These are the top 20 Chinese short video/live applications with the highest number of downloads and revenues during the first quarter of 2019
Tik Tok team with content creators in Singapore. PHOTO: Tik Tok LinkedIn account
The top of the list remains stable and continues to be dominated by Bytedance’s app Tik Tok. Although many applications in the list use pan-popular entertainment as the main content strategy, the latter half of the list shows that the overseas game live broadcast market is receiving more and more attention from Chinese manufacturers.
In the TOP20 download list of this issue, there are 5 live game applications, including Nimo TV, Cube TV, StreamCraft, Game.ly Live, and Noonlive. Among them, IGG "StreamCraft" started testing in local markets in early 2018 and began to work in various markets such as Indonesia and Latin America in January of this year.
The 20 apps on the list received 414 million downloads in the overseas App Store and Google Play during the Q1 application period, up 103% from the 204 million downloads in the same period last year, 57% of which came from the Indian market, Indonesia and Brazil each accounted for 4.9% and 4.5%.
The overseas version of douyin, "Tik Tok" has surpassed USD 11 million in the first quarter, up 135% from USD 4.88 million in the same period last year. The US market contributed 66%, followed by the UK market with 9%.
During Q1, BIGO LIVE's overseas income was nearly USD 52 million, accounting for 52% of TOP20's total revenue, up 57% from the previous year's USD 33 million. The main income of BIGO LIVE is still from the Middle East market. Q1 Saudi Arabia contributes 39% of the total revenue and the US market contributes 22%.
In the 20 applications on the list, the total revenue of overseas App Store and Google Play exceeded USD 100 million, up 35% from USD 74.7 million in the same period last year, 34% of which came from the US market, and Saudi Arabia, Taiwan and Japan each accounted for 26%, 3.4% and 3.3% respectively.
Tik Tok recorded its best first quarter yet for new users over the past three months, adding an estimated 188 million during Q1 according to the same source. This marked a year-over-year increase of 70% from Q1 2018 when 110 million users installed ByteDance’s hit app for the first time.
Tik Tok was the third most installed app globally during Q1 across the App Store and Google Play, the same rank it held during the previous quarter. It was ranked behind only Facebook’s WhatsApp and Messenger at No. 1 and No. 2, respectively.
According to thenextweb internet users grew by 8.6% during the past 1 year globally, a total of 4.43 billion users including 350 million new users by the start of April 2019. The number of Social media users has also increased by more than 200 million since this time last year to reach almost 3.5 billion.
India Tik Tok’s largest market accounted for the greatest share of growth in internet users in the first quarter of 2019, with data from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India showing that the country added more than 44 million new internet subscribers in the first three months of the year.
With the company already claiming more than 500 million active users and more than a billion downloads it is clear to why so many people believe TikTok is the next big thing in the world of social.
On Apr 17, 2019, the Indian government asked Apple and Google to remove Tik Tok because of inappropriate content and a couple of other incidents caused by the app. Soon after a week’s time on Apr 24, 2019, Indian Madras High Court reversed the ban. According to the people in charge of Tik Tok, currently, the company has hired almost 500 employees and is planning to expand the team scale in the future to provide more localized services to the Indians.
In Dec 2018, Tik Tok ranked 1st in Indian Play Store and exceeded WhatsApp, which ranked 1st in 2017. Indian users occupied 39% of the Tik Tok's 500 million global users. In a nutshell, India is the largest overseas market of Tik Tok. With the further promotion of the Belt and Road policy, companies such as ByteDance will pay further attention to the overseas market and provide more localized products.