Summary

The growth of democratic engagement on social media, particularly in a US presidential election year, has stoked fears that platforms could be abused to influence the result, as in 2016. These fears will be exacerbated by the inability of leading firms to guard against fake news and emerging threats like deepfakes. Regulatory threats will also loom large in 2020, with a focus on antitrust, data privacy, and tax avoidance. Facebook is likely to be hit the hardest, but will not be the only company to suffer.

Any change to the ability of companies to gather and store user data will undermine their core business model of monetizing this data through ads. 2020 will see many of the leading US and European social media firms attempting to follow the lead of Tencent’s WeChat and become all-encompassing super-apps. There will also be further attempts to grow their presence in markets such as internet TV, ecommerce, and mobile payments.

This report provides information on key themes that will impact the social media sector over the next two years, including AR and VR, ecommerce, deepfakes, and data privacy.

Scope

- This report is a sector scorecard, which identifies those companies most likely to succeed in a world filled with disruptive threats. Inside, we predict how each theme will evolve and identify the leading and lagging companies.
- It includes a theme map that shows the 50 biggest themes driving growth in the social media sector.
- It explains how some of the largest listed players in the sector have performed over the last three years.
- It looks at major technology and macro-economic trends impacting the social media sector.

Reasons to buy

- Companies who invest in the right themes become success stories; those who miss the big themes end up as failures.
- Corporate executives and investors who want to outperform their competitors need to understand all the themes that impact their sector.
- However, many of these themes are, by definition, outside of the core competencies of company boardrooms because they typically originate from external industries. This social media sector scorecard provides a top-down, comprehensive outlook for the key players in the industry over the next two years, based on the key themes set to transform their market.