Short Video From China to Africa
An exploration of China's short video industry & the development of Transsion owned Vskit
There was a point in my life when I watched a ton of mukbang videos...basically, videos of people eating messy food way too close to the camera. This wasn’t because I actually enjoyed them, or because my deskmate told me it was a tried and true dieting tactic, but because I worked at a short video company in China and the team was on a constant quest to figure out what Chinese social media trends could be localized for markets abroad.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the distinguishing features of Chinese apps that manage to go global (particularly Chinese apps that manage to make it in Africa) and those that fail. So that’s just what I’m going to spend this newsletter doing, fleshing short video winners and losers and understanding what made them just that. You’ll find:
The tale of Meitu, the AR & AI-powered selfie editing app that struggled big time in the US
A brief history of China’s short video & tool app market
A case study and interview from friends over at Vskit, the Transsion owned short video app that was the first of its kind in Africa
Meitu Making Beauty Global
Tool apps, or apps used to edit photos and videos, are incredibly popular in China. They’re (mostly) free, fun to use, incredibly intuitive, and make photo sorcery scarily easy. I’m not ashamed to admit that Meitu, an augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI) powered photo editing app, was one of my gotos. Beijing winters are incredibly drying. When wielded properly, Meitu can provide a much-needed, artificial glow.
Meitu began its US expansion in 2015, with its staff reportedly working out of an apartment in Los Angeles, California neighborhood. Over the next year, the team spent time getting a ‘feel for local tastes and customs in preparation for its US launch. The selfie editing app then went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange at the end of 2016, closing the day with a $4.8 billion valuation, Hong Kong’s biggest tech IP in a decade.
While the company maintained offices in the US, the app’s developers stayed in its Xiamen, China headquarters. Their US team dedicated its time to marketing, data analytics, localization, and local partnerships. When Meitu’s US launch finally came to fruition, what followed were complaints of a toxic work environment and in-app features that whitened skin tones. Meitu’s efforts in the US were largely unsuccessful. It would take the company until 2020 to turn a $9 million profit.
A few of the many reasons why Meitu didn’t manage to make it was its lack of local talent, poor understanding of its target market, and, most importantly, failure to provide a social media channel for its users to share their catfish-ey photos.
Similar to Meitu, other tool apps in China, dealt with the ‘social media channel’ issue. Tool apps are used to edit, alter and add to content that will eventually be shared online. While they were an integral part of China’s short video industry development, they’ve struggled to raise profits and maintain a loyal userbase.
China’s Short Video Industry: Tool Apps, and Time Compression
China launched its first 4G networks in 2013, opening the door for new innovation in mobile app development. In the same year that 4G hit China, a series of tool apps and first-generation short video apps swept the nation, opening the door for the short video industry.
Xiaoying, a photo, and video editing app launched in 2013 managed to attract 1 million users over a ten-month period. Unfortunately, the app lacked a social media landscape that allowed users to share and socialize around the content being created, resulting in major struggles for user retention that would haunt the mobile application for years to come.
Then came Weishi (微视), a short video app developed by Tencent. Its distinguishing feature was an 8-second time limit, making it the first tool app to integrate short video. On August 28th, 2013 an account under the name ‘Pony’ uploaded a video that was subsequently played more than 720,000 times, thrusting the app into superstardom.
In interviews, the Weishi team would say that they were driven to develop an app with a time limit based on research that showed 8 seconds was just enough time for information to make an imprint on the human brain. They also considered mobile data charges, finding that sending an 8-second video was about the same size as downloading several compressed files.
By 2016, Weishi was still in the mix but hit a huge snag when they decided to inspire users with celebrity posts. This expensive venture left little guidance and space for ordinary users to develop their own content. And, by 2017, Weishi completely shut down.
This experience offered a few more lessons that would follow Chinese short video companies as they internationalized: content is king, regular people want to feel like celebrities too, and templates and repetition are the true building blocks of creativity.
By the time Tiktok (known as Douyin in China) rose to popularity in China, they’d largely figured out the formula. After a 2017 video was shared and reshared on social media with the Douyin logo floating at the bottom, the app’s popularity soared throughout China, its in-app editing features, kick-ass algorithm (that it guards closely to this day), and pre-generated short video challenges taking the nation by storm.
For more on the development of China’s short video industry read here (in Chinese).
Lessons in Localization
Next up was Tiktok’s massive globalization. While much of its success abroad can be attributed to smart marketing, the Bytedance owned app also gained a much-needed content boost that allowed them to circumvent traditional barriers faced in developing an app from scratch.
A difficult aspect of working with a short video company in its early stages is finding and developing organic content. I’ve learned that the internet is made up of two types of people lurkers and posters (though some of us are a little bit of both). The hardest thing in the world is converting lurkers into posters. Because of this, social media apps across the world spend millions yearly getting influencers to post anything and everything on their platforms hoping to convince organic users to do the same. Tiktok took a slightly different approach.
Before Tiktok came along, all of the cool e-Kids used to be on Musical.ly. The short video app was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs, and long-time friends, Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang. It was meant to be an online self-learning platform featuring 3-5 minute videos, but this model didn’t attract users. So, the pair made a fantastic decision to pivot and become a sort of karaoke app, integrating subtitles and music. From 2016-2107 Musical.ly became wildly popular, reaching 70 million downloads and 10 million videos posted per day.
And then, just when the time was right, Tiktok swooped in offering somewhere between $800 million to $1 billion to acquire Musical.ly, all of its content, and all of its users. This gave Tiktok the much-needed user and original content boost to take off in Western markets. Because many of the videos acquired were lip-synced videos of fashionable young people singing popular songs, they were able to repurpose and repackage this content for markets worldwide.
This strategy isn’t as simple when it comes to African markets. As many tech companies are learning when it comes to Africa, you can’t just repurpose content and expect it to take off. Unsurprisingly, representation is really important to people. This is exactly why Tiktok invested so much time and effort in pulling popular African creators from Tiktok and Instagram, running influencer activations, and hiring local talent in Africa.
You can read more about Tiktok’s Africa expansion in an article I wrote for Quartz Africa here.
But well before Tiktok made the leap, there was Vskit.
Vskit in Africa
Vskit, a Transsion Holdings-owned short video app, learned lessons in localization and ran with them early on.
You might know of Transsion Holdings because of their massively popular mobile devices. In 2020, Transsion maintained a 44% share of Africa’s mobile phone market. In addition to mobile phones, Transsion also develops software under its ‘mobile value added’ service provider Transsnet Group, a joint venture with NetEase Group who is famously known for its music streaming service in China.
Once upon a time, I did a Youtube video about Transsion here.
A few things happened before Vskit came to life. Recognizing their rising share in Africa’s mobile phone market, and the captive userbase it came with, Transsion first piloted a mobile applications company called Afmobi. Through Afmobi, Transsion was able to explore Africa’s mobile application space and find gaps in the market.
From Afmobi came, Palmchat, a mobile app meant to rival WhatsApp at a time when first-generation Tecno phones weren’t running Android operating systems. There was also Palmpay, a digital payments app launched in 2019, offering 10% cashback on airtime purchases and bank transfer rates for Nigerian users. There was also PalmPlay, Transsion’s very own app store.
Curating Local Content
According to Vskit Marketing Manager, David Mwawasi, Vskit was born from the recognition of a growing trend towards local content and a reduction of internet costs through data bundles.
But, before they were able to do anything, they needed to develop content in a market where short video was a relatively new concept.
“...we had to show the talent what to do. So we needed a local presence that could appeal to those local content creators and create local content,” said Mwawasi, in an on-site interview.
Creating content from scratch in a growing market isn’t so simple. As diversity and accessibility of content grow, the lifespan of content declines.
In the early days of China’s short video apps abroad, they were able to pull content from defunct short video apps from the US like Vine and Musical.ly and repurpose trends from Chinese short video apps. Repurposing allowed the apps to explore which trends would take off in new markets and iterate from there. Quite a few short video challenges from China caught on across the world. Remember the ‘Karma is a Bit*h Challenge”? I watched so many variations of those videos on the backend that it made my head hurt. A significant amount of time was spent trying to replicate the magic.
As time went on and these apps were able to gather data, establish local teams, and perfect trend watching, to the point where these tactics became less and less necessary.
First Mover, Data Based Advantages
Vskit had a huge leg up in this process. Local talent acquisition enabled them to uniquely understand local trends and achieve what Mwawasi calls the delicate balance between “catering to what consumers want and understanding where trends are going”.
In addition to local talent, they also had a first-mover advantage and a direct pipeline through Transsion devices on which Vskit is preinstalled.
But, most important of all, the app had data, A resource that is so vital and so underrated when people consider scaling apps across Africa.
Data exists in silos on the African continent. Whether held by private multinational companies or governments, it’s hard to get ahold of. There are few organizations dedicated to gathering making data available for all, but it’s an uphill battle.
Check out African Open Data for more on this.
As I said, Vskit was lucky. They had tons of user data gained from Transsion headsets offering a unique insight into what would later become their core userbase.
“...The reason why we're in this business is because you can get data, set the metrics, and be informed on how to proceed. So it's very accurate in that sense...you don't want to be making guesses you don't want to be groping in the dark. So [data] is everything’ said Mwawasi.
Through the power of data and direct distribution channels, Vskit was able to launch simultaneously in Kenya and Nigeria in 2018. By 2019, Vskit hit 10 million users in Africa.
The Future
David Mwawasi believes that Africa’s tech industry is in its infancy and the best is yet to come. In the meantime, Vskit is focused on scaling and maintaining a pocket-friendly app.
“I think a key focus for a very long time was to amass as many users as you possibly can...take your users [in] with good content and don’t charge them for anything. But then you go to your corporate partners and tell them look, we have this number of active users..so if you're interested in selling your products on the platform, come on board”.
Thanks to everyone for reading. A very special thanks to Daniel Lin for setting up the interview & David Mwawasi for providing invaluable insight!