The traffic of Douyin and Kuaishou to the creators is not enough, and the window period of the WeChat video number

WeChat, which is used by more than a billion people every day, has always been cautious about product iterations.

If you exclude the opening of external link access in order to match the regulatory trend, WeChat has only made two breakthrough updates in the past five years: the launch of mini programs in 2017 has changed users' habits of using mobile applications to a certain extent. And in 2020, in order to further enrich the content ecology on the platform, WeChat launched a video number and live broadcast function.

Now the outside world is concerned about what will happen to the product experience after WeChat opens the external link; it is also concerned about what impact many competitors will have on WeChat and even Tencent after entering the WeChat ecosystem - such as video numbers - a basic consensus in the market is that it needs to accelerate its growth, the faster the better, in order to cope with the many potential challenges that come with the opening of the external link.

In the open class, the video number team did not announce the number of active users, but focused on the content ecological construction in the past year.

They have highlighted the live broadcast of some large-scale events, such as the launch of Shenzhou 12, the Tokyo Olympics and the return of Huawei's CFO. They also tried to broadcast the concert live, and according to official data, the West Side Boys Concert and the Mayday New Year's Eve Concert attracted 27 million and 14 million people respectively.

However, these successes have their own contingencies: they are all event-based content, have natural social communication, are more likely to be concerned, and can also be fermented and disseminated with the help of the circle of friends.

To judge whether a platform has a stable, healthy and sustainable creator ecosystem, the core is to look at the performance of its daily content. Contingencies, mega-holidays, and marketing events can only bring a wave of new users in the short term. From this point of view, there is still a big gap between the video number and Douyin and Kuaishou.

The video number team is also aware of this. In the WeChat open class, they said that in the future, they will launch a number of payment capabilities, including paid live broadcast rooms and video tipping functions; at the same time, the video number live broadcast will invest 5 billion cold start packages to obtain traffic for new anchors.

The number of users of Douyin and Kuaishou has entered a relatively saturated state, but the overall number of creators and platform content continues to grow, and even reached the state of content surplus, which also means that the traffic that creators can share in these two platforms is now decreasing, especially newcomers. The intention of the video number is obvious, and now is to seize this window of opportunity.

In addition to the video number, WeChat's other core businesses also disclosed new developments:

The number of monthly active users of WeChat search reached 700 million. In contrast, the monthly active users of Mobile Baidu are 600 million, and the monthly active users of Douyin Search are 500 million. In addition, the proportion of long-tail search terms in WeChat search has increased by 20% compared with 2020, which indicates that users' trust in WeChat search is rising.

The daily active users of WeChat Mini Programs reached 450 million; in 2021, the average daily usage of Mini Programs increased by 32% year-on-year, and the number of Users paid for Mini Programs increased by 80% year-on-year.

WeChat Pay currently covers more than 10 million merchants, the number of WeChat collection codes exceeds 50 million, 50% of WeChat Pay users have opened WeChat Pay points, and more than 100 million people use the "use first pay" function.

Enterprise WeChat is about to further deepen the interconnection with WeChat, and the new feature that will be launched soon is to fully connect with the video number. (Gao Honghao)