Text | Praying Mantis Observation
Author | Qingyue
"Every day I'm 'forced' to pursue articles."
Xiaoyu demonstrated it on the spot. She took out her mobile phone and opened a short video app, and swiped to the seventh short video. It was an excerpt from a short web article:
I'm a vicious female supporting role, but I played badly.
Since I found out that the real daughter is the heroine, I have started to live with my tail between my legs.
Less than five minutes after the stroke, the tenth article was another tweet:
To save the love brain
I contracted a field of wild vegetables
That night, I saw Wang Baochuan dragging a dead body to the depths
These short stories that have been moved are very attractive to readers at the beginning, either with twists and turns, or Internet hot spots, but when you want to continue reading, you find that this platform has only moved a small part of the content, the rest needs to be read. You can only see it on other platforms, such as Zhihu, Zuyou, UC Browser, LOFTER, etc.
Xiaoyu himself is a senior lover of online literature, especially suspenseful love. Now, it is inevitable that most of the time will be taken away by the short video and the content of the tweets in the short video.
The flood of short videos is beginning to engulf the web text market.
The "cake" of web articles, short videos can't be eaten in one bite
Short video creators carry short stories from Zhihu, Youyou, and UC browsers, which are just the tip of the iceberg of short videos hitting the online text market.
In the five years from 2018 to 2022, the number of short video users has increased from 648 million to 1.012 billion, and the number of new users per year has exceeded 60 million. At the same time, the user utilization rate has increased from 78.2% to 94.8%, an increase of 16.6 percentage points.
On the other hand, in 2018, online literature took up 7.8% of the time in various mobile applications, and in 2019 it was 7.2%, and by June 2020, it had decreased to 4.6% . The time for online writing is naturally getting less and less.
But even so, the short video platforms are still eyeing the small cake of web articles.
In the field of free reading, ByteDance has harvested a lot of traffic with Tomato Novels. QuestMobile data shows that in December 2021, Tomato Novels topped the list with 93.27 million monthly active users, which is higher than the second-ranked Qimao Novels. Nearly three thousand.
Judging from the recent year-on-year growth rate of monthly active users on major online reading platforms, Byte’s tomato momentum is still very fierce.
After relying on free reading to accumulate traffic and readers, in the past two years, ByteDance has gradually formed a matrix of paid novel products.
For example, Douwen Novels in January last year, in April, also launched "Bingke Novels" and "Xincao Novels". Novels, frequently read novels, green fruit novels, etc.
Although the short video platform is coming aggressively, judging from the financial report data disclosed by China Literature on March 16, the defense of the online platform is also quite good:
First, based on non-IFRS, China Literature’s net profit attributable to its parent in 2022 will be 1.35 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 9.6%, and the corresponding net profit rate will reach 17.7%, a year-on-year increase of 3.5 percentage points;
Secondly, the Qidian Reading App under Yuewen successfully broke through the growth bottleneck in 2022. Its MAU in December 2022 increased by 80% year-on-year, and its annual revenue in 2022 increased by more than 30% year-on-year;
Finally, by the end of 2022, China Literature’s overseas reading platform WebNovel will provide overseas users with about 2,900 Chinese translations and about 500,000 local original works, cultivate about 340,000 overseas online writers, and have about 170 million overseas visiting users.
The increase in net profit attributable to the parent company, the year-on-year increase in the MAU of core self-owned products, and the acceleration of the internationalization of online literature. In 2022, China Literature has delivered a report card that is both stable and resilient.
The flow is "failure", and the first point is to read the article
From e-commerce, local life, to social networking and knowledge payment, the short video platform has invaded all walks of life quietly, but with a strong sense of presence.
In the face of the aggressiveness displayed by the short video platform, China Literature’s performance on the defensive end is also remarkable. At its root, there may be two reasons for it in the view of “Mantis Watch”.
On the one hand, judging from the intrusion of short videos into e-commerce and local life industries, the advantage of platforms led by Byte is, to put it bluntly, traffic.
The 2022 ByteDance investment report shows that the current number of global monthly active users of ByteDance has exceeded 2.5 billion. With its unique advantages in traffic, ByteDance has hardly encountered other industries that also rely on traffic. What is the threshold, but web articles are different. The cornerstone of the web article industry is built on a large number of high-quality original works, not traffic.
Explained by the ratchet effect in economics, people's consumption habits are irreversible after they are formed, that is, it is easy to adjust upwards, but difficult to adjust downwards.
Substituting it into the consumption habits of online readers, newbie readers who have just entered the pit are more likely to be attracted by free online content, but as time goes by, newbie readers are also growing continuously, and their ability to read aesthetics is also changing. As the number increases, they will also have higher requirements for the quality of the articles.
This is why the development of Tomato Novel has not yet encountered a bottleneck, but ByteDance is ramping up its paid reading. After all, only paid reading can guide the output of high-quality content more effectively.
Compared with the short video platform, China Literature Group obviously has a richer reserve of high-quality content. Taking 2022 alone as an example, the China Literature Group platform will add about 540,000 writers and 950,000 works, and the number of new words will exceed 39 billion . In contrast, the short video platforms led by Byte are still relatively backward in the production capacity of high-quality web content.
On the other hand, the reason lies in the fight for the "second landing point".
Publisher Zhao Yong pointed out that in recent years, industries such as animation, film and television dramas, and games have been seeking high-quality works from online literature for content development, and online literature platforms are also in-depth work on copyright utilization and work adaptation on the content side.
Based on this general trend, Byte has also made preparations. Last year, Tomato Novels tried to adapt multiple IPs into short dramas, such as "Niannian Wuming", etc., creating a model where dramas and novels are launched simultaneously. Later, it also acquired "Let's Watch Together" comics to deploy comics business, combining web articles, short dramas and comics.
Unlike the late-moving short video platform, it is clear that China Literature is more experienced in the layout of the "second landing point".
After the acquisition of Xinli Media, China Literature has assembled the entire chain from IP pre-development to IP visualization and operation, forming a refined industrial production process.
In the past year, based on the premise that the visualization of the IP ecological chain has become increasingly mature, China Literature has also produced some blockbusters, such as "The World", which hit a new high in the ratings of CCTV-1 prime-time TV dramas in the past eight years, "Qingqing's Daily", which refreshed iQIYI's fastest record of breaking 10,000, etc., not only increased the influence of the original work, but also fed back the creation of the online literature industry.
Next, there will be the second part of the top IP such as "Celebrating More Than Years 2", "Fights Break the Sphere 2", and "Zuo Son 2", but what worries the market is that some of these second parts are not the original series. People and horses, and "Celebrating More Than Years" and "Zuo Son-in-law", these works are all IPs that China Literature had reserved ten years ago.
Can the explosion continue? Does China Literature still have enough "IP with real development value"? The jittery market is already staring at China Literature’s next move.
Abandoning the zero-sum game, how can the online text platform maintain the basic flow of traffic?
The "Statistical Report on China's Internet Development Status" shows that as of December 2022, the number of short video users will exceed one billion for the first time, and the user utilization rate will be as high as 94.8%.
Short video content is constantly enriched, driving the growth of user scale and stickiness, and becoming the main source of mobile Internet time and traffic increment. Faced with the multiple impacts that short video platforms may bring in the future, online literature platforms led by China Literature want to Keeping the basic traffic flow well, "Mantis Observation" believes that the following two points are the key.
The first point is that content and creators are still the starting point of all industry extensions. However, judging from the content, the current web articles are falling into a vicious circle of homogenization and routine.
Since many creators accumulate experience through reading books and seek inspiration from novels that have already exploded during the creation process, this has led to endless problems of blending and covering, content homogeneity is becoming more and more serious, and routine production "Formula cool writing" also abounds.
From the perspective of creators, the flood of short videos has also separated some leading authors. For example, the great author "Cat Who Can Cook" who won the starting point rookie king was released on Tomato Novels under Byte. New books; new books by established authors such as Yaoye and Yueguan are also currently published on Tomato Novel.
Therefore, how to avoid homogeneity, routine, rough water injection and other problems, and how to improve the content creator ecology, attract creators by income, and retain creators by experience, may be the next step that traditional online literature platforms need to solve The problem.
The second point is that there is indeed competition between the traditional online literature platform headed by China Literature and the short video platform headed by ByteDance, but it has definitely not risen to the level of a zero-sum game.
In a zero-sum game, that is, a non-cooperative game, the parties participating in the game, under strict competition, the gain of one party must mean the loss of the other party, and the sum of the gains and losses of all parties in the game is always "zero", so both parties There is no possibility of cooperation.
But the relationship between short videos and web articles has not evolved to the point of "either you die or I live".
Previously, Internet literature platforms such as China Literature and Qimao have tried to cooperate with short video platforms to launch short drama content. This form not only broadens the monetization form of Internet literature IP, but also supplements the expressiveness of text, and continuously deepens the content of works and content. author's influence.
In the future, if the connection between the two can be closer, the problem of insufficient original high-quality content of the short video platform led by Byte can be easily solved. At the same time, readers are more patient with videos than texts. Short videos may also be an opportunity and key for online text platforms to keep a good traffic base and find new increments.
In the face of market uncertainty and the expansion of the boundaries of the short video platform, the stable performance of the online text platform at this stage is only temporary. How to make breakthroughs in content, creators and form innovation is the key to its steady and long-term development.
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