CHART: Chinese short video hit one billion users for the first time in 2022

The number of short video users in China exceeded one billion for the first time as of December 2022, and the user utilization rate grew to be as high as 94.8%, according to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).

The scale of short video users continues to grow, as it becomes the main source of mobile internet time and traffic. Users grew from 648 million to 1.012 billion from 2018 through 2022, with annual new users reaching over 60 million and hitting as high as 100 million new users in 2020 driven by multiple factors such as the epidemic situation, technology, and platform development strategies.

At the same time, the user utilization rate increased from 78.2% to 94.8%, an increase of 16.6 percentage points, and the gap with the utilization rate of the largest Internet application (instant messaging) narrowed from 17.4% to 2.4%.

This number infers that about 70% of the 1.4 billion population in China according to United Nations data have adopted the increasingly growing short video trend. This number continues to climb as short videos gradually penetrate into the entire life scene of netizens including live broadcasting, e-commerce, education, tourism and other industries.

This Techloy chart below shows the market size of online videos in China, based on data from Statista.