Prompted by FacebookLive in Taiwan, the Livestream Economy Gains Steam in China

A new breed of internet applications that some are calling the “livestream economy” is becoming increasingly popular in China and other Asian markets. The rise of Facebook Live in Taiwan and the growth of user-generated content has prompted much of this discussion, particularly relative to other Chinese markets.The following are three key points that emerge from an analysis of this “livestream economy”: “Chinese-American differences”, “different age preferences” and “realization patterns.”

Chinese-American differences

Four of the top 10 Chinese companies are prominent in the technology ecosystem: Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu and Ant Financial.

Tencent relies on instant messaging with its WeChat product, Alibaba relies on e-commerce, Baidu relies on search, and Ant Financial Service relies on gold flow.

These four areas are also in line with current network technology trends. With nearly 700 million people in mainland China, the market size of these Chinese companies can be staggering. WeChat has nearly 20 million accounts, and the daily growth rate in accounts is 10,000. The future growth is considerable.

Different from the United States’ focus on underlying technology innovation and intrinsic development (investment-related new technologies), Relative to the United States, China pays more attention to application innovation instead of underlying technology innovation. For example, WeChat enables users to “transmit messages” and “call for a car, “booking”, “ordering”, “shopping”, “payment”, and so forth.

These application capabilities are something that the United States and other countries can’t imagine. The separate Uber application’s ability to call car and to collect and pay for them is showing the strength and power of combining capabilities within the single WeChat application.

Different age preferences

For social media users, the ratio of male to female is relatively average. Among them, and the activity in the afternoon and evening is high. They prefer to use social, financial, office, education, pictures and other applications. Examples include “Mother and baby”, “car”, “family”, and “finance”.

For information portal users, the proportion of males is high, mostly in the 25 – 36 year-old demographic. The morning commute is the most active, preferring to use travel, travel, life, online shopping, etc., and the consumption tendency is for “catering” and “jewelry”, “watch, and “sports health”, for example.

For live broadcast users, the proportion of males is also high. The proportion of young and unmarried people prefer music, video, car services, etc., and the consumption tendencies are “dress” and “leisure”, and “living services.”

Realization patterns

How does livestream related to consumers? The way in which revenues can be realized from media can be divided into the following five areas:

1. Paid manuscript, organization to participate in offline activities.
2. Advertising display position.
3. Publishing newspapers.
4. The platform itself is carrying products, promoting its own products or selling products through the media.
5. Fan marketing through content, services, building a platform, and direct sales or sales channels.

The livestream economy represents the rise of a personal era in which the most important thing is the “content” itself, and whether the content communicator knows the contemporary language, can use the most popular language in communicating with the audience to conveying interesting content for that particular platform.