Colossal Growth of Online Industries during the Pandemic
2020 has seen a dramatically changed world, oriented towards staying at home. Whilst many companies and industries like retail collapsed other industries flourished, like online shopping and gaming.
Multiple lockdowns all over the world, have shown little focus on physical sports, and instead people have centred more on Esports. Esports is a major sector in the gaming industry and had a vast amount of growth in this stay at home era. The corporation Epic Game’s online video game Fortnite smashed the record for most online users at a specific time. A total of 12 million users tuned in for an in-game Travis Scott Concert. Many music artists have had to cancel their shows due to COVID-19 restrictions. Epic Games teamed up with Travis Scott (American Rapper) and to perform a concert for him in-game on April 23rd 2020.A similarly outstanding feat was achieved in Microsoft owned Roblox when American Rapper Lil Nas X performed his song Holiday in Roblox on November 13th and amassed 33 million viewers.
Social Media platforms like TikTok exploded when we were placed in lockdown, thriving on the stay at home message that was given to gain a bigger audience.
As the table shows the growth of the platform in the US colossal, with the platform’s users almost doubling in the space of a year. This is a direct impact of the global pandemic as the growth predictions slowed down dramatically when approaching 2021 and later years.
However, not every market had a similar fate. This was the case for high street retail. Multinational retailer Debenhams plummeted into administration for the second time in 2020 and put a shocking figure of 12,000 jobs at risk. On the other hand, Amazon, the world’s biggest online retailer originally had a downward trend in stock price at the start of 2020, but as lockdowns were issued around the world, they started to see unprecedented growth with the stock price doubling in 4 months.
As the saying goes, “In life, there are winners and there are losers”
Sources: https://www.businessofapps.com/tik-tok-statistics/
Google Finance: market summary Amazon
https://www.sportskeeda.com/esports/news-lil-nas-x-roblox-concert
Image:
Cosmopolitan UK, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
