Around 2017, Zuckerberg, Zhang Yiming, and Su Hua jointly took a fancy to a Chinese startup that does social software in the United States Musical.ly. The app, which launched in North America in August 2014, topped the U.S. App Store list in less than a year, reaching more than 100 million users in 2016.
At the time, the form of the Musical.ly was not only novel, but also in line with the Cultural Atmosphere of the United States. They built a social software that let users create and share 15-second to 60-second lip-synced MVs, which won the love of American millennials. At the same time, the new form of audio and video social networking is also tapping mainstream social software.
According to QuestMobile's data, the user scale of the short video industry in 2017 is also sprinting from 200 million to 400 million people, and domestic netizens will spend 5.5% of their online time in short videos, and this proportion just reached 1.3% in 2016.
When the younger generation begins to appear in the consumption scene, it also means that new trends are beginning to emerge. In 2017, byteDance's short video team began to sail overseas, buying Flipgram and Musical.ly, and launching TikTok. Since then, the original Musical.ly users have migrated to TikTok, and a social upstart that can keep 500 million people addicted on their mobile phones has been born.
Today, Tiktok's monthly active life has exceeded 1 billion, rapidly expanding to more than 150 countries and regions around the world, and in 2021, its e-commerce GMV has reached a maximum of about 6 billion yuan, becoming the third largest global traffic platform after Meta and Google.
The wheels of emerging business formats never stop, and today's rising stars are still close behind. In 2021, "going to sea" has become the biggest certainty in all walks of life, and refined to social software, real-time audio and video type of play has become a bigger growth point after the epidemic. This "new sexiness" also attracts more players to jump on the competition, such as Yala, which focuses on the Middle East market, Bigo Live, a live broadcast product under Huanju Group, MICO, a social product under Naked City Technology, and Uplive, a live social product owned by Asia Innovation Group (AIG), and so on.
Yalla ranked 3rd in the Middle East mobile app best-seller list with the addition of dual attributes of gaming and social networking; MICO has entered the top 10 of social app best-seller lists in more than 100 countries/regions; bigo Live has long been ranked in the top 10 of the total revenue list of Apple and Google Store. After dominating emerging markets such as Southeast Asia and the Middle East, the latter two have also begun to enter the European and American markets. In less than a year since its launch, Uplive has successively won the first place in the revenue of mobile live broadcasting apps in the three major language regions of Chinese (Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan), Arabic (Middle East) and Japanese.
The reason behind the popularity of real-time audio and video social is simple and clear, China's audio and video social, live broadcast and other industries as a whole are 1-2 years ahead of overseas, and there are advantages in operation. On the other hand, after being affected by the epidemic, user behavior habits have shifted to online, and online interactive entertainment methods have naturally become a hunting ground.
However, in the continuous iteration of new growth and decline, some structural business model variables are still quietly breeding, and greater value needs to be mined in it.
First, the localization of audio and video social outings
In fact, if an international company's product strength is to be evaluated, it depends on whether it can be adapted to the environment of different parts of the world.
For example, you can buy the same flavor of Coca-Cola in Egypt as the United States, and this uniqueness has created the ultimate business model, and the Coca-Cola model has been given a new concept by the Wharton School: a marketing strategy of indifference. It refers to the fact that when the product has irreplaceable competitiveness, the company can ignore the differences in the target market, adopt a highly standardized delivery scheme, and become the definer of the Coca-Cola product.
This theory worked in the previous pages of the Internet age, but by the latter page of the Internet age, the theory has become unworkable, at least in the field of software. Not only the geopolitical colors, the awareness of independent innovation and learning, but also the folk customs and customs of various places, etc., have set up new barriers to globalization for products with emotional value.
Therefore, how to integrate regional characteristics according to local conditions and do local software is almost the basic question that Internet software exporters must answer. The typical case of Chinese audio and video social going to sea is even more well-understood, and MICO has several customized colors in the Middle East market and the US market. For example, because consumers in the Middle East usually have a strong sense of national pride, the big guy who pays the first list in the live broadcast room can raise the national flag of his own country in the live broadcast room.
Of course, the best way to perceive water temperature is to take root on the front line. For example, Uplive set up branches in Tokyo, Ho Chi Minh City, Jakarta, Cairo, Los Angeles and other regions to operate together, and many of the top executives of the branches are even "top leaders" are locals, so it can help Uplive carry out some activities more effectively and avoid some mines; Yalla Group can have a deep understanding of the traditional culture of the Middle East, because its founding team has many years of experience in the Middle East. In terms of product performance, it is also possible to choose to online the traditional majlis (parliament) in the Middle East from the beginning, all of which are different from the precise way of playing foreign software.
There is no doubt that in the current trend of globalization, enterprises that want to see the world, before the supply chain, local office team and other "grain and grass" are abundant, it is more important to have in-depth communication with the local market in order to prescribe the right medicine.
So, just standing on the subdivision track of real-time audio and video social software, how can you enter the local water temperature as quickly as possible? To compete with local and global competitors, let's take a look at the characteristics of each major market.
Second, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, North America, who is embracing audio and video social networking?
If you look at the upstream of the industry chain, if you want to make a social application with stable performance with real-time audio and video interaction capabilities, you can't do without real-time audio and video (RTC) technology.
We selected the top 100 social software data.ai in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Japan, South Korea, the United States and other regional markets in January 2022, and screened the applications using RTC technology for analysis.
First of all, the Middle East market is one of the regions that most embrace real-time audio and video social products, in the Middle East market TOP100 list, the use of RTC technology products accounted for 26 models, of which, the use of Vomon Agora SDK there are 19 products, accounting for 73%, while including China's overseas, the United States, the Middle East local products.
The data comes from Data.ai and is later calculated by manual statistics
From the 26 social software distributors selected, there are 10 overseas companies from China, 1 from the Middle East, 13 from the United States, and the rest from Singapore, Canada and other regions. From the perspective of application scenarios, the highest proportion is 1V1 audio and video and video group chat scenes.
It can be seen that the acceptance of foreign software in the Middle East is relatively high, and the main competition of Chinese overseas players is not only from local companies, but also from other overseas countries such as the United States.
According to Hootsuite data, in 2020, 71% of Middle Eastern users accessed the Internet through 3G/4G, and the mobile Internet penetration rate reached a maximum of 90%, of which 64% were smartphones (80.6% in the UAE), ranking among the top in the world. But it is not easy to dig for gold in the blue ocean of the Internet in the Middle East. Therefore, in the very complex land of the Middle East, it is necessary to have insight into the local culture, but also to innovate and find a sense of integration in new social networks such as real-time audio and video, so as to gain user recognition.
Second, Southeast Asia is already a holy place for Chinese social software to go to sea. A total of 15 products from Southeast Asia were selected for the list, 10 of which were issued by publishers from China. Due to the proximity of cultural habits to the domestic market, Southeast Asia is a popular area for Chinese mobile applications to go to sea, and overseas travelers believe that the population growth and Internet development stage in Southeast Asia are similar to China's development path, so it is also called the second Chinese market.
In terms of Internet penetration rate, Southeast Asia has grown rapidly, and in 2021, Southeast Asia will add 40 million Internet users, and the overall penetration rate will reach 75%.
Judging from the attributes of the 15 social software selected, the social category of dating/strangers is the largest, accounting for 6 models, and in the application scenario, 1V1 audio and video accounts for the highest proportion. Among the 15 products, 12 use the Agora SDK of Avon, accounting for 80%, of which the same is mainly overseas products.
In the Middle East, offline entertainment is traditional and relatively closed, so consumers are more willing to pay for online social and entertainment. However, although the geographical area in Southeast Asia is not large, the geographical differences between different countries are large, and the demographic structure, lifestyle, user consumption habits and behaviors are not the same, which also brings constraints to localization. For example, in the Philippines, users like highly functional, efficient and direct products, with high consumer desire; Vietnam is just the opposite, users prefer consumer products with strong practicality and strong routine; Singaporeans like story-based product designs with novel and interesting visual elements; Malaysians like entertainment, creative and interactive products... This all escalates the degree of localization difficulty of overseas products.
For Southeast Asian seamakers, while taking into account diversity, finding areas that seek common ground while reserving differences in local colors may achieve a higher market expansion rate.
The Japanese and Korean markets have shown more difficult to integrate, and 8 of the 12 software selected for the list are Japanese software.
In fact, online activities in Japan are far less lively than offline. In Japan, where the total population is only more than 120 million, the proportion of aging accounts for 28.9% (over 65 years old), and this demographic structure itself compresses the incremental space for online entertainment. At the same time, Japan's game industry is very developed and is the main source of most entertainment activities for japanese people.
The market is small, leaving few opportunities for social entertainment, and entertainment is tilted towards games and offline activities. Half of the 8 software selected in Japan are dating/stranger social attributes, and all of them are 1V1 audio and video social scenes.
Although the Japanese and Korean markets are difficult for Chinese enterprises to penetrate, in the use of RTC technology service providers, the coverage of the Agora SDK of SoundNet is still more than 75%, which can be said to be the preferred service provider for local enterprises.
Although going to Japan is a relatively bottleneck and difficult business. However, it can be seen that the Japanese people's enthusiasm for online love dating and the relatively more sticky single social software, starting from the product creation of love psychology, may capture the hearts of consumers.
Compared with the above markets, social software in the United States is relatively mature. Of the 13 software products selected for the U.S. market, only three are from China and Canada, and the rest are U.S. products. Going to the market that has good usage habits often requires a differentiated path, and therefore, in the exploration of emerging social software, 7 of these 13 products are strangers in the social field, and the use scenarios are also based on 1v1 audio and video and video group chats, which is also in line with the local entertainment color of the United States. Similar to the Japanese and Korean markets, more than 84% of products in the U.S. market use the Agora SDK.
There is no doubt that different markets not only have local regional colors, but also have different market competitiveness. Back to the upstream of the industrial chain, some similarities can be found. In the TOP100 list, the choice of RTC technology can almost always be seen that Agora accounts for the largest share, both more than 70%.
That is to say, on a global scale, no matter what region, SoundNet has won the choice of the most application products. At the same time, it fully covers the head products of China's overseas, local and other countries around the world, and globalization is not only a matter that the application layer must face, but also one of the important considerations for technology providers to be selected.
Third, the globalization on the other side, the value of the upstream
Just like the underlying logic of all to B products, when the more customers are served, the wider the scope, and the greater the accumulated data, they can play a greater role through self-learning, and The technical services of SoundNet in the world can also achieve such an effect.
Specifically, Soundnet can analyze the social outbound business based on insights into global customer usage. For example, through the analysis of user habits in different regions and different scenarios, network type and device insights, network transmission quality analysis, etc., it obtains a more targeted analysis of the characteristics and gameplay of each region, which can help customers adjust regional operation strategies and play methods more to achieve business improvement more efficiently.
For example, Zhao Bin, founder and CEO of Agora, shared his insights into popular and innovative real-time interactive application scenarios in various regions of the world at the RTE2021 Real-time Internet Conference, mentioning that 1-on-1/small class lessons, talk rooms, and interactive podcasts have become popular scenes in the global TOP3, and these three ways of playing have shown different forms in different regions: 1-on-1 and small class classes rank first in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and other regions; and interactive podcasts have become the Asia-Pacific region (including Japan, South Korea, India, Southeast Asia, Oceania, etc.) and the Americas ranked first hot scene.
For example, Japan and South Korea have surpassed Europe and the United States to become the most innovative regions, and their innovation scenes have a more scientific and technological sense, so more cutting-edge innovation scenes such as Metavalse (metacosm) have also been born in Japan and South Korea; although the Indian region is not economically developed, the development speed of the telecommunications Industry Internet is faster, so the scenes with more social attributes, such as "watching the game together" have risen in India.
For Southeast Asia, the most diverse region described above, SoundNet also found that nearly 20,000 different types of mobile phones and smart devices are actively using real-time interactive technology. This means that technology providers can help app developers come up with optimization strategies for device adaptation issues in different regions.
Understand that local geographical characteristics are the first layer of advantages of technology providers, and in depth, global service experience can also help overseas companies find a better way to play. In terms of helping overseas enterprises achieve localized operations, from App launch, to retention, monetization, and then to refined operation, SoundNet can give "silent support to moisturizing things".
Voice network solution architect Zhou Fuping once gave an example, "There was once an anchor who broadcast live on Java Island, but the terrain of Java Island is relatively special, the quality of network coverage is relatively poor, if he moves back and forth live, the picture will be stuck, and later through our analysis, we found the problem and helped the anchor solve the problem." ”
Another case is related to the fact that he once served a dating app for the Southeast Asian market and for young people after 95. The app operation team initially had only 3 product managers and 2 R&D, but it required one month to go live and three months to commercialize. Relying on the technical support and service experience of SoundNet's overseas customers, the customer has successfully achieved localized operations, and the application has now ranked among the top 10 of the 2021 Q2 Chinese manufacturer entertainment application overseas download list released by App Annie.
In fact, for Chinese enterprises going overseas, in addition to facing difficulties in terms of technology, greater competition is a series of challenges in different market environments, policy factors, human characteristics, and data compliance. For the larger market, the competitors are not all from Chinese companies, but other local or international enterprises in overseas markets, and the role of technical service providers is to provide a vane for overseas markets, in the future, for overseas enterprises, not only to fully localize product operations, but also to the global coverage ability of the underlying technical service providers as an important consideration.
Today, the fleet of going to sea has not stopped, many investors told 36Kr that the horizontal space of emerging markets and the horizontal space where audio and video social can explore new ways of playing are very large, and China's rhythm of audio and video social networking is one or two years faster than other regions, which is behind the logic of changing from copy to China to copy from China.
The difficulty, then, is that copying and pasting unchanged must not work, which needs to be combined with the local cultural color to highlight it. Faced with a new market starting from scratch, more often than not, a good shovel can improve work efficiency. That's what we often say, choice is more important than effort.