The Covid-19 pandemic brought many changes to everyone’s day-to-day life, but it also profoundly affected various industries. While some industries, like the cinema business and travel companies, absolutely flopped due to everyone being stuck in their homes all the time, others saw a huge boom.
Let’s look at five industries that boomed during the pandemic and see why they saw success, how it affected them, and how they’re holding up today!
1. Online Meeting Software
Whether you were working a 9 to 5 or going to school when the pandemic started in March of 2020, it’s almost certain you’ve googled “zoom download” at least once in the past two years. Remote meeting software saw a huge boom as businesses and schools moved to work-from-home models to account for the pandemic.
These days, Zoom is still doing pretty well for itself. While the pandemic is no longer the primary concern of many businesses, a good chunk still lets workers attend meetings from home. The same goes for schools, as studies show retention rates are higher in online classes when compared to in-person numbers.
With this in mind, it’s no surprise that Zoom is still seeing quarterly profit increases well into the 2022 fiscal year.
2. Food Delivery Services
One of the many financial victims of the pandemic was restaurants and cafes. Since nobody could visit these establishments in person, those running them and those craving their products had to resort to ordering food through apps like Uber Eats and Doordash.
On top of this, many were afraid of going to the grocery store or to grab everyday necessities, leading to many companies that were previously focused on delivering restaurant goods now offering general shopping delivery too.
With all of this in mind, it only makes sense that these apps would see a huge increase in userbase and, by extension, profits. Research shows a boom of over 200% when it comes to revenue and above 300% when it comes to the number of active users!
As far as growth goes, a study of Uber Eats shows a steady and constant increase in profits well after the start of the pandemic, so we can be sure these services aren’t going anywhere any time soon!
3. Gaming and Game Streaming
Since everyone has a phone, computer, or console these days, being stuck at home was the perfect excuse for gamers to dig into their backlogs and a great point of entry for those who’ve never tried gaming beyond Candy Crush or Windows Solitaire.
G2A, one of the biggest online game marketplaces, saw a huge uptick in searches at the start of the pandemic, particularly from folks over 60 years old, with over a 200% increase in interest by that demographic.
The leading platform for streaming video games – Twitch – also saw record growth, with a Streamlabs study seeing an 83% uprise in viewership on the site. This means that even those who didn’t have the cash or equipment to dig into gaming enjoyed it through various online creators!
Twitch – and gaming in general – are still healthy and growing. TwitchTracker gives us viewership numbers since Twitch’s inception up to right now, so we can see that neither streaming nor video games are going anywhere!
4. Pornography
Everyone was at home, and many people were all alone. It only makes sense that the majority wanted to get frisky more often than usual during these troubled times, and stats corroborate that.
Mainstream sites like Pornhub saw a huge increase in traffic numbers, and an array of new amateur porn sites cropped up and started doing numbers on the world wide web. Porn certainly saw many spikes and drops in viewership, but it’s still stable even though the peaks of the early pandemic are unlikely to be recreated any time soon.
Another platform that saw a huge boom was OnlyFans. People stuck at home were both looking for a way to turn their time sitting around into money and for a way to get some intimacy into their at-home routines. OnlyFans filled both needs and saw a steady increase in searches that’s still going today!
5. DIY and Home Improvement
When you spend all of your time at home, you’ll eventually have to deal with the obvious problems that make that experience a bit less than ideal. Many people turned to DIY and home improvement to pass time during quarantine, whether it was a leaky faucet, unmowed lawn, broken TV, or squeaky door.
After a slight drop in revenue and quarterly improvements in early 2020, Home Depot, America’s biggest DIY and home improvement store, saw a large increase in sales in the 12 months after the start of the pandemic.
While growth for the industry has stalled since the pandemic has ended, as can be seen in Home Depot’s year-over-year quarterly growth in late 2021 and 2022, it’s still in a much better place than it was pre-pandemic.
Conclusion
The pandemic was a blessing in disguise for these industries, and many companies saw record growth. Platforms like Zoom and OnlyFans went from underdogs to financial giants during quarantine. Food delivery, gaming, and home improvement companies saw a much-needed uptick in users that’ll surely help them keep up with the changing market in the coming years.
All this is to say that we can’t ever know what the future brings, but analyzing how events affect certain industries can give us an interesting perspective of both how the market behaves in these times of peril and how the human psyche and day-to-day can majorly affect which companies reach stardom and which are left in the dust.
