BIGO LIVE Redefines Creator Success Beyond Follower Counts

What Most Platforms Still Get Wrong

The live streaming industry has spent years chasing metrics — follower counts, view numbers, engagement rates. Eric Kim, who joined BIGO LIVE in 2019 after six years running TM Wireless, one of California's largest T-Mobile retail operations, has a different read on what actually moves people.

"If you want to move the hearts of a group of people, you're really not going to do that through strategy or PowerPoint decks," he says. "You do it through building great systems which help enforce great habits."

That operating philosophy shapes everything about how BIGO LIVE thinks about creator investment — and it starts with a clear-eyed take on what most social platforms never really delivered on their original promise.

"So much of the internet was about this promise that you're going to be able to engage with whoever you want around the world," Kim explains. "But in reality, a lot of platforms are two people not online at the same time, kind of sharing a coexistence by looking at the same material. What I loved about livestreaming is everybody who was hanging out was online right now."

The Seoul Gala: Numbers That Tell the Story

The BIGO Gala in Seoul drew 1,200+ attendees from five continents to KBS Hall. Nearly 200 creators and agencies were formally recognized — but not based on raw reach alone. BIGO's selection criteria deliberately weight the depth and authenticity of community relationships over sheer follower counts.

Winners weren't just announced on stage. BIGO broadcast their faces across billboards throughout Seoul, taking the recognition from a 1,200-person auditorium into public life across the city.

"It's a much more compelling story than, hey, you should try livestreaming, you might be able to make a living off of it," Kim says. "It's, 'Hey, you should try livestreaming, you might become the person that you've always wanted yourself to be.'"

Why In-Person Events Do What No Virtual Format Can

Virtual events create attendance. Physical events build memory. That's the exact distinction Eric Kim draws — and it's not just a feel-good line. It describes a real behavioral gap that BIGO observed as pandemic restrictions lifted and the platform began scaling its in-person programming.

"When a creator attends these in-person events, they are inside the event," Kim says. "They shake hands with people they would not have networked with online. They take photos with fans. They see creators from other countries. These things can just never really be captured by a virtual moment."

For newer streamers, a gala is often the first moment a platform stops being abstract — no more just a screen, a leaderboard, and a push notification. For established creators, it's a live marketplace of cross-border relationships and business conversations that would never have started in a chat window. The lights, the red carpet, the whole production — Kim argues these signals something engagement dashboards simply can't: the platform believes the work is real.

The Agency Model: A Business Within the Business

One layer of BIGO LIVE's creator infrastructure that most outsiders overlook is its third-party agency network. These agencies recruit, onboard, and develop broadcasters on the platform's behalf — and they're not a workaround. They're core to the model.

Kim describes it as "a business within a business," built on a key insight: BIGO's strongest creators often had skills that went far beyond content creation itself.

"Great creators didn't just have a great story to tell. They had experience, they had confidence. Some of them are born leaders or have tremendous business acumen," he says. "What they could do was something far better than what we could do, which is rally people around their brand of content creation."

The agency model also tackles one of livestreaming's most under-discussed structural problems: isolation. Streaming from your room every night can feel lonely. Agencies create a peer layer — colleagues with names and faces — that transforms solo broadcasting into something that feels more like a team sport.

"We found that if you have colleagues, people you can put a face and a soul behind what you're doing, it creates this shared moment," Kim says.

Recognition That Shapes Behavior, Not Just Morale

Here's what sets BIGO's recognition framework apart: it's designed to change how creators engage with their communities, not just celebrate who's already winning.

Because BIGO weights relationship quality over raw reach, creators know that every new username in their stream carries genuine potential. "Every username that pops up might be my next best friend," Kim says. "You notice the person who might just be shy based on the way you see their behavior, but they show up every day."

That philosophy produced one of Kim's most-cited examples. A creator known on the platform as "TracTrac" swept consecutive gala cycles — and then put her platform resources to work in a way that had nothing to do with awards. During severe flooding in Vietnam in 2025, she led on-the-ground aid efforts using her reach and resources.

"She wasn't just thinking about looking great and winning awards," Kim says. "She found a way to become more gracious and do more. It was that feeling of: we recognized the right person."

From Spending to Infrastructure: A Bigger Industry Shift

Eric Kim's critique extends well beyond events. Most platforms and brands, he argues, still treat creator relationships as a transaction: pay for posts, fund campaigns, book appearances, move on. That model produces short-term spikes and shallow commitment.

"I would say we need to shift that conversation from pricing and spending to investing in infrastructure for creators," he says. "What platforms, corporations, and brands can do that is maybe even bigger than money is providing systems that allow creators to grow."

The gap is especially pronounced in how Western marketing budgets engage with live streaming. BIGO LIVE operates across more than 150 countries with a reported user base of 700 million, yet most Western advertising dollars still flow through short-video and influencer-post frameworks that don't account for live streaming's gifting economies or cross-border fan communities.

"Live creator economies, especially global ones like ours, are definitely being underappreciated," Kim says. "Not understanding something or not being familiar with something does not mean that it's less culturally important. It just means it's a blind spot."

Building Careers, Not Just Clout

Seven years into building BIGO LIVE's North American creator operations, Eric Kim keeps the scoreboard simple. The platform's internal mission, as he frames it, comes down to two things: help people make friends and make money.

"Not every creator should feel value because they've reached 10 million followers," he says. "It's really more amazing that they have a loyal community that's consistent, that understands them, that works on a platform that supports them and admires them."

For the broader industry, that's a harder thing to copy than any feature rollout. Platforms built around transactions produce short-term returns. Platforms that invest in systems, in meaningful recognition, and in moments that outlast any algorithm are building something genuinely difficult to replicate.

"I like to think we're here helping people build careers," Kim says. "As long as you can pay the bills, you can keep doing what you love to do. That's what makes BIGO really special."