1
C H A P T E R 1
Introduction
1.1 MICRO-VIDEO PROLIFERATION
Traditional long video sharing platforms, like Youtube
1
and Youku,
2
were very successful before
2010. ey encourage professionals to capture and upload high-quality long videos online, and
while also allowing ordinary users to consume long video contents. After 2010, however, we are
indeed living in a new era of ever-dwindling attention span and are hungry for the quick content,
e.g., tweets and micro-blogs instead of the complicated documents. In such a climate, the way
that the Internet users digest videos also had a dramatic shift. Not unnaturally, the bite-sized
videos embracing the philosophy of “shorter is better,” are becoming popular with the rise of
some services, like Vine,
3
Snapchat,
4
Viddy,
5
and MixBit,
6
which limit their video lengths up
to 6, 10, 15, and 16 s, respectively. As a result, we have dubbed such short videos “micro-videos.”
In Table 1.1, we summarize some mainstream micro-video services and their statistical data.
Formally, micro-videos are defined as videos that are usually captured by ordinary users via
mobile devices to record a few seconds of their daily lives to share over social media platforms.
e properties of easy-to-operate, instant sharing, down-to-the-earth content make micro-
video services unexpectedly popular, especially among the grassroots. Considering Kuaishou as
an example, as of January 2019, it had reached 190 million active users and 10 million uploaded
micro-videos daily, and each active online user usually spends up to 1 h to share, search, and view
their interested micro-videos on Kuaishou. Figure 1.1 demonstrates one Kuaishou micro-video
example.
As micro-videos have surged in recent years, micro-video platforms have become success-
ful online communities that penetrate many aspects of society. First, it largely enriches people’s
life by providing valuable chances for people to share their life, encounter different people, and
make friends. Second, it facilitates the spread of traditional culture. In the TikTok platform, an
app owning more than 500 million active users globally as of June 2018, the top culture categories
are calligraphy and painting, traditional crafts, and opera. For one opera-related competition,
1
https://www.youtube.com/
2
https://www.youku.com/
3
https://vine.com/
4
https://www.snapchat.com/
5
http://www.fullscreen.com/
6
https://mixbit.com/home
2 1. INTRODUCTION
Table 1.1: Examples of the current popular micro-video platforms
Platforms Kuaishou
7
Huoshan
8
Instagram
9
Snapchat TikTok
10
Monthly Active
Users (million)
321
(2019.1)
47
(2017.9)
330
(2018.8)
300
(2018.9)
500
(2018.6)
Duration (s) 11 or 57 15 3–60 10 15
Date of
Establishment
2011.7 2016.4 2010.10 2009.4 2017.5
Minutes Users
Spend Online on
Average
60
(2019.1)
59
(2017.9)
53
(2018.8)
40
(2018.9)
52
(2018.6)
Figure 1.1: Illustration of a micro-video example selected from the Kuaishou App.
7
www.kuaishou.com
8
www.huoshanzhibo.com
9
www.instagram.com
10
www.tiktok.com
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