We all know that, sooner or later, the rising post-00s generation, kids born from 2000 to 2009, will eventually replace the older generations as the dominating force of internet. But the change seems to be coming upon us faster than expected.
During Asia Beat held on March 18, Wu Xinhong, founder and CEO of China’s leading photo app developer Meitu, shared a set of interesting data, giving us a peek into how this trend completely changed their the face of their company.
“In 2015, we noticed that China’s post-00s gen are surprisingly active on social networks. Their active degree on Meipai, a video editing app developed by Meitu, is three times that of the post-90s gen and five times that of the post-80s gen. It’s beyond our capacity to amass data from all companies in this sector, but this data alone is enough to underline the imminent exploration of the post-00 user group.”
Booming Post-90s, Post-00s User Demand
In 2007, Meitu team developed a Mars Pinyin Input Method, which converts words and sentences into novelty tags. The service only took them three days to develop, but it brought over 40 million users, according to the company. The startup found that over 80% of the new users are post-90s youth who love to talk via QQ, group chat and QQ Zone.
“We found the post-90s users have passions for pursuing individuality. The Mars Input Method satisfied their needs for celebrating individuality, but there’s still another demand that remained untapped back then: photos”. Wu pointed out that keywords like “unorthodox photos” have high search rates, but the market is still vacant. Meitu launched MeituPic in 2008, and saw a quick spurt in followers, claiming to now have over 500 million users worldwide.
In 2015 we witnessed a boom in demand from the post-00 generation users, which will in turn bring a new opportunity for startups. This time the media has evolved to fast-steaming video, while the competition among photo editing apps has reached a feverish pitch.
The wide application of mobile broadband also set up a groundwork for the spread of video services, Wu noted. To tap this trend, Meitu launched their home-grown video editing app Meipai. Over the past year, video-related services have been a hot spot for both PC and mobile terminals, attracting the attention of users and capital.
This article is part of Technode’s coverage of Asia Beat, where Technode was a media and organizational partner. Translated from TechNode China.