In the face of increasingly prominent user growth pressure, B station with young users and Xiaohongshu, which is dominated by female users, are turning more attention to the bottom of the consumption pyramid - straight men, and middle-aged straight men.
At the beginning of December last year, Station B won the exclusive rights to the English FA Cup Chinese mainland digital media for the next three years. This is the first time that Station B has extended the content copyright layout to the sports section.
In order to attract viewers, Station B announced that all FA Cup matches will be broadcast live for free. In contrast, Migu Video's Premier League season package costs 158 yuan, and the price of a single game is about 3 to 4 yuan. In the case of spending money to watch the ball is becoming more and more common, the free live broadcast of Station B is undoubtedly quite attractive.
In addition, Station B invited Zhan Jun, Zhang Lu, Dong Fangzhuo and other football celebrities to explain the key games; and opened the official account of "English FA Cup Match Fungus", released game highlights, wonderful goals, etc., and currently uploaded 43 videos, accumulating more than 100,000 fans.
The coveted straight man's Little Red Book also tried to make a breakthrough from sports events, its movement was faster than the B station, and the entry point was selected in the Olympic Games.
In July last year, Xiaohongshu became a strategic partner of CCTV Olympics. During the Tokyo Olympics, Xiaohongshu gained intensive exposure on the CCTV media matrix.
Early next month, the Beijing Winter Olympics will open. Xiaohongshu did not obtain the IP authorization of this event, but still launched the "Ice and Snow Season" operation activity by cooperating with dozens of ice and snow parks and inviting ice and snow sports experts to settle in, trying to hitch a ride again.
Under the impact of flat entertainment methods such as live broadcasts, short videos, and mobile games, traditional sports events such as the FA Cup and the Olympic Games, which are full of elitism and grand narratives, are not the darlings of "Generation Z" young people such as the post-95s and post-00s generations. These events have come all the way from the era of live television, and the typical audience portrait is a middle-aged straight man, which can fill the user gap of B station and Little Red Book.
At present, B station and Xiaohongshu are the two most valuable Internet communities in China, but they all need to deal with the challenge of breaking through the core circle and attracting a wider range of users.
The problem with Station B is that the user is too young. At a financial report analyst conference at the end of 2020, Chen Rui, CEO of Station B, revealed that the average age of its users was only 21 years old, while the average age of new users was only 20 years old. This not only makes the ceiling of active users of Station B clearly visible, but also limits the imagination space of the advertising business.
The problem with Little Red Book is that the concentration of female users is too high, accounting for more than 70%. At present, Xiaohongshu mainly relies on advertising to make money, and the unbalanced gender structure of users is obviously not conducive to attracting advertisers in automobile, liquor, digital and other sectors.
The two major platforms "breaking the circle" mainly rely on strong operation, such as "Houlang" of Station B and Yin Zheng stewed vegetables of Xiaohongshu, etc., which have attracted the attention of a large number of users outside the circle in a short period of time. But the problem of user structure has not been fundamentally solved. With the help of large-scale sports events, the inclusion of sports fans mainly middle-aged straight men is a step worth trying for Station B and Little Red Book.
But it is easy to buy copyrights, and it is difficult to retain users. The biggest challenge is that Station B and Little Red Book have formed a unique community atmosphere that is unlikely to change with the increase of sports content; even if it attracts a large number of new users in the short term, it is difficult to let them settle down with the attractiveness of the community itself.
However, in the face of user growth pressure, B station and Xiaohongshu are very necessary to gnaw the hard bone of straight men. If you exhaust all kinds of means and still can't break through, the two major platforms may wish to consider acquiring Tiger Flutter and solving the problem with a curve of "in vitro cultivation".
According to many reports, Hupu currently has more than 100 million registered users and a total of 80 million active users. However, this kind of data cannot be believed, and the MAU data monitored by third-party institutions is mostly in the order of millions, which is beneficial but of little significance to the two major platforms.
If Station B and Xiaohongshu Tang win the Tiger Poker, the real value is the brand of "straight male community" and puGC users with both stickiness and creative vitality. If it can be used by me, the two communities will be able to seize a core position when they break through the fortress of straight men.
A
Station B and Xiaohongshu have hundreds of millions of MAU (monthly active users) and tens of millions of DAUs (daily active users) respectively, and are still growing. At the same time, its core user portraits are Generation Z and urban women, and the commercialization seems to be much more reliable than that of Wenqing, Kochi, straight men and other people.
However, with the depletion of the Internet demographic dividend and the enlargement of the scale of the community, Station B is facing the problem of slowing down the growth of users, and Xiaohongshu urgently needs to improve the gender structure of users.
According to the financial report, from the second to the fourth quarter of 2020, the average monthly MAU growth rate of Station B was 55%, 54% and 55%, respectively. This high-speed growth not only has the factors of more demand caused by the epidemic, but also the results of the B station's vigorous breaking of the circle.
However, in 2021, the user growth of Station B has slowed down, and the average monthly MAU growth rate in the first three quarters was 30%, 38% and 35%, respectively, a contraction of 20 percentage points compared with the previous year.
As of the end of the third quarter of last year, the MAU of Station B has reached 267 million. Coupled with the effective control of the domestic epidemic and the weakening of unconventional demand for Internet video content, it is not easy for Station B to re-increase the growth rate.
Station B previously set the goal of "400 million MAU by 2023". Now that there is less than a year left, Station B is still facing a MAU gap of about 100 million, and it is necessary to find new user gold mines as soon as possible.
In contrast, the user volume of Xiaohongshu is relatively small, and the growth is still very fast. According to the official data of Xiaohongshu, its MAU exceeded 100 million in June 2020 and reached 200 million in November 2021, doubling in one and a half years.
However, the imbalance between men and women has always plagued little red books. It evolved from cross-border shopping guides, with its own "planting grass" gene, and female users and beauty and lifestyle content have long dominated. This atmosphere has shaped the community temperament of Xiaohongshu, and also affected the perception of the outside world, hindering the integration of male users to a certain extent.
Station B and Little Red Book have realized the problem and tried to make changes from multiple dimensions.
Among them, Station B made a short film "After the Wave", He Bing's speech seems to be embracing young people, and in his bones, he is creating a condescending "daddy taste" to cater to the emotions of middle-aged people.
At the end of last year, the B station New Year's Eve party was also getting closer and closer to the local Taiwan Spring Festival Gala, the concentration of the second dimension was much thinner, and the Japanese songs were replaced by Xue Zhiqian, Zhou Shen, and phoenix legends, and even joined the cross-talk of the Deyun Society.
Xiaohongshu has greatly expanded the content matrix, and food, digital, sports and other categories are the key packaging objects. In addition to choosing popular artist Liu Haoran, its latest advertising film also invited ski star Gu Ailing. Basketball stars such as Iverson, Marbury, and Zhou Qi have also been invited to settle in.
In the past two or three years, the two major communities have attacked on all sides, and many hits such as "Houlang" and Yin Zheng stewed dishes have also been done. But from the operational data, the tactical victory has not yet brought about strategic success.
According to public data, as of the first quarter of 2021, the monthly active users under the age of 35 of Station B accounted for more than 86%; Xiaohongshu did not announce the change in the proportion of male and female users, but it is generally expected that women still account for 70% or even higher. This user structure will obviously drag down the revenue of both companies.
The decline in the growth rate of the game business of Station B in recent quarters is related to the young age and low spending power of new users. The high proportion of female users of Xiaohongshu limits the choice of advertisers; and the overall downturn in Internet advertising has also increased the difficulty of Xiaohongshu to obtain advertising revenue.
The importance of offering a more obvious "killing move" and tapping the people outside the circle with more monetization potential began to highlight the importance of Station B and Xiaohongshu. Straight men, who have never been welcomed by domestic Internet companies, it is time to enter the vision of China's two major communities.
B
Rough estimates show that middle-aged straight men are a multi-hundred million-dollar group with a high income level and willingness to spend. The biggest common denominator of this group is sports, especially football, basketball and other popular sports.
Station B and Xiaohongshu have successively entered the copyright of the event, hoping to impress the male population over the age of 35 with the help of sports content. But at present, the two communities around the competition of various concave shapes, the actual effect is not ideal.
The day after the B station officially announced that it had obtained the rights to the FA Cup, it broadcast the second round of multiple matches live. But it wasn't until early January this year, when the FA Cup entered the third round, and strong teams such as Manchester United, Manchester City and Chelsea played, that the popularity of the official live broadcast room began to climb.
For example, Liverpool's 4-1 victory over Shrewsbury on 9 January saw nearly 8 million viewers. Other popular matches of the same period had similar performances.
However, the heat came and went in a hurry.
After the match, Station B released a video of Liverpool's game, which was played only 21,000 times and had 95 bullet screens. The rest of the content released by the "English FA Cup Match Fungus" was equally dismal, and only the FA Cup promotional video recorded by the well-known fan "Brother Refund" reached 1 million times, more than the remaining forty pieces of content combined.
In addition, the B station UP owners have limited interest in football, and there are very few secondary creations around the FA Cup, reflecting that the creator community is not active.
More importantly, Station B relies on free watching to attract a large number of audiences, but after the "white prostitute", many users have not settled in the community, let alone created a new small circle. From the number of fans of sports KOLs, you can get a glimpse of this fact.
Station B previously invited Feng Xiaoting, the captain of the Chinese men's football team, to settle in, and famous football clubs such as Liverpool and Bayern also opened official accounts. However, the enthusiasm of B station users is not high, Feng Xiaoting has 2.46 million fans on Weibo, but less than 50,000 fans in B station; Liverpool's fans are only in their early 10,000 years, and Bayern has only accumulated less than 150,000.
Little Red Book faces a similar dilemma.
During the Tokyo Olympics, Xiaohongshu invited a large number of athletes, sports journalists and sports experts to settle in, organized dozens of bloggers to form a reporting team, and also launched theme activities such as "1,000 Ways to Participate in the Olympic Games", encouraging users to publish Olympic-related content, which attracted a lot of attention for a while.
However, from the perspective of establishing social connections and contributing community content, the impact of these initiatives is relatively limited.
For example, Gu Ailing, who is promoted by Xiaohongshu, has only 165,000 fans so far, and the number of likes for a single note ranges from thousands to tens of thousands, which is not the same as the millions of fans of artists such as Ouyang Nana.
In addition, after experiencing high-density content operations during the Tokyo Olympics, Xiaohongshu users are still not very "cold" about sports content.
Taking the Women's Asian Cup as an example, on January 20, the Chinese women's football team defeated the Chinese Taipei team 4:0, and the comments on the relevant posts of the Little Red Book were only more than 50, while the vertical football APP understood the same news of the ball emperor with more than 1,000 comments.
By acquiring copyrights and providing free event content, B Station and Little Red Book can attract a large number of sports fans in a short period of time; but after the game, users quickly disperse, most people will not continue to consume other content in the community, and it is even rarer to become content contributors.
Under the influence of this "tidal effect", the efficacy of Station B and Xiaohongshu in breaking the game with the help of sports content is bound to be greatly reduced.
C
Station B and Xiaohongshu have invested a lot of resources in the layout of sports, but the results have not been successful, which is closely related to their own community atmosphere. It is difficult for new users to integrate into the circle of old users, and precipitation and conversion cannot be discussed.
In order to protect the experience of core users, the two communities cannot do major surgery on community culture, but can only fine-tune locally. But in the face of new pressure, B station and little red book need to open the breakthrough of straight men as soon as possible.
In this case, the value of the acquisition of Tiger Poker began to stand out.
Tiger Poker is a veteran sports community in China with a history of 18 years. It gathered a group of professional fans Chinese the Internet, produced professional content in the fields of event analysis, trading rumors, industry observation and other fields, and gradually accumulated a large number of pan-sports users. The annual Goddess Contest is a circle-breaking stroke, which has greatly expanded the audience of Tiger Poker.
In 2019, Cheng Hang, CEO of Hupu, once said, "We have tapped into the essential needs of a man. That is, men like to be with men, but men are afraid to talk to women". Tiger Punch has formed a unique JRs (family) culture, labeled "straight male community".
However, at the commercial level, Tiger Po has gone through a bumpy journey.
As a sports community with the NBA as the core, the biggest weakness of Tiger Poker is that there is no event copyright. Users can't watch the live broadcast of the game in Tiger Poker, but can only chat about tactics, gossip, and even spray each other, making more sports fans prohibitive.
On the other hand, the commercialization of Tiger Poker has not been done well, and it has been highly dependent on advertising for many years. Cheng Hang revealed in an interview in early 2020 that 48% of the company's revenue at that time came from advertising.
Too single and traditional revenue model, so that Tiger Poker is not welcomed by the capital market. In 2016 and 2019, Hupu sprinted to the market twice, and finally fell into the sand; Byte once invested 1.26 billion yuan in Tiger Poker in 2019, becoming the largest shareholder, but the latest industrial and commercial information shows that the list of Shareholders of Hupu has no byte figure.
Alphabet (ID: wujicaijing) asked byte about this matter, but has not received a response as of press time.
The difficulty of survival of independent communities is the consensus of the Chinese Internet. Forums such as Tianya, Cat Poker, and Iron Blood Community are all lessons from the past; Tiger Poker is facing financing difficulties in both the primary market and the secondary market, and it is gradually becoming one of the strategic options to sell itself in time while still holding tens of millions of users.
From a financial point of view, the valuation of Tiger Poker is about three or four billion yuan; with the cash reserve strength of Station B and Xiaohongshu, there is no difficulty in winning Tiger Poker.
On the other hand, the two major communities are accelerating the layout of sports copyright, which is what Hupu urgently needs to quickly improve the dilemma of community content relying on the sniffles of tencent sports, a major copyright owner. Station B and Xiaohongshu have hundreds of millions of monthly active users, including millions of professional and semi-professional creators, which can also bring huge potential user increments to Tiger Poker.
In the process of competing for straight men, Station B and Xiaohongshu have different starting points and different purposes, but the two paths are similar, and it is likely that they will eventually meet in a narrow way. Whoever can take the first shot and take the tiger punch will have the opportunity to take the initiative.