Launched in 2013, this Xiamen-based app is among the first to target China’s increasingly health-conscious female users and provide women-specific health and lifestyle tips for its users. With over 100 million users, Meiyou is an important app for marketers who wish to reach out to China’s 392 million female internet users.

What Is Meiyou?

Meiyou started out as a period tracker. It allows users to log in information about their period and provide predictions of their next period, information on their fertile window as potential ovulation date. Meiyou soon gained popularity among female users thanks to the ever-increasing awareness of personal health and wellbeing among Chinese consumers.

According to a recent research, the accumulated number of users across women’s health apps in China reached 22.5 million as of June 2018, nearly four times as many as that in July 2017. The explosive growth is an indication of China’s booming women’s health industry. Single women are most interested in tips related to general health, fitness, and beauty whereas married women pay more attention to parenting and baby-related health information.

As Meiyou amasses its user base, the app has grown to be a comprehensive platform which does not only provide a period-tracking feature but also serves as one of the few women-oriented online social venues. Currently, Meiyou offers three major features for its users.

3 Main Features Meiyou Offers

The tracker is not just for periods but also for a woman’s pregnancy due date.  Meiyou offers different tracking modes to cater to the needs of different groups of women including single women, mother-to-be as well as mothers.

Depending on the mode, users can log in specific information that helps them track their overall health, any symptoms or abnormities, weight, and even moods. For instance, users who are expecting can use Meiyou as a reminder of their pregnancy checkups, due dates, as well as a platform to get health tips during pregnancy. As for mothers, Meiyou offers tailor-made content such as baby food recipes, vaccination reminders, “Wikipedia for parenting”, and even children stories for users based on the age of their child.

Secondly, a social venue which Meiyou refers to as “Ta Ta Circle”. A combination of microblogging and forum services, this feature allows Meiyou users to connect with each other, post updates of their pregnancy journeys or life as a single woman, share recommendations on women, mother, and baby products. Unlike the most popular microblogging site Weibo or other women-focused platforms such as Xiaohongshu, Meiyou has built various communities and sub-pages under this social feature for users based on who they identify themselves as (e.g., single women, mothers, mother-to-be).

Thirdly, it is an e-commerce platform where users can buy anything from clothing to baby products, from home décor to skincare with just a few clicks. Meiyou’s incorporation of social and e-commerce features is a much-welcomed move as research suggests that nearly 40% of users use mobile women’s health apps to join an online community and 20% to shop for health supplements. Together these three features have increased the user stickiness of Meiyou app; 93% of the time users spent on browsing women’s health apps was spent on Meiyou alone.

Who Uses Meiyou?

The specification design turns out to be key to attracting and retaining users. Statistics from the first half of 2018 show that Meiyou has the largest number of monthly active users (over 39 million) among its competitors.

The majority of Meiyou users are young females aged between 15 and 35, an age group that is most likely to bear kids in China. These users are predominantly middle- and high-income urban dwellers whose salary averages between 5000 and 20,000 yuan (US$725 – US$2900).

Ways to Brand on Meiyou

Meiyou has switched from a pure utility app to a multipurpose platform. Thanks to its niche nature, Meiyou offers a unique opportunity for marketers to connect with China’s young female users especially those who have become a mother or are on their way to become one.

There are six options to advertise on Meiyou, which, according to the nature, format, and placement of the ads, can be grouped into three different types.

First, splash ads, which is a full-page interstitial ad that is displayed immediately after a user launches Meiyou. This form of ads can either be a still image or a short video that lasts for a couple of seconds.

Secondly, ads that are placed along with the user-generated content on Meiyou including native ads which match the theme and style of Meiyou’s content, in-text links which can be a simple call-for-action message that appears next to user-generated content, floating ads which always appear on the right side of the app and follow users’ screens as they scroll up and down in the app, and pop-up ads which often prompts users to follow a link to your brand.

Last but not least, brands can invest in video ads on Meiyou which gives users a more immersive experience of the product or service of interest. Each form of these ads has its pros and cons.

To maximise the output of your campaigns, be sure to talk to our experts or download our e-book today for more tips on digital marketing in China.

The post Meiyou, Finally A Health App That Caters To China’s 392 Million Female Internet Users appeared first on Digital Crew.

In a globalized world, knowledge of languages is paramount in facilitating cultural exchanges, economic and social activities. As China is increasingly integrated into the global system, the world has witnessed an influx of Chinese people studying, working, and doing business abroad. At home, over two million Chinese students are learning a second language, making them the largest language study group in the world.

It comes as no surprise that Youdao Dictionary, a multi-platform online learning and translation service owned by Chinese Internet giant NetEast, has grown sustainably over the past decade and become the most popular translation application in China. Youdao Dictionary, along with other Youdao online learning services, has attracted more than 100 million monthly active users (MAUs) as of the first half of 2019.

The success drove Youdao Inc., the online education technology company of NetEast, to go public in the U.S. equality market last October, raising a total of US$95.2 million. As Youdao Inc. continues to raise funds and increase its market share, its signature application Youdao Dictionary has become one of the most popular e-learning services among Chinese students and well-educated, high-income online learners.

Image: Major services offered by NetEast’s Youdao Inc. (Source: Youdao IPO Prospectus)

What Is Youdao Dictionary?

Launched in 2007 as a desktop translation software, Youdao Dictionary has expanded to browser extensions and mobile applications. Statistics show that Youdao Dictionary took up about 80 per cent of the Chinese market. This figure promises Youdao Dictionary great potentials for growth as China’s mobile translation service is expected to attract 500 million users by 2020. With a massive user base of over 700 million desktop and mobile users, Youdao Dictionary was listed as “APP with most commercial value” by QuestMobile.

Don’ t Be Fooled By Its Name! It’s Not Just A Dictionary

In contrast to other platforms that focus solely on e-learning or translation, Youdao Dictionary offers a unique blend of translation, language learning, and massive open online courses (MOOC) through just a few clicks on users’ mobile devices.

First and foremost, Youdao Dictionary supports the translation of 108 languages, a feature user can instantly access when they launch the app. Powered by machine learning and other advanced technologies, the app offers a translation of real-time dialogues, texts in augmented reality and in full documents.

Also on the homepage, users can browse a variety of user-generated content on language learning tips, inspiring quotes in foreign languages, and trending learning materials such as the most popular TV dramas and movies.

The MOOC content and additional language learning resources are where Youdao Dictionary truly stands out. Reports suggest that China’s online learning popularity has reached nearly 150 million and it is still growing rapidly. In line with these trends, Youdao Dictionary offers free and paid online courses via its Boutique Course feature. For instance, users can buy exercises and courses focusing on TOEFL/ILETS languages tests seamlessly through the app.

According to Youdao, twenty million users registered for its courses in 2018 alone, with the fastest growth concentrating on the K12 education sector. That same year, Youdao announced that it would apply AI technologies to integrate online learning and teacher-student exchanges into its mobile application.

Moreover, these resources are personalized as users launch the app for the first time, they can choose to identify themselves as language learners at various levels or as parents. This means that users can not only make the best use of resources from the app but also target specific groups of audiences as content creators and businesses.

The Only Education App That Made It To The Top 10 Apps Among Younger Users

If you are looking for young Chinese Internet users, you will typically find them in mobile games, video-streaming platforms, and social media sites, which is why it was surprising and encouraging when Youdao Dictionary was ranked as the Top 10 Favorite App among users under 24-year-old in 2017. In fact, Youdao Dictionary was the only education app that made it to the list.

Who Else Is Using Youdao Dictionary?

In addition to having a distinctively young user base, Youdao Dictionary’s users have a higher education background and higher income compared to the general Chinese Internet population. With the majority of its users based in developed provinces along the east coast, Youdao Dictionary’s users predominantly have a Bachelor’s degree or higher, making over 5000 Yuan (US$718). In 2018, the monthly income of Chinese urban residents’ averages at around 3200 Yuan (US$ 460).

Chart: Distribution of Youdao Dictionary’s user by age, data source: iResearch

In short, Youdao Dictionary’s users are predominately well-educated college students and high-income white collars. Both groups are known to have high purchasing potentials and that they are willing to invest in their personal growth which is why the app was ranked as having the most commercial value in 2018.

What’s In It For Brands And Marketers?

Youdao Dictionary provides the option of native advertising, where advertisements are designed to match the form, appearance, and function of the app. In other words, advertisements in the app are displayed along with user-generated content.

Image: Example of Native Advertising on Youdao APP, Source: Youdao Inc.

This setup is especially beneficial for brands which offer services that match the needs of the app’s users. Although the phrase “content is king” has become a platitude, it is still the golden rule—perhaps more so than ever—when both marketers and consumers are glutted with different products in the market.

Since Youdao Dictionary has already curated content for different groups of users, brands have a higher chance of reaching out to their targeted audience with personalized messages in the form of native advertising.

Interested and want to know how to excel in the Chinese market? Be sure to talk to our specialist or download our e-book for more insights into digital marketing in China.

The post Youdao Dictionary, China’s 500 Million E-learners’ Destination Of Choice appeared first on Digital Crew.

Toutiao or Jinri Toutiao is China’s equivalent to Google news with a twist. This platform offers much more than just news. Unlike many western news platforms that publish news from different sections of society either locally or internationally, this platform stands out in terms of content.

Toutiao is owned by Bytedance, the parent company of Tik Tok – one of the most popular apps in the world with 500 million users. It comes as no surprise that Toutiao is currently dominating the news producing space in China because it’s USP is strongly associated with ‘news creators’ and what they want to push to the public.

How Does Toutiao Work

When you click on Toutiao, you will reach a home page that has all the relevant news headlines towards the centre like news about Xi Jinping, current affairs, international news etc.

P.S. – It doesn’t produce its own content but ties up with publications that want to push out their content instead and gives them a wider reach. It’s like a news agency but for other news publications.

The categories encompass sections like watermelon – which takes you to another home page that has trending videos, live videos, commercials, Television, gaming etc. Let’s just say the user will never get bored. Tik Tok’s geeky cousin surely knows how to keep its users equally engaged.

As you click on the live section, it will lead you to another interesting page that has live videos that are being published by creators coupled with a chatroom that allows users to engage with the creator.

It also lets you play DOTA and other popular games with users. It has a mobile game section that lets users choose from a plethora of games for their phone screen to keep them engaged as they commute or just indulge in leisure.

The best part about this platform is that it gives farmers an outlet to be authentic with their customers. Farmers have earned a living from live-streaming the way they grow their produce. Toutiao gives them yet another outlet to help them reach out to new buyers and promote organic farming.

What Is In It For Marketers?

It currently has a userbase of 700 million users that skim through news appealing to them. Toutiao then uses a complex algorithm to understand their user’s behaviour (Similar to Netflix) and then pushes out content that is relevant to the user.

News publications that are seeking to break into this space must incorporate Toutiao in its marketing strategy as it will give them an initial impetus. The user engagement also gives marketers an added reason to advertise on this platform because of its ‘Infotainment’ quotient, where the user scrolls through news but also looks at other entertainment.

Conclusion

As a news aggregator, Toutiao has managed to capture attention from millennials because of the way its positions news (Click baits and more), this familiarity breaks the traditional news platform stereotype and offers a fresh perspective, making it one of China’s hottest platforms of the present.

Would you like us to give you more insightful information? Reach out to us!

The post What Is Toutiao appeared first on Digital Crew.

TikTok was the 6^th most downloaded app in the world in 2018 for this one particular reason that none of the Google and Facebook-owned apps have incorporated into their marketing strategy as yet. The app breeds localized content wherever it launches. The Chinese-owned Bytedance app has successfully mastered the art of localised video marketing resulting in high engagement rates in countries like India and China.

In total, TikTok has more than 500 million users and it looks unstoppable. Competition has been following closely with Facebook launching Lasso, a clone of the app in a bid to crunch TikTok’s market share. Lasso went live just 1 month ago and it’s still unclear how it performs in terms of user acquisition and growth.

How Does TikTok localize its content?

1. TikTok’s local connect formula

When in China, TikTok does what the Chinese do and when India, it does what the Indians do. TikTok establishes a #Hashtag that acts as a brief to the creators who then take it forward popularising the content. In many cases brands like Louis Vuitton, Guess, Christian Dior have run TikTok campaigns via creators to expand their presence in an engaging manner.

2. TikTok’s Hashtag Formula

China’s youth is currently obsessed with western fashion, makeup, tech and lifestyle brands and TikTok nailed its campaigns with Michael Kors by hiring 3 fashion influencers to appear at an event with the brand’s ambassadors namely Yang Mi and Mark Chao. The Douyin KOLs with a collective follower base of 4 million promoted a ‘City Catwalk’ hashtag challenge by sharing videos of them doing a catwalk with Michael Kors products.

3. TikTok’s Cultural connect formula

‘Our localisation strategy helps us in encouraging users to create relevant and local content along with incorporating global trends in localized flavour.’ Raj Mishra, Business head, Tik Tok India.

Tik Tok cracked India’s cultural formula that drove the vibrant youth i.e. Bollywood. Bollywood movies, songs, filmstars, musicians were the top Tik Tok influencers that catalysed Tik Tok content in India. Top Bollywood celebrities like Jaclyn Fernandes, Shahid Kapoor, Sharaddha Kapoor and many more use Tik Tok to promote their movies or brands they are associated with. Jacqueline often uses the app to make interesting shoe challenges with Sketchers using famous Bollywood songs from her movies or other movies.

4. Tik Tok’s React Feature

The video messaging app has successfully picked out the fact that reaction videos on Youtube get views in millions and accordingly decided to incorporate that feature in their app. The new react feature enables creators to innovatively share their reactions to the videos they love. Now, using the “React” option under the “Share” menu in the app, you can record an audio or video of your reaction alongside the original video. What’s more? You can get as creative as you want with your reaction, and then pin and place your “React” video on the screen.

5. Tik Tok Influencers

As a platform with real time active content, Tik Tok is actively picking out talent and pushing talented videos to the explore page with the best challenges under hashtags. Tik Tik Influencers are mainly the creative performers who are adept with their visual art skills like lip syncing, dancing, grooving, makeup artistry on camera and many others talents.

Conclusion

As a marketer, it makes complete sense to localise your content according to your brand and the audience. If your brand has a large audience base in a country with high population like India and China, it makes complete sense to leverage an app like Tik Tok. However localising your content also highly depends on your brand attributes. For example, you can’t have a Tik Tok video for a pharmaceutical brand whatsoever because of the guidelines it is associated with.

Reach out to us if you want to localise your content with the right strategy

The post How Tik Tok Has Succeeded In Localized Marketing appeared first on Digital Crew.

Smartphones in India: 44 of the top 100 Android apps in India were developed by Chinese companies. Following the lead of Chinese smartphone makers like Xiaomi and Oppo, which have dominated mobile sales in India for some time, the content behind the touchscreen glass in India is increasingly now from China, as well.

Smartphone Production

Over one billion cell phones have been produced in China between January and August 2018. China has been one of the leading cell phone manufacturing countries in the world and may continue to develop steadily soon. In addition to its established status as a manufacturing country for mobiles, China’s domestic mobile phone market has become one of the largest cell phone markets in the world.

Chinese Apps

Chinese apps have simultaneously made it to the screens of Indian smartphone users, and they have been getting favourable responses from the population. The list of top Chinese apps includes major names like ByteDance the world’s highest-valued startup, which offers TikTok and local language news app Helo in India, and Alibaba’s UCbrowser, as well as lesser-known quantities like Tencent-backed NewsDog and quiet-yet-prolific streaming app maker Bigo.

Source: Factor Daily

The Infographic states how five of the top 10 Android apps in India are from China, up from just two at the end of 2017.

Chinese Tech Investments In India

Alibaba bought into Snapdeal and Paytm via multi-hundred-million-dollar investments in 2015, and the pace has only quickened since then. In 2017, Tencent invested in Gaana (music streaming) and Swiggy (food delivery) in major deals, having backed Byju’s (education) and Ola (ride-hailing) the year prior. The pair also launched local cloud computing services inside India last year.

Beyond those two, Xiaomi has gone beyond selling phones back to local companies and developing local services for its customers

Famous Apps

Source: Factor Daily

44 Chinese apps have made it to the Google play store among the 100 most downloaded apps in India. This brings us to our next question:

How did Chinese Mobile Technology Spring Up This Quickly In India?

The age group of Smartphone consumers are mainly millennials that fall into the age bracket of 18-25 years with maximum purchasing power and ambition.

We mentioned in our previous blog how millennials in China (415 million) and India (440 million) make up 47 percent of the world’s millennial population, and together, they’ll be the leading authors of our 21st-century narrative. The two Asian generations have a lot in common in terms of their upbringing and culture. The two groups adhere to certain timelines that determine success and finding a suitable marriageable partner. This generation Is far more exposed to the world than their parents were and have many opportunities and resources at their disposal.

How Did the Chinese Investors Take Advantage of This National Population Similarity?

That local approach appears to have been the key for those app makers which have found success in India. Rather than taking a very rigid approach like Chinese messaging app WeChat — owned by Tencent, which failed in India — the likes of ByteDance have developed local teams and, in some cases, entirely local apps dedicated to India. With the next hundreds of millions of internet users in India tipped to come from more rural parts of the country, vernacular languages, local content and voice-enabled tech are some of the key strategies that, like their phone-making cousins, Chinese app developers will need to focus on to ensure that they aren’t just a flash in the pan in India.

The post Smartphones: Make In India Or Make In China? appeared first on Digital Crew.

Tencent to shut down QQ’s Web Version: In the west, netizens will be mourning the death of Yahoo messenger, one of the earliest messengers in existence since the 1990’s that will shut down in 2019 simply because it couldn’t keep up with modern day social messaging.

QQ users in China are probably experiencing the same levels of nostalgia that the 90’s kids of the western social media world are going to witness in 2019. “That’s what got me through high school computer classes,” one user says on Weibo. But to be clear, it’s not the death of QQ. As a matter of fact, the platform is still alive – but mostly on teenagers’ smartphones.

Why Is Tencent shutting down the web version of QQ?

From Jan 1st QQ users will be required to utilize the platform’s mobile and desktop apps to communicate. WebQQ will no longer operate. The company said the move comes as a result of the restructuring of its businesses. Users are requested to download one of QQ’s apps.

However, a source from the company mentioned that the closure is due to the end of the product’s lifecycle. “It does not have many users anymore,” the employee said.

Tencent refused to comment on the closure.

How Did WeChat Contribute To This Demise?

The now ubiquitous WeChat was actually first based on the QQ network. With more than 1 billion monthly active users, today’s WeChat lets people chat, pay bills, play games, shop, and access government services without ever leaving the app.

Facebook Escape Theory

In conservative countries like India, teenagers escaped Facebook and flocked to Instagram because older users like their parents and relatives hopped onto the platform. QQ on the other hand has a staggering 800 million monthly active users, which is 200 million fewer than its sibling WeChat. But ironically, WeChat’s dominance has given QQ a new life: Teenagers have flocked to QQ because their parents and relatives are all on WeChat.

All About That Userbase

QQ’s user base has shown signs of shrinking since 2017, when its monthly active users (MAUs) decreased by 1.9%, in the first quarter. This was followed by further declines during the second quarter. The company continued to hemorrhage users this year. Its latest financial results show that its MAUs fell to 803 million, down 4.8% compared to the same time last year. WebQQ came online in September 2009 to provide access to users who were unable to log in on desktop devices or on mobile phones, including people using public computers. The company later released an update called SmartQQ, in which all services but messaging was removed.

All About The App

Other than the main chat page, the app also has a personalized news feed similar to the hit aggregator Toutiao named Kandian. It also has a page for everything else, from its own blogging site Qzone to shopping with JD.com (backed by Tencent), comics and other interesting sections as well.

Moving Forward

In September, Tencent announced that it would be restructuring to counter challenges to its consumer-facing businesses. The company plans to increase its focus on enterprises by establishing new business divisions while investing heavily in cloud computing.

The post Tencent To Shutdown The Web Version Of QQ appeared first on Digital Crew.

These 10 Chinese Startups don’t just circle around AI but are inclusive of care rental and even english learning apps. The number and quality of Chinese startups has dramatically increased over the past decade.

New Patterns of Technology Usage

As countries and regions move from developing to developed, they often skip generations of technology that other, more long-term developed countries spent decades in. For example, we mentioned in our previous blog how people in China use their mobile phones to pay for goods 50 times more often than Americans because credit cards never gained the same penetration they did in the US.

There is a similar trend occurring in many countries in Africa where mobile pay penetration is actually greater than electricity or clean water. China’s population is currently 1.4B people, While a sizable portion of that population still lives in the rural areas of China, this is a population more than 4x as big as the United States. Example – It took bike-sharing company Mobike only 10 months to go from nothing to 20 million rides per day (2017 Report on AI — Stanford).

Here Are The Top 10 Chinese Startups to Watch Out For:

1. Cloudwalk: We’ve already spoken about how China is soon going to be the Godfather of AI in our previous blogs. Cloudwalk is a member of a growing mafia of facial recognition and AI startups, Cloudwalk has raised significant funding from Shunwei Capital, Oriza holdings and Puhua Capital ($75MM) and the government of Guangzhou ($301MM). Cloudwalk has also partnered with the Zimbabwe government to test their technology with a different ethnicity at a very wide scale

2. DaSouChe: The used car trading platform has already exchanged over 500,000 cars since 2012. They are a near unicorn, having raised $180MM in a 2017 Series D round

3. Laidian: Most people in China use their phones to shop, pay bills and taxes. Their battery usually runs out before the end of the day and it can be inconvenient to bring out a heavy power bank with them all the time. It raised $20MM in 2017 Series A. Laidianis the power bank rental startup that provides an alternative for those who cannot charge their mobile phones while they are outside the home and office

4. Tujia: Tujiaprovides services highly tailored to the Chinese audience. It is better known as the ‘Chinese Airbnb’. Their employees manage the check-in and check-out and for any properties served by third parties, Tujia actually has each house inspected (Forbes India). As of Tujia’s Series E round in late 2017, they are valued near $1.5B, but they are hardly a household name outside of China

5. VIPkid: This English language tutoring site is scaling at an incredible pace. VIPKidhad 296,363 students and 38,724 teachers as of 2017 — a sharp rise from the 3,305 students and 404 educators it had just two earlier, according to its investor materials. By 2019, it’s projecting a near 10-fold rise in students to 2.4 million, and more than 280,000 teachers.

6. iCarbonX: The Chinese data company aims to improve health care using artificial intelligence and biotech. Founded in 2015 by Genomicist Jun Wang, the company has become a comprehensive platform for health data, pulling in information from millions of people.

7. DeepGlint: This AI based startup is similar to other AI/ML Chinese startups, DeepGlint has heavily focused on computer vision. However, they’ve been the first of the groups to invest heavily in human behaviour and trajectory analysis. Are you moving slower or faster than the crowd around you? Are you moving in an erratic way? DeepGlint’ssoftware will pick you out of the crowd quickly and identify security to keep an eye on you.  They’ve raised a comparatively small $18MM, but this also makes them highly likely to be a takeover candidate for one of the big AI, eCommerce, or communication companies in China.

8. Liulishuo: Another AI powered English language learning platform and app that offers personalized and adaptive language learning to 50 million users in 379 cities in China and over 175 countries around the world. Liulishuois attacking the same massive English language learning opportunity in China that VIPKid is going after, but in a much more programmatic way.

9. Pico Interactive: Pico developed one of the first high quality, truly wireless VR headsets. No computer, no phone, no tether needed, starting at $599. The headset received strong reviews at CESin early 2018 and is well positioned to be a technology leader in VR. It’s more likely that Pico’s technology is licensed or bought by one of the bigger players in VR like HTC, Facebook, or Playstation, but Pico still has a great opportunity to expand significantly in 2018 and beyond.

10. Roobo: A hardware and AI company, Roobo develops next generation service robots. It’s BeanQ education consumer robot won Best of Red Dot in 2017. Roobocontinues to innovate with a line of robots that extends up into the very large Farnese, which can carry on a conversation, recognize phases, navigate through airports, banks, shopping malls and conference halls.

The post 10 Chinese Startups to Watch Out For In 2019 appeared first on Digital Crew.

Tik Tok in India reached a milestone of 15 million registered users in India alone. Bollywood celebrities like Tiger Shroff, Shahid Kapoor, Disha Patani, Jacqueline Fernandez and Tanmay Bhatt jumped onto the Tik Tok bandwagon thereby driving their mainstream social media followers to this app.

Tik Tok’s Upside In Countries Like China

The Lady Dior white handbag sold out through Tik Tok’s platform and this new strategy to target young customers by using Tik Tok to communicate the details of the product with the animation has seen better results. Beauty brands such as Estee Lauder and Lancome also started using the same application, and even Michael Kors and Adidas Neo then followed suite.

How Tik Tok Works

What enhances the experience is TikTok’s ‘For You’ feed. It offers personalised recommendations to users according to their viewing preferences. The content is curated in a way that instead of serving up videos from only the popular users on the platform, users also get recommendations of video content shared by regular users of the app. With this feature, TikTok is enabling more users to find success in being a creator on the platform and reaching new, global audience.

Tik Tok’s Popularity In India

TikTok, the popular lip-sync app, is filled with 15-second clips of meme-friendly content featuring its youthful users miming to their favourite songs. The videos range from the harmless to the explicit, depending upon the users followed. The app has gone viral, having racked up close to 100 million downloads and with 20 million monthly active users in India.

Parental Concern

The popular Chinese app has made its inroads in India but parents are concerned with this ‘generation’ of the app users that go to insane lengths to get a certain video. The apps have benefited mightily from the short-video craze that’s taken hold among pre-teens and adolescents, but this is putting them in danger from predators, experts said. Given the mature nature of much of the content and the age of users, the content on these apps could be in violation of the law, they said.

Concern Continues In Other Countries

The popularity of the app doesn’t just spark concern in India but also in United States and Australia over its failure to protect children from harassment and virtual bullying. Hong Kong primary school children were placing themselves at risk by exposing their identities on the app as well

According to Tik Tok’s service agreement, the app is not for users under 16 years old and the firm will terminate accounts where necessary. Despite the rapidly growing user base, apps like TikTok don’t have a grievance redressal officer in India. The government is insisting on this for all major social media platforms.

The app only allows users two settings when posting: for videos to be completely private – meaning restricted to the creator’s viewing only – or for clips to be entirely open to the public. In the privacy settings offered by Tik Tok users can only choose if friends, or anyone, can send them private messages, and block specific users. There is no friends-only sharing option. Users are also not able to delete their accounts themselves but must do so by email request.

Regulations In the future

“If these apps are operating in a manner that under-18 children use it, then one needs to check what are the other safeguards they have built for parental consent — this is definitely something that has to be looked into,” said Supratim Chakraborty, associate partner at law firm Khaitan & Co. “From a national security standpoint, children fall under the sensitive category. Today, there is a lack of law to put forward strict compliance.”

The post Tik Tok Content In India Might Need Moral Policing appeared first on Digital Crew.

Meituan Dianping aka China’s Ubereats is its largest on-demand food delivery firm that also offered bike sharing and ride hailing services initially. The app successfully managed to raise $4.2 billion earlier this year through its initial public offering in Hong Kong.

Meituan currently has about 340 million active users who are able to use the platform to order meals, book hotel rooms and arrange various forms of transport. It combines a range of services with similarities to Groupon, Yelp and UberEats through the 4.7 million merchants that have joined the platform, which in turn allows Meituan to earn its revenue through commissions and delivery fees.

Why Did Meituan Decide To Ditch Bike Sharing & Ride hailing?

In April, Meituan tried to break into the bike-sharing fray that was initially dominated by DiDi Chuxing prior to the passenger murders. It also managed to face off Alibaba-backed Ofo. Over the past few years, Mobike and Ofo were burning through large sums of investor money in a bid to win users from subsidized rider, but both have shown signs of slowing down their ride games.

Overcrowded With Competitors

Mobike is downsizing its fleets to “avoid an oversupply” as the bike-sharing market falters, Meituan’s chief financial officer – Chen Shaohui said during the earning call. Ofo has also scaled back by closing down most of its international operations.

Meituan stated that it has no plans to expand car-hailing beyond its two piloting cities – Shanghai and Nanjing – after venturing into the field to take on DiDi Chuxing last December.

Revenue From Food Delivery Services?

Meituan’s major source of income is from the food delivery business that accounted for 62% of its revenues in 2017. Meituan’s competitors are going all out to lure consumers away with steep discounts in what has effectively become a race to the bottom. Alibaba’s food-delivery unit – Ele.me has set aside hundreds of millions of dollars for cheaper meal access. The ride-sharing giant DiDi Chuxing is also expanding its food-delivery service known as DiDi Foodie, which is now available in four Chinese cities since its beta-launch in April.

Scope For The Food Delivery Market In China

Aside from fending off heavy competition, Meituan also has to spend to attract new users. According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, the food-delivery market only accounts for less than 10% of China’s total dining market. To grow the market further and get more people to use its app, Meituan has been subsidizing meal purchases so that consumers have greater incentives to go order online.

Route For The Future?

Meituan’s latest filing says that it is currently focused on “expanding our customer base, satisfying unmet customer needs and enhancing our network, rather than prioritizing monetization now.” A spokesperson said that the company has no comment on the pricing of its shares and the investments from Li and Lau.

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Douyin Got Lucky With Meipai’s Upgrade

Douyin is known as the app that achieved fame within a very short span of time. It took the app 200 days to download and garnered 100 million users within a year successfully hitting the 1 billion view mark daily as well.

Meipai on the other hand was a popular video sharing app created by Meitu, a technology company known for its image editing apps and selfie-specialty smartphones. Meipai was launched in 2014 and became popular incredibly fast. As of 2015 & 2016, 76% of Meipai’s users were women with an average age of 23 and 60% of them lived in first and second-tier cities. Brands like L’oreal, Disney, Maybelline, Snickers Elle, Victoria’s Secret and Adidas hosted campaigns on that platform.

What Happened In 2017?

On March 22^nd, Meipai users were shocked when they opened the app and found the homepage essentially blank. In the upper left-hand corner was a box with the words “Meipai system upgrade notification”. Clicking that box led users to an announcement from Meipai stating that the platform had been temporarily shut down for a complete system upgrade. The announcement further explained that during this time, the homepage will remain blank and users will be unable to view content or upload new content. While Meipai apologized for the inconvenience, they did not set an end date for the shutdown, leaving Meipai users in doubt about its return. There was no sign of the app resurfacing anytime soon and this left a void in the world of video content creators.

How Did This Benefit Douyin?

Thousands of influencers built massive audiences on Meipai and experienced severe loss of engagement and audience. Douyin stepped into the video influencer world at the right time and as a result Meipai influencers and users flocked to the video messaging app. Before Meipai could make a comeback, it lost its users to Douyin.

How Meipai Laid The Foundations For Douyin

Meipai started off as a short video app similar to Douyin, with 15-second short videos, a model similar to Vine. Over the years they gradually expanded, adding new features like live streaming and video additions that went up to 5 minutes. As the popularity of Douyin has grew, Meipai tried returning to its roots, making a heavy push to promote short vertically-shot 15-second videos and introducing lip-syncing features and other special effects that looked eerily similar to Douyin.

However, as Meipai did this in order to compete with Douyin and retain users, they inadvertently helped their influencers become familiar with Douyin’s content style. Meipai influencers then had a ton of backlogged content which they were able to rapidly repackage and post on Douyin making it a win-win situation for Douyin and Meipai users.

Another Speculation About Meipai’s Decline

Apart from the system upgrade theory, another reason for the app’s decline was a new set of rules and regulations for sponsored posts called the M plan. According to these rules All sponsored posts were supposed to be registered by the brand through Meipai’s official platform. The platform also added an additional fee for sponsored posts, priced at 35-50% of the influencer’s fee.

Additionally, after the plan was unveiled, Meipai became increasingly strict about monitoring content. If KOLs didn’t register a post and their system suspected sponsored content its organic reach would be severely throttled. Sometimes, the post would be taken down entirely and the KOLs would receive a warning.

The Decline

Unfortunately, Meipai’s system was not very accurate and frequently falsely tagged content as sponsored. This exasperated many KOLs who were producing high-quality content who wanted genuine views, engagement and impressions forcing them to look for alternatives to take their audiences with them.

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