China’s Generation Z is hooked on these short video apps

Short-form video apps have been around since early this decade in China, but their popularity has exploded the past three years on the back of a growing new segment of consumers known as Generation Z.

This post-millennial demographic group, which researchers have defined as people born from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, have grown up using the internet from a young age and become savvy with streaming video on their smartphones.

“The rise of the short form video is in line with the content consumption behaviour of China’s mobile-driven internet users. As their time has become more fragmented, they long for something short, but contain enough entertaining information,” said consulting firm iiMedia Research in a recent report.

It estimated viewers of short-form videos, which are clips less than 20 minutes in length, reached 242 million in China last year. That number was forecast to hit 353 million – more than the size of the US population – by the end of this year.

China’s three largest internet companies – Baidu, Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group Holding, which owns the South China Morning Post – are all competing in the short video market against smaller, but fast-growing players like Beijing ByteDance Technology.

Celebrities on the mainland use short videos to engage with their fans, while many Gen Z consumers had adopted the format as a way to express themselves.