Chinese users find out about the Armenian startup from photos and videos hashtagged #PicsArt, not different from how VSCO gets discovered from #vscocam on Instagram. Screenshot: TikTok-related stickers from PicsArt’s libraryWhen people catch sight of an impressive image filtering effect online, many will inquire about the toolset behind it. PicsArt has done zero paid marketing in China,” noted Nam. “Many larger companies are spending a lot of money on advertising to gain market share. The regional growth, which has been 10-30 percent month-over-month recently, appears more remarkable when factoring in PicsArt’s zero user acquisition expense in a crowded market where pay-to-play is a norm for emerging startups. Most of PicsArt’s users live in the United States, but the app owes much of its recent success to China, its fastest growing market with more than 15 million MAUs. They come in every week, and find the editing process Zen-like and peaceful.” Trending in China For many users, coming on PicsArt is a built-in habit. Almost 100 percent of the people on PicsArt are creating or editing something. “On TikTok and Instagram, the majority of the people there are consumers. What separates PicsArt from the giants, according to Nam, is that people who do share there tend to be content creators rather than passive consumers. About 40 percent of PicsArt’s users post on the app, putting it in a unique position where it competes with the social media juggernauts on one hand, and serves as a platform-agnostic app to facilitate content creation for its rivals on the other. Image: PicsArt via WeiboThe app doubles as a social platform, although the use case is much smaller compared to the size of Instagram, Facebook and other mainstream social media products. PicsArt wants to help users stand out on social media, for instance, by virtually applying this rainbow makeup look on them. It picked up $20 million from a Series B round in 2016 to grow its Asia focus and told TechCrunch that it’s “actively considering fundraising to fuel rapid growth even more.” PicsArt has so far raised $45 million, according to data collected by Crunchbase. There’s a generation of young people who communicate through memes, short-form videos, images and stickers, and they rarely use words,” Tammy Nam, who joined PicsArt as its chief operating officer in July, told TechCrunch in an interview. “PicsArt is helping to drive a trend I call visual storytelling. Rather, they pride themselves on having niche interests, be it K-pop, celebrities, anime, sci-fi or space science, topics that come in the form of filters, effects, stickers and GIFs in PicsArt’s content library. The “Gen Z” (the generation after millennials) users aren’t obsessed with the next big, big thing. Nearly 80 percent of PicsArt’s users are under the age of 35, and those younger than 18 are driving most of its growth. Like VSCO, PicsArt now offers video overlays, though images are still its focus. The demand is big enough that PicsArt, a rival to filtering companies VSCO and Snapseed, recently hit 130 million monthly active users worldwide, roughly a year after it amassed 100 million MAUs. But for many others, especially the younger crowd, making their photos stand out is a huge deal. If you’re like me, who isn’t big on social media, you’d think that the image filters that come inside most apps will do the job.
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