China’s answer to Twitter sees a live streaming boom

Just like Facebook Live and Twitter’s Periscope, China’s Weibo is seeing a boom in users making their own live streaming video on the social network.

Weibo users created 10 million live broadcasts from April to June – a rocket-ship 116-fold increase over the first three months of the year, a Weibo representative tells Tech in Asia.

Weibo Live is being used by brands, media outlets, and individuals – like this duo doing yoga that I just spotted in the Weibo app:

GIF by Tech in Asia.

The flurry of hearts, likes, and comments is reminiscent of Periscope. What’s different is that some users are giving virtual gifts – which cost real money – as a gesture of appreciation to the live stream host. The broadcaster can then cash out the gifts to make money from their live streaming antics.

It’s creating a wave of web celebrities.

Weibo is not the first to be doing this in China. Several new video apps have popped up in China this year catering to a nascent but growing demand to watch fellow netizens do everything from eating to playing video games to shilling cosmetics.

The country’s snowballing live streaming is also creating new web celebrities. Zhang Qige, a 23-year-old woman who plays games while chatting on her webcam, claims to have made US$150,000 in the past year from her online capers.

Some make it even bigger, such as Papi Jiang, a 29-year-old drama student turned comedian seen here in one of her skits:

Papi, known for her squeaky voice and fast-paced banter, effectively turned herself into a media startup earlier this year and attracted US$1.9 million in venture capital funding.

But on China’s micro-censored internet, live streaming has alarmed authorities. State news agency Xinhua last month warned that some streamers showing sexual content, gambling, or violence were “challenging public morals,” “seriously damaging the internet environment,” and “endangering public order in society.”

Despite the resultant clampdown, this new form of online entertainment is flourishing.

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