YouTube tops Netflix as Asia's top streaming entertainment service

CATEGORY ANALYSIS: MEDIA AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS

Despite media and telecommunications representing some of the fastest-changing and most disrupted categories in this year’s Asia's Top 1000 Brands list, the dominance of a handful of players has shown little signs of change.

The most significant changes have occurred in the streaming entertainment category*, where YouTube jumped a phenomenal 67 places this year to steal the crown from Netflix.

YouTube is number one in every region except Australia and New Zealand, where Netflix remains on top, and in China, where it is banned.

Interestingly, the Google-owned platform’s subscription layer, YouTube Premium (formerly known as YouTube Red), fell from 2nd place to 7th place.

Spotify and Amazon-owned gaming platform Twitch also made significant gains, from 111th and 109th, to 4th and 35th respectively.

Unsurprisingly, Google remains the preeminent search engine across Asia-Pacific in every market except for China and South Korea, where it is second to Baidu and Naver respectively.

While a few providers have swapped places this year (MSN and Daum swapping as 9th and 10th, 163.com and Goo swapping at 17th and 18th), the list has remained mostly unchanged. Chinese search engine Sogou is the biggest year-on-year mover from 29th to 14th.

Thai mobile providers DTAC and AIS have dropped out of this year’s list (13th and 19th in 2018), while, interestingly, environmentally-conscious search engines Ecosia and Google Blackle have slipped in at 26th and 27th.

Similarly, Facebook has held onto the top slot in the social networking category despite having endured perhaps the most tumultuous 12 months in its history. It has slipped down in Japan (from 2nd to 3rd), and in China (from 4th to 6th) where it is banned.

Russian-founded private messaging service Telegram and South Korean instant messaging service Kakao Talk have both gained four places (from 13th to 9th, and 15th to 11th respectively), while Tencent QQ dropped from 12th to 16th.

Two brands, Netease and ICQ, dropped off the list, while eight brands joined, including Zhihu, Pixiv, ArtStack, Bebo, Wikia, Zalo, Skype and Orkut.

In the mobile phone service provider category, British telco Vodafone — which operates a partner network across many regions in Asia-Pacific  — has retained the number one slot.

Indian mobile operator Jio made the greatest headway over the last year, from 50th to 15th place.

There was some reorganisation in the top slots, as Chunghwa Telecom (CHT) bumped up from 4th to 2nd, Singtel from 7th to 4th, Maxis from 16th to 12th. But the top operators shift hugely from market-to-market, due to the locality of mobile providers.

*The streaming entertainment category is only in its second year in the Asia's Top 1000 Brand ranking.