Author| Zhang Chao Editor| Luo Lijuan
Under the national fitness trend, Keep, which is positioned as an "intelligent sports platform and professional equipment shopping guide", has also taken advantage of the east wind.
The latest data shows that the number of Keep users has exceeded 300 million, the number of monthly active users has reached 40 million, and the number of members has exceeded 10 million.
With the increase in platform users and creators who are keen to share fitness content, today, Keep, an app launched in 2015, has transformed from a sports fitness tool into a home intelligent sports experience technology platform that integrates sports content, fitness hardware, and food consumption, covering home users' "eating, wearing, using, and practicing".
Wang Nan, creator operation director of Keep, revealed that the Keep community has accumulated more than 100 talents with more than 500,000 fans, and has also received 9 explosive training courses, with 14 million practitioners per month. The addition of talents has greatly enriched the Keep content ecology, and the platform has accumulated more than 1,000 high-quality content creators, and more than 3,000 sets of PUGC content have been precipitated on the platform.
However, in order for talents to stay on the Keep platform for a long time and continue to create valuable content, it is not enough to rely on the community atmosphere alone, but also to help talents achieve business monetization.
To this end, Keep recently officially released the "10,000 People Stretch Plan", focusing on the growth path of sports and fitness talents, and helping the "IP" evolution of talents through refined operations.
Specifically, Keep will invest tens of billions of traffic resources and 50 million cash rewards in the next year to support high-quality fitness content creators, while increasing the commercial development of talents and enhancing the commercial influence of head creators.
Huang Jingjing, vice president of Keep, said: "In the next 1 year, Keep will create 150 million creators with training, and achieve 10,000 fitness experts with a single platform income of more than 10,000 in 3 years. ”
Keep Vice President Citrine
Promoting the growth of the business value of talents is also a way to expand the business scale of the platform.
For Keep, although it is currently in the head position of the fitness platform, it is still in the early stage of exploration on the road to commercial monetization.
At present, keep's main business model can be divided into four parts: membership fees charged to app users, commercialization of talent advertising, consumer goods revenue (that is, online mall services), and offline Keepland fitness space.
According to Zheng Bin, commercial marketing director of Keep, in the past two years, platform talent marketing has been developing at a very high growth rate, with an annual growth rate of nearly 50%.
According to official data, as of now, the Keep platform has gathered 1,000 high-quality content producers, produced 156 million follow-up courses this year, and nearly one million people interact with creators every day.
Keep, which has rapidly accumulated traffic in the past few years, began to increase the number of advertising and marketing services. According to Keep's logic, the company encourages each talent to first build a fan base, create a personal IP, and then transform into a commercial IP with the help of the platform.
In this process, Keep has been playing the role of "linker" in the past, by linking advertisers and talents, helping advertisers find suitable talents for marketing, and also providing "energy supply" for the creation of business IP.
Zheng Bin, Commercial Marketing Director of Keep
With the richer and more diverse types of talents in the future and the gradual broadening of the audience, Keep hopes to become the builder of the platform marketing link, open up the full link of the talent IP marketing, and let the talent have the link and closed loop of independent marketing.
In short, this is the process of the development of a service "personalization" to "modeling", which means that Keep talent marketing has the possibility of model replication.
In order to make the entire monetization path longer, Keep also launched the "Calorie Storm" plan, trying to launch advertisements before, during and after the training of the talent course to increase the coverage of product marketing; at the same time, the design and opening of the role of the "brand content officer", so that the talent not only makes content for brand endorsement, but also brings more value in the incubation stage of the brand, that is, the talent and the brand side are deeply bound to strengthen the commercial monetization ability.
In 2022, the commercialization of Keep may usher in a new stage of development. How will the seven-year-old company monetize its business? How will it deal with competition from other content platforms? Huang Jingjing, vice president of Keep, and Wang Nan, director of creator operations at Keep, answered one by one in front of the media.
The following is the content of the dialogue (24/7 technology has been deleted):
New goal: content and commercialization
Q: How has keep changed for sports enthusiasts (both celebrities and ordinary consumers) since its inception? How does Keep empower them? What is Keep's profit model?
Huang Jingjing: Since 2014 and 2015, the general direction of national policies has guided us to do some sports and health-related things, and we have been very lucky in the entrepreneurial process and enjoyed the dividends of national policies. At that time, all parties also agreed with this direction.
From the supply side, at that time, many professional institutions paid more attention to competitive sports; the content was more fragmented, and many of them were old content, so the things that the public fitness could choose from were more limited.
Keep grasped a very accurate positioning point from the beginning of the business, when the entire App positioning was called "mobile fitness coach", which was characterized by reducing the time cost and money cost of user exercise, grasping convenience, simple content and easy to practice, etc.
By 2017 and 2018, we began to use AI technology to customize content, solving the problem of how to become a more long-term plan after having high-quality content. Combined with such technical means, according to the basic data indicators provided by individual users, a personalized, more granular customized plan is generated, which can be more suitable for users. After about 3-4 years of development, the quality of many talented content creations has also improved year by year because of the cooperative paid plan.
Now, we repeatedly mention that the user's own emotions include creativity, because the user's persistence is not done by cold machine algorithms, but must rely on people and services, which have a temperature content connection. So we feel that content is infrastructure, after the original pain points are gone, how do we do it deeply? Using more fun ways to make users feel the joy of the movement itself is our recent effort.
Regarding the profit model, we talked about advertising today, and the talent is also a very important force in the middle, keep can help them achieve commercialization. Monetization is not only a monetization model for brands, but also should pay attention to the monetization of content. Second, the membership business is relatively mature. Third, the consumer goods business. Also, the offline Keepland fitness space. The core of these commercial products is still in the service, whether it is membership service or talent marketing, the underlying logic is to serve the user's "eating, wearing and practicing" needs.
Q: Regarding the Talent Support Program, what other expectations are there besides the goals? For example, the future of the company's realization, profitability and so on.
Wang Nan: The two goals we just had are to incubate more than 150 "millions of followers" creators within one year, and within three years, 10,000 creators will earn more than 10,000 yuan based on content on the Keep single platform. These two goals are relatively simple, but very landed, and we have sorted out based on the growth volume of fitness experts in the entire industry, as well as the characteristics of the Keep platform and the PUGC content attributes.
Next, in the planning of commercial monetization, it is definitely the two directions of content and commercialization.
In terms of content, content incentives are a kind of content incentive, and we will also explore paid courses with creators. At present, we can see paid content on the site, and then we hope that more and more professional authors will work with us to continue to enrich and expand the form of content.
In terms of commercialization, a brand new product has also been developed this year - "Calorie Storm", which is a recommendation model that is very friendly to the authors of the entire platform. We will build more direct communication between the talent and the brand, so that more seed creators can contact some high-quality business orders in advance, accumulate some experience, and let the head authors and the platform establish a longer-term connection.
Look at growth: Keep still has potential
Q: Keep users have grown rapidly in the past two years, with more than 40 million monthly active users in the first half of this year. What do you think of the future growth potential of this vertical market, and what level of traffic pooling is likely to reach in Keep? What is the entire user profile of Keep, and what kind of consumption preferences do they present?
Huang Jingjing: Due to China's huge population base, China's fitness population penetration rate is still lower than that of developed countries such as Europe and the United States. Compared with developed countries, there is still a lot of room for growth in the development of China's sports and fitness market. In this context, Keep's potential for growth is naturally great.
From the perspective of what we do, it still lies in whether the form of providing services continues to iterate, which can be closer to the pain points of the user's current fitness. In the past year or two, everyone has solved the problem in a deeper way, and the scale itself is not a problem, but to solve the pain points of a larger group of people. Because exercise is a person's instinct, even the elders who do not have exercise habits will go out to walk and move, so the sports crowd and lifestyle bite very tightly.
How to let more users participate in the use of products through services is a bigger proposition.
Users have been waiting for us to attract them with something better. Therefore, our current view is that current products and services have attracted a considerable number of users, and more products in the future, including talent partners, may attract a larger user base.
Wang Nan: The proportion of users between men and women is relatively balanced, mainly young people. With the gradual enrichment of content in the past two years, we have found some phenomena in the site: for example, slightly older users have become active in the station, and dance and tai chi content has been continuously consumed by users repeatedly, and the demand for fresher content will be put forward.
Q: In addition to buying Keep's classes, do users have other consumption preferences?
Huang Jingjing: We just talked more about content consumption, in addition, our own products are also doing very well.
For example, items like jump rope are also very popular. Its entire experience design and app are integrated, so it pulls up the growth of the category.
We users, the consumption of equipment is constantly exploring. On the other hand, our diet, including hardware, bracelets, etc., has grown very well in the station, because it is tied to the user scenario.
Talk about competition: keep the content unique and open-minded
Q: Now that short video platforms and content platforms are also doing online fitness content, what are the essential differences between Keep and these platforms in terms of content?
Wang Nan: First of all, compared with the comprehensive content platform, Keep, as a vertical brand, has the advantage of being more professional and systematic, and the user population is more accurate.
Keep brings together the best quality follow-up training experts on the whole network, and users will actively generate sports behaviors when practicing for a long time; in the training course setting, we combine the course with intelligent hardware, and at the same time open up the live broadcast rights of talents, which are different from other comprehensive content platforms.
For the talent and fan groups, their needs are also different for each platform. Keep and other pan-content platforms are not an either-or relationship for both hosts and users. The needs of users and celebrities on our platform are actually different from those on other platforms. We can also see that the creators of all categories, many of them are multi-platform, multi-habitat development. It can be said that the content in the Keep station must be different from other platforms, because it is a hard indicator to make users willing to practice. We also hope that through the 10,000-person stretch plan, the career of fitness experts will be extended to a longer period of time, and the value of personal IP will be fully realized.
Huang Jingjing: As far as the users themselves are concerned, they are in line with our slogan, and our professional, scientific and trustworthy points of content have always been worth adhering to. From the perspective of the content supply market, many sports content is not scientific, such as a very short period of time to slim down, diet, which is not the guidance of the correct concept of exercise. We will continue to consolidate the professionalism and uniqueness of the sports content itself.
For example, the frequency of courses and exercises shared by celebrities today may be millions or 20 million, and the content life cycle is very long. Some users practice a video thousands of times, which is equivalent to thousands of interactions generated by the master. Therefore, the difference in content usage behavior will also bring about platform differences.
Q: Other platforms are laying out sports content and signing up some exclusive authors, will this have an impact on keep's exclusivity? Will it make Keep irreplaceable less?
Wang Nan: First of all, a more clear point is that Keep users actually have a very big difference from those platform users, that is, the proportion of Keep users is similar to that of men and women, mainly to practice, not just to watch. Even for the Talent course, we have divided the difficulty rating of K1-K5, the number of calories burned, and the clock card record of each practice, and real fitness users have demand for these functions and data. These users have their own attitude to life, so they will start based on their own needs in choosing what they use, follow Keep to achieve certain sports appeals, and have their own goals and expectations.
Huang Jingjing: I think that in terms of the uniqueness of the content, it ultimately depends on who has a deeper understanding of the needs of users. Keep has always had its own official content team, which is also our unique advantage. For the understanding and grasp of user needs, other platforms do not have vertical investment, but more through the operational strategy to solve this problem. But our observation and accumulation over the past few years are still different in the uniqueness of the content. Some content outside the site may be very hot, but placed in the site is not necessarily liked by users, but may need to be guided by us, will usher in a lot of consumption.
Q: Can keep the talents who are incubated and empowered jump out of the platform development after forming a personal IP in the future? If they develop on multiple platforms, will it cause some competitive pressure on Keep?
Huang Jingjing: We very much encourage them to develop multi-platform, and if this platform is open enough, we are willing to cooperate, because the content needs to be continuously innovated.
For example, Keep turned ballet, yoga, and even Yi dance into exercises this year. Our creative ability should be difficult to match in China, so we can continue to output content, and some friends are also looking for us to cooperate. For us not to worry, we look at what is done later or not, not what is in the present moment. At present, keeps, whether it is excellent talents or content output, has a very open attitude.