The digital ad market rebounded surprisingly strongly in the third quarter, a cavalcade of earnings results today showed. The results confirm earlier indications that marketers regained confidence over the summer after slashing spending when the pandemic crisis first began. The question now is whether the new surge in Covid cases will cause another pullback.

All the tech firms reporting September quarter results on Thursday showed better-than-expected revenue growth. Alphabet’s Google, which suffered its first revenue decline as a public company in the June period, reported revenue growth of 14%. Notably, Google’s growth was driven by YouTube, where ad revenue rose 32%.