Quick one tonight because I've been half-watching a number climb all day and I cant stop thinking about it.
Today is 11/11, which in most of the world is just a Monday (or Veterans Day here in the US, which is why I had the day off to sit around refreshing a spreadsheet like a lunatic). But in China its Singles Day, and Alibaba turns it into the biggest shopping event on the planet every single year. Today they crossed something like $38 billion in gross merchandise volume in one 24 hour stretch across Tmall and Taobao. Last year it was around $30.8 billion. Theyve been growing this thing every November since 2009 and it still went up double digit percent on a number that already sounded made up.
For comparison, US Cyber Monday last year did about $7.9 billion. Total. For the whole day, across every retailer that reports numbers. Alibaba beat that by lunchtime, their time.
I know the scale of Chinese ecommerce isnt exactly breaking news to anyone who pays attention, but I dont think most people here have any real sense of the gap. Its not "bigger," its a different order of thing entirely. And I say this as someone who has genuinely tried to explain it to friends at dinner and watched their eyes glaze over because $38 billion doesnt mean anything once a number gets that big. It stops being a number and becomes a headline.
The part that actually got me
The thing I find more interesting than the total, honestly, is how much of it apparently ran through livestreaming. There's a guy over there, Li Jiaqi, people call him the "Lipstick King," who does live video where he tries on lipstick shades for hours and just sells insane volumes of the stuff in real time, like a QVC host if QVC had 25 million people watching on their phones instead of cable subscribers whose parents left the TV on. Viya is apparently even bigger. These arent niche influencers, theyre driving what sounds like a meaningful chunk of a $38 billion day, one lipstick swatch at a time.
We keep talking about "the future of retail" here like its Amazon Go stores with no checkout line, and meanwhile the actual future, or at least a very profitable present, is a guy in a studio talking into a phone for six hours straight while a number ticks up in the corner of the screen. Nobody in Silicon Valley is building that. Not seriously, anyway.
I tried watching one of these streams for a bit tonight with zero Mandarin and honestly it didnt matter. You dont need the language to understand "he just held up a jar of something and forty thousand people bought it in ninety seconds." Its mesmerizing in a slightly upsetting way, like watching a stock ticker for a company that sells feelings.
Unrelated but also not really
Small aside because I cant help myself: Disney+ launches tomorrow and I already paid for the three-year deal back when they opened preorders, $138 up front, which felt like either a great decision or a very confident bet on Disney not messing up their own streaming app. Ive got low expectations for the interface honestly (most legacy media company apps are rough at launch, Ill believe its good when I see it) but Im still weirdly excited to watch the original Star Wars trilogy again without hunting down a disc. Its a strange thing, one day two enormous, completely unrelated pieces of the internet economy both landing basically on top of each other. A shopping record nobody here noticed and a streaming launch everybody here is going to be talking about by Wednesday.
Anyway. Refresh your feeds tomorrow, Ill probably have opinions about the app once its actually live. For now Im just sitting here mildly stunned that a single day of shopping in one country can outdo an entire month of holiday spending here, and that most of the coverage I saw about it today was buried three pages deep behind fantasy football news. Priorities, I guess.