According to foreign media reports, YouTube will launch a short video feature called "Shorts" by the end of the year to compete with TikTok.

The report shows that "Short" will set up a new channel in Android or IOS YouTube app, and there will be no independent app. The report describes the launch of YouTube Shorts as "the most serious effort Silicon Valley technology companies have made so far to combat the rise of TikTok."

In response to the strong rise of TikTok, Google's video site YouTube plans to launch a short video function called Shorts at the end of this year to participate in direct competition with TikTok. However, compared with TikTok's independent APP mode, Shorts will become a part of YouTube's main application, which may affect the competitiveness of Shorts.

Foreign media said that by launching "Shorts" in the YouTube app, it can ensure that it has a fixed audience, and the channel is used to publish short videos similar to TikTok.

In addition to Shorts, Facebook has also developed its own version of TikTok Lasso, which has been tested in markets such as Brazil. In October last year, Google was said to have intended to buy a competitor of TikTok to enter this emerging field faster.

According to the "Research Report on the Market Competition and Development Prospects of China's Short Video Industry in 2020-2025" by China Research Institute of Industry Research, short video is very popular in the world for many reasons, such as the 4G bonus of the mobile Internet, the increasingly fragmented behavior of users, the increasing demand for content, and so on. But in some markets, a factor has played a role in boosting the common people's dream, that is getting rich quickly and getting people's attention.

Kuaishou and Douyin have a head start

2017 is the first year for Kuaishou and Douyin to enter the overseas markets. Kuaishou started to build an overseas team as early as 2016. In May 2017, the overseas team began to operate independently. In the same month, Douyin officially launched the overseas version of TikTok. The two started at almost the same time.

The International version of Kuaishou is Kwai. Its first testing is in South Korea, Russia, Thailand and Indonesia. Unlike Kuaishou's route in China, Kwai's strategy in South Korea is to rely on star to catch attention. Kuaishou focuses on inclusiveness, which means showing opportunities to ordinary people; but Kwai is different, which will change strategies according to its local market.

Taking the Korean market as an example, Kwai has invited popular stars such as IU, G-Dragon, and Suzyto use Kwai to make short videos, which can attract fans and users to download in large quantities. However, Kwai denied the media's claim that they were drained by celebrities, saying that they "use Kwai spontaneously."

Douyin successfully entered the overseas market with an instant hit

After it acquired Musical.ly, it successfully entered the US market.

Regardless of the number of product releases or downloads from the TOP list, the best-performing Chinese publishers in the United States in 2018 is ByteDance. In the first half of 2018, the best-performing Chinese APP on the U.S. free list was Musical.ly, a short video product owned by Toutiao (ByteDance). In the first half of the year, Musical.ly was ranked among the top 40 in the US IOS & Google Play free list, and ranked first in the short video field. It is the favorite short video application for young American users.

According to Sensor Tower's January 2020 list of the world's most downloaded social media applications, TikTok ranked first in the world, with 104.7 million downloads, a 46% year-on-year increase in downloads compared to January 2019. The two most downloaded markets are India and Brazil, which accounted for 44.8% of total downloads in January. It is precisely these two markets that are also the main market for the 8th fastest player. According to App Annie data, TikTok ranks first in Google Play Brazil's top 7 download list, and third and seventh are Kwai International Edition Kwai and Kuaishou's short video editing application VStatus. It can be seen that not only is TikTok popular in Brazil, but Brazilian users have expressed strong interest in short videos.

In addition, with the rise of short video applications in Brazil, upstream applications such as picture and video editing have also ushered in a small boom. According to data from App Annie, 6 of the top 100 Google Play Brazil download lists are photo and video editing applications, among which 3 video editing apps such as Vstatus, Noizz and Inshoot come from China.

Brazilian users desperately hope to change their lives through short video

Compared with India, Brazil has a larger gap between the rich and the poor. According to the Brazilian Business Information Network, Brazil ranks second in the world in terms of the proportion of 1% of the world's richest people's income to the country's total income, while India is not even in the top 10. That is to say, 1% of Brazil's population income accounts for 28.3% of the country's total income, adding up 50% of Brazil's lower income, or even less than half of the 1% super rich. Therefore, Brazilians seem to need such a "rising channel" more urgently than Indians.

TikTok has entered the Indian market for two years and formed a special street that attracts numerous Internet celebrities and fans to punch in. I wonder if there will be such a special street in Brazil? After all, TikTok enters Brazil only 6 months.

According to the statistics, there are no fewer than 6 Chinese short video apps that enter the Brazilian market. In addition to the video editing application VStatus, TikTok, Kwai, there is also the short video application Likee and the short video production tool Noizz, the video tool community Lomotif, WhatsApp status video capture tool Zapee and so on. Among them, Likee and Noizz are also ranked by App Annie as the top 2 of the world's top 10 breakthrough apps in 2019. According to the latest data from SimilarWeb on February 26, in the Google Play App Ranking in Brazil, Kwai ranked 32th, Noizz ranked 44th, and TikTok ranked 50th.

Do everything possible to meet the diverse needs of users

The reason why China's short video can beat other giant products is its "globalized products, localized content." The following is a good example.

The promotional pictures of Facebook's Lasso are the same in the United States and Brazil, but TikTok's promotional pictures are different in the United States and Brazil.

Of course, this is only a microcosm of the localization of the overseas short video app. The main thing is that the overseas short video app is committed to understanding the cultural characteristics of different countries and meeting the specific needs of different users.

Both Kwai and TikTok have set up offices in Brazil. While supporting the official language Portuguese, they have also cultivated several African dialects to cover and serve more Brazilian users.

One of the ultimate performance of the localization of Chinese company products is VStatus, which is owned by Kuaishou.

VStatus in Brazil tries its best to be consistent with user habits. The most commonly used social communication application in Brazil is WhatsApp, so the introduction of VStatus in Google Play is directly based on WhatsApp Status. 

This is an article from chinairn.com, written by Huang Jiang, translated by Chris Yuan.