China’s second-largest short-video service Kuaishou is fine-tuning its new app Taizan, which targets young people, gearing up to compete with ByteDance’s Douyin for user’s time.
Taizan, just released a week ago, is a short-video aggregator showcasing recommended Kuaishou’s popular clips along with tags or “attitudes,” as the app names the feature. Users can comment on these clips or give a “thumb up.” It’s likely that more functions, including uploading user-generated content and direct messaging, will be added to the app, local media TechPlanet wrote, citing people close to the matter.
Eight-year-old Kuaishou’s quest for new hits has been an urgency as it lifted its 2019 advertisement sales revenue target by 50% to USD 2.18 billion. The company also expects to gather 300 million daily active users (DAUs) before the 2020 Chinese Lunar New Year, which will land in January.
Since 2017, Kuaishou has introduced dozens of apps at a brisk pace, hoping to revitalize the weakened user growth. These attempts include video editor Kuaiying, photo-editing tool Yitian Camera, and stranger-networking app Kuaishou Dianwan, but few of them have generated huge traffic, market watchers said.
Earlier in October, the Kuashou platform had an average DAU between 200 million and 210 million, almost kept flattish comparing with the number from May, company insiders told 36Kr. Its main rival ByteDance’s Douyin, however, already claimed 320 million DAU in June.
Meanwhile, these two rival platforms are moving to be more like each other. Nearly half of both platforms’ users were overlapped in May, according to 36Kr’s research house Zhike.
Beijing-based Kuaishou is reportedly considering an initial public offering in the US. The firm is collecting more than USD 1 billion at a USD 25 billion valuation in a pre-IPO round, mainly from Tencent.