programmatically continues to increase.

Instagram has introduced a branded content feature that will soon bring sponsored influencer posts to your newsfeed—even if you don't follow their account.

After initially struggling to gain traction, social commerce has finally begun to materialize as platforms, including Instagram and Pinterest, fill the need for discovery in the digital shopping environment.

Facebook users are spending less time on the social platform, and that is leading to a reduction in overall time spent with social networks in the US. Time spent on social networks declined by 1 minute last year, a stark difference from the cumulative 13-minute gain in 2016 and 2017.

Social commerce is on the rise as visual platforms like Pinterest and Instagram fill a need for product discovery. By developing an effective social commerce strategy, brands and retailers can drive awareness, affinity, consideration and conversion.

The majority of social commerce in the US takes place on Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook, though Snapchat is also part of the mix.

As media time reaches a saturation point, consumers in Canada are showing a decided taste for the immediacy of digital.

Traditional and digital channels are driving media consumption in parallel in India, unlike Western countries where time spent with traditional media is shrinking.

Smartphones are the primary internet access device for consumers in South Korea, and mobile internet activities will continue to drive gains in both digital and total time spent as time spent with most traditional media channels declines.

The reports in this collection look at time spent with media in the US, Canada, the UK, France, Germany, China, Japan, South Korea and India. Two other reports take a close look at time spent with mobile and social in the US.

UK adults have reached peak media consumption, spending an average of 9 hours, 38 minutes each day with media. Time spent is shifting to digital channels, particularly to smartphones.

Time spent with media by US adults has nearly stopped growing as the gains in digital usage do little more than offset the declines in time spent with TV and other old media.

After years of steady increases, time spent on social media by US social network users fell last year. Those figures will flatten as the intensity of Facebook usage starts to moderate and activities such as digital video and video games draw more time and attention.

Facebook’s move last year to discourage passive consumption of content, especially videos, has impacted engagement. Average daily time spent on the platform by US adult users fell by 3 minutes in 2018. And that time will remain unchanged this year, per the latest eMarketer forecast on US time spent with media. In fact, we have reduced our forecast for Facebook compared with the previous figures released in Q3 2018.

Facebook’s annual f8 conference is aimed at developers, but it included a range of announcements that will impact marketers as well. In this report, we go beyond the news and unpack what those announcements mean.

Social media principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson discusses Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes’ recent op-ed on breaking up the company he helped create with Mark Zuckerberg. What is Hughes proposing? Just how powerful is Facebook? And what should the government’s role be in regulating it?