Entertainment Market of the USA During the COVID-19 Outbreak
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As of June 15, the number of COVID-19 confirmed cases in the United States had exceeded 2.18 million and more than 20,000 cases were added each day. The pandemic has accelerated the boom in the online entertainment market. Below App Growing Global analyzes entertainment mobile market with advertising data.
The COVID-19 outbreak has worsened sharply in the USA since the end of March and there is no clear trend for improvement. The number of entertainment ads doubled in April from March, remained unchanged in May and expected to be flat in June.
1–1. The Market of Live-streaming Apps
Twitch, the largest overseas gaming live-streaming platform acquired by Amazon, has a long-standing position in the USA entertainment category Top 5 in the App Store, with a conservative advertising strategy. As of June 15, only 172 ads had been placed in the first half of the year, according to App Growing Global.
During the pandemic, Bigo Live and Uplive, live-streaming platforms from Chinese developers, quickly stepped up their efforts to seize the USA market. Bigo Live ran 8186 ads from April 1 to June 15, compared with 5384 by Uplive, both of which were added at the end of March when the COVID-19 in the USA began to worsen. Product attributes of Uplive are similar to Bigo Live’s. To avoid a head-to-head confrontation with Twitch, their live content is not just about the game, but a broader content and female anchors.
1–2. The Market of Video Content Apps
There was a huge demand for TV and movie streaming media and users were willing to pay for subscriptions during the pandemic. These long-video content apps are largely dominated by local developers, with premium content standing firm in the industry. There are head developers such as Hulu, Netflix, Disney+, and HBO. And Tiktok quickly breaks into the blank space of short video, whose monetizing way is not traditional video ads or subscriptions, but stream advertising with better conversion effect.
Bigo’s another short video app — Likee also began advertising in the USA in March to catch up with the market. Kaishou’s Zynn was published at the beginning of May and quickly rocketed to the top of the download charts, but it had been removed from Google’s Play Store following accusations of plagiarism. How to legally disseminate local regulations and localize operations is a major challenge for short video publishing.
1–3. The Market of Dating Apps
Dating is not about getting married in the USA. Dating apps are highly accepted in the USA, with more and more users who will use several dating apps at the same time.
In addition to Tinder, which has a large market share and try to meet all types of dating needs, and POF Dating — an adult dating app, the market is constantly emerging with new hot dating apps, like Blued&Taimi — gay dating apps; OkCupid — focus on long and serious relationships; Bumble — a woman-friendly app; HOLLA — attracting and matching people through video contents and etc,. Dating apps are in full bloom in the USA.
With a high demand for video chat during the pandemic, some apps’ advertising materials apply video online dating as an entry point, such as Bumble — “Stay social while you distance” and HOLLA — “No More Swipe! Let’s Video Chat On HOLLA Now!”
Entertainment apps maintain their original tone while gradually expanding or integrating social, video and live-streaming boundaries in order to better retain users and achieve longer-term and healthy monetizing.
The report includes App Store’s entertainment, social, images and video categories, based on the number of advertisements from App Growing Global as a measure of ad performance. The number of advertisements is not exactly equal to their actual ad consumption and is for reference only.
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