The Pandemic reshaped our world, and the consumers’ world is no exception.
One of the most evident changes has been registered in the retail sale sector. More and more people have begun shopping online between 2020 and 2021, and there has been a serious shift away from physical stores to digital shopping. However, this is only the tip of the iceberg.
From e-commerce platforms to OTT services platforms, from online bookmakers to online brokers, the growth in the online world continues.
That being said, let’s take a look at those industries which actually benefited from the “New Normal”.
E-Commerce Platforms
During the Pandemic waves of COVID-19 of 2020 and 2021, people around the world experienced many obstacles regarding public gathering and retail sales. The natural consequence of the many stay-at-home orders worldwide has been a substantial growth of the most important e-commerce platforms.
Between the most relevant e-commerce with an international presence we remember:
- Amazon
- Alibaba/Aliexpress
- JD
- Walmart
Amazon is the best example of how much this sector has grown during the last year, and it can easily be proved by the astonishing data regarding the company. In fact, according to the 2020 annual revenue Amazon will grow up to $386 billion dollars compared to the $100 billion of the year before, which equals to a 38% growth from 2019.
OTT Content Platforms
OTT or “Over-the-top” content platforms are media services directly offered to viewers via the internet, without the need of using cable, broadcast, satellite television or other “old school” platforms.
While these kinds of services were already growing in the last decade, they boomed during the Pandemic.
Between the most important OTT content platforms we remember names such as:
- Prime TV
- Netflix
- Disney+
- YouTube
To put in perspective their boom during the COVID-19 crisis, we need to analyse Netflix, a leading-company in this sector.
Netflix, like most of these platforms, is a subscription based video-on-demand service that offers access to thousands of movies and television contents. During the Pandemic, they reached 195,15 millions subscribers, equal to a 807,68% growth compared to the subscribers of the year before.
Online Bookmakers
While the sport betting industry received a very bad impact on the first phases of the pandemic, when many sport championships stopped across the world, starting from the Italian football serie A.
After the first wave of epidemic passed and with the restart of some important sport events in the world of football, basketball, boxing and so on, because many sports betting shops were closed people started to bet their money through online bookmakers.
In the European Union for example there are more than 16 million online customers which bet regularly through online bookmakers services, and 63% also use safer gambling tools in order to gamble responsibly.
Between the most important bookmakers we remember:
- Better
- William Hill
- SNAI
- Sisal Matchpoint
Online Brokers
Online trading platforms have been on the rise since the last 10 years, with an important increase between 2020 and 2021.
Because of the fact that many people couldn’t go to work or invest their money directly in person, they started to search on the internet for new positions to open and investing chances. It was only natural that the first choice would have been the stock market.
Due to IT tech advancement, today to become a trader you need basically three things: a smart device, a connection to the internet and a trustworthy online broker. While the first two are easy to achieve, you must be aware that not all brokers are safe and scams have increased as well.
That is why people decided during the last year to open a trading account mostly with regulated brokers only. Between the most important ones of these kind of brokerage service we remember:
- eToro
- Plus500
- RobinHood
- IG
To give you an idea of how much the sector is growing, just think that eToro recently reached 20 million registered users.
