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Driven by livestreams, consumer spending in social apps to hit $17.2B in 2025
The livestreaming boom is driving a significant uptick in the creator economy, as a new forecast estimates consumers will spend $6.78 billion in social apps in 2021. That figure will grow to $17.2 billion annually by 2025, according to data from mobile data firm App Annie, which notes the upward trend represents a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 29%. By that point, the lifetime total spend in social apps will reach $78 billion, the firm reports.
Image Credits: App Annie
Initially, much of the livestream economy was based on one-off purchases like sticker packs, but today, consumers are gifting content creators directly during their livestreams. Some of these donations can be incredibly high, at times. Twitch streamer ExoticChaotic was gifted $75,000 during a live session on Fortnite, which was one of the largest-ever donations on the game-streaming social network. Meanwhile, App Annie notes another platform, Bigo Live, is enabling broadcasters to earn up to $24,000 per month through their livestreams.
Apps that offer livestreaming as a prominent feature are also those that are driving the majority of today’s social app spending, the report says. In the first half of this year, $3 out every $4 spent in the top 25 social apps came from apps that offered livestreams, for example.
Image Credits: App Annie
During the first half of 2021, the U.S. become the top market for consumer spending inside social apps, with 1.7x the spend of the next largest market, Japan, and representing 30% of the market by spend. China, Saudi Arabia and South Korea followed to round out the top 5.
Image Credits: App Annie
While both creators and the platforms are financially benefitting from the livestreaming economy, the platforms are benefitting in other ways beyond their commissions on in-app purchases. Livestreams are helping to drive demand for these social apps and they help to boost other key engagement metrics, like time spent in app.
One top app that’s significantly gaining here is TikTok.
Last year, TikTok surpassed YouTube in the U.S. and the U.K. in terms of the average monthly time spent per user. It often continues to lead in the former market, and more decisively leads in the latter.
Image Credits: App Annie
Image Credits: App Annie
In other markets, like South Korea and Japan, TikTok is making strides, but YouTube still leads by a wide margin. (In South Korea, YouTube leads by 2.5x, in fact.)
Image Credits: App Annie
Beyond just TikTok, consumers spent 740 billion hours in social apps in the first half of the year, which is equal to 44% of the time spent on mobile globally. Time spent in these apps has continued to trend upwards over the years, with growth that’s up 30% in the first half of 2021 compared to the same period in 2018.
Today, the apps that enable livestreaming are outpacing those that focus on chat, photo or video. This is why companies like Instagram are now announcing dramatic shifts in focus, like how they’re “no longer a photo sharing app.” They know they need to more fully shift to video or they will be left behind.
The total time spent in the top five social apps that have an emphasis on livestreaming are now set to surpass half a trillion hours on Android phones alone this year, not including China. That’s a three-year CAGR of 25% versus just 15% for apps in the Chat and Photo & Video categories, App Annie noted.
Image Credits: App Annie
Thanks to growth in India, the Asia-Pacific region now accounts for 60% of the time spent in social apps. As India’s growth in this area increased over the past 3.5 years, it shrunk the gap between itself and China from 115% in 2018 to just 7% in the first half of this year.
Social app downloads are also continuing to grow, due to the growth in livestreaming.
To date, consumers have downloaded social apps 74 billion times, and that demand remains strong, with 4.7 billion downloads in the first half of 2021 alone — up 50% year-over-year. In the first half of the year, Asia was the largest region region for social app downloads, accounting for 60% of the market.
This is largely due to India, the top market by a factor of 5x, which surpassed the U.S. back in 2018. India is followed by the U.S., Indonesia, Brazil and China, in terms of downloads.
Image Credits: App Annie
The shift toward livestreaming and video has also impacted what sort of apps consumers are interested in downloading, not just the number of downloads.
A chart that shows the top global apps from 2012 to the present highlights Facebook’s slipping grip. While its apps (Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp) have dominated the top spots over the years in various positions, TikTok popped into the number one position last year, and continues to maintain that ranking in 2021.
Further down the chart, other apps that aid in video editing have also overtaken others that had been more focused on photos or chat.
Image Credits: App Annie
Video apps like YouTube (#1), TikTok (#2) Tencent Video (#4), Bigo Live (#5), Twitch (#6), and others also now rank at the top of the global charts by consumer spending in the first half of 2021.
But YouTube (#1) still dominates in time spent compared with TikTok (#5), and others from Facebook — the company holds the next three spots for Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, respectively.
This could explain why TikTok is now exploring the idea of allowing users to upload even longer videos, by increasing the limit from 3 minutes to 5, for instance.
TikTok is testing a longer 5 minute video upload limit
pic.twitter.com/qiRbJmHkma
— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) August 25, 2021
In addition, because of livestreaming’s ability to drive growth in terms of time spent, it’s also likely the reason why TikTok has been heavily investing in new features for its TikTok LIVE platform, including things like events, support for co-hosts, Q&As and more, and why it made the “LIVE” button a more prominent feature in its app and user experience.
App Annie’s report also digs into the impact livestreaming has had on specific platforms, like Twitch and Bigo Live, the former which doubled its monthly active user base from the pre-pandemic era, and the latter which saw $314.2 million in consumer spend during H1 2021.
“The ability of social media users to communicate with each other using live video – or watch others’ live broadcasts – has not only maintained the growth of a social media app market, but contributed to its exponential growth in engagement metrics like time spent, that might otherwise have saturated some time ago,” wrote App Annie’s Head of Insights, Lexi Sydow, when announcing the new report.
The full report is available here.
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Link-in-bio monetization platform Snipfeed raises a $5.5M seed round
The link-in-bio business is heating up as more mobile website builders compete for a coveted slice of real estate on a creator’s TikTok, Instagram or Twitter. Linktree leads the space, securing a recent $45 million Series B raise to build out e-commerce features, but Beacons boasts competitive creator monetization tools with just a $6 million seed round in May. Now, Snipfeed enters the ring with its own $5.5 million seed round, including investments from CRV, Abstract Ventures, Crossbeam (Ali Hamed), id8, Michael Ovitz (founder of CAA), Michael Bosstick, Diaspora Ventures and others.
Linktree has been around since 2016 and has more funding than its up-and-coming competitors. But for creators seeking to monetize their following, these newer platforms may be more attractive to some creators, since they already have built-in tools to help them monetize their followings. Linktree currently supports tipping on the platform for users subscribed to its $6 Linktree Pro platform, but Snipfeed offers a wider range of monetization options; some creators are making more than $20,000 per month on the platform, according to CEO and co-founder Rédouane Ramdani.
Snipfeed started as a content discovery platform with 44,000 weekly active users — but when Snipfeed added a creator monetization tool to its platform, it became its most popular feature. So, in February 2020, with little to no funding left, the company completely pivoted to its current link-in-bio business. Since then, Snipfeed has amassed 50,000 registered users, with the user base growing 500% in the last six months (Linktree, for comparison, has more than 12 million users).
Based in Paris and Los Angeles, Snipfeed’s 15-person staff is particularly interested in the “long tail” of creators, which it says encompasses more than 46 million people.
“Content creator doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to be the next Addison Rae or a TikTok star,” explained Ramdani. “It means that you might be a doctor or lawyer, and on top of that, you’re going to have a TikTok where you explain how to file your taxes and that kind of stuff. They have this expertise, and they’re wondering, ‘How can I turn that into a side-hustle?’ ”
Image Credits: Snipfeed
In addition to a standard tipping tool, Snipfeed allows users to sell digital goods, like on-demand video, e-books, access to livestreams and one-on-one consultations. But Snipfeed’s biggest differentiator is its Cameo-like system for selling personalized content. For example, TikToker maylikethemonthh uses Snipfeed to sell asynchronous, video-recorded tarot readings. While asking a single, personalized astrology question costs $5, a more in-depth reading can cost up to $20 or $40.
Snipfeed is free to set up, but if you make sales, the company takes 15% — this percentage is inclusive of any transaction fees. Through Snipfeed’s referral program, creators can make 5% of sales from anyone they onboard to the platform (this comes out of Snipfeed’s commission).
“We decided to go with this model because we really want to have a relationship where we help the creators really make money. We only make money if they make money,” Ramdani said.
If a creator or celebrity were to sell personalized videos on Cameo, they’d lose 25% to the platform. Meanwhile, Beacons takes 9% of sales from its free version, and 5% from its $10 per month version, which offers more customization, integrations and analytics.
Image Credits: Snipfeed
Still, depending on the type of creator, the features that each link-in-bio startup offers might matter more than the cost. Beacons allows users to share a shopping-enabled TikTok feed, which could be a huge money-maker for creators that often share product recommendations with affiliate links, which give them a commission from sales. Ramdani said that astrologers have been particularly successful on Snipfeed, since fans can book a variety of asynchronous services at a wide range of prices. But these features could benefit any creator who can profit from answering followers’ specific questions — a chef could offer recipe ideas based on what’s in a fan’s fridge, or a life coach could make a personalized video if a follower requests advice.
With its $5.5 million in seed funding, Snipfeed plans to build out its e-commerce tools so that creators can sell physical products on their link-in-bio (Beacons and Linktree are also working on this with their recent funding rounds — but Beacons’ and Snipfeed’s seed rounds are small compared to Linktree’s Series B). The company also wants to develop educational content to show its users how to best monetize their platform — if Snipfeed can help its creators make money, then it’ll make more money too.
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Instagram’s TikTok rival, Reels, rolls out ads worldwide
Instagram Reels are getting ads. The company announced today it’s launching ads in its short-form video platform and TikTok rival, Reels, to businesses and advertisers worldwide. The ads will be up to 30 seconds in length, like Reels themselves, and vertical in format, similar to ads found in Instagram Stories. Also like Reels, the new ads will loop, and people will be able to like, comment on, and save them, the same as other Reels videos.
The company had previously tested Reels ads in select markets earlier this year, including India, Brazil, Germany and Australia, then expanded those tests to Canada, France, the U.K. and the U.S. more recently. Early adopters of the new format have included brands like BMW, Nestlé (Nespresso), Louis Vuitton, Netflix, Uber and others.
Instagram tells us the ads will appear in most places users view Reels content, including on the Reels tab, Reels in Stories, Reels in Explore and Reels in your Instagram Feed, and will appear in between individual Reels posted by users. However, in order to be served a Reels ad, the user first needs to be in the immersive, full-screen Reels viewer.
Image Credits: Instagram
The company couldn’t say how often a user might see a Reels ad, noting that the number of ads a viewer may encounter will vary based on how they use Instagram. But the company is monitoring user sentiment around ads themselves, and the overall commerciality of Reels, it says.
Like Instagram’s other advertising products, Reels ads will launch with an auction-based model. But so far, Instagram is declining to share any sort of performance metrics around how those ads are doing, based on tests. Nor is it yet offering advertisers any creator tools or templates that could help them get started with Reels ads. Instead, Instagram likely assumes advertisers already have creative assets on hand or know how to make them, because of Reels ads’ similarities to other vertical video ads found elsewhere, including on Instagram’s competitors.
While vertical video has already shown the potential for driving consumers to e-commerce shopping sites, Instagram hasn’t yet taken advantage of Reels ads to drive users to its built-in Instagram Shops, though that seems like a natural next step as it attempts to tie the different parts of its app together.
But perhaps ahead of that step, Instagram needs to make Reels a more compelling destination — something other TikTok rivals, which now include both Snap and YouTube — have done by funding creator content directly. Instagram, meanwhile, had made offers to select TikTok stars directly.
The launch of Instagram Reels ads follows news of TikTok’s climbing ad prices. Bloomberg reported this month that TikTok is now asking for more than $1.4 million for a home page takeover ad in the U.S., as of the third quarter, which will jump to $1.8 million by Q4 and more than $2 million on a holiday. Though the company is still building its ads team and advertisers haven’t yet allocated large portions of their video budget to the app, that tends to follow user growth — and TikTok now has over 100 million monthly active users in the U.S.
Both apps, Instagram and TikTok, now have more than a billion monthly active users on a global basis, though Reels is only a part of the larger Instagram platform. For comparison, Instagram Stories is used by some 500 million users, which demonstrates Instagram’s ability to drive traffic to different areas of its app. Instagram declined to share how many users Reels has as of today.
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Twitch introduces Animated Emotes for their 10th anniversary
Twitch announced today that it will release major updates to its Emotes this month to celebrate its 10th anniversary. These new features will include Animated Emotes, Follower Emotes and a Library for Emotes.
Since the origin of the livestreaming platform for gamers, Emotes — Twitch’s version of emojis — have been a key component of Twitch culture. They’re micro memes, and images like Kappa, TriHard and PogChamp have come to carry meaning in the greater gaming world, even off the Twitch platform.
“Emotes are a language that transcends countries,” said Ivan Santana, senior director of Community Product at Twitch. “Anywhere you are in the world, they mean the same thing for us.”
The Amazon-owned platform regularly adds new global Emotes, which can be used on any streamer’s channel. Individual creators can make custom Emotes for their own community, which paying subscribers can use across the platform. But the ability to add animated gifs as Emotes is something that the community has been asking for since Santana can remember.
“I’ve been at Twitch for four years, and it’s something people have been asking for since before I joined,” Santana told TechCrunch. “It’s certainly been a very, very long time.”
Streamers who lack animation skills need not worry. While the more tech-savvy among us can upload custom gifs, Twitch will provide six templates for streamers to choose from, which can animate their existing Emotes. These animations include Shake, Rave, Roll, Spin, Slide In and Slide Out. Viewers who are sensitive to animations will be able to turn off the feature in their Chat Settings.
Image Credits: Twitch
Twitch is also beta testing Follower Emotes, which will be available to select Partners and Affiliates. This feature creates a fun, free incentive for viewers to hit the follow button on a channel they might be checking out for the first time. When viewers follow a channel, they’ll be notified when the creator is streaming, which can lead to an eventual subscription. Twitch takes 50% of streamers’ subscription money, creating a valuable revenue stream for the company.
In Q1 of 2021, Twitch viewership hit an all-time high, growing 16.5% since the previous quarter. Twitch viewers watched 6.34 billion hours of content in Q1, making up 72.3% of the market share. That’s double the total hours watched on Twitch in Q1 of 2020. Facebook Gaming and YouTube Gaming earned 12.1% and 15.6% of viewership in the sector, respectively.
“For a long time, creators have been asking for better ways to attract and welcome new viewers into their channel,” said Santana. “The idea is generally to create a lot of excitement around that community, and more feelings ultimately of community.”
Creators with beta access will be able to upload up to five Emotes for their followers, but unlike Subscriber Emotes, followers won’t be able to use these across other channels. There’s no guarantee that Follower Emotes will be here to stay — Santana says it’s a feature Twitch is “experimenting” with — but if all goes well, the feature will roll out more widely later in the year.
Finally, the Library function will make it easier for creators to swap Emotes in and out of subscription tiers without having to delete and reupload them each time. This builds upon an upgrade that launched in January, which centralized channel-specific icons into an Emotes tab on the Creator Dashboard. As usual, new Emotes have to be approved by Twitch before they’re put into use. The Library will roll out soon to all Partners and Affiliates, staggered over a few months to account for an expected increase in volume of new Emotes.
“As Twitch has scaled, we now have millions of communities across many different cultures across the world,” Santana said. “We can hand over more of the controls of our Emote language to our community, and let them sort of evolve in a way that we never could imagine that ultimately serves them in their unique ways.”
Twitch teased that there’s more in the works to celebrate the platform’s 10th anniversary, including an official 10-Year celebration.
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Getty Images leads $16M investment in Promo.com, a social video template tool
The social video tool Promo.com just raised $16 million in a Series B round led by Getty Images, the company synonymous with stock imagery.
Brands, creators or whoever else might need some quick and dirty video content can search Promo.com for what they need, just like they would use a stock photography service. Getty offers its own library of stock videos as well, but Promo.com provides both the video clips and the tools for non-editors to craft a basic edit with a little bit of customization.
Brands can select an existing professional video clip from a library, plug in their own message and add a logo or custom audio. All that’s left is downloading the customized video and whisking it off to their social channels.
Mizrahi-Tefahot Bank, one of the largest banks in Israel, also participated in the Series B round through debt financing. Promo.com’s existing “strategic partnership” with Getty Images will deepen as part of the deal, giving the former company access to the latter’s expansive existing pool of video clips.
Image Credits: Screenshot/Promo.com
Of course, Promo.com isn’t the only show in town. Video creation platform Biteable raised $7 million of its own in December, and similarly allows companies to make bright, bite-sized video content for social. The super streamlined graphic design platform Canva also supports video editing with its own library of stock images. Vimeo offers its own video template service too, known as Vimeo Create, which grew out of the company’s acquisition of the AI-powered video editor Magisto.
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TikTok launches a Green Screen Duet feature, tests dedicated ‘Topics’ feeds
As competition with tech giants heats up, TikTok is rolling out a series of new features to help keep its short-form video app ahead of rivals. The company today announced the launch of a new Green Screen Duet feature, which combines two of TikTok’s most popular editing tools to allow creators to use another video from TikTok as the background in their new video. It also confirmed the test of a new way to discover videos. Called “Topics,” these are dedicated interest-based feeds featuring the top, trending videos in a given category.
Green Screen Duet joins an existing set of Duet tools that let creators lay out two videos side-by-side. Today, Duet layouts include “Left & Right,” “React” and “Top & Bottom.” Creators currently use Duets to sing, dance, joke or act alongside another user’s video, react to a video’s content or even just watch a video from another, sometimes smaller, creator to raise awareness or call attention to its content.
Editing tools like Duet and Stitch are key to what makes TikTok not just a passive video viewing app but, rather, a new type of video-first social network. It’s also proven so popular, it has since been adopted by Facebook’s TikTok clone, Instagram Reels, where it’s known as Remix. Snapchat has been developing a Remix feature of its own, too.
Image Credits: TikTok
TikTok’s new Green Screen Duet will now appear as another option alongside the existing layouts, offering users a way to more easily use another video in the background as they record their own video overlaid on top.
This sort of video experience is something TikTok creators already do in a variety of ways. For example, they may capture images or screen recordings, then use other editing tools to create a green screen effect like this. Or they may react to a video using a Stitch instead, as that can be easier. A built-in Green Screen Duet feature simply offers another way to record new videos that include existing videos.
When the feature is used, the Duetted video plays in the background over the new video being recorded. TikTok believes the launch will inspire new formats for creativity and expression, as a result.
TikTok has been busy upgrading its interface to improve recording and discovering new video content in its app in recent weeks, as Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat have tried to reproduce TikTok’s feature set in their own apps. For instance, TikTok just launched interactive music features last month in an effort to get ahead.
In another leap, TikTok is also now testing a new Discover page in the app, where instead of only featuring the current trends, as before, it now organizes videos into categories.
Image Credits: TikTok
These categories represent the many areas of interest on TikTok, like gaming, beauty, dance, TV & movies, sports, family, learning and much more. When you tap into any given category, you’re taken to a feed that includes the community’s top, trending content. The feeds will be affected by factors like relevance, timeliness and interest, and can help users find new content and creators outside of what their personalized For You page shows.
TikTok confirmed the test has been rolling out in the U.S. over the past few weeks.
The company also is currently testing e-commerce shopping features, where some brands like Hype and Walmart have been given a new “Shopping” tab on their TikTok profile where users can shop items, add to cart and then check out without leaving the app. (Walmart enabled its tab during its livestream event in December, and it’s been there ever since.)
Image Credits: TikTok
The integration is less elegant than Instagram’s Shops, as there’s not a native, universal cart or integrated payment mechanism. Instead, users are visiting the retailer’s website directly.
The advances TikTok is making, however, has been paying off in terms of capturing a large Gen Z user base.
According to eMarketer, more Gen Z users in the U.S. now use TikTok than Instagram, or 37.3 million monthly active users compared with 33.3 million users, respectively. And by 2023, the firm predicts TikTok will surpass Snapchat in terms of total U.S. users, as well.
But TikTok’s global ambitions are impacted not only by its ban in India but also the possibility that creators will find more monetization opportunities on established platforms.
Yesterday, for example, YouTube announced a $100 million fund for top YouTube Shorts creators, and said it will soon be testing ads on Shorts. That could help creators generate revenue from short-form content, while also converting casual viewers to channel subscribers where there are even more opportunities to monetize. Snapchat and Instagram have also been wooing creators with cash, and ultimately, if creators find they can make more money elsewhere they could shift some of their attention away from TikTok, no matter how many creative new features it adds.
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YouTube announces a $100M fund to reward top YouTube Shorts creators over 2021-2022
YouTube is giving its TikTok competitor, YouTube Shorts, an injection of cash to help it better compete with rivals. The company today introduced the YouTube Shorts Fund, a $100 million fund that will pay YouTube Shorts creators for their most viewed and most engaging content over the course of 2021 and 2022. Creators can’t apply for the fund to help with content production, however. Instead, YouTube will reach out to creators each month whose videos exceeded certain milestones to reward them for their contributions.
The company expects to dole out money to “thousands” of creators every month, it says. And these creators don’t need to be in the YouTube Partner Program to qualify — anyone is eligible to receive rewards by creating original content for YouTube Shorts.
YouTube declined to share more specific details about the fund’s operations at this time, including how creators will be vetted or what specific thresholds for receiving payments YouTube has in mind. It also wouldn’t offer details as to whether YouTube creators could receive multiple payments in the same pay period if they had several videos that would qualify, or any other details.
And while the company stressed that only “original” content would gain rewards, it didn’t clarify how it will go about checking to ensure the content isn’t already uploaded on another platform, like Reels, Snapchat or TikTok.
Image Credits: YouTube
Instead, YouTube said that more details about the payments and qualifications would be available closer to the fund’s launch, which is expected sometime in the next few months. It pointed out also that it has paid out over $30 billion to creators, artists and media companies over the last three years, and it expects the new fund will help it to build a long-term monetization model for Shorts on YouTube going forward.
YouTube isn’t the only platform to take on the threat of TikTok by throwing cash at the problem.
Snapchat has been paying $1 million per day to creators for their top-performing videos on Spotlight, its own TikTok clone, minting several millionaires in the process. Facebook-owned Instagram, meanwhile, made lucrative offers to top TikTok stars to use its new service, Reels, The WSJ reported last year.
Despite the size of these efforts, TikTok’s own Creator Fund remains a competitive force. It announced its fund would grow to over $1 billion in the U.S. in the next three years and would be more than double that on a global basis. This March, it also added another requirement to receiving the fund’s payments, including having at least 100K authentic views in the last 30 days — a signal that it’s setting the bar even higher, given its current success.
Alongside the debut of YouTube’s Shorts Fund, the company also noted it’s expanding its Shorts player feature across more places on YouTube to help viewers discover this short-form video content, will begin testing ads for Shorts and will be rolling out the new “remix audio” feature to all Shorts creators.
Image Credits: YouTube
This somewhat controversial feature allows Shorts creators to sample sounds from other YouTube videos for use in their Shorts, instead of only using song clips or original audio. Some YouTube creators were surprised to find the feature was opt-out by default — meaning their content could be used on YouTube Shorts unless they took the time to turn this setting off or removed their video from YouTube.
Since its launch, YouTube has also rolled out other features to Shorts, including support for captions, the ability to record up to 60 seconds with the Shorts camera, the ability to add clips from your phone’s gallery to your recordings made with the Shorts camera and the ability use basic filters to color correct videos. YouTube says more effects will arrive in the future.
But even as YouTube tries to catch up with TikTok on feature sets, TikTok has been expanding its own effects lineup and becoming more YouTube-like by supporting longer videos. Some TikTok creators, for example, have recently been given the ability to record videos three minutes in length, instead of just 60 seconds.
YouTube says the new fund will roll out in the coming months and it will listen to the feedback from the creator community to develop a long-term program designed for YouTube Shorts.
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Bilibili ups the ante in games with $123 million investment in TapTap
Competition in China’s gaming industry is getting stiffer in recent times as tech giants sniff out potential buyouts and investments to beef up their gaming alliance, whether it pertains to content or distribution.
Bilibili, the go-to video streaming platform for young Chinese, is the latest to make a major gaming deal. It has agreed to invest HK$960 million (about $123 million) into X.D. Network, which runs the popular game distribution platform TapTap in China, the company announced on Thursday.
Dual-listed in Hong Kong and New York, Bilibili will purchase 22,660,000 shares of X.D.’s common stock at HK$42.38 apiece, which will grant it a 4.72% stake.
The partners will initiate a series of “deep collaborations” around X.D.’s own games and TapTap, without offering more detail.
Though known for its trove of video content produced by amateur and professional creators, Bilibili derives a big chunk of its income from mobile games, which accounted for 40% of its revenues in 2020. The ratio had declined from 71% and 53% in 2018 and 2019, a sign that it’s trying to diversify revenue streams beyond distributing games.
Tencent has similarly leaned on games to drive revenues for years. The WeChat operator dominates China’s gaming market through original titles and a sprawling investment portfolio whose content it helps operate and promote.
X.D. makes games, too, but in recent years it has also emerged as a rebel against traditional game distributors, which are Android app stores operated by smartphone makers. The vision is to skip the high commission fees charged by the likes of Huawei and Xiaomi and monetize through ads. X.D.’s proposition has helped it attract a swathe of gaming companies to be its investors, including fast-growing studios Lilith Games and miHoYo, Alibaba, as well as ByteDance, which built up a 3,000-people strong gaming team within six years.
Bilibili’s investment further strengthens X.D.’s matrix of top-tier gaming investors. Tencent is conspicuously absent, but it’s no secret that ByteDance is its new nemesis after Alibaba. The TikTok parent recently outbid Tencent to acquire Moonton, a gaming studio that has gained ground in Southeast Asia, according to Reuters. Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, is also vying for user attention away from content published on WeChat.
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Lowkey raises $7 million from a16z to help game streamers capitalize on short-form video
While the growth of game-streaming audiences have continued on desktop platforms, the streaming space has felt surprisingly stagnant at times, particularly due to the missing mobile element and a lack of startup competitors.
Lowkey, a gaming startup that builds software for game streamers, is aiming to build out opportunities in bit-sized clips on mobile. The startup wants to be a hub for both creating and viewing short gaming clips but also sees a big opportunity in helping streamers cut down their existing content for distribution on platforms like Instagram and TikTok where short-form gaming content sees a good deal of engagement.
The startup announced today that they’ve closed a $7 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from a host of angel investors including Figma’s Dylan Field, Loom’s Joe Thomas and Plaid’s Zach Perret and William Hockey.
We last covered Lowkey in early 2020 when the company was looking to build out a games tournament platform for adults. At the time, the company had already pivoted after going through YC as Camelot, which allowed audiences on Twitch and YouTube to pay creators to take on challenges. This latest shift brings Lowkey back to the streaming world but more focused on becoming a tool for streamers and a mobile hub for viewers.
Twitch and YouTube Gaming have proven to be pretty uninterested in short-form content, favoring the opportunities of long-form streams that allow creators to press broadcast and upload lengthy streams. Lowkey users can easily upload footage captured from Lowkey’s desktop app or directly import a linked stream. This allows content creators to upload and comment on their own footage or remix and respond to another streamer’s content.
One of the challenges for streamers has been adapting widescreen content for a vertical video form factor, but CEO Jesse Zhang says that it’s not really a problem with most modern games. “Games inherently want to focus you attention on the center of the screen,” Zhang tells TechCrunch. “So, almost all clips extend really cleanly to like a mobile format, which is what we’ve done.”
Lowkey’s desktop app is available on Windows and their new mobile app is now live for iOS.
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Amazon’s GameOn app, a platform for sharing mobile gaming clips, launches on iOS
Mobile gaming hasn’t seen the same demand for streaming content in the past as desktop has, but Amazon sees a market there to extend Twitch’s dominance. After launching on Android back in November, the company’s mobile streaming centric app has just launched on Apple’s App Store.
The app lets users record short clips (anywhere from 30 seconds to 5 minutes of content) of gameplay from a variety of titles that support screen recording capture. Users can screen record these clips directly into the GameOn library at which point they can add commentary or additional edits before publishing to the GameOn platform or sharing links to the platform on other sites.
The GameOn platform is interestingly fully disconnected from Twitch with separate branding and different channels. Amazon has been partnering with streamers to wholly focus on mobile gaming while promoting challenges unique to the app.The company says the service is compatible with over 1,000 mobile games.
Developers have been increasingly vigilant about brining more full-featured ports of desktop titles to mobile though the lack of sophisticated controls has made this a challenge. As gaming platforms aim to bring cloud streaming networks to iOS there could end up being more demand for shot-on-mobile content and titles that users control with a gamepad, but this will depend on whether the App Store grows more amenable to these platforms over time.
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