The rise of live streaming in China – a detailed look

 It looks like their recent digital campaign encouraging Chinese netizens to ‘be themselves’ really worked 😉

China has witnessed a thriving development of live streaming since late 2015. As the mega cosmetic brand Maybelline and leading e-commerce platform Taobao both leveraged the trend to drive sales, a Chinese data provider focused on mobile Internet-QuestMobile decided to probe deeper to understand why.

It conducted a deep-dive research on the live stream mobile apps in August, focusing on the user behavior and China’s leading independent live stream applications, including YY, Inke, and Douyu.

According to the data provided by QuestMobile, the monthly active users has reached  85 million in May (the eighth bar), a huge jump from the 52.71 million in last October (the first bar), which means the user base increases by more than 33 million over a eight-month period.

On live stream applications, users can get access to both prerecorded online videos and live shows. The study shows that the videos (the orange line) are more attractive to audiences during the daytime from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m., while the live shows become their principal amusement during the late night from 10 p.m. to 4 o’clock in the morning.

The research also summarized the Top 5 live stream applications in China, respectively – Inke, YY, Douyu, Huya Live and Panda TV (ranked according to their latest MAUs in May 2016). Inke, a newcomer which hit the market in May 2015, has enjoyed a strong increase in active users, from 660,000 to 25.67 million to May this year. It beat  out the previous market leader YY and ranked the NO.1 among all the live stream applications in China.

Anyone can create a live show with Inke!

new internet celebrities have used the app to catapult themselves to fame using the platform