Sam Blumenthal

The backdrop for Tophatter’s new approach is gaming’s overall rise in the U.S., which has pushed retailers and brands to experiment with gaming-adjacent platforms like Twitch. (Twitch has nearly tripled the number of monthly broadcasts it has hosted since 2019, bringing it up to 9.7 million monthly streams today.) In-game transactions, called... See more

In the span of just two years, Whatnot became the first U.S. livestream shopping unicorn with a valuation of $1.5 billion. Its app is home to thousands of sellers that deal in sports and Pokemon trading cards, action figures and comic books. Some have created multi-million dollar businesses on the back of its marketplace. Lafontaine says it’s these... See more

The total scale of the country's livestreaming e-commerce industry reached 433.8 billion yuan (about 65.69 billion U.S. dollars) in 2019 and is expected to double by the end of 2020, a report by global accounting firm KPMG and AliResearch showed.

The average time users spend on Versihop has gone up 50% since the live video update, and the streams are generating a 4x higher conversion than the overall rate. Khan views video as a means of helping shoppers to discover the independent brands the platform specializes in. Verishop does not provide user or sales numbers, but its base is 80% female... See more