2021 has passed, continuing last year's practice, Moby Dick Once Again joined hands with App Growing Global to retrieve the top 100 non-game apps with the largest delivery in 2021 according to the dimension of the amount of creatives placed overseas, and based on this data, combined with observations from multiple dimensions, to review and analyze the overseas situation of non-game apps this year.
In 2021, which categories will be attacked overseas?
Even if the official update of iOS14.5 in 2021 has led to the problem of missing data and rising costs, overseas developers still have not stopped buying. According to the data of the C.A.S creative intelligent analysis system of hot cloud data, in the first half of 2021, the total number of products placed in app apps has reached about 4600, which has exceeded the number of products delivered in the whole year last year, of which the number of new products is about 2000, and the new rate is nearly 45%.
According to the data provided by App Growing Global, in 2021, reading, entertainment, and social are still the three categories with the highest proportion of creative delivery. In addition, there are also some new categories of apps appearing in the list.
The distribution of apps in each category in the Top100
Top 10 creative servings for non-gaming apps in 2021
In terms of the top 10 of the materials in 2021, the traditional tool category still occupies 4 seats, followed by 2 news apps, NewsBreak, which is mainly used in the US market and Opera News acquired by Kunlun Wanwei, Ali's toB e-commerce App Ali International Station ranks 3rd.
The remaining are 3 pan-entertainment apps, but from the perspective of the amount of materials and results, Kuaishou has returned to the rationality of "reducing costs and increasing efficiency" after experiencing a wave of passionate release overseas. TikTok also dropped from the 4th place in the total number of launches in 2020 to the 9th place, and the main theme of TikTok with 1 billion MAU in 2021 is commercialization. Likee, who is a short video troika, dropped out of the top10 because of the more "rational" strategy of gathering.
Top 10 outbound apps for creative serving in 2020
Bigo Live, which is still attacking the overseas market in 2021, has some changes in the target market. Japan, which is a key market in 2020, has fallen out of the top 5 in 2021, although some overseas manufacturers have crossed the high threshold for entering Japan, but it is more difficult to enter the first echelon, so it is unlikely to maintain a relatively large investment force for a long time. In 2021, Bigo Live is putting a lot of material into Vietnam for interested readers to observe.
2021 Bigo Live creative volume market distribution, data source: App Growing Global
2020 Bigo Live creative volume market distribution, data source: App Growing Global
Below, the author will not talk about the overall change classification, and the next article will analyze the specific products.
In 2021, the web/comics category won the hottest sea track
According to the year-end buying inventory article "Year-end Review | 2020, which apps attack overseas markets" released by Moby Whale in 2020 and App Growing Global, in 2020, the highest amount of creative placement is the book track. From this year's situation, books are still the hottest track, this year's creative top 100 apps, a total of 24 book apps, almost the same as last year's 26. In App Growing Global's recently released "White Paper on Online Comics Overseas Purchases", it is also mentioned that in 2021, more than 1,700 book apps around the world will run more than 1.3 million mobile ads, which accounts for about 5% of non-game app ads.
However, compared with last year, this year's large number of book apps show the characteristics of "multilingual" and "matrix layout", the most typical is Dreame, in 2021 Dreame's parent company STARY's online literature products even won the top 4 of the advertising creative placement list. These will be highlighted in the next part.
2021 Creative Delivery Top 3 Online Article Overseas App, data source: App Growing Global
In the entire web & comics track (all book apps), there are also some new changes, such as Bilibili Comics, which began to increase in Q4, to seize the English market first, and then expand to multilingualism. But for now, in the global comic market dominated by South Korea, whether Bilibili Comics can run out needs continuous attention.
The second most numerous in the Top100 is entertainment apps, accounting for 22. (Like last year, the author classified live apps with video chat features into the social category, and apps without video chat features into the entertainment category.)
2021 creative delivery volume for various social apps, source: App Growing Global
From the situation this year, the entertainment category is still composed of 5 parts of short video, live broadcast, long video, music playback and K song, of which short video is the highest proportion of the entertainment category, and there are 3 apps in the entertainment creative top 4 that are short video apps, namely Snack Video and Kwai under Kuaishou, and TikTok under Byte. It is worth mentioning that Likee, which entered the top 3 in creative delivery last year, has dropped to the 9th place in entertainment app creative delivery this year. This is in line with JOYY's decision to proactively reduce marketing costs.
Top 3 entertainment apps for creative engagement in 2021, source: App Growing Global
And as observed last year, apps that buy a lot on entertainment tracks are still dominated by big players (funplus in the picture below is not the game company funplus that we are familiar with). Among them, Byte is the most active, with a total of 4 entertainment apps on the list, namely TikTok and its simplified version of TikTok Lite, another short video product Helo, which focuses on Southeast Asia and Brazil, and resso, a music product.
Top100 Percentage of vendors behind entertainment apps, source: App Growing Global
The social track is also a very popular track, with a total of 20 social apps in the top 100, but a slight drop from 24 last year. As last year, video chat still makes up the majority of the social track, but it's down from 84 percent last year to 47 percent this year. Behind this is the "tough living environment" for cash flow products such as video chat apps. In the existing environment, whether it is product, growth or commercialization, the first priority is compliance. According to the author's understanding, the supervision of app stores, especially iOS App Store, is further tightening, and many large manufacturers are stepping on the line.
On the other hand, the types of social products in the Top 100 are also more abundant than last year, such as community classes, voice classes, etc. Compared with last year, and the types are more diverse, such as Lemon8 (formerly Sharee) and other grass communities. (Some time ago, the beluga whale went to sea and released (some time ago, the beluga whale went to sea and released the article "Byte does not do a small green book in Japan, do a small yellow book" has been reported in detail, interested readers can refer to it)
Compared with last year, the social app of the top 3 creative placements is still the head products of the show live broadcast, Bigo Live, Mico and Lamour, the video chat app of Atron.
Top 3 social apps for 2021 delivery, source: App Growing Global
The three hottest tracks are the same as last year, but the second-tier app in the heat has changed compared to last year.
Shopping apps expand their middle east presence, news apps target emerging markets
In 2020, the tool category is a very popular track, and it will remain so in 2021, but the specific situation is different from last year. Last year, the three categories of mobile phone wallpapers, memes and video clips in the tool track were the hottest, while this year's hottest is file transfer, mobile phone cleaning, which is a more basic and practical tool product, a bit of a sense of crossing.... This type of tool app is still based on advertising monetization, and several apps with relatively high creative delivery also have very high downloads, such as FileMaster, which ranks first in creative delivery, according to Sensor Tower data, the app has been downloaded 6 million times in the past 12 months. In addition, from the perspective of market distribution, emerging markets with large user bases such as Brazil, India, and Indonesia are the key markets for these top tool apps. It can only be said that the demand we thought was changing may not be happening so quickly.
FileMaster downloads worldwide in December 2021, source: Sensor Tower
In terms of shopping, the app that enters the top 100 is still dominated by e-commerce platforms, in which AliExpress of Alibaba's ToC and toB's Alibaba.com are still on the list, in addition to shein and ROWME, two brand independent stations, have been listed continuously. Since the fame of the above players is already very large, it will not be repeated here.
A new phenomenon observed in the shopping track this year is that there are many e-commerce platforms in the Middle East that are on the list, such as Fordeal and AlMart, two platforms owned by Fordeal, and SaraMart and JollyChic.
But the entire Middle East market is really a double day of ice and fire. On the one hand, since the epidemic, the penetration rate of online shopping in the Middle East has been rising. According to data released by Saudi Arabia at the end of April 2020, online shopping in Saudi Arabia increased by 400% in March and April 2020 alone, which shows the strong online shopping intention of consumers in the Middle East.
On the other hand, we also see that even though the Middle East is a gold-heavy market, several cross-border e-commerce platforms in the Middle East still adopt the strategy of selling low-priced goods overseas by virtue of domestic supply chain advantages. The bankruptcy of JollyChic and some other platforms in 2021 also shows the middle east, a seemingly wealthy market, and if companies do not find the right way to develop, there will still be certain problems in cash flow.
In addition, Akulaku, an installment product that made it into the Top 100 list last year, is on the list again this year, and the ranking of creative delivery has risen from 56th last year to 19th this year. Affected by the epidemic, both European and American users and Southeast Asian users have generated great demand for installment payment, buy first and pay later and other services, many brands have been listed, and the growth of Akulaku's launch volume this year is also reasonable.
In terms of large categories, the most significant change in 2021 and 2020 is that the number of ads in financial and news apps has increased significantly this year. Several financial apps mainly focus on the transaction of real money and virtual currency, such apps because of the transaction, often need a local license, so we can see that many overseas apps are actually located overseas. We will not dwell on this.
The growth in news app creative servings has also been noticeable, with only two players, Newsbreak and OperaNews, on the list last year, and this year the number has increased to 5. However, these 5 apps are still owned by Newsbreak and Opera. These include Apex News, a new product entered this year, which is opera's app that focuses on the European and American markets and provides local news. In addition, the Lite versions of Newsbreak and OperaNews, the two head players of news apps, have entered the top 100 list this year, and the target markets of the two products are Latin American and African markets. After the news outsea experienced a boom that began in 2017, it gradually cooled down in the following years, and many companies withdrew, and these two companies firmly cultivated this category for a long time after eliminating difficulties.
The above is an inventory of the top 100 overseas apps in 2021, in the following, the author will make a more detailed analysis of the changes in the three tracks of the hottest books, social networking and entertainment.