From stranger social networking to overseas live streaming, "Ya Chuang Group" has taken a different path from Momo!

The commonality between social networking and live streaming is that both are highly interactive, and rewards solve the common monetization problem of social products. At the end of 2015, when 17 was taken off the shelves, Asia Creative Group, which owns the stranger social product "Pengpeng", had already been observing the live broadcast market. Co-founder Ouyang Yun told 36Kr that the team judged at the time that live streaming could indeed make money; and more importantly, live streaming should also be classified as a type of social networking. In their view, "real-time live streaming is superior to WeChat and is the best social media."

However, Asia Innovation Group did not directly embed the live broadcast section into the original application like Momo did. In June 2016, Asia Creative Group launched the independent live streaming app Up Live, focusing on overseas markets, initially focusing on Taiwan, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia (Vietnam). Bigo, which was launched slightly later in March of the same year, entered Taiwan earlier than live.me. Pengpeng’s overseas users and the group’s gaming business FunPepper brought the first wave of traffic to Up Live. The team said that as of now, Up Live has tens of millions of registered users, more than 2 million MAU, and hundreds of thousands DAU.

According to Qinggua Media's observation, in the second half of 2016, when the domestic live broadcast track became saturated and entered the second round of qualifying, the concept of live broadcast going overseas began to become popular. Many of the existing players are backed by large platforms, and most of them have entered the market from Greater China. For example, the shareholder behind Bigo is YY, the domestic PC show leader, VOOV is an overseas live broadcast project incubated by Tencent itself, and recently Inke also publicly supported its investment project MeMe. Although Cheetah's live.me focuses on the United States, it also ranks in the top ten of the free social application rankings in Taiwan based on its relationship with its partner Snow Leopard.

At this stage, the content of each company is mainly based on appearance and show format, and is similar. The fastest growing company in Southeast Asia is Bigo. After seizing the large Indonesian market, its total number of users now numbers in the tens of millions. Referring to the situation of the domestic live broadcast war, the first and second echelons have basically emerged within half a year, and the DAU that can enter the Final Table is basically above 5 million.

Although constrained by objective conditions such as the lack of popularization of online payment and market fragmentation, the overseas live streaming market will inevitably reach another level after the massive influx of capital in 2017. How will Up Live, which does not have a large traffic pool, respond at this time? Ouyang Yun believes that this question should be answered from two dimensions. On the one hand, Up Live has been operating for more than half a year and has already explored a differentiated strategy. At the same time, the company has also made a development plan for 2017.

Currently, Up Live has been successfully implemented in three regions: Taiwan, Hong Kong and Vietnam. On the day of publication, the product ranked 8th among Taiwan's free apps on Google Play (there are many Android phones in Taiwan), and the next 17 were ranked 14th.

Data source: App Annie

Ouyang Yun said that compared with other live streaming platforms , they put more emphasis on localized operations and set up local teams in key markets. In mid-2016, the company acquired the Taiwanese voice dating platform MimiCam. Considering that the most important element that determines the content of a show is "people", and the supply of internet celebrities and anchors in Southeast Asia is not as complete as that in China, Up Live will operate its own internet celebrity brokerage business and complete a series of tasks from anchor discovery to quality training.

"Many people say that bandwidth is the biggest cost of live streaming, but we think the anchors are where the most money is spent." Ouyang Yun revealed that the elimination rate of Up Live anchors is very high, and he hopes to form a competitive barrier for the product from the quality of the anchors. "Users are more willing to pay for excellent anchors. Up Live's revenue was 4 million US dollars in December last year and 6 million US dollars in January this year. The user AR PU value is higher than other platforms."

In addition to the self-built mechanism for cultivating internet celebrities, the company's original gaming genes also provided different ideas for Up Live operations. Previously, Up Live launched a small game in its product that uses virtual currency to buy and sell friends, which increased user activity while also creating a certain amount of revenue. Compared with other live streaming platforms, Asia Creative Group has a ready-made gaming team that can be called upon instantly.

In 2017, Up Live's strategic focus was on market expansion. Its strategy was to first target regions with high net worth users or relatively mature basic conditions, including the Middle East, Japan, Indonesia, etc. From a group perspective, Ouyang Yun hopes that games, membership services, rewards and other profit channels can contribute a total of US$200 million in annual revenue, and Up Live can account for more than half of that. In addition to traditional reward methods, Ouyang Yun is optimistic about the advertising benefits of live broadcast content. E-commerce , game manufacturers or local businesses are all potential charging targets, and the local team will also need to have BD capabilities.

In terms of the team, Ouyang Yun was the founder and CEO of Gaopeng Group Buying, and served as Tencent's vice president of strategy, responsible for product strategy of mobile products and value-added service departments. Co-founder Tian Xingzhi once served as GM of Zynga China, during which time he achieved top 10 mobile social games ranking in the world. Tian Xingzhi's previous project XPD Media was acquired by Zynga.

Asia Innovation Group has previously received two major rounds of financing , with a cumulative amount of US$40 million. Investors include KPCB, Heyu Investment, Intime Capital, Index Ventures, WhiteStar Capital and well-known angel investors from Qunar, Facebook, Google and Zynga.