Five Friday Facts #84
News
News
K-Pop YouTube views tripled thanks to ‘Gangnam Style’
According to a recent article by Mashable, K-Pop videos have become highly popular in the past year due to the staggering success of Psy’s video for “Gangnam Style”. YouTube announced that views of videos from Korean artists have tripled since last July, when Psy’s record-breaking video emerged on the video sharing platform. YouTube compiled data supporting this fact, as indicated by the sharp spike in K-pop video views indicated in the graph below. These views increase again, when Psy launched “Gentleman” a follow-up video earlier this year. “Gangnam Style” is the most-viewed YouTube video of all time, with over 1.7 billion views. “Gentleman” has seen incredible success as well, having accrued 483 million views in just over 3 months since its launch. YouTube notes that the year prior to ‘Gangnam Style’, K-pop videos had a viewership of 2.2 billion worldwide; in the year after the video’s launch, this number surged to 7 billion. The platform also notes that a majority of views prior to ‘Gangnam Style’ came from Asia Pacific. In the past year, however, 91% of the views came from outside of the region. Mashable notes that US views in particular had doubled in the year after “Gangnam Style” was released.
30M users, 300M subscriptions on KakaoTalk Games
Korean chat app KakaoTalk has seen considerable success on its gaming offshoot, KakaoTalk Games. The platform has grown to 30 million users and 300 million accumulated subscriptions in its first year since it launched. TechInAsia notes that this feat is particularly impressive given that it only offered ten games when it was introduced last year. The company reported that this increase in users is accompanied by a whopping increase of 194% in accumulated sales on the gaming platform.
6% of US netizens are on Reddit; mostly young males
TheNextWeb recently reported on the demographic breakdown of Reddit users in the US. Based on a study by the Pew Research Center, the findings indicated that 6 percent of the total internet population were active users on the social link sharing platform. TheNextWeb notes that the failure of its main competitor, Digg, is a factor that led to the rapid growth of Reddit. While the 6 percent is an overall internet user rate, it is interesting to note that 15 percent of male internet users in the 18-29 age bracket frequented the site. By contrast, female users in the same age bracket only came to 5 percent, and men aged 30-49 were at 8 percent.
300M Enterprise Accounts on Sina Weibo
As Sina Weibo users continue to increase, brands are quickly taking to establishing their own presence on the microblogging platform. According to China Internet Watch, Sina Weibo had roughly 300 million Enterprise accounts in 2012. The platform itself has users accessing Weibo from multiple sources; desktop users hit 285 million, while mobile app users were at 88 million in March 2013. According to Sina, the top five brand categories for Enterprise accounts were online shopping, entertainment, consumer electronics, catering food and clothing. It is interesting to note that online shopping comes out on top with a significant margin of 6.4% in terms of most followed Enterprise Weibo Accounts. Receiving promotional information constituted the strongest reason for following Enterprise accounts, with nearly a quarter of the respondents agreeing that this was a factor (23.9%).
China Now Has 591M netizens, 460M on mobile web
According to a recent article by TechInAsia, internet users in China has grown to consist of 591 million users and 460 million mobile web users Based on new data from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), the findings illustrate considerable growth in the past three years, from the 420 million internet users reported in mid-2010. The number of mobile web users in particular has doubled since December 2009. TechInAsia notes that the increasing popularity of mobile web is related to the high penetration rate of mobile phones, with more than 1.1 billion subscriptions “at last count” and 300 million users with 3G. Mobile web is especially promising, given the fact that over 70 percent of new netizens accessed the internet via mobile phones in the first half of 2013.–roughly twice as much as new users who access the web through desktop PCs (35.4%).
