Humanity pays the bill, how short video is becoming the closest medium to money (transfer)
Combining with business, short video, a gradually mature sub-media, quietly staged a story of pretending to be a pig and eating a tiger in the cold winter of traditional online media. So "quietly", as Luo Zhenyu, the founder of Logical Thinking, mentioned in his New Year's Eve speech at the end of 2016: "When we were talking about BAT, suddenly a software became popular, and everyone suddenly found that the fourth largest traffic in China was. The app is Kuaishou. When we are reading wisely and understanding the world, we don’t even know that there is a platform that is so big.”
Kuaishou has recently announced that there are currently 50 million people using the platform every day, with an average duration of more than 40 minutes, a total of about 6 million short videos are uploaded every day, and nearly 2 billion videos are in stock. The current Kuaishou valuation has exceeded 10 billion yuan. Coincidentally, Miaopai, another short video platform, made statistics on its own platform data from another dimension not long ago: in the past 2016, the average daily playback volume of Miaopai videos increased from 340 million at the beginning of the year to 2.04 billion, an increase of more than 6 times. ; The monthly video playback volume exceeded 100,000 times and the number of users reached 45,000, an increase of more than 3 times.
How is the short video of pretending to be a pig and eating a tiger becoming the closest medium to money? This article attempts to intuitively discuss and sort out the relationship between production, distribution, exchange, and consumption from economic common sense. For ease of understanding, the above four processes are compressed into three parts: production, distribution, and consumption of short videos.
Production: Who is making short videos anyway?
3 days ago (February 21), movie star Jet Li posted on Weibo announcing that his Kung Fu video website "Street Force" was launched, featuring short videos and graphic messages of about 5 minutes. The sports short video community "Second Hi" founded by sports star Sun Jihai has also attracted attention. But what has been discussed more is the short video platform founded by a group of senior traditional media people in the past two years, including "Today's Ranking", "The Paper" founded by He Yifan, the former executive editor of "Chinese Entrepreneur" magazine. "Pear Video" founded by Qiu Bing, the former CEO of the news, "One" founded by Xu Husheng, the former editor-in-chief of "The Bund Pictorial", and "Instant Video" founded by Wang Liuquan, the former editor-in-chief of Blue Lion.
Obviously, in the context of great changes in communication media and presentation forms, the production and distribution of information is no longer the patent of institutional media. Blogs and official accounts have successively cultivated an open communication ecology where everyone can become a media. In the past two years, small-scale self-media has benefited a lot from this ecology.
"I have the ability to produce and develop content itself. If I can find a good medium to spread the content, I believe this is a great opportunity." Wang Liuquan introduced to NetEase Technology his considerations before launching Instant Video in 2015. It was very common at that time that we-media mainly disseminated pictures and texts, and even an organization had several accounts. If we continued to cut into the picture and text market, it would not be easy to compete. At that time, the domestic sales of smartphones had exceeded 1 billion, the 4G network was further improved, the WiFi coverage in public places increased sharply, and with the reference of the development track of foreign YouTube, Wang Liuquan felt that short videos would soon become one of the normal ways for people to obtain information .
The PGC-type short videos produced by the Immediate Team generally range in length from 1 to 5 minutes. According to Wang Liuquan, for example, a 3-minute video of a business person, the hard cost of shooting is generally about 10,000 yuan. In terms of commercialization, there is currently a to B customized content service model, "It is neither an advertisement nor a promotional video, but based on the content it wants to spread on the mobile terminal. For example, when a brand needs to talk about a product, we can help It is realized.” According to its introduction, it has already cooperated with Unilever, Chow Tai Fook, Tencent, Wei Jing, etc. for payment of different sizes. In addition, the more typical short video business models currently on the market come from advertising and e-commerce.
But there is also a short video production method with lower production cost, even negligible, that is, grassroots users on the Kuaishou platform are more flexible to shoot and upload UGC content. As mentioned earlier, Kuaishou has no header content, and about 6 million UGC short videos are uploaded every day. Among the 100 million monthly active users, 60% of them will shoot and share videos, with an average of 2.5 uploads per month. This part of the group has hatched a considerable number of short video experts, either intentionally or unintentionally, and many of them have benefited from the realization of influence and turned to e-commerce, or shared with the platform through live broadcasts. Kuaishou told NetEase Technology that the platform and users currently have five or five points in terms of live broadcast revenue.
Although the production cost of UGC content is extremely low, it really increases the uncontrollable risk for the platform. Looking at history, we know that domestic representative video sites such as Youku have tried to do UGC before, but the results were not satisfactory. Therefore, in addition to purchasing copyrighted works, they are more and more inclined to PGC and self-made dramas.
"For example, YouTube is the best foreign video UGC platform, which itself has Google diverting traffic; domestically, Baidu is also diverting iQIYI. If it is an independent UGC video platform, it is actually difficult to find particularly good business income. ”, Wang Liuquan believes that pure UGC video platforms may have a shorter natural life cycle, and although YouTube is a UGC nature platform, the best performer is still PGC. As the long tail, many UGCs will eventually go to PGCs.
Distribution: The platform spares no expense to staking
In September last year, today’s Toutiao CEO Zhang Yiming announced that “at least 1 billion yuan will be distributed to short video creators on Toutiao in the next 12 months,” which is regarded by the industry as an important indicator of the transformation of traditional news clients. Some people think that Toutiao and Kuaishou may eventually face off.
Almost at the same time as Toutiao announced the 1 billion subsidy, Alibaba's Weibo, Heyi Group and UC jointly announced the establishment of the "Video Entertainment Alliance" to fully open up the accounts, content, algorithms, relationship interaction, etc. of the three platforms. , that is, fan relations, published content, playback and likes, messages, etc. will all be synchronized on the three platforms. Soon UC announced the "W+ Quantum Plan", and also invested 1 billion yuan in a special fund to encourage and support articles and video works in the form of creative bonuses and advertising sharing.
As early as September 2013, Tencent released a short video independent app "Weishi", which soon became marginalized and merged into Tencent Video from a separate product; The social platform "Laiwang" launched a 9-second short video shooting and sharing function, but it quickly disappeared.
"Some big companies don't look down on the street stall business, but when you are big enough for three or five years, they will look at the market again." Gao Jiaxi, who founded the short video platform "Lebo" in 2013, told NetEase Technology Express.
He believes that in many cases, large companies are not as sensitive to new products and understanding of user needs as startups. "For example Kuaishou, it can insist on doing some subtraction, but in fact, many product managers in large companies do not have the ability to achieve a high enough strategic level of products, and they are essentially product managers. But if it is a startup company, the boss is in the first place. On the front line, when a product manager of a large company goes to fight with the founder, to a certain extent, whether it is the spirit of hard work, the understanding of the product or the enthusiasm for the cause, it is impossible to fight.”
Therefore, for large companies, the cultivation in the field of short video today is almost all manifested in supporting content platforms that have begun to take shape, or doing industrial layout, or doing strategic anti-unloading. And when the short video platform is in close contact with the dust, it is unknown whether many other Internet industries have "learned martial arts and sold them with BAT" as before.
Consumption: Humanity pays the bill
In Huxley's view, "people will gradually fall in love with industrial technologies that make them unable to think".
Perhaps to put it another way, human nature prefers things that can bring ease and pleasure to it, including the form of expression of ease and pleasure. In the era of fullness and warmth, human nature has increasingly become a new engine of consumption. People are indulging in the fragmented pastime brought by modern technology.
In this way, it seems no surprise that "50 million people use it every day".
Short videos just cater to modern people's habit of ingesting fragmented information. Picture information is not only concerned about the classical theory or professional skills it conveys, but whether it is novel and interesting, and even whether it can satisfy people's curiosity and prying psychology. "Cruel Bottom Story" does not require meticulous work, just "defamiliarization", you can get the flow effect of killing a master with random fists.
And how can the consumption upgrade that everyone is talking about not cover short videos. According to Wang Liuquan, the instant video was originally cut from the food video. The team visited the embassies of France, the United States, Italy, and Sweden, and asked these chefs to talk about their representative food. "Lifestyle is the easiest to accept, so we cut to the way of life."
He is very optimistic about PGC short videos from the point of view of middle-class consumption. "Groups in an environment of consumption upgrading have a need for content, so high-quality content will be more strongly concerned by these people."
Another short video representative company, Meipai, also told NetEase that the current short video community model is relatively mature. Since its launch in May 2014, the average daily time spent by Meipai users has increased from 12.9 minutes in May 2014. 33.8 minutes as of October 2016. Meipai is currently divided into 13 vertical channels, including celebrities, dance, food, beauty, cute pets, etc. These concepts sound somewhat extravagant.
"The context was completely destroyed, first by the intrusion of illustrations and photographs, and later by the use of unthemed language." This is Neil Postman's account of the late 19th century in his classic "Entertainment to Death" A pessimistic prediction of the possible consequences of the nascent visual medium. More than a century later, people found that this point of view of Bozeman still applies, but in the era of short videos, intelligent use is far more brilliant than in the past.
The consumption habits of users that have been gradually cultivated are now reacting to the production of short videos, including both the platform distribution channel and the production and production parties.
No, a circular chain is just like that.