Asia's live streaming platforms are going to make America's social media giants hit a wall

This post examines the growth rate of Asian live streaming platforms and the developments in e-commerce and advertising that have resulted.

Streaming platforms such as BigoLive and BeLive host live streamers who stream everything from eating a pizza, shopping, traveling activities, makeup tutorials, music performances and even sleeping.
Streams are monetized by ad deals and audience members or fans who pay to send virtual gifts to their favorite streamers.

For BeLive, the streamer takes 60% of the gift's value, while BeLive gets the remaining 40%.

On average, streamers can earn about $20 for a 30 minute stream.
Top streamers can earn close to $600 for an hour long stream.

The benefits of live streaming are offset with disadvantages like the low barrier to entry leading to over saturation so that only a handful of live streamers succeed.

Many live streaming platforms shut down due to the high costs involved in driving traffic to their apps.

The biggest obstacle came from the Chinese government ban of Weibo’s live streaming feature in June 2017.
This affected 30 other live streaming apps and Weibo lost $1 billion of the company’s market capitalization.
Over 60% of Chinese live streaming platforms have closed down since then.

In the commercial space e-commerce forms of real time selling have surged.
Taobao (from Alibaba) and its rival JD.com, two of China’s biggest online shopping platforms, have both launched their own live-streaming platforms: Taobao Live and JD Live.
Brand influencers with large fan bases are paid to promote their products.
While the streamer presents the products, links appear on the screen and allow the viewer to buy them.

Almost 70 percent of over 100 beauty brands that have operations in China use live streaming as a marketing and advertising tool.
Maybelline sold 10,000 lipsticks within two hours by live streaming its products using a Chinese influencer.

The majority of funding for live-streaming platforms now goes to the top companies in the sector, squeezing out the smaller players and rewarding those who play by the rules.

While the outlook for social live streaming is cloudy that for retail live streaming looks bright.
Will this trend catch on outside Asia to take hold of a more significant part of the attention economy?

What about platforms like Steemit, D Tube, D Sound and D Live?

Comment your thoughts below :)