In social media, it has been Douyin and Kuaishou that have stolen user attention from Tencent’s WeChat. Ad revenues had been one of the last categories where the BATs held on to their dominance, but that’s over now, too. ByteDance surged past Tencent and Baidu in 2020, and now its ad business is nearly double those of the previous incumbents.

Amazon was slated for an already high 34.6% increase, but now it’s expected to nearly lead the world with a 61.4% boom (only Reddit, Kuaishou, and Meituan will grow ad revenues faster among our forecast cohort, but from vastly smaller bases). In a Strong Year for Everyone, No One Will Flex More than Google.

China’s premier short-form video social media apps Kuaishou and Douyin were slower to launch their livestreaming ecommerce services. However, both have invested substantial resources into building out this functionality, and the results are evident. As Kuaishou, Douyin, and WeChat embrace the livestreaming ecommerce format, the figures for livestreaming social commerce are beginning to boom.

Within two years, Kuaishou, JD.com, and Apple will have joined the $10 billion club as well.

It is likely that Kuaishou also has more users in China than Snapchat, Twitter, or TikTok have in all of Asia-Pacific, but we do not have user estimates for Kuaishou yet.

Ecommerce sales on short-video and livestreaming app Kuaishou rose to $100.73 billion (RMB 650 billion) in GMV in 2021 from $59.04 billion (RMB 381 billion) in 2020, per a report from Caixin Global. It added that Kuaishou expects to reach $139.47 billion (RMB 900 billion) in GMV this year. While Douyin may look like a road map, commerce on TikTok in the US will develop independently.

The rest of the world is waking up to the potential of shoppable livestreams, but it’s old news to China’s short-form video players and ecommerce platforms. Short-video leaders Douyin (TikTok’s sister app) and Kuaishou (known outside of China as Kwai) have been expanding their social commerce operations, not just to sell products, but to provide services and other forms of content as well.

Short-video apps Douyin and Kuaishou also reported increased brand usage and user engagement with livestreams. Some brands have moved livestream production in-house to take greater control of the process, while others shifted content to short-video apps and owned media (known as “private domain” in China, e.g., WeChat chat groups) to reduce their traffic acquisition costs.

Short-video apps Douyin and Kuaishou also reported increased brand usage and user engagement with livestreams. Some brands appear to have moved livestream production in-house to take greater control of the process, while others shifted content to short-video apps and owned media (known as “private domain” in China, e.g., WeChat chat groups) to reduce their traffic acquisition costs.

Farmers are livestreaming on short-video platforms, such as Kuaishou, to engage with and sell to consumers directly.

For example, Tencent, which operates the massive WeChat messaging app, has provided financial backing for an app called Kuaishou, the leading competitor to Douyin. Kuaishou has its own sister app Kwai, which has started to take off in Brazil. Privacy and Security Issues. TikTok’s growth may also be affected by the ongoing US investigation of its Chinese ownership and how TikTok users’ data is handled.

Douyin—China’s version of TikTok—and video sharing app Kuaishou, for example, both saw further increases in daily active users (DAUs) in February, compared with the same period in 2019. The pandemic has also led more businesses to try live streaming to convey ecommerce opportunities.

Other major players include short-video apps Kuaishou and Douyin (TikTok’s sister app), as well as the Pinterest-like Xiaohongshu. Most of these apps are social in nature, so it’s little surprise that D2C players there are highly dependent on social commerce selling, which we forecast will generate RMB 2.427 trillion ($351.65 billion) in China this year.

We took a look at this for our latest report on digital video in China and spoke with Annie He, global PR manager of Kuaishou Technology, a Beijing-based short-video platform.

In mid-May, the China Cyberspace Administration—the state’s internet watchdog—called out tech giants Baidu, ByteDance, Kuaishou, and Microsoft for improperly collecting user data there. Behind the government’s push for greater data privacy and security is not just its desire to be seen as a responsible global partner that adheres to international norms.

Douyin’s local competitor, Kuaishou, is also rapidly becoming a major digital ad publisher, and even ByteDance’s news aggregator, Toutiao, is likely stealing meaningful ad spending share from traditional media. We are not yet able to break out digital ad spending forecasts for ByteDance properties, nor for Kuaishou.

Since its 2004 inauguration, the annual 618 online shopping festival, which takes place from June 1 to June 18, has been adopted by other companies like Alibaba, Pinduoduo, Douyin (TikTok’s equivalent in China) and Kuaishou, which ran their own campaigns with elements of omnichannel shopping.

Shoppable livestreams are also extremely popular on short-video apps Douyin and Kuaishou. Key product categories. Amid the rapid expansion of both the middle class and ecommerce in China, the beauty category reached new heights in 2020. Consumers in China spent $11.0 billion on beauty products online last year, with skincare making up the majority of those sales, per research firm The NPD Group.

Feichuan: Currently under development, this Clubhouse-inspired invite-only app from leading short-video company Kuaishou is in its beta version. MiTalk: Smart device maker Xiaomi has revamped its messaging app MiTalk—first released before WeChat but failed to reach the same scale—and is turning it into a voice-based social app targeting professionals.

Led by platforms like Alibaba's Taobao, Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok), and Kuaishou, shoppable livestreaming is by some estimates already a multibillion-dollar industry.