Kuaishou is China’s original short-video king, and it now hosts ‘little shops’ and live streaming

Kuaishou is China’s second largest short video app. After growing largely from popularity in China’s rural areas and lower-tier cities, Kuaishou moved into live streaming, ecommerce and long-form videos in the face of more competition.

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Kuaishou has allowed content creators in rural China to shine. The whole short video craze has been like China’s Got Talent on steroids. (Picture: Kuaishou)

Josh Ye

Published: 11:42pm, 25 Jul 2019Updated: 8:10am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

Want to watch women eating light bulbs and grown men lighting firecrackers in their underwear? That’s the sort of short video content that sends many people to Kuaishou.

With more than 300 million monthly active users and a market valuation potentially reaching US$25 billion, Kuaishou has become a video streaming giant in China as it expands into other areas such as video game live streaming and long-form videos.

China Internet Report

Founded in 2011, Kuaishou was first created as a GIF generator app under the name GIF Kuaishou, which means “GIF Quick Hand” in Chinese. It wasn’t until November 2012 that Kuaishou pivoted from being a utility to a community, serving up short videos. From then on, the Beijing-based platform became known simply as Kuaishou, or Kwai outside China.

Once it became a short video platform, Kuaishou reportedly targeted growth in China’s lower-tier cities and rural areas. While company CEO Su Hua denied the strategy was deliberate, he said that’s where most of the platform’s users are today.

“85% of Kuaishou users are from second-tier cities and below, and 15% are from first-tier cities, which is in line with China’s Internet user demographic,” he told Technode in 2016.