After the bonus period, all major short video platforms have invariably entered the era of stocks to compete for the purpose of increasing fan stickiness. And the underlying logic lies in the expansion of business diversification or a strategy to solve the decline of the Internet advertising environment? This article starts from the changes and transformation of various short video platforms, combines the current situation of Internet giants and the rise and fall of Internet advertising to discuss, and recommends interested children's shoes to read~
"Tomorrow, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes."
This was once a prediction of Andy Warhol, the advocate and leader of pop art in the 20th century, but now it has become a reality in the short video era.
Whether it’s Douyin, Kuaishou, Bilibili, or Xiaohongshu, Internet celebrities of all sizes and their loyal fans have formed a unique platform ecosystem and become a traffic black hole in this Internet age.
It is a pity that, as the artist with the greatest influence on pop art, Andy Warhol still has a saying that is rarely known-"Fame is fleeting, only art is eternal."
Although the original intention of this sentence is to shout for real art in the impetuous era, it inexplicably coincides with the current "turning the rudder" of various short video platforms.
After the major short video platforms have passed the bonus period, it seems that they have finally ushered in the competition for the stock era. And its primary goal is to get rid of the "addiction" of pursuing traffic and fans in the past, and turn to deepen the stickiness between bloggers and fans.
What is behind it is the expansion of business diversification in the environment of fishing in the dry lake? Or the only way to deal with the decline of the Internet advertising environment?
1. Douyin measures "iron fans", Kuaishou pushes "Top 100", and the short video platform moves closer to station B
The wind rises from the end of Qingping, and the waves form between the waves.
Recently, many bloggers have discovered that Douyin is testing the "Iron Fan" function internally. In addition to a rumored news picture, there is also a saying: the Iron Fan system is online, and Douyin will fully encourage it in 2022. The waist is bloomed, the mid-tail is encouraged, and the tuba is locked in.
And Douyin’s explanation of iron fans is “core fans” who “have loved the work for a long time, and their interaction data is much higher than the average level after the broadcast”.
In this statement, we can extract 4 key sentences:
Their completion and interaction data for your work is much higher than the average level; more
than half of the payment behavior in Douyin is contributed by fans;
Douyin will increase the exposure of your video among fans and make the traffic more stable;
and Fans establish emotional links to increase the number of core fans.
After reading it in turn, it is not difficult for us to understand the deep meaning of the platform: they love you, they have a high willingness to pay, we will push more "you" videos to them, and "you" need to cultivate more "iron fans" ".
Coincidentally, at 8:00 p.m. on February 27, Kuaishou's "Arabian Nights" 2021 Top 100 Anchor Gala will start a live broadcast. The key word of the conference is different from last year in that there are 4 words "Top 100 Anchor".
And one week before the party, Kuaishou released the list of top 100 anchors selected by the station based on three dimensions of "expressiveness, content, and cohesion". Each group is ranked by user votes, and the highest ranked person in each group is selected as one of the top 100 stars.
Different from the GMV indicators such as turnover and number of games, the ranking method is full of copper smells. This time, the selection of the Top 100 Stars focuses more on the uniqueness and positive energy of the broadcast itself, as well as the interaction and close relationship with fans. .
It can be seen that Kuaishou is throwing away the sales-only business model, so that many media commented: "The choice of Kuaishou this time is in line with its traditional interactive context and the repeatedly emphasized community essence", and the inclusive value has been moved out again.
Today, the content ecology presented in front of the creators is that the two largest short video traffic platforms in China have turned to each other. One was once famous for "decentralization", but now it is becoming "solid fans"; "Cargo capacity" is proud, but now it is looking at the longer-term platform ecology.
Just as Station B began to supplement its own short video business after its medium video business stabilized, Shake and Kuai, which used to run on different tracks with Station B, are now gradually moving closer to Station B, and attach importance to the connection between fans and creators. What is the reason?
One possible answer is that advertising, as the main income model of the Internet, has a certain ceiling and growth rate boundary in its development. When the economic cycle switches, short video platforms that rely mainly on advertising revenue need multiple commercialization paths in parallel. .
2. Major manufacturers are stalling, and emerging advertisers have dropped sharply. Internet advertising is going through a cold winter
On the evening of February 24 at the beginning of the year, the domestic e-commerce giant Alibaba announced its third quarterly report for the fiscal year 2022 (Q1 2021-Q1 2022), showing that its operating income was 242.58 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 10%; The profit was 7.068 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 86%.
At present, among the various businesses under Alibaba, only the retail business, which is the main business, really makes money, while Alibaba Cloud makes little profit.
In the retail business of Ali as the main business, a key data is that the customer management fees (including advertising fees and commission income) of Taobao and Tmall fell by 1% year-on-year, showing negative growth for the first time, while this data in 2021Q3 only recorded 3% positive growth.
Looking back at Ali’s stock price at this time, in the extremely pessimistic environment of the entire Internet, it has fallen by more than 65% from its high to the present.
Also in the 2021Q3 fiscal quarter, the answers submitted by major Internet manufacturers are relatively bleak: Tencent’s advertising revenue increased by 5% year-on-year; Baidu’s search and information flow advertising revenue growth rate also fell to 6%.
At the macro level, the QuestMobile report pointed out that the overall growth rate of Internet advertising slowed down in the third quarter, and the year-on-year growth rate fell to 9.5%.
After experiencing the era of mass entrepreneurship and innovation in 2015, the era of self-media in 2017, and the upsurge in education and new consumption in 2020, some cutting-edge advertisers failed to make it to the finals after running out of bullets, and eventually hated the battlefield; some had enough food and grass However, they were directly shut down for rectification; some ushered in a consumption downgrade, directly lost the opportunity to continue to raise new financing, and the brand dissipated.
As an Internet company whose revenue is extremely dependent on advertising, when the growth rate of advertising declines, it faces huge challenges. So the next thing I saw was news of layoffs, optimization, and downsizing from various factories in the workplace software.
Under such circumstances, even content platforms such as Dou, Kuai, Station B, and Xiaohongshu, which are black holes in domestic traffic, cannot survive alone. When the glory of advertising is gone, platforms need to establish new business models to provide future growth. Point, e-commerce is undoubtedly the first choice.
Looking back at the beginning of last year, Douyin e-commerce set a goal of trillions in GMV for the whole year. In October, Mu Qing, vice president of Douyin E-commerce, disclosed some data at the "2021 Douyin E-commerce Service Provider Ecological Conference": From January to September, the GMV of Douyin e-commerce increased by 7.9 times year-on-year; Views exceeded 42.5 billion; the cumulative number of sold products exceeded 7.4 billion.
Kuaishou disclosed revenue data in its 2021 full-year financial report recently released, pointing out that the platform's annual GMV (total e-commerce transactions) exceeded 680 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 78%; as early as September last year, Kuaishou e-commerce repurchased The rate has reached more than 70%.
As for Xiaohongshu, advertising revenue accounted for 80% of its total revenue in 2020, but at the beginning of this year, the community department and e-commerce department were merged into a new community department, and the original secondary department under the community department, the open platform department, was cancelled. , also added three reorganized secondary departments, namely Merchant Department, Trading Product Department and Service Department.
At this time, when we combine Douyin’s “Iron Fans” and Kuaishou’s “Top 100” to see, it is not difficult to find the deep meaning behind a series of actions of the content platform: to strengthen the revenue of individual users, starting from e-commerce, and the premise is to let them Find someone you can "follow".
3. Advertising top stream B station is also transforming
"Classmate Zhang", who is popular on Douyin, has gone out of the circle to the point where almost no one knows it, but with 14.567 million fans, his advertising price on the star map is only 300,000.
It is rumored that "Teacher, my name is Classmate He" who was based on station B was once valued by the well-known financial blogger @月风_Investment Notes: "The market price of the entire network will be around 3 million to 5 million. , and Party A is vying to vote.”
According to tech planet reports, as the UP master Banfo Xianren with 650W fans, his customized video is about 590,000; while the UP master Zhujun with more than 700,000 fans at station B will have an annual income of about one million in 2021 , an increase of nearly 10 times compared to 2020.
If calculated by dividing the quotation by the total number of fans, station B should be regarded as the content platform with the highest advertising quotation for a single user.
But now, Bilibili's own "Top 100" standards are also changing. The "Top 100" standards disclosed by Station B this year have become "professionalism, influence, and innovation." Compared with last year's "Top 100" Lineup, this year, 63 UP hosts were selected into the "Top 100" for the first time, and UP hosts with less than 1 million followers reached 11.
I still remember Chen Rui, chairman and CEO of Station B, once said: "Now what everyone is competing for is the comprehensive capabilities of the platform and its own ecological layout, including whether creators can achieve long-term and sustainable career goals in this ecosystem."
Indeed, when the traffic dividend of the Internet platform peaks, deepening the value of creators will naturally become an important channel for platform competition, and their choice is naturally to bring goods.
In September 2021, Bilibili LiveStar Han Xiaomu, the champion of the most popular anchor selection at station B every year, will start the first large-scale live broadcast with goods, focusing on the two-dimensional peripherals;
At the beginning of December 2021, after station B spent 118 million yuan to obtain a payment license, the internal test of the small yellow car will be live-streamed with goods;
Then, UP masters such as Hurricane Movie and TV, DongDongGun, Foodies Please Close Your Eyes, etc. made their own posters, and they warmed up and started to bring goods.
Although the results of these two attempts were not satisfactory, at any rate, Station B took a step from 0 to 1.
The primary dilemma faced by station B is still the fear that the commercialization of the mismatched painting style will make users flee one after another. After all, as we all know, Bilibili is a company that dare not even post ads; secondly, the product supply chain of Bilibili has not yet been established, which is not a matter of overnight for the platform and UP owners. There is a long way to go.
Four. Conclusion
All in all, the short video platform is getting rid of the "addiction" of the past.
When Douyin started to push "iron fans", we knew that the increase in public domain traffic would be further compressed; when Kuaishou started to push "Top 100", we knew that the past behavior of crowding out old fans was unsustainable, and long-term value should be pursued; The stock price of station B has dropped to freezing point, and it has started to promote "live broadcast with goods". We know that the realization of short video diversified business channels is imminent.
At the node where Internet advertising is declining, all major content/traffic platforms are experiencing a torture: How can I survive this cold winter?
The answer may still be the same: stand with your users, think about what they think, and let them find someone to "follow".