Chinese Internet giant Baidu invests US$70.5mil in livestreaming amid coronavirus-led boom

Tan KW

Publish date: Thu, 14 May 2020, 06:58 PM

Baidu, China's biggest internet search company and artificial intelligence champion, said it is investing a further 500mil yuan to boost its live-streaming services, aiming to cultivate 1,000 star content creators amid a surge in online users during the coronavirus pandemic.

“Baidu will promote the live-streaming business more proactively [this year],” said Baidu executive vice-president Shen Dou at the company’s annual 2020 Wanxiang Conference on Wednesday.

Shen said Baidu’s apps and platforms saw an average of one billion daily visits during the height of the coronavirus outbreak, giving it a solid edge over competitors. “Data gleaned from our search engine gives us a clearer understanding of the types of livestreaming content users want,” he added.

While livestreaming has been around for years, the coronavirus pandemic has seen a spike in the popularity of such services, with millions of Chinese people turning to live-streaming and e-commerce platforms amid citywide lockdowns across the country.

Over the recent Lunar New Year period at the end of January, users on Douyin - the mainland Chinese version of TikTok - spent an average of 99 minutes on the app each day, compared to 67 minutes during the festive season last year, a QuestMobile report in February showed. Kuaishou, Douyin’s closest competitor, also saw a rise in average daily usage time from 44 minutes to 71 minutes during the same period, the report said.

The size of China’s livestreaming market reached 433.8bil yuan in 2019 and is expected to be double that in 2020, according to a report by data analysis firm iiMedia Research in February.

And although China’s economy suffered its first contraction in nearly three decades in the first quarter of this year, some livestreamed events over the recent Labour Day holiday recorded sales of as much as 140mil yuan and the volume of sales from livestreams was 4.7 times more than in the holiday period last year, China’s vice-minister for commerce Wang Bingnan said earlier this month.

However, Baidu faces an uphill battle to grab market share from apps like Douyin and Kuaishou, which have been focused on livestreaming for years and are already established in the space, said He Yixuan, an e-commerce analyst from research firm Analysys.

“It would be difficult for Baidu to venture into the livestreaming market at the moment,” He said, adding that it would take time for the company to cultivate its own live-streaming celebrities, or key opinion leaders (KOLs).

Some of the most famous KOLs, such as ‘Lipstick King’ Li Jiaqi, became household names by streaming predominantly on specific platforms. Li, who once sold 15,000 lipsticks in five minutes, got his start on Alibaba Group Holding’s e-commerce platform Taobao and still regularly streams on Taobao Live. (Alibaba is the parent company of the Post.)

To stand out from other players, Baidu said it will use AI and big data to “build a live-streaming platform with a focus on information and knowledge users need”.

Baidu will also help its 3.8 billion content creators promote their content across its diverse platforms including search engine app Baidu, short video app Haokan and collaborative online encyclopaedia Baidu Baike, it said in a press release.

“We will build up our capacity to facilitate communication between content creators and users on all our platforms, letting users not only gain information and services they need but also communicate directly with content creators,” it added.

- SCMP

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