Quest Mobile regularly publishes statistics on internet usage/consumption in China. For instance, July last year they revealed that mobile internet users in China started to decline.

It jus published some statistics about the internet usage during this year’s prolonger Lunar New Year holidays. The total amount of hours spent on the internet reached 6.1 billions on the first day of work (after the government extended the holidays by 3 days).

That means, on average, each person spent about 6 hours per day online:

Total number of hours

Also interestingly, for the first time that short video (dark grey in the graph below) has overtaken news (blue in the graph below) as the second biggest category in terms of screen time.

The first place still belongs to social (yellow in the graph below) – basically meaning Tencent’s WeChat & QQ. Their share of screen time is declining, but in a very slow pace.

Percentage of time by genre

ByteDance took over a film, which could not show on cinemas because of the crisis caused by the virus, for $630m and showed it for free on its video platforms. Perhaps that also contributed to the growth of screen time of that category.

It is generally expected that content apps would benefit from the coronavirus outbreak, which forced a lot of people to be stuck at home.

However, many other businesses, including many transaction-focused startups that were already struggling with cashflows prior to the crisis, might not fare so well.

Maybe there is an opportunity there to kill of some of the zombies and leave room for more creative companies to grow.

Thanks for reading The Low Down (TLD), the blog by the team at Momentum Works. Got a different perspective or have a burning opinion to share? Let us know at [email protected].