Driven by live streams, consumer spending in social apps to hit $17.2B in 2025 – ProWellTech

The live streaming boom is kicking off the creator economy as a new forecast estimates consumers will spend $ 6.78 billion on social apps in 2021. That number will grow to $ 17.2 billion annually by 2025, according to data from mobile data company App Annie, which notes the upward trend equates to a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 29% over five years. At this point, total spending on social apps will total $ 78 billion, the company reports.

Initially, much of the livestream economy was based on one-time purchases such as sticker packs, but today consumers are giving free gifts to content creators during their live streams. Some of these donations can be incredibly high at times. Twitch streamer ExoticChaotic received $ 75,000 during a live session on Fortnite, which was one of the largest donations of all time on the social network for streaming games. Meanwhile, App Annie notes that another platform, Bigo Live, allows broadcasters to make up to $ 24,000 a month from their live streams.

Apps that offer live streaming as a standout feature are also the ones that make up the bulk of social app spending today, the report said. For the first half of this year, $ 3 came in for every $ 4 spent on the top 25 social apps, such as apps that offered live streams.

In the first half of 2021, the US became the top consumer spending market in social apps by spending 1.7 times the spending of the next largest market, Japan, and accounting for 30% of the market by spending. China, Saudi Arabia and South Korea followed to round out the top 5.

While both the creators and the platforms benefit financially from the live streaming economy, the platforms benefit in other ways beyond their commissions on in-app purchases. Live streams help drive demand for these social apps, and they help increase other key engagement metrics like time spent on the app.

A top app that is clearly growing here is TikTok.

Over the past year, TikTok outperformed YouTube in the US and UK in terms of average monthly time spent per user. It often continues to lead the former market and even more resolute in the latter.

In other markets like South Korea and Japan, TikTok is making headway, but YouTube is still leading by a wide margin. (In South Korea, YouTube even leads 2.5 times.)

TikTok aside, consumers spent 740 billion hours on social apps in the first half of the year, which is 44% of the time spent on mobile devices globally. The time spent on these apps has continued to trend up over the years, with growth increasing 30% in the first half of 2021 over the same period in 2018.

Today, the apps that enable live streaming surpass those that focus on chat, photo, or video. For this reason, companies like Instagram are now announcing dramatic shifts in focus, for example that they are “no longer a photo-sharing app”. They know they need to move to video more fully or they will be left behind.

The total time spent on the top five live streaming social apps will exceed half a trillion hours this year on Android phones alone, not including China. That’s a 3-year CAGR of 25% versus just 15% for apps in the Chat and Photo & Video categories, noted App Annie.

Asia Pacific accounts for 60% of the time spent on social apps thanks to growth in India. As India’s growth in this area has increased over the past 3.5 years, the gap between India and China has narrowed from 115% in 2018 to just 7% in the first half of this year.

The downloads of social apps are also increasing due to the growth of live streaming.

To date, consumers have downloaded social apps 74 billion times, and that demand remains high, with 4.7 billion downloads in the first half of 2021 alone – a 50% year-over-year increase. In the first half of the year, Asia was the largest region for social app downloads with a market share of 60%.

This is mainly due to India, the top market, which overtook the US by a factor of 5 in 2018. After India, the USA, Indonesia, Brazil and China follow in terms of downloads.

The shift towards live streaming and video has also had an impact on what kind of apps consumers want to download, not just the number of downloads.

A chart showing the world’s top apps from 2012 to today underscores Facebook’s slipping grip. While its apps (Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and Facebook) have dominated the top positions in various positions over the years, TikTok jumped to number one last year and will maintain this ranking in 2021.

Further down the table, other apps that help with video editing have overtaken others that were more focused on photos or chat.

Video apps such as YouTube (# 1), TikTok (# 2), Tencent Video (# 4), Bigo Live (# 5), Twitch (# 6) and others are now also at the top of the global consumer spending charts Half year 2021.

But YouTube (# 1) still dominates compared to TikTok (# 5) and others from Facebook – the company holds the next three spots for Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram.

This could explain why TikTok is now exploring the idea of ​​allowing users to upload even longer videos by, for example, increasing the limit from 3 to 5 minutes.

Additionally, live streaming’s ability to increase growth in terms of time spent is also likely why TikTok has invested heavily in new features for its TikTok LIVE platform, including events, support for co-hosts, Q&A and more, and why it made the “LIVE” button a more prominent feature in its app and user experience.

App Annie’s report also looks at the impact of live streaming on certain platforms like Twitch and Bigo Live, with the former doubling its monthly active user base from before the pandemic and the latter to $ 314.2 million in the first half of the year Consumer spending recorded in 2021.

“The ability of social media users to communicate with one another through live video – or watch live broadcasts from others – has not only sustained the growth of a social media app market, but has also fueled its exponential growth in engagement metrics how the time spent contributed. would otherwise have been saturated some time ago, “wrote Lexi Sydow, Head of Insights at App Annie, when the new report was announced.

You can find the full report here.