Yang Yang, a 22-year-old Chinese corn farmer, spends two to three hours per day streaming video of life in his cliffside village to smartphones across China. He spends lots of time clinging to a cliffside ladder, one hand on his selfie stick, while he banters with fans about village life.

It’s hardly riveting television, but in China it has an audience: In just two months, Yang has managed to earn more than 1 million views and 45,000 regular followers on Kuaishou, an online video app favored by the 73 percent of Chinese who live in small cities and villages.

That’s a lot of people. Kuaishou claims it has 700 million registered users who upload 10 million videos per day. But rather than being celebrated for its focus on China’s economically and culturally marginalized majority, Kuaishou has been derided by China’s educated urban elite.

That’s a mistake. China’s countryside is growing faster than its big cities and the economic gap between urban and rural is narrowing. If China’s intellectuals don’t respect that fact, its investors certainly do. In recent weeks, Chinese media reported rumors that Beijing Kuaishou Technology Co. Ltd, Kuaishou’s developer, is seeking new funding at an estimated valuation of $15 billion, which would make it one of the world’s more valuable startups.

Kuaishou is the unlikeliest of Chinese internet success stories. Founded in 2011 as a photo app, the company pivoted to becoming a video sharing platform in 2013. It was good timing. Chinese smartphone owners were starting to make -- and watch -- millions of videos and livestreams per year, often to lucrative effect. In 2016, revenues for the sector exceeded $9 billion, up 43.4 percent from 2015. The most successful of these videos and streams combine the power of Chinese social media with snappy, humorous filmmaking often focused on celebrity, fashion and urban life. Luxury advertisers, in particular, are keen to reach young and affluent people attracted by this programming. And young, affluent Chinese are keen to post their own videos to enjoy a bit of glamour-by-association.

But that’s not a description of the typical Kuaishou enthusiast. According to one analysis, 70 percent of Kuaishou’s users earn less than $460 per month, 88 percent haven’t attended university, and a majority live in less developed parts of China. Kuaishou has managed to attract them by forgoing celebrity videos and promoted content in favor of algorithms that recommend items that other users like. It’s an approach that leaves users with the impression (if not the reality) that their videos have a fighting chance to be viewed. And that attracts users who know they’d be wasting their time posting content to sites focused on fashion, luxury and city life.

The approach boosts content quite unlike the displays of aspirational opulence featured on other Chinese video sites. Indeed, the platform is best known for videos that, in the words of one anthropologist, emphasize “crude humor” that “reflects the lower socioeconomic backgrounds of the app’s subscribers.”

The most popular of these wouldn’t be out of place on “Jackass,” the American reality show. There are short clips of men shoving firecrackers down their pants, and an infamous set of videos in which a 45-year-old mother eats lightbulbs, a cactus and mealworms. There’s weightier stuff, too, like a harsh kind of protest rap focused on discrimination against China’s less fortunate (especially when it comes to dating), and videos that highlight rarely aired negative social phenomena like teenage pregnancy. Crudity, in this sense, is just reality for most Chinese -- and the primary reason that Kuaishou has been so successful.

Indeed, even as other video platforms see their growth stunted by Chinese government oversight and brutal competition, Kuaishou expands. Today it’s the fourth-largest social media platform in China, behind WeChat, QQ and Sina Weibo.

That’s why it’s a smart bet for investors like Tencent Holdings Ltd, which pumped in $350 million in March 2017. China’s smaller cities already produce 59 percent of China’s gross domestic product and retain significant commercial and cultural pull.

China’s big-city skylines may get most of the attention, but government-led investment drives focused on China’s countryside and smaller cities ensure that neglected demographic groups will exert increasing influence on China’s economic and cultural future. Kuaishou, having established itself as the platform for China’s overlooked majority, is poised to become the voice of that affluent future.


By Adam Minter

Adam Minter is a Bloomberg View columnist. -- Ed.


(Bloomberg)