Livestreaming is back!

In the final episode on our series about creator economies, David Pierce is joined by producer Hadley Robinson to explore the world of livestreaming and its recent popularity across every social platform. Livestreaming is certainly not a new thing though, so why does it seem to be having a moment? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:48David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of StreamSnipers. I'm your friend David Pierce, and this is the third episode of our mini-series, "Looking at the Business of Being a Creator." I want to start this episode by telling you about a new nightly routine that I've developed. TikTok has been the app that I look at right before bed for a long time now. I really don't recommend this, by the way. It's really aggressively too easy for just a quick TikTok scroll to turn into like, two hours of watching and me suddenly getting too little sleep for no good reason. But I do it anyway. And recently, the thing I've found myself doing a lot is watching live streams. They show up right in the For You feed in TikTok, and for a long time, I would just skip past them. But

• 1:30David Pierce?

  recently, for whatever reason, I've found myself diving in more and more. And let me tell you, friends, TikTok Live is a weird, weird place. Last night, for instance, I watched a live that was just a girl standing on a beach, talking about how she was going to go in the water, but not actually going in the water, for so long that all of the viewers ended up getting annoyed by her and this entire process. And yet, there were like, 18,000 of us watching.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  It's friggin' storming out here, guys. It's storming out here, and I just...

• 2:01David Pierce?

  Oh, and the best part is I'm pretty sure, like 98% sure, that the live was actually just a replay of a different live from a few days ago, which some of the viewers said they had already seen. It was insane. I also took some notes on other lives that I've found over the last few weeks. There was the one that was just a long shot of a pier with waves crashing over it as the guy pointing the camera told us it was about to be destroyed.

• 2:26Speaker 03

  Here cam video from tomorrow will be interesting for sure. You're right, Taylor.

• 2:29David Pierce?

  As far as I can tell, never was. Watched it for a long time anyway. There was one where a truck driver had mounted his phone to his windshield, so I was just watching the view of the road as he drove. I watched that one for a long time instead of sleeping, for some reason. There was another one that was just two students in anatomy class, streaming themselves eating gummy candy and blatantly not paying attention in anatomy class.

• 2:57David Pierce?

  There was one that was one of those quarter machines in a casino where you put in a quarter and try to knock a bunch of other quarters off the ledge. That one is a staple of TikTok Live. You find them everywhere.

• 3:07Speaker 04

  We got 100 bucks right here and 50 bucks right there.

• 3:10David Pierce?

  So is the interactive sleep stream, where the creator is just asleep and viewers can give gifts or send messages to play certain songs or make stuff happen to try to wake them up.

• 3:20Speaker 05

  Viewers join my livestream and minions wake me up.

• 3:25David Pierce?

  But my favorite one so far, I think, was a still shot from one of those huge car crushing machines in a junkyard. I spent like a full hour watching this machine pick up cars, move them over, drop them in the crusher, crush them, and move on. It was awesome. And then, over and over and over in my feed, over weeks at a time, I kept seeing this one guy.

• 3:51David Pierce?

  His screen name is the Six Shooter with the number 6 instead of the first S, and it seems like almost every night he does the same livestream. It's just him in a small gym with a few basketballs, a hoop, and a rebounding machine, and he spends a couple of hours sometimes trying to make 50 3-pointers in a row.

• 4:10David Pierce?

  I found myself watching this stream night after night for hours with hundreds or thousands of other people. We all cheer when he gets close to 50. We groan when he misses. Someone is always counting in the chat. And if I'm being honest, sometimes we all just collectively root for him to miss. It's both kind of boring, if I'm being honest, but also totally enthralling. And Seth McCoy, who is the six shooter himself, told me, I'm not the only one who feels that way.

• 4:37Speaker 06

  There's people in my comments that say, I don't even like watching basketball. This is just therapeutic. So it's like a, I forget what the word is, but like ASMR type stuff.

• 4:46David Pierce?

  Okay, let's back up quickly. Seth is a basketball player and a good one, but he only started turning shooting into content over the last couple of years.

• 4:55Speaker 06

  During COVID was when it all kind of started picking up. We're all at home. We're not doing anything. I'm bored out of my mind. And my brother walks in after seeing a lethal shooter video. And lethal shooter is kind of somebody that I look up to and I'm seeing what he's doing. And I want to do stuff like that because I think I have the same types of skill. And, uh, and he's like, Seth, why aren't you doing this? And I'm like, I'm like, what do you, what do you mean? He's like, dude, dude, he's like, you're better than lethal shooter. Like you need, you need to be doing what, what he's doing. That day we made my Instagram account.

• 5:29David Pierce?

  At first Seth tried to do trick shoddy stuff, which is another staple of live platforms everywhere. He was shooting threes with shoes on his hands or trying to make shots with tennis balls instead of basketballs. He was also posting highlights of his own games and all that was doing fine. Not great, but fine. But early on, he had this one goal. He didn't really know what he was doing, but he wanted to get enough followers to go live.

• 5:52Speaker 06

  The goal with, with lives is you have to get to a thousand followers. I didn't know what I'd do. I didn't know if I'd just sit there and talk. I didn't know what I'd do on lives. I had no plan. I just knew, okay, a thousand followers means I get to go live. And I think with me, with the personality that I have, I thought, okay, well, if I get to go live, people will understand who I am as a person, understand what I'm doing it for, rather than my videos. Cause my videos, I'm just trying to get attention. My lives, I can build a community.

• 6:22David Pierce?

  Early on, he tried the sit in front of the camera and talk thing, and that also went okay. But talking into a camera when nobody can talk back, and even the chat is kind of delayed from what you're talking about, is just awkward. And as Seth kept telling me, this community feeling of the whole thing was the whole point that he was after.

• 6:42Speaker 06

  When I was younger, I told myself, like, I would try to reach out to the bigger pages, and I would never get a response. And I told myself, if I ever had a platform, I would use it to inspire. I want to inspire the younger generation to love basketball as much as I do.

• 6:55David Pierce?

  So Seth, not really knowing exactly how any of this should work, kept going live. And he eventually started streaming some of his own basketball workouts. And he had this goal, not so much for content, but just for himself. He wanted to hit more than 105 3-pointers in a row. Why 105? Because there was this super viral video of Steph Curry hitting 105 in a row.

• 7:18David Pierce?

  And so Seth, of course, was like, "Well, maybe I can beat that." And he became obsessed with trying. And he started streaming all of his attempts live. Oh, and about the same time, he also figured out a crucial way to make his live streams work.

• 7:32Speaker 06

  One thing I figured out is lives that are horizontal do horrible. So I had to flip it to normal. If you're scrolling, that's the normal view that you see. And I did that, and I started shooting.

• 7:45David Pierce?

  That's when things really took off. Seth started calling his lives things like making 50 in a row, and people started showing up.

• 7:54David Pierce?

  One night, I joined him. He had 3,400 people watching. And he told me he's getting more than a million viewers a week on his lives at this point. But the question, then, for him, and really for anyone making stuff like this, is so what? Seth has this audience. People like watching him. And he thinks there's a business here. But one thing he's been trying to figure out is how exactly to monetize the streams himself. Live is different from a lot of the ways people make and monetize content, and it's a little messier. One way people have found is just to basically ask viewers to give you stuff. There's things like SuperThanks and Super Chat on YouTube, and you can ask for tips on certain platforms. And on TikTok, there's gifts.

• 8:35Speaker 06

  So I'm trying to turn around more in talk. I'm trying to to help as many people as possible. I'm playing around with the gifting now. I've done it the last three lives. And you know how silly you sound when you turn to the camera and say, let's get 50 donuts? Like, I sound so stupid. Like, I don't know. It's so silly. But it all comes comes down with with monetization.

• 8:57David Pierce?

  The other thing he's planning is giveaways. He wants to work with brands, especially basketball brands, to give away their stuff on his streams. And he also started this thing called the Six Shooter Academy, where you can sign up to learn how to shoot like Seth. That's all part of the business. But the thing that seems to get Seth most excited right now is all the people who come on his streams and root for him to miss. Or comment things like, it's a loop when he makes too many in a row. Now Seth, like any good creator, is trying to monetize the haters.

• 9:26Speaker 06

  Now I'm trying to get my haters to to interact. Hey, I'm trying to hit 50 in a row. Don't don't join my live and don't make me miss. So each gift is going to be a sound, like while I'm shooting, or strobe lights, or just something that's a distraction to try to make me miss.

• 9:42David Pierce?

  That explanation and that combination of things actually hits a pretty broad spectrum of the ways creators are monetizing their live streams. Giveaways are a big one. Really, any kind of product marketing or live shopping is growing in a huge way. But I think the most interesting other space is this direct interaction. How do you get your fans and your haters to pay for your lives, indirectly or otherwise? The interactive sleep idea, which Seth says was the inspiration for the sounds and strobe lights that he's thinking about, has big potential. I think you're going to see that lots of places. Some others have subscriptions. I don't know if you've ever come across the Lo-Fi Girl on YouTube, for instance. Those are the channels that stream never-ending live music that's great for studying or working. It makes money through a monthly subscription that gives you loyalty badges in the chat,

• 10:27David Pierce?

  and custom emoji, and some cool stuff on Discord, and even access to new videos ahead of time. But the most interesting thing about all this is just that it, like, works now.

• 10:39David Pierce?

  Live has obviously been big in gaming for a long time. Twitch got a lot of things right early on, and it's just fun and natural to watch someone else play video games. That just works.

• 10:50David Pierce?

  But there have been so many other attempts to make other kinds of live happen through the years. Remember when like Meerkat and Periscope were going to be the next big thing, but neither of those obviously turned into much of anything. It felt for a lot of years that live streams were mostly just known for streaming horrible things like shootings. And live was a content moderation problem, much more than it was an actual revenue stream or entertainment platform. But now YouTube Live is growing fast, both as a way for people to premiere videos for everybody at the same time, and as an actual live streaming platform. Live is one of the fastest growing things on TikTok and a huge business opportunity for the platform. Twitch's just chatting section continues to grow. It's a deeply weird

• 11:33David Pierce?

  and fun place to hang out on the internet. Live is a thing now. We're going to take a break and then we're going to get into how we got to this moment and where the money really is in live. We'll be right back.

• 11:51Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 12:38David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Hadley Robinson is here. Hi, Hadley.

• 12:41Speaker 07

  Hello.

• 12:42David Pierce?

  You and I kind of divided and conquered on this particular subject.

• 12:46Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 12:47David Pierce?

  The first place we kind of sent you was to go figure out why live is happening now.

• 12:52Speaker 07

  Right. So I think to get to where we are today, you have to go back a little bit. I think webcams in the 90s are kind of the starting point.

• 13:00David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 13:00Speaker 07

  Little fixed cameras that you might put, I don't know, like at the top of a ski slope, or there was a famous one where they like just put it in front of a coffee maker.

• 13:09David Pierce?

  I remember that.

• 13:11Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:12David Pierce?

  But also, the vibe of that is not that different from the stuff that people do now. Like, it's amazing how little has changed.

• 13:16Speaker 07

  That's what I was about to say.

• 13:18David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 13:18Speaker 07

  But to really get a sense of the trajectory of live streaming, kind of as we know it today, I talked to David Craig. He's a professor at USC Annenberg School of Communications, and one of his areas of expertise is creator culture. He told me we really have to start around 2007.

• 13:36Speaker 08

  The earliest precursor of what we in the West think of as live streaming was launched with Justin.tv.

• 13:43Speaker 07

  Each user had channels. They were encouraged to broadcast themselves, just doing whatever they do. Again, sounds familiar. The original Justin, he would wear a webcam on his hat, and he had this like backpack laptop setup, and he would just stream live continuously. They called it life casting back then.

• 14:02David Pierce?

  Right. It was like the kind of make your own Truman Show experience.

• 14:06Speaker 07

  Yes, yes. And Professor Craig said it was a lot of almost reality TV live.

• 14:12Speaker 08

  And it didn't quite work out. It turns out, reality shows are much more interesting if they are edited and there's a story. And people were not ready at that moment to tune in and just hang out and watch people living out their lives online.

• 14:29David Pierce?

  Fair.

• 14:30Speaker 07

  But they did settle into one area that was working well, and that was gaming. And when they saw that was working really well, they went all in, made it Twitch in 2011.

• 14:39Speaker 08

  They quickly discovered that there was this huge community and very engaged community interested in watching people playing online games, and not just for the purpose of learning how to play the game or watching great gameplay, but for a means of socialization, as a way to hang out. It was live streaming with a purpose.

• 15:00Speaker 07

  So Twitch blew up. It had more than 3 million users per month in the first year. Amazon bought it a few years later for $1 billion. And around this time, everybody's also getting a smartphone, video capability, connectivity is getting better, and other tech companies kind of start sniffing around the live space. And this is what you were mentioning before, startups like Meerkat, Periscope were drawing funding, Facebook Live was becoming a thing.

• 15:28Speaker 08

  The Meerkat era, yes. In the case of Meerkat, I think it was a consortium of different Hollywood companies that invested in this, but had no idea what made live streaming different from broadcast television and didn't fully appreciate and understand how to navigate that. Periscope, as we know, was purchased alongside with Vine by Twitter. And one of the things that Periscope could not get their head around was that the creators were the core value of live streaming platforms. And that meant they needed to pivot to a way to promote monetized support, both financially and even creatively and emotionally, the work that creators were doing on Periscope.

• 16:10Speaker 08

  Periscope was rather treated just as a added value proposition on the Twitter platform and has now since disappeared.

• 16:19Speaker 07

  These apps and platforms were never really able to scale up. And they pretty much either failed spectacularly or faded from view over time.

• 16:27David Pierce?

  So do we think we can kind of blame Twitch for that quick rise where Twitch figured out this one thing, which is like, people like to play games. And then everybody else saw Twitch growing and selling to Amazon and said, okay, let's, let's figure this out and tried to sort of make it bigger than that before it was ready to be bigger for that. Like, is it, can that whole boom sort of be traced back to Twitch, do you think?

• 16:48Speaker 07

  I mean, it certainly works on the timeline that way. Amazon saw value in Twitch and a lot of other places started to wonder if there was value in other areas. And maybe it was they didn't understand that gaming was unique at the time. And there was something more to it than just straight, like going live from everywhere. You know, I think the point of not really making it work for creators back then, not understanding it was kind of like about them and that like to spend all this time, because live takes a ton of time for creators, it should kind of be worth their while.

• 17:19David Pierce?

  That makes sense.

• 17:20Speaker 07

  Okay, but I want to kind of bump over to Asia and particularly China at the time, because live stream was going in a different direction there.

• 17:31Speaker 07

  Live streaming at this time in China is having a lot of success. And it starts with online dating. Professor Craig assures me this isn't porn, which is strictly prohibited.

• 17:42David Pierce?

  So this is not OnlyFans before OnlyFans that we're talking about here?

• 17:45Speaker 07

  Right, right. You can't do that in China.

• 17:47Speaker 08

  It was a visual representation of pretty women who are able to then engage hundreds, if not thousands, of men online through live streaming platforms to spend time with them, to converse, to chat, to interact, to watch, to sing, to discuss their day, to talk about the world. You might use the analogy to the movie "Her."

• 18:11Speaker 07

  This is a little bit of a side, but there is like all this context going on that like women are moving to cities because there's a lot more economic activity. A lot of the men are left behind. There's a lot of lonely people. There's, everyone's got a phone. Basically, live in this context is really starting to work and a lot of platforms there see this. And every platform develops a live feature.

• 18:34Speaker 07

  And soon a new thing starts happening on live, and that's shopping. It starts taking off in China around 2016. And it's not just beauty products. It's also cars. It's rockets. They're like selling everything. In that time period, in the last like five or six years, it's just gotten huge. It's a $400 billion industry there.

• 18:55David Pierce?

  So what does that look like? Like, give me a sense of what like a live shopping stream might look like. Is it, obviously, everybody uses the sort of QVC and Home Shopping Network on the internet example when they talk about this stuff. Is that kind of how it works? It's just somebody being like, "Buy this," and then there's a link on the side and you can buy it. And if you want it, you buy it. And people do?

• 19:12Speaker 07

  So yeah, it is a little like QVC, but it's kind of a chattier approach where the host or seller answers questions about the products and responds to people. And it's all on one app interface. So you can watch, you can ask questions, and you can buy the product right there. Sometimes these hosts are influencer-type people are ready, who can open a channel and bring over their mass audience. But sometimes companies or brands just pay their own staff or smaller influencers to go live and sell these products.

• 19:41David Pierce?

  I mean, and I guess to some extent, that's not, that's an extension of regular influencer culture, right? Like, we've spent a long time with, you know, Kim Kardashian saying, "Look at this shampoo, buy my shampoo." The shopping stuff is just a more sort of interactive and in some ways like honest version of that. So I guess it makes sense to me that it's big. But honestly, what did you say? It's a $400 billion industry? That's a crazy number.

• 20:04Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's a huge, huge number. It's a number that excites a lot of people in the US because it seems like, I think people are visualizing that kind of opportunity.

• 20:15David Pierce?

  Okay, I want to come back to that. But first, we need to take a break. We're going to come back in just a second and talk about live shopping coming for America. We'll be right back.

• 20:26Speaker 03

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• 20:54David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. So Hadley, China is all in on live shopping. Live shopping's a huge industry. And at some point, I'm assuming it sounds like someone in America went, "What if we did that but for America?" Because this is how live streaming works. Okay?

• 21:08Speaker 07

  There are a lot of people who think live shopping or commerce could be big here, too. As discussed earlier, you know, social platforms like TikTok are getting in the game and offering tools to creators and helping them monetize. But there's also a ton of startups. One consultant I talked to told me that 80% of the cold calls she was getting earlier this year were from live commerce startups.

• 21:27David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 21:28Speaker 07

  One of these upstart live platforms is called Whatnot.

• 21:32Speaker 09

  You know, one way to think about it is kind of like eBay meets Twitch.

• 21:35Speaker 07

  That's Grant LaFontaine. He's the CEO and co-founder. And the first time I went on Whatnot, I was watching this guy wheel a shopping cart through a thrift store and basically pick things off the rack, engage interest, and communicate with people there who were like interested in those jerseys over there. And then I flipped to another one of a guy at home selling records. I saw one of people unwrapping baseball cards. I don't know if you checked it out at all, David.

• 22:02David Pierce?

  I did. So you told me about this right as my parents sent me a big box of my old sports cards. And so I just went and checked this out. And it turns out, it's kind of addicting. Like, I haven't collected sports cards in a long time. I just have this big box of them. And now I'm kind of back in, like, watching people open the packs and debate what's good and what isn't, and trying to find, like, the misprints, because the misprints are always more valuable. I have no interest in buying any of those things, but like, I found myself spending way more time watching them than I expected to.

• 22:33Speaker 07

  They started, like, as an e-commerce marketplace selling collectibles. The first thing was Funko Pops, which I had never heard of, but are these, like, big-headed action figures collectibles?

• 22:44David Pierce?

  I was at Target the other day, and I got to watch a mom and her son negotiate whether he could buy one, two, or three Funko Pops for, like, 20 minutes. Like, I did a whole lap around Target and came back to them still negotiating about Funko Pops. So, like, do not underestimate the power of Funko Pops.

• 22:59Speaker 07

  No way. I mean, it's, yeah, it's propelled Whatnot into a huge business. Grant said he and his co-founder had kind of started seeing people auctioning stuff off on YouTube and Instagram with these really vibrant comment sections. And so, you know, they went from just kind of being like an e-commerce site that's asynchronous, is the word for not live, into deciding, like, let's try a live thing. And so they launched a live product, and it went pretty well.

• 23:29Speaker 09

  I was the first person to go live. Two and a half hours, I sold, like, 120 Funko Pops. And so if you're a seller and you can see something in two hours, where you can sell 120 items, which would typically take you I don't know, a couple of months on eBay. That's a compelling value proposition as a seller. Then we went to Pokemon cards, sports cards, comic books. There's a lot in between, but kind of fast forward to today. You know, we're probably selling things in about 80 plus categories. We're about 350 people. We've raised about half a billion dollars in venture capital funding.

• 24:02David Pierce?

  Wow, you weren't kidding. Don't underestimate Funko Pops indeed. Goodness.

• 24:06Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 24:06David Pierce?

  You see a lot of the same, like, watch me open Pokemon card packs on YouTube and stuff like that. But there's no sort of obvious shopping thing at the end of it. It sounds like what Whatnot did was say, you want to make this thing, people like watching you open Pokemon card packs. Let's give you the tools to like sell and ship this stuff at the same time. Am I understanding that right?

• 24:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, and I mean, if you, if you go onto Whatnot, basically there's like a column on the left where you can click all the items that are kind of coming up and just buy them. And, you know, there's also a vibrant comment section. So the person who's doing the selling is responding to people's questions.

• 24:41David Pierce?

  I see.

• 24:41Speaker 07

  The evidence is out there that people are moving a lot of product when they're live.

• 24:45Speaker 09

  It's an incredible sales channel. And that is where some of like the data from China probably holds true. Was it the, uh, on Singles Day this year, I think one of the guys sold like a billion dollars worth of product in 24 hours. And it's otherworldly. And we're not close to that, anywhere close to that in the United States yet. But, but still, if you're, you know, the like for like comparison of, let's take, um, a traditional search-based marketplace and compare it to, you know, live stream shopping and how much product you can move per hour. Live stream shopping has a huge advantage there.

• 25:16Speaker 07

  Grant told us that some sellers on Whatnot are making tens of millions of dollars per year.

• 25:21David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 25:21Speaker 07

  Which kind of feels like it's moving out of the creator economy and into just very big business.

• 25:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 25:27Speaker 07

  So back to David, who, you know, was telling me about the history. He kind of had, had this one story about live shopping.

• 25:33Speaker 08

  I once went to a event in a, um, a beauty store in Hong Kong in 2017 where the creator was live streaming simultaneously across five different platforms and sold out the product from the French perfume company in 40 minutes. The French seller was standing next to me and said, we'll never go back to traditional advertising.

• 25:59David Pierce?

  Okay, so that just made something click in my brain, which is that what this actually does is make it makes the advertising and it makes the store the same thing, right? Like it's this stuff has all been so sort of abstracted where like you have an influencer who is like buy this thing and then you have to click a link and you have to go to a thing and you have to buy it and there's it's often hard to connect it back to the influencers. It's like the podcast ads all telling you to like, you know, put slash podcast at the end of your thing. Whereas with this, it's just like there is a person you care about and a product you might like, and they are one and the same. And so of course it's going to convert better and be faster and be more fun. And like, everybody has an incentive to be interesting and everybody has incentive to sell you stuff. It's kind of, it's like

• 26:39David Pierce?

  the most efficient vehicle we've ever created to just sell people things from people that they like. That's kind of wild. I had never really thought about it like that.

• 26:47Speaker 07

  Yeah. Professor Craig was kind of pointing out that like the loss of the 30 second advertising spot is just huge. You know, the fact that we're all, a lot of people are streaming without ads nowadays.

• 26:59David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 26:59Speaker 07

  You know, it's harder for business to figure out how to tell you what they've got. And having people go live, that is advertising, you know, it's just in a different format. Maybe, you know, maybe a more effective format.

• 27:10David Pierce?

  Totally.

• 27:11Speaker 07

  The other thing that seems to be key to live shopping and making it work and just key to live in general, I mean, we were talking about this earlier with Twitch, is community. Grant said a lot of the sellers on whatnot develop relationships with each other. When I was researching this story, I listened to this one podcast and it was two guys who met on whatnot and now host this podcast together.

• 27:31Speaker 09

  You know, when I think about collectors and enthusiasts, you're often not buying the item for the item's sake. You're buying the item almost as an excuse to sit there and talk with people who have a similar shared interest as you. You know, the object is almost secondary to the community and an excuse to have conversation around things. And so when you think about that and the live shopping experience, it's not really about the object, it's about the experience around it. Are you talking with someone who's knowledgeable? Are there other people in there that have the same interests? Is it fun?

• 28:03Speaker 07

  And this is a point a lot of experts kept making to me that shopping is actually a social experience for many people. Like friends go shopping together, they try things on, they ask each other how it looks. And then there's this other social component, which is having a sales rep help you and answer questions. And so the host of a live stream and the people in the chat can kind of replicate that real world experience.

• 28:24David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, that that whole idea of community is something that kind of came up. I think through both of our reporting on this a lot is that so much of live is about like minute to minute, second to second, community building, right? And in a lot of ways, it's much harder than just like posting a video and responding to some of the comments in the comments, which is a thing a lot of creators do. But on the other hand, it also feels much cooler to like ask a question and have them answer it directly to you as it's going. And I think live, when it works, I think brings people so much closer that way. And there's even a thing like, I just think back to these girls I was watching sit in anatomy class. Like the thing that combined us all in that chat was not, we're all interested in anatomy class or whatever.

• 29:09David Pierce?

  It was just, it's a bunch of people who are like bored on TikTok at the same moment. And there's like something connecting about that. And then if you can add Funko Pops or Pokemon cards or whatever on top of that, suddenly like, I will be part of this community and we'll talk about it together and I'll buy the thing. And then we can talk about the thing that I bought. And that actually totally tracks for me that all of this is sort of in service of that feeling of community for people. That's really interesting.

• 29:32Speaker 07

  Yeah. And I mean, that might be what was missing, you know, in Meerkat and Periscope, that they didn't see that that's really like, you have to build a community space. That's why people want to go there.

• 29:43David Pierce?

  Totally.

• 29:44Speaker 07

  I think one interesting thing that David Craig pointed out in terms of the difference between China and the US is that in the US, we have kind of an attachment to the retail experience.

• 29:52Speaker 08

  China hasn't, didn't go through our 20th century retail mall advertising culture that we are still clinging to, where we still want to keep the mom and pop shops alive, or we want to keep mall culture alive. They were very quick and deft and adapted very quickly because there wasn't a lot of that already to to prevent it.

• 30:13David Pierce?

  Yeah, like malls are dying and we're sad about it. And most people in other places are not sad about malls dying.

• 30:19Speaker 07

  Right.

• 30:20David Pierce?

  So then that makes me wonder, like, are the malls, so to speak, getting into social shopping? Like, I know this is a thing Amazon has experimented with over time, but like, is this the future of all of these big retail companies, too?

• 30:30Speaker 07

  Oh, man, this is a great segue because the one thing that David Craig told me is that Walmart is getting in the game.

• 30:38David Pierce?

  Oh, well, there you go. It's on now.

• 30:39Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 30:39David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 30:40Speaker 07

  They have set up a creator's studio. You can sign up, you have to apply, but it seems like there's a very low barrier to entry. You don't have to have any followers to start out, which like, we'll see if it works because we were just talking about like, like that community thing. But yeah, if you want to go and try and sell Walmart products and take a cut, anybody can go and try and do that.

• 31:01Speaker 08

  All the big retailers have understood now that the future of retail is in social commerce and are moving as quickly as they can, even though they aren't tech platforms, they are moving into and becoming tech platforms, not just in response to Amazon, but because they understand that people are walking in, you know, not getting the traffic back the way they once did in the stores.

• 31:23Speaker 07

  They're not going to keep having traffic in their stores. I think we're moving in a one-way direction. And I mean, that kind of brings me to one point that a lot of people brought up with Live and why it's having more of a moment now in the US, and it's because of the pandemic.

• 31:38David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 31:38Speaker 07

  I think you see that with Six Shooter, right? Like, he said, he started it during the pandemic. He was bored. There was nothing else to do. People were trying to figure out their time. And yeah, there's a big audience of other people who are bored and want to watch it.

• 31:50David Pierce?

  Right.

• 31:50Speaker 07

  And then retailers are starting to see the need to up the online sales game, you know? And then tech companies are starting to build tools for creators to do it all. So I don't think you can overstate, like, the US might have needed a little push into Live and the pandemic kind of, kind of helped a little bit.

• 32:07David Pierce?

  Totally, yeah. Well, and it makes me wonder if where we're headed now is the Walmart side of things is one version of it, right? Where you say, basically, we have the mall and you're going to come shop it on camera and people are going to go along with you, right? Like, you're the guy you were talking about on Whatnot, who's literally pushing a shopping cart along. That's such an interesting version of live shopping, but then there's another side of it that is. Basically, all of these platforms are just gonna sort of build in like buy now tools to their stuff. And so people will just go live and like if I hold up, I have a, I have a can of seltzer here. And like if I hold it up on camera, it's just gonna pop up and go buy this seltzer.

• 32:43Speaker 07

  Right.

• 32:44David Pierce?

  Is it all of those things? Do you think like, I guess what I'm trying to figure out is like, do we end up with a bunch of, you know, quote unquote, like shopping creators? Or does shopping just come to all creators?

• 32:55Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's really interesting because I think, I think the other thing is like, a creator and a seller is not necessarily always the same thing. Creators are entertainers and some of them might do sales very well. But when you're, when you're just a seller, you know what I mean? When you're just there to like make the sale, I don't know if that's as enticing. You know, I, I actually was flipping, I noticed that I had Amazon's live shopping app on my, on my TV. And so I was like, I'm just gonna check this out. And I'm like, I don't care. I don't want any of this. Like, I'm not going to a live channel to just like randomly shop.

• 33:30David Pierce?

  Just having a person hold a thing up and be like, here is what it looks like and how it feels is something. But that's not the sort of full potential of live shopping, I think. Like, that's the thing where it's like, okay, this is a person that I either I know or I trust for some reason. Like, that stuff feels really powerful to me and it's like, that's, that stuff starts to feel different. When it's like, okay, I'm now sort of shopping with the help of someone I care about and trust. Not, there's a hand model on my phone. You know what I mean? And I think, uh, I, it's gonna be interesting to see if these big retailers can figure out how to get some of that magic of that first thing over time. Or if all of the creator platforms will just figure out how to build buy buttons and they'll kind of win that race from the other direction.

• 34:10Speaker 07

  Right.

• 34:15David Pierce?

  So now that we've both spent a lot of time in this world, are you, are you as obsessed with live streams as I am? Or live shopping in general? Have you bought anything on a live stream? Be honest.

• 34:23Speaker 07

  I have not bought anything on a live stream.

• 34:25David Pierce?

  No?

• 34:25Speaker 07

  No. Uh, I have, I have been looking at. Many more lives than I ever did before. Like, it's just one of those things I was, I feel like I was scrolling past. But there's a lot of people doing interesting stuff.

• 34:37David Pierce?

  Yeah, yeah. This feeling like not only do I get to see somebody else's reality, but in some small way, shape it, I think is like intoxicating to people.

• 34:45Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:46David Pierce?

  And I totally get that feeling. Even just like the, this, this dumb girl I was talking about at the beginning, who wouldn't go in the water, like when she eventually, like, everybody got so mad at her on the stream, she started being like, okay, fine. And then the stream was so proud of itself for finally convincing her to do this. You're, you get to like be an avatar in somebody else's world for a minute. And there's something kind of amazing about that.

• 35:07Speaker 07

  Totally. I think that like building in any kind of tension really works for live streams. Is the wave gonna crash? Is she gonna go in the water? Like, is he gonna miss? All of those things, it's like, that's what keeps you on.

• 35:20David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 35:21Speaker 07

  You're waiting, you're, there's anticipation.

• 35:23David Pierce?

  Totally.

• 35:24Speaker 07

  And it takes a long time. It's real life, you know? It's not edited and cut. So, and I found that watching a lot of streams where I'm like, well, is he gonna actually fix the tire? I mean, the most mundane thing, but like, why am I still watching it? But I like, wanna see it.

• 35:37David Pierce?

  Yeah, I used to think of that as, as a, as a bug of live streams, that it was so sort of inefficient in its use of time, that it's like, if I just wanna watch somebody fix a tire, like, I'll just come back for the clip. But no, it's actually, it feels real. It's like you, you are actually watching somebody's life and this stuff takes time and there's something kind of powerful about that.

• 35:55Speaker 07

  Totally.

• 35:55David Pierce?

  Just don't do it before bed. That's my takeaway.

• 35:58Speaker 07

  Okay, I think that's a, that's a good call. I'll need that advice.

• 36:01David Pierce?

  All right, well, Hadley, thank you for joining me deep, deep down this crazy rabbit hole of live streams. I also want you to know that as we've been doing this, I did just go to whatnot.com and I am now watching someone sell sports cards and all of a sudden, I might buy one. This is a real problem that I'm having. So we should go before I, before I spend a whole bunch of money that I don't have on trading cards.

• 36:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, good call.

• 36:27Speaker 07

  This episode was produced by David Pierce and Hadley Robinson. It was mixed by Andrew Marino. Liam James is our lead producer and Brooke Minter is our editorial director. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

• 36:51Speaker 10

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