TikTok "brother" Lemon8 rises

After CEO Zhou was funded by the US Congress, whether TikTok was banned is still inconclusive. But many users are already looking for a way back, worried about losing their "happy home" of surfing. As a result, another of ByteDance's apps, Lemon8, is rising rapidly and has climbed the top 10 of the US App Store download list. However, Lemon8, which uses lemon yellow as the theme color, may not be able to replace TikTok. The model of focusing on graphics + grass planting seems to be closer to Xiaohongshu in terms of product positioning. More importantly, no matter what the field, social media still has a certain game of public opinion, but if it is only planted grass, it will always be much better.

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Within a week, ByteDance twice caused heated discussions among users in the United States. On March 24, Zhou attended a hearing before the Energy and Commerce Committee of the House of Representatives of the U.S. Congress to be questioned on a series of TikTok issues. A few days later, another ByteDance-owned app, Lemon8, sprang up, and in the week ending April 2, the app was in the top 10 of the US App Store download list, surpassing competitors such as YouTube, WhatsApp, Gmail and Facebook.

It is worth mentioning that Lemon8, which only began to enter the European and American markets in March this year, has never entered the US Top 200 list before.

From the form of graphic display, Lemon8 is very similar to the Instagram familiar to American users, but from the content point of view, Lemon8 is undoubtedly more like the domestic Little Red Book, covering five lifestyle areas such as fashion, beauty, food, fitness and travel.

Overseas, Lemon8 seems to fill the gap in the Xiaohongshu ecology, and the attributes of graphics + strong grass make users feel novel. According to app information provider Apptopia, Lemon8 has been downloaded 16 million times worldwide since its launch, with Japan accounting for the largest number of downloads, accounting for 38% of total downloads.

Before the rise of the United States, the first step in the globalization of Lemon8 was Japan. Lemon8, formerly known as Sharee, focuses on sharing and growing grass products, and was launched in Japan by ByteDance in early 2020. In the Sharee phase, the growth and launch of products are concentrated in the Japanese market.

Xiao Shan (pseudonym), a blogger living in Japan, told a reporter from Beijing Business Daily that Lemon8 can successfully enter the Japanese market because the Japanese beauty industry is developed and can provide more content materials for the platform; Second, ByteDance has successfully launched BuzzVideo, TikTok and CapCut in the Japanese market, with a high degree of localization.

In September 2021, Sharee officially changed its name to Lemon8, inspired by the similarly pronounced "Lemonade". In March 2022, after the cumulative number of downloads in Japan exceeded 1 million, Lemon8 quickly entered the Southeast Asian markets such as Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia, and achieved certain results. According to statistics, Lemon8 has been downloaded nearly 20 million times worldwide in the past year, of which 85% of downloads came from Thailand, Indonesia and Japan.

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Compared to the beginning of 2022, Lemon8 has quadrupled its monthly active users. Among them, the traffic of its own platform cannot be ignored. According to the data, Lemon8-related topic videos received 2.1 billion views on TikTok.

According to public reports, the main person in charge of Lemon8 is Chen Ying, who reported to Zhu Jun (Alex) that the two had a superior-subordinate relationship during the Musical.ly (the predecessor of TikTok), and joined Byte in Musical.ly 2017. Chen Ying is also the head of BuzzVideo, another short video product of Byte Overseas, which is also currently focused on the Japanese market.

For user positioning and next plans, Beijing Business Daily reporters contacted Lemon8 and TikTok, but have not received a reply as of press time. However, according to relevant media reports, Lemon8 is currently in contact with many overseas MCN organizations, aiming to introduce TikTok influencers and live streaming players to Lemon8.

Internet analyst Yang Shiwei admits that for ByteDance, it also shows that it is looking for ways to reduce the impact of the TikTok ban and explore other business opportunities. Although the positioning and commercialization of this app in the United States needs further observation and evaluation, its rapid rise has attracted widespread attention.

Yang believes that TikTok has accumulated a large number of content producers and has more experience in making localized products. However, community products are more complex than media-based products such as TikTok, and require more refined operation and governance capabilities.

And if Lemon8 and TikTok's e-commerce business play a synergy, commercialization is imminent. A reporter from Beijing Business Daily browsed and found that Lemon8 has allowed users to link to external e-commerce independent sites and directly jump to purchase. In other words, Lemon8 has begun to monetize.

However, some people also expressed doubts about whether Lemon8 could run through the business model after "copying" Xiaohongshu. A person close to Xiaohongshu told the Beijing Business Daily reporter, "Simply put, the algorithm recommendation logic of bytes and the grass planting logic of Xiaohongshu are not connected, the logic of the recommendation algorithm is that the content finds people, and the platform distributes the content directly to the user through an efficient algorithm, and the user leaves after reading it; In the process of planting grass, users will take the initiative to search for the corresponding products, understand the experience of other users, and in this process, they will be planted and ordered, and then go back to the platform to share their experience after purchasing, thus forming a closed loop of planting grass."

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After Lemon8 exploded, Gabrielle Victor, who has 430,000 followers on TikTok, defined it as "the child of Pinterest and Instagram." This also suggests that if Lemon8 wants to open up the overseas grass breeding track, it is inevitable to fight Instagram head-on.

Chen Shen (pseudonym), an investor in the content creation industry, said: "At this stage like Lemon8, you can only increase the scale of users by burning money. However, it is almost impossible to achieve a high penetration rate like Xiaohongshu, because Instagram, which is similar to Xiaohongshu's model, has been overseas for many years and is arguably the world's largest influencer platform. ”

It's just that compared to the barbaric growth of Instagram, Lemon8 has chosen a more direct way - paid posts. Xiao Shan said that Lemon8 uses the Chinese Internet company's method, that is, in the early stage of activation, pay KOLs and use traffic to support the content of these KOLs, let them publish posts on the app to increase user engagement.

According to estimates from third-party companies, Lemon8 has adopted advertising and creator incentives, and has launched a total of 550,000 creatives in the past year.

This is not the first time Lemon8 has used money magic, according to people close to Lemon8, when the Japanese and Southeast Asian markets were launched, Lemon8 also launched a post subsidy, as long as the creator completes a certain number of qualified notes, they can get the post subsidy.

In Yang World's view, according to this plan, the ultimate form of Lemon8 is likely to be Instagram's grass community platform. However, in the current comparison, Lemon8 is still in the early stages of development, and it is too early to define it.

Beijing Business Daily reporters Fang Binnan and Zhao Tianshu