A Few Chinese Companies Made Livestreaming Big in America. So What Are Americans Doing on It?

This is not at all what Silicon Valley had in mind.

It is 12:30 a.m. On the livestreaming app Live.me, a young woman sits cross-legged on her bed, hair loose, in a baggy gray T-shirt and denim shorts, talking through her day and now and then greeting whoever has just walked in. Late at night, the app's front page is wall-to-wall with women like this, chatting.

Two streaks of purple flash across the screen and a purple sports car covers half of it. More small gifts follow, among them a "bridal veil" that, once activated, sits on her head by itself.

The streamer, Felicia Sanders, laughs and reads out the name of the viewer who sent it. The sports car costs 4,999 coins — 415 yuan, or about US$60. There is a more expensive gift on the platform: a castle at 19,999 coins, which takes a top-up of more than 1,600 yuan.

If you have ever watched Inke or Huajiao in China, none of this will be new. Neither, in fact, will the interface:

The streamer's name is in the top-left corner. Across the top are viewers who paid to pin their avatars there. Lower down, comments from people who haven't paid flicker past, while gifts and heart-shaped likes keep bursting onto the screen.

As on Chinese apps, Live.me streamers make their money from gifts. Viewers buy coins and turn them into gifts; the gifts a streamer receives convert into diamonds, worth roughly half of what the viewer paid, and at 4,000 diamonds she can cash out.

Sanders, who turned 24 last month, lives in Los Angeles and has tried every livestreaming app going. The only time she had been written about before was during a video livestream on Instagram, when the NBA player Chandler Parsons — the Memphis Grizzlies small forward worth US$20 million — commented asking her to lift her top and show more.

Tabloids including the Daily Mirror called Sanders an Instagram model, a term close to the Chinese "Weibo influencer." Her features are sharp and she photographs well, without leaving much of an impression — exactly like the influencer-streamers back home.

She has 180,000 followers on Instagram, where the grid of square photos records a life of beaches, saunas, nightclubs, the gym and staying in. Only one of the pictures isn't of her; in most of them she is in a bikini, showing off her figure.

Most of her followers are men who tell her she is sexy and has a great body. That doesn't make her hide her love life — she often posts pictures of herself with her DJ boyfriend. Otherwise, the two things she reposts most are pizza and naps: her favorite food, and her favorite way to spend an idle hour.

Not many people want to watch a livestream on Instagram, and hers didn't last long. She moved on to posting videos on Snapchat, then to Twitch, America's biggest game-streaming platform, to stream games. But she had no particular talent for banter or for gaming, and even when she plugged her streams to the tens of thousands of followers on her Twitter account, hardly anyone on Twitch watched.

American livestreaming apps kept arriving, one after another, and most of them went nowhere. Streamers like Sanders never found a stage that fit — until Live.me.

In under a month, Sanders picked up more than 20,000 followers and 790,000 diamonds. On the platform's 50-50 split, that is about US$2,806. She now streams one to three times a day, for anywhere from 15 to 90 minutes.

There isn't much substance to what she does. She thanks people for gifts, over and over, and reminds you to tap follow in the top-left corner, to share the stream to other platforms, and to like it.

She stands for a whole class of streamer here. After midnight, the feed on Live.me's front page fills with women like her.

Being young, good-looking and having a hot body is enough to earn real attention and real money — the same formula that puts streamers at the top of the rankings on Inke and Huajiao in China.

The top earners here are men, and almost nobody sings for you with a straight face

Live.me launched in April 2016. It was built by the Chinese company Cheetah Mobile, and it is now the livestreaming app with the highest downloads and the highest revenue in the U.S. App Store. On April 28 this year it closed a US$60 million funding round.

Live.me leaned on internet celebrities for traffic at first. He Yandan, Cheetah Mobile's vice president and Live.me's product lead, told QDaily that in the early days the team signed YouTube stars to pull users in.

Roman Atwood, who has 12 million YouTube subscribers, was one of those early signings. On Live.me he often appears on camera with his wife, and the two set up stunts: can six men stop a moving Mini, can a rifle split a tree a hundred meters away in half, can the audience agree on a name for his daughter.

Stunts that go viral on YouTube never became the norm for American livestreamers. Those YouTubers are not Live.me regulars, and most of what runs on the platform doesn't look designed at all.

Overwhelmingly, what American streamers most like to do is talk to you. There is no shout-rap star on the order of MC Tianyou; even in the talent category, you rarely see anyone with a headset mic singing song after song. What they do like is hawking their own follows and likes, and putting on music while they chat.

It is hard to find look-alike streamers with identical acts on these front pages. The most prominent slots go to people of every race, body type, job and dress sense.

The biggest earners on Live.me are not pretty, sexy women either. Seven of the top ten on the revenue chart are men. The biggest of them has taken in more than 40 million diamonds, over US$100,000.

Watch how they work the room and it isn't hard to see why men with neither looks nor talent do so well.

Brandon is one of many. His profile picture is the middle-aged U.S. Army sergeant you'd see in a film: standard cold-weather camouflage, "U.S. ARMY" over the left chest, the surname "Brandon" over the right.

Brandon streams at least three times a week, but he seldom wears the uniform — off duty it's a T-shirt or a hoodie. He likes to hold a cigar and blow slow smoke rings at the camera. He has two daughters, and once in a while he picks up the younger one, four or five years old, so she can say hi. Most of the time, though, the stream sounds like this:

"If you're not following me, you must be crazy!" "Follow me, guys, follow me right now!" "Hurry up and f***ing share my stream!" "One more! Give me one more!"

Brandon got through all of that three times in under thirty seconds. He can keep it going for ten or fifteen minutes without a break, exactly like the sergeants bawling at recruits in films such as Hacksaw Ridge. Plenty of American soldiers stream on Live.me; scroll the list and you'll turn up several avatars in uniform.

Beyond the trappings of the job, Brandon works raffles and mutual follows to get gifts out of people.

"Send me 30 coins and that's one raffle entry — you can win fireworks. Send 100 coins and you can win a Ferrari."

When a viewer does send a gift, he calls on everyone else to go follow that viewer. "Everybody, please follow xxx." "If you're not following xxx, you're crazy." In half a minute Brandon shouted the gifter's ID five times, to win them followers.

"Male streamers really are more popular on our platform," says He Yandan, who calls this the biggest difference from comparable Chinese platforms. The other difference is that streamers here like to make friends. Following each other is a habit American video creators carried over from the YouTube era, when they routinely followed one another and guested on each other's channels. Now that they stream, they also follow the viewers who send them gifts.

Brandon does. He writes the names of gifting viewers in a notebook on camera and promises to follow them back once the stream ends. He hasn't been at this long and has only just reached 5,301 followers, but this "sincere" approach has already earned him more than 400,000 diamonds, about US$1,400.

That style is common on Live.me.

Most foreign streamers rarely put on a headset and sing to you in earnest. Many, like Brandon, stream by making friends. More often they simply ramble on with whoever is commenting, and some pull in their families and friends to shoot the breeze in a late-night room.

We tracked major livestreaming platforms in China and the United States for two weeks, at midday and late at night. On platforms like Live.me, the content is mostly talk. China's Inke and YY have already split into distinct formats — YY has the wider range — though Chinese streamers' personas are also more stock.

America's two hottest livestreaming apps both come from China

Live.me, the app Brandon and Felicia chose, launched in the U.S. last April. Two months later its download ranking broke into the top 50 of the overall U.S. chart; it now sits around 180. On the App Store revenue chart it is regularly in the top 50, and has passed Boom Beach, the game from Supercell.

The other big one is Live.ly, launched last May, ranking a little lower on both downloads and revenue. Live.ly is also Chinese: its team works out of an old building on Jumen Road in Shanghai's Huangpu district.

They brought over the same kind of interface and the same virtual gifts. Live.ly, though, has more streams built around talent and interaction.

Last Wednesday night, Eric Artell tagged his Live.ly stream #StarWars. At 12:05 a.m. U.S. time, more than 10,000 people were still watching. Artell, a die-hard fan, had set the night's theme: a Star Wars quiz.

Using Live.ly's remote-guest feature, a viewer called Venasa was patched into the room. Artell greeted her at high volume and put the first question: "Who wrote the Star Wars music that's playing right now?"

Venasa was plainly stuck, and her voice wavered. The comments had already produced the answer; the screen filled with John Williams. Artell gave her the BB-10 toy he had set aside anyway.

Eric Artell is an American actor who now lives in Los Angeles. He once voiced Merry in a little-played Lord of the Rings game, and hosted the children's science show DragonflyTV. He started out as a comic — even the commercials he shot for Coca-Cola and Burger King cast him as the goofball.

Since acting never made him big, Artell worked his way through one social platform after another. On YouTube he and a friend made a show, Rolf Review, discussing films, actors and gadgets; several years on it had only a few thousand subscribers. When Vine shut down for good, he posted an RIP picture, mourning the short-video platform where he had made so many friends and colleagues.

Measured against his acting career, Eric Artell is now, by any reasonable standard, famous. Even a late-night game show on Live.ly draws more than 10,000 viewers. When the first Hillary Clinton–Donald Trump debate was streamed on Facebook Live at the end of last year, it peaked at 180,000.

Live.ly's users are concentrated between 13 and 18, which makes Artell, at 36, an elder statesman. But he knows how the place works. There is the Emoji Game, for instance: whoever is fastest to send the emoji matching the word Artell calls out becomes his BFF — which here just means the two accounts follow each other.

Live.ly's features and gifts resemble Live.me's, but everything about it is younger and sillier. The gifts are no longer sports cars and roses but pandas, two cartoon dinosaurs hugging, bursts of hearts. The priciest one costs 328 yuan, far below the 1,000-yuan-plus castle on Live.me.

All of it points back to the teen short-video app behind Live.ly: Musical.ly. That app is the more popular of the two in the U.S.; by July 2015 it had over 70 million users and around 55 million monthly actives. Most Live.ly streamers today are Musical.ly users.

Artell was an early one, with 463 short videos on the platform, mostly role-play and comedy bits. Like him, most of Live.ly's popular streamers came over from Musical.ly, where they had recorded hundreds or thousands of 15-second clips and built sizable followings.

Many livestream stars started out in short video

Unlike Live.me, Live.ly draws its traffic from the short-video app behind it. Nearly every active Live.ly user also makes videos on Musical.ly.

Musical.ly launched in China and the U.S. at the same time, in July 2014. It lets you pick a track from a library and record 15 seconds against it — lip-sync, dance, whatever you can think of. It tests your imagination, but recording is easy. Biz Carson of the American tech site Business Insider put it this way: unless you spend time among teenagers, you may not know the app exists; but if there's a high-schooler in the house, you have probably served as background scenery in one of their 15-second lip-sync videos.

From the early days of YouTube to Musical.ly now, a user with a distinct personality and a knack for rallying people can still become a star from nowhere. Justin Bieber got his start covering R&B songs on YouTube, caught Usher's attention and debuted after signing with Island Records.

Getting famous on YouTube that way is much harder today. Large institutional accounts moved in and took the traffic that once went to amateurs. Every one of YouTube's ten most-watched videos in 2015 and 2016 was an officially produced celebrity music video. Against production of that quality, an unknown has little chance of reaching the front page.

Musical.ly has taken over that role. Some of its users were once popular on Vine and YouTube, but what it draws in bulk are ordinary young people.

It became a place that turns unknowns into stars and gathers teenagers in one spot.

Ariel Martin, an ordinary 15-year-old in middle school, is one of the enormous stars Musical.ly produced. She has 18.5 million followers there under the handle @BabyAriel.

"Going viral was a complete accident," Martin says. Over the summer of 2015, her family's home in Florida flooded and everyone had to move in with her grandparents. In that aimless summer she made her first lip-sync video on Musical.ly, choosing a passage by the American rapper Nicki Minaj, probably for the line that keeps coming back:

I - I - I'm the shit With no make up Don't have to curl my hair up All this booty here mine

In the video Martin wears no makeup, her curly blonde hair down, in a white turtleneck. After a handful of posts her following took off; within three months she had 2 million.

Across the 1,000-plus clips she has recorded, the most frequent backdrop is the purple floral bedsheet in her bedroom. Martin says each 15-second video takes her two to three hours to prepare: picking the music, learning the words, working out the expressions and the moves, doing her makeup. "I'll record it a lot of times, until I get the one I think is good."

Long blonde hair, big eyes, very long painted nails, a wide toothy smile, exaggerated expressions — that is more or less her signature. Most of the time the 15-year-old looks well beyond her years, and her hairstyle, lipstick, hair color and earrings all become talking points in the comments.

Once she was popular, Baby Ariel joined Musical.ly's star-making program. The company ran outdoor tours in 20 American cities, bringing its influencers offline to perform for ticket buyers. On the back of Musical.ly, Martin's YouTube channel pulled in 2 million subscribers and she taped an appearance on Good Morning America, moving from platform celebrity toward the mainstream.

Lip-sync apps existed before Musical.ly took off — Xiaokaxiu in China, and abroad the German-built Dubsmash, which caught on among celebrities. Beyond copying the fun part, Musical.ly put far more work into running its community. One of its themes, "Don't Judge Me," became an internet-wide craze: a user makes herself look hideous on camera, then waves a hand and returns to her real face, the point being don't judge me by my looks.

The download curves for Musical.ly and Live.ly swing hard with the week: downloads surge on Saturday and Sunday and drop straight back on Monday. Behind that is a team that works its community hard.

Musical.ly's active users like to call themselves Musers, and most are 15 or 16. On weekends they put on T-shirts with the Musical.ly logo and turn up at meetups arranged on no fixed schedule. Stars like Martin come too, meeting fans on the official tours. Those events are streamed live on Live.ly and parked in the most prominent slot.

What the Chinese companies brought over includes, of course, padded numbers

The first time we streamed on Live.me, we had 80 followers within five minutes. The stream showed nothing at all — a black screen — and the viewers stayed anyway.

Live.ly has fewer "users" with an appetite for black screens, but it is not short of followers either. Register and they arrive on their own, even if you never post a video. Their profile pages are identical: no bio, no work of any kind.

It all feels very familiar from Chinese livestreaming platforms.

As for making money, tipping with virtual gifts, the model of Chinese performance streaming, offers one route. Most Chinese performance streams look like one another, yet companies have made money at it anyway; YY, the first to try, went public.

Momo, in its earnings reports, calls livestreaming and short video "the biggest engine of continued revenue and profit growth."

Now they have gone to America.

The livestreaming revolution Silicon Valley imagined never arrived. A way to kill time did

As in China, livestreaming is nothing new in the United States.

Twitch, built on game streaming, is six years old and sold to Amazon for US$1 billion in 2014. But Twitch lives mostly on the PC.

The American mobile livestreaming war started in 2015. Meerkat caught fire at that year's South by Southwest, and within months Periscope, incubated by Twitter, took the attention away.

These apps all aimed to get everyone involved, showing other people whatever they were living through. The press naturally liked that sense of being there. Jimmy Fallon used it to stream rehearsals for his late-night show. The hosts of the American morning news and talk program Today used it to walk viewers backstage.

It did not go the way Silicon Valley founders and the media imagined. Meerkat has already been written off, and Periscope is frighteningly empty.

Owen Benjamin is an independent musician who has played piano shows around the U.S. for years and has 635,000 Twitter followers, yet his piano-and-vocal streams on Periscope top out somewhere between one and two thousand viewers. An ordinary user's stream there draws about 50 people — Periscope never learned to pad the numbers.

The big difference between Live.me, Live.ly and all of these is that they are not trying to get everyone involved. They go after professional streamers and give them a way to earn.

The largest company to bet on livestreaming and miss is Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg's social network now has 1.9 billion users worldwide. At Facebook's developer conference a year ago, Zuckerberg launched Facebook Live, and offered an example from his own viewing:

"I saw a mom on the livestream platform skiing down a snowy mountain with her child, and the scene was mesmerizing. I stared at the screen for several minutes, because I was curious whether that child would fall the next second." At launch, Zuckerberg imagined it as a place where family members share their lives and record what is real.

In June 2016, Facebook signed up more than a hundred partners — mainstream media companies including CNN, the New York Times, Vox and Tastemade, plus more than a dozen celebrities — to make live programming. Livestreaming was also dressed up as a weapon in political combat: Hillary Clinton's team used Facebook for a four-hour stream reading out the 5,500 lawsuits involving Donald Trump.

In July 2016, a Black man in Minnesota was shot dead by police at a traffic stop, and his fiancée, Diamond Reynolds, sitting beside him, streamed the shooting and his death on Facebook Live.

Livestreaming put the clash between police and Black Americans straight in front of the camera, with no newsroom deciding whether the footage was fit to air. For a while, the argument ran over whether Facebook Live would change how news travels.

But livestreaming for everyone never took hold. What made Facebook Live famous was the big stories.

In mid-April this year, a middle-aged man uploaded to Facebook Live a video of himself shooting and killing a man in his eighties. The footage stayed up for two hours before it was taken down.

Every time blood appears on screen, Facebook Live gets a wave of attention. Across its first year, every spike in searches for it lines up with an act of violence:

And every time the jolt passed, the attention went with it. None of the shocks made it part of daily life.

By this April's developer conference, Zuckerberg had gone cool on livestreaming, saying only that the company would work on filtering out unacceptable content.

From small startups to Twitter to Facebook, Silicon Valley's attempt to use live video to change the news and the way people pass information around did not work. What caught on in the end is what caught on in China: boredom beating boredom.

Cover image from Sorority Move

Fangyu Li also contributed to this article.