Hi folks, we are back with our weekly edition of China’s Digital Digest, wherein we bring you weekly updates on China’s digital space. The report takes a quick glance at China’s complex and rapidly evolving social media landscape by providing updates on the latest happenings across the social media industry. Here are the major highlights of the report.
1. WeChat And Douyin Among Most Used Apps In China During the Holiday
Among the apps that used the most cellular data during the nine-day holiday in China were Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok owned by ByteDance, Tencent Holdings’ super app WeChat, China’s second-largest short video platform Kuaishou, Tencent Video, and Jinri Toutiao, the news aggregator that also belongs to ByteDance.
These apps combined used more than 75 percent of mobile data during the period, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). Tencent and ByteDance each had two apps in the top five. Four of the top five apps have a history of more than 10 years, with the youngest app being Douyin, which was launched almost eight years ago. This is the first time that the MIIT has released a top-five app ranking for the holiday period.
2. Pika Founder Responds to Sora’s Release, Expresses Excitement
In response to the growing competition, Pika founder Demi Guo expressed excitement and readiness to compete directly with Sora.
Before the release of Sora, Runway and Pika were considered to be top players in the video generation track. Pika Labs focuses on the maturity of algorithms in generative video development. Pika 1.0 can generate and edit videos in various styles with movie-like quality and special effects. The release of Sora provides industry insights and algorithmic ideas for leading start-up companies like Pika.
3. ByteDance Releases SDXL-Lightning Model For Text-To-Image Generation, Increasing Speed by 10 Times
According to the report from Jiemian News, it was learned from informed sources that ByteDance has released the text-to-image open model SDXL-Lightning. It is reported that this model can generate high-quality and high-resolution images in a very short time, making it one of the fastest text-to-image models currently available.
The SDXL-Lightning model from ByteDance adopts a progressive adversarial distillation technique, achieving unprecedented generation speed. This model can generate high-quality and high-resolution images in 2 or 4 steps, speeding up the generation process by ten times. It is the fastest text-to-image model at 1024 resolution, with computing costs reduced to one-tenth.
4. Alipay Expands Focus to Content and Social Networking, Recruits Talent from Competitors
According to a report by the Chinese business magazine “China Entrepreneur,” Alipay has been strategically recruiting talent from platforms such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu since last year. The focus has been on roles in operations and advertising to bolster its content strategy.
Earlier this year, Alipay began internal testing of a social feature called “Interest Communities.” This feature, as seen in images provided by users involved in the testing, includes various interest groups like coffee, wine, camping, baseball, hiking, fishing, cycling, and more for user discussions. Users can join local groups for offline activities by simply clicking, signaling Alipay’s pivot towards social networking.
Wrapping Up
The vast and diverse nature of the Chinese Social Media space makes it incredibly challenging to keep a tab on the rapid developments taking place. However, China’s Digital Digest brings you all the latest updates from there to keep you abreast of all the evolving trends.
To delve deeper into the findings of our latest report, click here.