Growing Chinese app aspires to be 'world’s best' gay social network

Xiaoxiao anchors personal webcasts on an app called Blued, which is China’s largest gay social-network with more than 27 million registered users. His life has become a sort of an entertaining reality show for his viewers online, some of whom send him money in the form of virtual gifts.

But Xiaixiao clarified: "I’m doing this not for money but for fun. It’s easy to find the same kind of people as me. I feel happy talking with them."

His clarification does not take away anything from the fact that China’s ‘Pink Economy’ is growing by leaps and bounds. The phrase Pink Economy refers to consumption of certain goods and services by the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) community.

Blued is part of the Pink Economy. Such firms offer LGBT-specific services such as live webcasts. These will have likely earned several hundreds of millions of yuan in revenue by this year-end, said Geng Le, CEO of Blued CEO.

"The performance of live webcasts is beyond our imagination. We launched the sector in January and it made a profit within a month," he said.

Blued now has about 200,000 anchors. Some of them could earn more than 100,000 yuan ($14,541) per month.

They engage viewers through singing, dancing and chatting – not much different from the fare on other live webcast platforms.

Geng attributed the success of this segment to the fact that people with shared interests like to interact online these days.

Blued also offers live webcasts featuring popular anchors outside of the LGBT community. This summer, it flew some anchors all the way to Brazil for live coverage of events related to the Rio2016 Games and to introduce local customs and experiences.

It also initiated a program called "Idol Trainee". It will send select anchors to Beijing for training and invite star tutors for webcasting together with them.

These days, live webcasts are not just a form of social contact; they are regarded entertainment – vivid and direct. And hosts get a crack at stardom, said Geng.

He said Blued is dedicated to improving the life of gays in China through internet and technology so that the society can be more tolerant toward the LGBT community while the community members could find each other easily.

Blued now commands over 90 percent of China’s LGBT social software market. "There are nearly 70 million LGBTs in China. It’s a big market," said Geng, adding that the number of registered users of Blued will likely double soon.

Small wonder, it is attracting potential partners and associates that want to work with it in the areas of entertainment, lifestyle services such as games and travel, and insurance for the LGBT community, said Geng.

"We used to position ourselves as China’s best gay social-networking company. Now, we aim to become the world’s best," he said.

In April, the company organized an international team and has set up offices in Thailand, Vietnam and England. Now, Blued boasts several hundreds of thousands of users in Thailand.

"By this year-end, Blued is expected to become the largest gay social-networking app in in Southeast Asia and the number of foreign users might equal domestic users," said Geng.