< Key Hightlight >

Regulatory themes are of paramount importance in the social media sector. Two in particular – antitrust and data privacy – have heavy weightings on the thematic screen of GlobalData’s social media sector scorecard. This isn't good news for most social media companies, as their positioning in these themes will negatively impact their future performance. 

Scope

This sector scorecard provides a top-down, comprehensive outlook for the key players in the social media sector over the next two years, based on the key themes set to transform their industry landscape.

Key Highlights

Only one of the 35 social media companies included in our scorecard receives a positive score of 4 or above for the antitrust theme. The company is ByteDance, developer of the popular video-sharing app TikTok. ByteDance stands to gain from antitrust intervention against rivals like Alphabet (which owns YouTube) and Facebook. For more on this theme, see our antitrust thematic report.

Reasons to buy

Companies that invest in the right themes become success stories; those that miss the big themes end up as failures. Given that so many themes are disruptive, it is very easy to be blindsided by industry outsiders that invade your sector. 

To help our clients gain a competitive advantage, we have developed GlobalData’s thematic research ecosystem. This single, integrated global research platform provides an easy-to-use framework for tracking all themes across all companies in all sectors. 

This report is a sector scorecard, which identifies those companies most likely to succeed in a world filled with disruptive threats.

Companies mentioned

Airbnb 

Alibaba 

Alphabet 

Amazon 

ByteDance 

DeNA 

Discord 

Facebook 

Gree 

Groupon 

Kakao 

Line 

Lyft 

Mail.Ru 

Match 

Microsoft 

Mixi 

Momo 

Naver 

New Work 

Parler 

Pinduoduo 

Pinterest 

Renren 

Sina 

Snap 

Tencent 

TripAdvisor 

Twitter 

Uber 

Weibo 

Yahoo! Japan 

Yandex 

Yelp 

YY