Short videos, livestreaming help boost poverty alleviation

Short videos and livestreaming applications are playing an increasingly important role in helping users in poverty-stricken areas to gain extra income by creating social e-commerce businesses and bolstering local economies as the country aims to eliminate poverty by the end of 2020.

Su Hua, founder and CEO of Kuaishou, said more than 19 million people earned income through livestreaming videos, e-commerce, knowledge payment and advertisement on Kuaishou this year.

This included over 5 million people from national-level poverty-stricken counties, the CEO said.

Empowering residents from the most underprivileged regions in China, the company has launched a series of rural entrepreneurship incubation programs that educate participants on how to set up and run businesses, as well as help rural residents sell locally made products.

According to Kuaishou, the company has helped its users from impoverished rural areas in China generate $2.8 billion in revenue in 2018.

Jiang Jinchun is a Kuaishou user who preferred recording and uploading videos about local specialties and gourmet items from his hometown in Hengfeng county, Jiangxi province. In 2018, he sold more 1,000 kilograms of tea and arrowroot powder, and helped 200 rural households increase their incomes.

Song Tingting, vice-president of Kuaishou, said the company has made substantial efforts in poverty alleviation, including providing data flows whose value could reach 500 million yuan ($71.4 million) for online content creators that sell high-quality agricultural products in poverty-stricken counties.

Song added that the number of short videos from poverty-hit counties uploaded to Kuaishou has so far surpassed 1.1 billion.

In addition, Kuaishou has cooperated with third-party e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and Tmall, both of which are run by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, mobile e-commerce platform Youzan, which is backed by Tencent Holdings Ltd, JD and online discounter Pinduoduo Inc.

So far, the company has more than 200 million daily active users and over 400 million monthly active users, with more than 200 million content creators recording and sharing their videos on the platform last year.

Short videos are seeing explosive growth in China. The revenue of the short video industry reached 14.01 billion yuan in 2018, up a blistering 520.7 percent year-on-year, and the figure is expected to surpass 55 billion yuan in 2020, said market research company iResearch.

Founded in 2011, Kuaishou allows users to upload short videos of 10 seconds to a few minutes each, with the content ranging from cooking to physical exercise, dancing and family gatherings.

Official figures showed that China's poverty relief achievements have contributed more than 70 percent to global poverty alleviation work in the past 40 years. The China aims to eradicate poverty by 2020, amid its drive to finish building a moderately prosperous society in all aspects.

"The method of publicizing products through short video platforms can greatly solve the lagging sales of agricultural products caused by a lack of resources and channels," said Zhang Xintian, an analyst from iResearch.

Users could learn about high-quality agricultural products through short videos, and further improve their awareness of rural life, Zhang explained.

Zhang added that cooperation between short video and e-commerce platforms is an explosive commercial model as the former can drive online traffic to the latter. Short video platforms could build their own e-commerce platforms and logistics infrastructure in the future, he said.