Kenneth Tan, chief executive of Singapore’s BeLive Holdings, says the company shut its consumer live-streaming platform because it paid its streamers more than it collected. The platform had reached about a million users.
“Pure consumer was not feasible, the unit economics did not work. We were paying the streamers more than what we were earning,” he told CÈ.
BeLive rebuilt as a B2B supplier over six months and now sells white-label live-video and live-commerce infrastructure to retailers and marketplaces. It listed on the Nasdaq Capital Market in April 2025 at US$4 a share, raising about US$10 million on revenue of roughly US$2 million for the year to December 2023.
The disclosure matters well beyond one small-cap, because the arithmetic behind it now governs a category worth tens of billions.
Social commerce across Southeast Asia moved US$47.6 billion of goods in 2025. Forecasts put it at US$186.5 billion by 2030, a compound rate of 31.4 percent, and it has climbed from under five percent of regional e-commerce to between 20 and 25 percent.
The volume is real. The margin on the consumer side of it never has been.
The volume is real. The margin on the consumer side of it never has been.
Virtual gifting, live-streaming’s first native revenue line, runs on a split where the platform keeps 50 to 70 percent across Douyin, Bigo Live and Kuaishou. That is the generous end for a platform. On the commerce side, top Douyin creators take 40 to 50 percent commission on the sales they drive, and TikTok Shop’s mid-tier affiliates in Southeast Asia take 10 to 20 percent per sale.
Now set that against what the same platforms charge the other side of the transaction.
TikTok Shop’s marketplace commissions run 4 to 12.5 percent. In Vietnam, standard store commissions moved from 2 or 3 percent to 3 or 4 percent in April 2025, then to 12.5 percent for marketplace sellers in March 2026. Shopee added a 5 percent technical support fee across Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam in February 2026.
The take rate is what moves. The order of payment stays exactly where it was.
Counting advertising, logistics and the promotional programmes sellers cannot opt out of, effective take rates across the region now reach 20 to 25 percent of post-discount sales. The platforms are recovering the creator’s cut from the merchant, one fee schedule at a time.
Tan reached the same conclusion from the opposite direction and left instead. He gave no revenue or take-rate figures for the consumer years, so how far under water that platform ran is his own number and he kept it.
Two exits from the same arithmetic, and neither of them is the business anyone described in 2019.
Two exits from the same arithmetic, and neither of them is the business anyone described in 2019.
Raise what the seller pays until the creator’s cut clears, which is the route TikTok Shop and Shopee have taken through 2025 and 2026. Or leave the consumer side and sell the plumbing to whoever still wants to run the stream, which is BeLive’s.
BeLive’s filings show what the second route pays so far: about US$2 million of revenue in the year covered by its listing accounts, against a valuation near US$56 million at the midpoint of its indicated range.
Vietnam is the number to watch. TikTok Shop moved commissions there by a factor of four in eleven months, and a marketplace that owns the demand has room a white-label supplier does not.1
Footnotes
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BeLive has not left consumer content altogether. In July 2026 its BeLive AI Studios subsidiary signed a memorandum of understanding with NewUnivers and ChopChop Systems to co-produce about 50 microdramas over twelve months. ↩