5/21 TBC Insider Digest
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Insider Digest 5/21/21: Pinduoduo goes into Short Video, The demise of Tencent Gaming is Exaggerated, and Zhang Yiming Quits
Apologies that this email didn’t send out on time! I apparently made a mistake with the scheduling. I also had to cancel our weekly meetup due to family medical matters, and hope to resume them next week!
For those who are new, feel free to join our WhatsApp group if you want real time communications with the rest of the community! It’s pretty low volume and always on topic!
5/17/21 Pinduoduo Goes Into Short Video
Back in February, Pinduoduo was already beta-testing short videos in their app. But now, "Big Video" 大视频 now replaces the old "Livestreaming" button on the bottom for some users. Currently, the business model seems to be just inserting ads for ecommerce goods every 6th video, not dissimilar to TikTok. In addition, you also get shown videos that direct you to livestreams, but with an explicit “pretty girls are waiting to chat with you” banner. This tells me that Pinduoduo’s livestreaming efforts have not been great because they are commodity, unbranded goods. It’s full of pirated videos right now and questionable content. It’s definitely a platform that tries to push the boundaries of regulation as far as possible. Please click through for plenty of annotated screenshots.
5/18/21 Tencent's Hyper Digital Reality is Even Bigger Than the Metaverse
Tencent Gaming unveiled the concept of Hyper Digital Reality, which they claim is much bigger than just the Metaverse. At first I found this slightly laughable, but then looking into it, it does seem to make sense why they’re trying to emphasize a few specific points, namely technology and real world impact. These are two common arguments levied against Tencent — that their gaming business is useless and not real technology.
The Exaggerated Demise of Tencent Gaming
Summary translation of an epic-length treatise on the current state of Gaming from a well known internet analyst who is an avid gamer himself. He isn’t always great but I thought this was one of his better pieces. TLDR; Tencent has a commanding lead and others are significantly behind, especially ByteDance (who has been written up in media as if they are #2 … but they’re not, NetEase has that position). Also brings up TapTap as a very impressive player that I will have to look a bit more into as it’s come up in conversations repeatedly. This thread includes 2 detailed reactions I gathered from Gaming experts so I highly recommend a read!
5/20/21 Zhang Yiming To Step Down As ByteDance CEO
I had to post something on the news that Zhang Yiming is stepping down as ByteDance CEO by the end of the year. It’s nothing sinister, but it doesn’t mean that all is well with the company either. It could also just be a lot based on his introverted personality. He’s much happier with books and ideas than socializing.
Other Posts from the Community:
QuanNM would like to know if anyone else has a view on Youdao, the NetEase education spinoff: Education platforms and 网易有道 Netease's Youdao
Welcome to our new members:
Things You Might Have Missed from the WhatsApp chat:
Professor Pettis twitter thread on internationalizing the RMB really got the group going …
Companies that Filed This Week
Soul App, a Gen Z avatar based social networking app that claims it is building the “soul”cial Metaverse …
Kanzhun AKA BossZhipin, the mobile recruiting app using messaging to connect job seekers and employers directly. A super interesting idea that I’ve written about previously on Insider
One Last Thing …
I just signed up for a membership with a website to get Chinese research reports. It’s crowd-sourced and seems to be fairly comprehensive and is very cheap ~$12 a month or cheaper. I’ll take suggestions for sectors you’re interested in diving into and try to find and summarize the best reports … just message me! The website is fxbaogao.com for those who want to try it out for themselves.
That’s it! Please check the forums for amazing contributions from our members and join the WhatsApp group!
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