In October 2021, Chinese livestreamer Li Jiaqi demonstrated how large creator-led commerce could become. During a 12-hour broadcast marking the first day of Alibaba’s Singles’ Day shopping period, Li pre-sold 12 billion yuan, then worth about $1.9 billion, in merchandise.
Bloomberg reporting reproduced by China Daily described the total as goods ranging from Shiseido lotions to Apple AirPods. Li was already closely associated with cosmetics and widely known as the “lipstick brother,” but the entire $1.9 billion total was not limited to beauty products.
The event nevertheless captured something important about modern product discovery. Entertainment, recommendation and checkout had been compressed into one screen, while a recognizable creator demonstrated products in the visual language of the platform rather than the language of a conventional commercial.
Livestream selling and UGC are not the same thing
Li’s broadcast was organized social commerce led by a major professional streamer. It should not be treated as equivalent to an unpaid customer posting a review from home. Paid influencer content, livestream retail and customer-created footage have different incentives, production systems and disclosure requirements.
They do, however, compete with conventional advertising in a similar environment. Each places a product inside a feed where audiences are accustomed to seeing faces, demonstrations, comments and immediate reactions. The content feels native to the space even when the commercial purpose is obvious.
That distinction matters because user-generated content is often described as though it succeeds simply because consumers believe it is unbiased. In practice, audiences regularly encounter free products, affiliate links, sponsorships and creators building businesses of their own. Credibility can survive those incentives when viewers understand what they are seeing and receive useful evidence about the product.
What the available figures actually show
A 2025 overview from Bentley University collects several industry findings about beauty marketing. It reports that 49% of Gen Z and millennial consumers in a 2023 BeautyMatter study had purchased a product following a social media influencer recommendation.
The same overview cites a 2024 Mintel finding that 61% of Gen Z shoppers preferred seeing real consumers in beauty campaigns. It also reports that brands using UGC saw 29% more web conversions than those using traditional advertising campaigns and cites survey findings showing greater trust in UGC and beauty influencers than in branded or traditional advertising.
Those percentages should not be treated as ten versions of the same measurement. They come from different studies, populations and definitions. One concerns influencer recommendations, another concerns casting preferences in beauty campaigns, and another concerns conversions on websites using customer content.
Taken together, they support a narrower conclusion: many consumers respond to product demonstrations and recommendations delivered by recognizable people in platform-native formats. They do not establish that every customer video is trusted, that traditional advertising has stopped working or that influencer content and unpaid customer reviews are interchangeable.
Bentley’s overview also notes that creators with between 1,000 and 10,000 followers are often perceived as more relatable and trustworthy. The appeal is not necessarily that a smaller creator has no motive. It is that the relationship between creator, audience and product can feel easier to interpret than a polished celebrity campaign.
Visible motives can be easier to process
Consumers do not need to believe that a creator is completely independent before accepting useful information from a video. They can notice a sponsorship and still evaluate whether the shade matches, whether the packaging leaks or whether the product behaves as demonstrated.
That response fits a broader pattern in which people know they are being sold to but continue when the value of the exchange feels clear. Suspicion does not automatically end a transaction. It changes the kind of evidence a buyer wants before completing it.
A conventional advertisement makes a controlled promise on the brand’s behalf. Customer footage can show the product operating in a less controlled setting, sometimes including flaws, uncertainty or results that vary from person to person. That does not make the footage objective, but it can make the evidence feel more usable.
This is also why manufacturing the appearance of spontaneity is risky. When brands script supposedly ordinary reactions too tightly, hide compensation or suppress negative experiences, the content loses the legibility that made the format valuable. The problem is not simply that the video looks produced. It is that the viewer can no longer tell whose experience is being represented.
Private sharing expands the same visual culture
An ElectroIQ compilation updated in 2025 reports that more than 40 million businesses use Messenger and that businesses and customers exchange more than 8 billion messages through the platform each month. It also reports that users share more than 1.3 billion photos and videos and send more than 5 billion emojis daily.
The compilation places men at 55.6% of Messenger’s audience and identifies people aged 25 to 34 as its largest age group. Those figures describe Messenger’s scale and audience, but they do not establish how many conversations contain product recommendations or how many purchases result from them.
What the figures do show is that visual communication is not confined to public feeds. Product screenshots, review links and photos can move through the same private channels people use for ordinary conversation. A recommendation from a friend in a message is different from a public UGC campaign, but brands operate in a culture where visual evidence can travel between the two.
A screen is not automatically experienced as distant
A 2021 exploratory study in Frontiers in Psychology compared perceived empathy and support in remote and face-to-face psychotherapy. Its sample included 23 patients and five psychotherapists, and the patients perceived their therapists as significantly more empathic and supportive during the remote sessions.
The study was small, conducted in a therapeutic setting and explicitly described by its authors as exploratory. It does not demonstrate why UGC converts customers, and it should not be presented as direct evidence about advertising.
Its relevance is more limited. It challenges the assumption that interaction through a screen must always feel less personal than interaction in a shared physical space. Under some conditions, mediated communication can still convey attention, support and proximity. Marketing content may use the same screen, but whether it earns trust depends on its own context and evidence.
The $1.9 billion lesson
Li Jiaqi’s 2021 broadcast sits at the most commercial and professionally organized end of creator-led selling. An unpaid customer clip sits at the other end. Treating them as identical obscures how sponsorship, audience size, platform mechanics and production affect credibility.
What connects them is not the absence of persuasion. It is the movement of product information into formats built around recognizable people, visible demonstrations and immediate audience response. The buyer can see the product being handled while also judging the person handling it.
Brands cannot guarantee the outcome simply by collecting more customer videos or making advertisements look less polished. The content still has to answer practical questions, disclose its incentives and show an experience that viewers consider believable.
The strongest UGC strategy therefore begins before anyone presses record. It begins with a product that gives customers something specific, useful and honest to show.