And, while digital is still cost-efficient, there is a lot of inflation - especially with the concentration of media into the hands of a few key players (BAT+B, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent & Bytedance). With this inflation it will be interesting to watch for:
A. More, new digital channels to emerge, offering strong audience connections at lower cost
B. Further digitization of traditional, non-digital formats such as radio, out-of-home
C. Creation of advertising formats through offline retail (restaurants, gyms, vending machines)
Mobile Video Is Surging
However, social networking has lost ground to video in the past two years. Social networking went from 60% of all time on mobile in 2016, to 47% in 2018. Video’s share of time grew from 13% in 2016, to 22% in 2018. Purpose-built apps for video (Douyin, Kuaishou, Miaopai etc), together with Weibo has enjoyed most of the recent gains. Weibo especially has also enjoyed a rebound with younger audiences - 82% of its users are under 30 years old.
Short video apps - namely Douyin -account for this big swing in attention to video. But numerous formats have grown, including; OTV (Online TV), live streaming and news video.
In this case of news video, the big winner is Toutiao and similar news streams who have done cost-efficient job of customizing and socializing news to match individual interests.
WeChat just isn’t the best vehicle for video, so despite the fact that Tencent has links/associated video sites (Kuaishou, Bilibili etc), WeChat has not been able to capture big gains with video.
