This week’s LATAM RoundUp brings the high expectations of local online retailers about Black Friday — which includes the creation of a specific segment by Navegg DMP; VOD market data in a growth moment in LATAM; and data about Brazilian internet habits.

Black Friday: big expectations in Brazil

The Brazilian DMP and data provider Navegg announced two new audience groups focusing Black Friday in the country. The first group is formed by "young internet users who like to buy during Black Friday"; whereas the second aggregates "users who like to shop online", available for other campaigns.

Creating an exclusive group for Black Friday reinforces the strong date for online retail in Brazil, a recent trend that has been imported from the United States. A survey released by eBit this week shows that 80% of online shoppers wait for this day to make purchases. The group usually chooses online shopping at least twice in a year — 96% shopped at least one item online in the past semester and 95% intend to do it in the next six months. eBit collected this data in August, from 2,224 internet users.

According to Caique Lauerti, product specialist, Navegg, those groups are available in big Brazilian publishers like Estadao, Globo.com, and Folha de SSP, as well as other portals which use Rubicon’s SSP and programmatic platforms, such as Yahoo’s Brightroll DSP, DoubleClick Bid Manager, MediaMathm and Turn.

Consistent growth of VOD in Latin America

Recent data published by eMarketer, compiling numbers from Data’s and other data sources, this week shows an overview of the growing Video on Demand market in Latin America, considering only Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela. eMarketer forecasts this segment will reach USD$1.8b in revenues by 2018.

Last year, revenues reached USD$0.510m only. The region already supports nearly 90 platforms for OTT VOD. Brazil leads with 29, followed by Mexico with 17.

Also, subscription VOD is expected to play a minor role compared to non-subscription VOD transactions. eMarketer emphasises that the latter will skyrocket from 9.4 million in 2014, to 129.5 million in 2018.

Looking at Netflix only, it is possible to recognise the heat of the market. Latin America, alone, would accumulate 7.7 million subscriptions by the end of this year – up from 4.9 million in September 2014.

How do Brazilians behave on the internet?

Most of Brazilian internet users use a desktop to browse the web. Yet, for social media, the preferred device is the smartphone. Conecta, Ibope’s web platform, released some data about the behaviour of the internet user in the country, which gives insight about the Brazilian audience.

According to Conecta, 54% prefer smartphones to browse social media, whereas 42% use desktop or laptops, and only 4% use tablets. For general web browsing, the numbers are 92% for desktop/laptop, 80% for smartphones and 33% for tablets.

The peak time of smartphone usage is between 12pm and 2pm. During weekends, it is between 6pm and 10 pm.

It is also interesting to observe the convergence of mobile devices and TV. 26% of the audience watch TV on their mobile — of this group, 64% do it at home, 52% do it on the bus, and the same percentage do it at work.

Data was collected with 1,004 internet users in July 2015.