Meet the Chinese live-streaming app Live.me that’s taking the US by storm
Cheetah Mobile’s app was developed around the Chinese model of ‘selfie-videos’ and online gift giving
Like many Chinese live-streaming apps, Live.me monetises by selling virtual items -- a unique business model pioneered in China’s billion-dollar personal live-streaming industry. But what sets Live.me apart from its Chinese counterparts like YY and Inke is that the majority of Live.me’s users hail from the US, despite the app being a product of Beijing-based Cheetah Mobile.
In fact, Live.me does not focus on its home country, instead choosing to focus on markets such as the US, the UK, Canada and Australia. Over 80.2 per cent of users come from the United States, followed by 6.9 per cent from the UK, analysts wrote in a recent report by investment research firm TH Data Capital.
Launched in April, Live.me quickly rose to popularity in the United States, especially among twenty-somethings. The app ranks within the top five social apps in the Apple App Store and is the top grossing social app on Google Play, according to data by app intelligence firm App Annie.
In its third quarter results on Monday, New York-listed Cheetah Mobile reported that revenue from its content apps such as Live.me and recently-acquired news app News Republic accounted for 4 per cent of its 1.13 billion yuan (US$164 million) quarterly revenue, or about 450 million yuan.
“When we started working on Live.me there were two questions that people would ask us. The first is whether or not the US will like this [Chinese] model of ‘selfie-videos’, and the answer is yes, they do like it,” said Cheetah Mobile chief technology officer Charles Fan in an interview with the Post.
“The second is whether or not US users want to spend money to buy gifts [like Chinese users do] and the answer is, yes, they do.”