The position of the video number in the WeChat ecology can be felt from the agenda setting of the WeChat official New Year's eve drama.
In the most important activities of WeChat every year, there are 5 major business lines on the main forum of WeChat Open Class this year, namely video number, WeChat payment, mini program, search and enterprise WeChat. Among them, the video number is the latest business to go online among these services, but it plays the role of the opening speech, which is enough to see its increasing importance.
Of course, on the other hand, the short video and live content ecology of the video number is also the basic disk of ByteDance, the most powerful enemy in Tencent's history. Therefore, the video number is of great significance to Tencent's overall group strategy, whether it starts from the WeChat ecology or for Tencent's overall group strategy.
This is also in line with the previous Titanium Media APP article "Supervision puts Pressure on Tencent's advertising and games, WeChat video number and mini program should appear | look at the financial report", the analysis and judgment of the video number.
However, the disclosure of the business progress of the video number is still "low-key" as always, and no core data indicators such as daily life and monthly activity are disclosed. But more and more officials are standing in front of the stage, trying to release more signals to the industry.
In the first year of launch, the video number mainly completed the construction of the basic framework of the product, and in the second year, it tried the direction of content operation. In two years, with little human intervention, the video number has grown to its own appearance. It belongs to the circle of friends, it also belongs to the WeChat ecology, and it is also an emerging traffic depression where countless content creators, including short video creators, are eager to try their fists.
1. The video number of the circle of friends: social expression
The screen of the Irish group Westlife Boys' live concert is not an "illusion" of your own circle of friends.
On January 6, on the main forum of the WeChat Open Class, the video number team gave the real data of the live concert on the evening of December 17: in this live broadcast customized for Chinese fans, it attracted more than 27 million onlookers, and the highest number of online viewers was 1.5 million. Arguably, this has reached the biggest peak since the birth of the video number.
The live broadcast of the West Side Boys' concert has set a record worthy of external praise and hanging peers for the development of the video number in the past two years.
But sometimes if you think about it carefully, it will be difficult to define whether behind the fame of this world war is the success of the video number itself or the credit of the circle of friends.
When the recommendation algorithm is subject to the matching of portraits and the reach of the crowd, social distribution can help content quickly, even explosively, find users who are interested in them, and quickly spread in one circle after another. This is a very important ability of video numbers.
But why are there so many live streams of video numbers, and the data of the West Side Boys is particularly eye-catching?
In fact, behind the West Side Boys' screen is a kind of public emotion surging and is the nostalgia for the past era of global prosperity in a world that has been divided and collapsed under the epidemic. After all, as a necessary learning track in the English class that year, the melody of the West Side Boys connects the memories of people in the 8090s for growing up, as well as the most primitive and simple yearning and throbbing of the green years in the campus.
This can explain why the miracle of the spread of the West Side Boys' video number has not and will not be reproduced in the live concert of May Day New Year's Eve two weeks later.
Because logically, as a classic pop culture symbol, mayday in China, its absolute number of fans may not necessarily be less than that of The West Side Boys, especially in the end, the Easter egg released by Mayday and Jay Chou, but this heat did not exceed the live broadcast of the West Side Boys (the official disclosure was 14 million people watching).
The reason behind this, to a large extent, is because the Mayday live broadcast is the New Year's Eve night, the entertainment content industry arms race is fierce, whether it is the B station or the major head satellite TV, have launched a more abundant content arrangement of the New Year's Eve party, robbing most people of the time and attention.
More importantly, in this era of frequent "collapse" of entertainers in the entertainment industry, when the residual temperature of the collapse of a Taiwanese high-quality idol has not yet dispersed, there may not be many social people who dare to blatantly "chase the stars" in the circle of friends.
So, while the entertainment content has made a great contribution to the video number, the official team's focus on the next is not here.
In the WeChat open class, Zhang Xiaochao, a lecturer in the WeChat open class responsible for the content of the video number speech, said that the three directions of pan-knowledge, pan-life and pan-information are the objects that the official team should focus on supporting in the future.
In the future, the video number will focus on the direction of pan-knowledge, pan-life and pan-information
This may be related to the content that broke through the million likes last year. According to the situation disclosed by the platform, most of them are concentrated on the live broadcast of hot events such as the launch of Shenzhou XII and the return of Meng Wanzhou. Officials believe that the video number has become a new platform for users to browse news events and experience leisure and entertainment.
The hot spots in the circle of friends brought by these video numbers, in addition to meeting the strong on-site characteristics of major news events, also meet the current patriotic sentiment expression needs in the social field, so it not only brushes up everyone's circle of friends, but also has a fairly high popularity in the live broadcast room.
Pan-knowledge, pan-life and pan-information content are relatively more subdivided vertical interest preferences, which belong to the important content composition of the public domain of social media platforms, which is also the core traffic pool on other mainstream short video/live broadcast platforms.
To some extent, the direction of such a key support strategy also means that the video number is trying to move forward to the mainstream of the industry, not just to survive in the circle of friends or private domain social networks. After all, public domain traffic is the weapon for social products to start all-round.
2. Video number of WeChat ecology: atomized components
If you want to ask what is new to the video number at the conference, then the video number team has defined a position for it - "atomized basic content component", which is one of the highlights.
The meaning behind the atomization of video numbers is that video numbers can be freely combined with other atomic components in the WeChat ecosystem and produce chemical reactions. Specifically, the video number integrates and connects with WeChat Pay, enterprise WeChat and other products, so that creators have the ability to operate private domains.
For example, for content creators, as the basic component of the WeChat ecosystem, when the content of the official account and the video account are integrated, the creator can insert several video cards in the article of the public account, so that everyone can see the video of the video account, and can also bring the component of the public account article in the video account.
When the video number is the most basic component, according to Zhang Xiaochao's words, "the content of the video number is ubiquitous in the entire ecology of WeChat, and it is naturally integrated into every aspect, so we don't need to think about what kind of ability to give it."
This sounds like a Versailles expression, and it is also the biggest difference between the current video number and the independent operation and short video/live broadcast platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou and B station.
Since the day the video number was born, it has a huge user and user community, a mature and stable WeChat payment system, small program merchants and other formats, as well as enterprise WeChat and other enterprise service platforms, etc., and peers such as Douyin, Kuaishou and B Station need to gradually build or acquire, or strategically cooperate with other giants (such as early Douyin and Taobao, Kuaishou and JD.com), pay a higher price to make up for these shortcomings.
With a golden spoon, the sense of crisis of the video number is not as strong as other platforms, so it is currently in the stage of faltering, or it needs to be willing to use the entire WeChat ecology, and even the capabilities of Tencent Group in all aspects.
A typical live video concert as mentioned above is actually a cooperation with Tencent Music Entertainment Group (TME) within the Tencent ecosystem, with the help of each other's resources and capabilities, which can instantly detonate the network.
This is also consistent with the perception of the video number by the management of Tencent Group. In the analyst question session after the release of Tencent's third quarter 2021 financial report, Martin Lau said when mentioning the topic related to the video number,
"The video number is a very good growth product, basically a product from scratch, and it has begun to take shape, but it is still in the early stage of development, as a short video platform, there is still a big gap compared to the industry-leading opponents."
Martin Lau's next expectations for the video number, in addition to sharing knowledge with the original content, especially the content creators with the video number, it is also expected to be able to carry out more related collaborative linkage with the exclusive content in tencent's system, including exclusive copyright content such as sports events, as well as music and e-sports-related content.
Perhaps there is a sea of stars in the distance of the video number team, but the current development path of the video number is to provide support for other formations of WeChat. For example, the next thing that the video number should focus on is the enterprise WeChat and the Mini Program. Huang Tieming, vice president of Tencent's WeChat business group and head of enterprise WeChat, said in the open class that the enterprise WeChat will soon launch a new version, and two new capabilities will be launched, one of which is the ability to fully connect weChat video accounts.
3. The creator's video number: traffic depression
"Missed TikTok Kuaishou, you can't miss the video number anymore." This is a popular phrase among content creators when the video number was first launched two years ago.
However, what the video number encourages, what is the policy of the platform, and how to get enough traffic and monetization in the video number ecology are the confusion expressed by most content creators when communicating with the Titanium Media APP.
What is the video number encouraging?
At the sub-forum of the WeChat Open Class's Video Number Creators Conference, Zou Haoxuan, a lecturer at the WeChat Open Class, said that the official encourages originality, live content, data discovery, and continuous publication of original content, with videos and works voiced by live people appearing on camera and voiceovers by real people, and believes that it can get more attention from fans.
What is the video number against?
Officials say they discourage all videos that are handled, evil, and violate platform-oriented videos. In 2021, the video number official will continue to fight against handling and evil through traffic regulation and other means. In 2021, the overall traffic of handling and evil within the video number platform dropped by 80%, and these traffic were all released to the original authors of real people.
Everything is tilting towards the "real person", you can understand that the video number is trying to find another way, is to run out of its own way outside the platform such as the vibrato under the re-filter play, and the two-dimensional virtual human/thing distribution center B station. But whether such an official preference is suitable for Internet natives who want to find a second life in Cyber world needs to draw a question mark.
But what is certain is that the video platform is trying to grow extensively from this before and enter the stage of refined operation.
Previously, the official support policy for content creators was more cautious about the video number. However, such a "slow" growth model with less intervention may be difficult to adapt to the current competition in the short video and live content industry ecology. Because after years of fierce competition in the short video/live broadcast industry, high-quality and sustained and stable production of professional content creators, in the number is actually very limited, and has a stable core private domain user base on major platforms.
However, compared with other platforms, which have formed a stable and mature gameplay and a relatively stable content creation ecology, the growth of video numbers is still in its early stages, and it still belongs to a traffic depression that needs to be reclaimed urgently.
Although the number of videos played and interacted with has been large, the premise of all this is based on the help of circle of friends, private dialogs and WeChat group conversations. A reference basis is that at present, the WeChat video number has not formed a native big V with enough circle-breaking influence, or a stable MCN matrix group.
Therefore, the video number should go further to the short video/live broadcast industry, and in 2022, the focus of the team is to hope that through more diversified operational means, more creators will produce content from the video number. On the one hand, more users will be able to swipe the video number to what they want to see. On the other hand, content creators can also get a reasonable commercial return by creating more quality content.
To this end, the video number clearly put forward a support plan for content creators, indicating that it provides traffic tilt and special fund support for original content. The video claims that in the coming year, 10 million original authors will have traffic, 1 million high-quality creators will be promoted to have income, and the growth system of content creators will be further improved.
For newcomer content authors, the video number said that there will be opportunities to obtain 5 to 1 million traffic packages provided by the platform. For authors who have matured and can continue to publish original and high-quality content, they have the opportunity to be officially added to the list of key support, and the official will always pay attention to the survival of the list.
In addition to traffic support, paid content under the WeChat payment system will provide a greater commercial "money scene" for video number creators.
Zhang Xiaochao revealed that in the future, it will not be ruled out that the video number will also have the provision of paid content, including the charge for live broadcasting, as well as the charging or tipping ability for medium-long videos or short videos.
In addition to the conventional incentives in traffic and commercial realization, there is another focus on the video number next, further increasing the interoperability between the video account and the official account. After a video account is bound to the public account, users can pay attention to the author's public account through the video of the video number, get more private domain traffic, and subsequent authors can reach it through the message box, operate the fan base, and even accurately drain the flow.
Overall, the Titanium Media APP found that from the perspective of the operational means and incentives released by the video number official this round, it can be said that it is extremely similar to products such as the mature short video/live broadcast product Douyin Kuaishou, and even in terms of content preferences.
However, in the two years since the growth of video numbers, the user data of platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou has not experienced a cliff-like decline, in addition to proving the strength of Jitter, it also shows that video numbers are increasing the market, further revitalizing everyone's demand for video and live content.
In the future, will the video number run out of its own characteristic growth path in the future? And, in the context of the current interconnection, all the big factories are eyeing the tiger, keeping an eye on the resources and capabilities of the WeChat ecosystem, and only willingly exist in the WeChat ecosystem, how much time and space is left for the video number? All of this requires an answer from it.
(This article was first published on titanium media APP, author | Li Chengcheng)