Hong Kong star Jackie Chan attracts 130 million on Kuaishou as Chinese platforms deploy celebrity live-streams to lure users

Chan’s debut live-stream session on the platform on Saturday lasted three hours and garnered 320 million likes
Chan, Backstreet Boys, Jay Chou and Andy Lau are among the celebrities Kuaishou, Douyin and WeChat’s Channels platform are using to attract users

China technology

Iris Dengin Shenzhen

Published: 6:00pm, 27 Jun, 2022

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Hong Kong martial arts legend Jackie Chan’s debut live-stream session on Kuaishou, a short-video platform in China, attracted over 130 million users as the country’s video apps deploy star power to gain users amid fierce competition.

The action movie star’s live-stream session on Saturday evening lasted nearly three hours, drawing 130 million users at its peak, 220 million views as well as 320 million “likes”, according to Kuaishou. Celebrities including actor Nicholas Tse and C-pop star Huang Zitao joined Chan in the studio, where he talked about his life story and performed songs.

Chan joined Kuaishou with an official account last October, and has garnered 57.5 million followers as of Monday. Among the 23 short videos he has posted on Kuaishou so far, Chan has received over 1 million likes for each video, with the most popular one being his first video announcing his arrival on the platform, which had 11.9 million likes and nearly 1 million comments.

TikTok’s Chinese version Douyin leads among the short-video platforms, with more than 600 million daily active users in 2021. Hong Kong-listed Kuaishou reported 345.5 million daily active users in the first quarter of 2022, up from 295.3 million from a year earlier.

A screen capture of Jackie Chan’s debut live-stream session on Kuaishou Saturday June 25, 2022, which attracted more than 130 million viewers at its peak. Photo: Weibo

Also engaged in the fierce competition is Tencent Holdings’ super-app WeChat, which recently featured a series of successful concerts by pop stars to promote its video function, Channels. On Friday night, an online concert by the Backstreet Boys, a US pop band hugely popular in China in the 1990s and 2000s, drew more than 44 million viewers on Channels. Banking on WeChat’s user base of 1.29 billion, Tencent has given Channels prominent visibility on the app, leading to rapid growth in user numbers.

Douyin finds favour with celebrities thanks to its popularity among young people, and it has also managed to sign up some of the biggest stars, including Hong Kong singer and actor Andy Lau, who has over 69 million followers.

For its part, Kuaishou managed to lure Mandopop superstar Jay Chou exclusively onto its platform in 2020. Chou’s Kuaishou account now has 31 million followers.

Both Kuaishou and Tencent’s Channels platform, part of the WeChat super-app, have used content from Pop star Jay Chou to rope in users. Photo: @jaychou/Instagram

However, thanks to the resources of Tencent’s music arm, WeChat has also been able to leverage Chou’s music content on Channels. Two Chou concerts broadcast on Channels last month had 47 million and 25 million viewers, respectively, according to Tencent.

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