Let's talk about the "Goldbach Conjecture" of the short video

Image source @ Visual China

Wen 丨 New Eyes, Author 丨 Ruan Xue, Editor 丨 Sang Mingqiang

Search, e-commerce, and social networking were once the foundation of the rise of BAT.

In the Goldbach conjecture , any integer greater than 2 can be written as the sum of three prime numbers. If these three core businesses of the Internet are regarded as three prime numbers, the short video industry has obviously jumped over the era of barbaric growth, and the horizontal bar in front of the player is how to integrate various business modules to achieve 1+1>2.

Short video became a black hole of time in the early days, south vibrato, north kuaishou, short video has obvious differences, which has also become a joke between users, and even evolved into two factions: people who play vibrato do not understand the aesthetics of fast hands users, and fast hands users do not adapt to the play of vibrato.

However, from the data point of view, most people are "mouth suspect integrity", and geographical partitioning can no longer explain this problem well, because in terms of user coincidence, from June 2018 to June 2019, the number of fast and jittery coincident users has increased from 72.7 million to 159 million: 1 year increased by 118%, and by November 2020, the number of coincident users increased to 210 million.

Behind the growth of user overlap, there are nothing more than two possibilities: one is that the competition is white-hot, and the incremental shrinking allows competitors to aim at the encroachment of each other's stock, and eventually fall into a zero-sum game, which is the other; the second is that competition differentiation has become two products that meet the different needs of the same user. But in its current form, Jitter is more like the latter, or put the time on a longer period of time, playing from the beginning, TikTok and Kuaishou have been on different paths.

Tell stories around the "center"

You may not know that the original prototype of Kuaishou was GIF Kuaishou, which was once listed on the application market in 2011 as a tool software, and it was born in the same year as WeChat. To this day, the two apps that originally had no intersection are often mentioned because they have similar social attributes.

At the beginning, Kuaishou is only a production tool for forming GIFs, the instrumentality is more prominent, and the finished products after production are mainly spread by people on Weibo, and many of the popular GIFs you have seen are mostly from Kuaishou's hands. At that time, most of Kuaishou's 900,000 users were producers, and the founder Cheng Yixiao's personal introduction on Weibo was still "something to play".

Two years after going live, in 2013, 4G came. This year, China has become the world's largest smart phone market, mobile Internet into the fast lane, at this time Kuaishou, has not been satisfied with the business of tools alone, proposed to transform the short video social platform, after this, the record became the main theme of Kuaishou, the connection between people and people, became the mission of Suhua when joining Kuaishou.

After setting a new goal, Kuaishou began to give the choice to the user. The platform no longer labels and categorizes the video, and in the display page, it no longer increases too much interference, and the waterfall-like double-column display video cover requires the user to take the initiative to click to see the content, and the interactive mechanism of multiple clicks has become the prototype of the mobile Internet private domain, including the later old iron culture.

Inclusive and non-interference constitute the underlying genes of Kuaishou.

According to the user portraits at that time, the most creative desire was the "small town youth" in the third and fourth tier cities, which was the new hinterland of Kuaishou. Unlike other video software to ask stars to promote the game, Kuaishou insists on decentralization, 70% of the inclusive traffic is distributed to the middle and waist creators, attention, discovery and the three interfaces of the same city are juxtaposed, and friends who talk with you in the restaurant today may become the red people in the popular page the next day.

Since the launch of the live broadcast function in 2016, live broadcast tipping has become the main commercial channel of Kuaishou, and laotie 666 has also become a hot word for brushing screens (Kuaishou live broadcast revenue in 2018 was about 20 billion yuan, far exceeding other mainstream live broadcasting platforms in China). 2017 was the first watershed year for Kuaishou: the number of daily active users of the Kuaishou APP exceeded 100 million, the total registered user data exceeded 700 million, and more than 10 million new video content was generated every day.

In the years since its establishment, Kuaishou has actually been weakly operating and controlling, and is often jokingly called "the most Buddhist APP". Corresponding to weak operations is the strong relationship between users and creators. Kuaishou decentralized distribution mechanism is to regulate traffic distribution according to users' social concerns and interests, and the fan arrival rate of published content is about 30%-40% (this set of data can be said to be quite terrifying), according to this model, high-value private domain traffic pools are also slowly cultivated.

Also telling stories around the center is Douyin, which was launched in late 2016, grew rapidly in 2017, and finally ushered in an outbreak in 2018. Before it, the old player who entered the short video was once considered to be the dark horse player of short video, for the simple reason that micro-vision, beauty shooting, second beat, etc. were defeated in 2018, and the fast hand at that time also banned the cloud above its head and was carrying out content rectification.

In the immersive product design, users can convert video by simply sliding up and down on Douyin, and similar to other headline products, the push mechanism of Douyin is algorithm centralization and traffic distribution decentralization. All newly released videos will go to an initial traffic pool, according to the interaction data, the algorithm will decide who will go to the larger traffic pool, the advantage of this mechanism is that the recommended video match is higher, but also to a certain extent weaken the user's attention to the creator.

Because for Douyin, the value of public domain traffic is higher than that of private domain.

At the beginning of the launch of Douyin, it carried a cool and exquisite label, took the special effects technology as a breakthrough, and used brainwashed music as a spear to hunt young people in first- and second-tier cities. And grounded Kuaishou played a poor tone, Douyin emphasized recording the good life, the early Douyin: 15-second video, music is responsible for rendering emotions, content is responsible for stimulating emotions. Most of these videos are reproducible, and the same BGM can be widely disseminated.

So an interesting phenomenon arises: when people think of the kuaishou of the past, they often say a string of personal names; when they miss TikTok, familiar melodies and technical stream videos are the first memories.

The era of carrying goods

From the perspective of time dimension, Kuaishou and Douyin both began their initial layout around 2018.

Both have successively launched the small shop function and tested the water e-commerce. In the past 18-19 years, although Jitter has continuously introduced third-party platforms to access small stores, but because the acceptance of live streaming goods by users at that time is not high, the platform in order not to affect the user experience, e-commerce entrance has not been placed in a prominent position, until an epidemic in 2020, completely changed this mechanism.

So we saw that Douyin signed Luo Yonghao, the premiere sales exceeded 100 million, and the high-profile entry into the live e-commerce track. From the perspective of organizational structure, in June 2020, Byte internally began to regard e-commerce as a strategic business, officially established a first-level business department named "e-commerce", and officially released the "Douyin E-commerce" brand.

At the other end, Kuaishou has also undergone similar organizational structure changes, the original head of operations Ma Hongbin will and the original head of commercialization will strictly emphasize the change of positions; Xu Xin, one of the original product leaders, will be transferred to be in charge of the user experience center; Wang Jianwei, one of the original product leaders, will close the product and live broadcast business reporting line and become the top person in charge of the product.

All along, live broadcasting and advertising are the two pillars of short video commercialization, and the rise of jitter e-commerce has added two cross-cutting concepts to short video and e-commerce: interest e-commerce and trust e-commerce. The discerning person can see at once that behind the new concept, there is still the old difference between the two: the public domain and the private domain, strong algorithms and strong relationships.

Relying on the public domain traffic pool accumulated in the past, based on content and algorithm recommendations, the corresponding products are pushed to interested users. That is, the official explanation of Douyin interest e-commerce: activating user consumption needs with content. The content mentioned here includes both short videos and live broadcasts, so we can see that in the push of douyin short videos, the live broadcast status will be displayed on the avatar, in order to achieve multiple contacts with users, business self-broadcasting and carousel have become a strange phenomenon in douyin.

If you dismantle douyin e-commerce from the perspective of "people", gene theory may be more effective. From the user level of Douyin e-commerce, Internet celebrities and celebrities have always been the objects of traffic tilt. In the Douyin e-commerce ecological report, women are the main group of buyers, and first-tier and new first-tier cities lead user growth. Among them, Shanghai, Chongqing and Beijing became the three most shopping-loving cities in 2020.

Kuaishou is the complete opposite, the unique "old iron economy" makes Kuaishou more inclined to "acquaintance social" way, and finally realize the operation of goods purchase, the cultivation of anchor private domain traffic, but also forced users to have both fans of dual identity, for a long time, live broadcast for the cultivation of user habits, so that their trust in the anchor with goods is higher.

The platform's support for waist anchors has also continued the inclusive gene of Kuaishou to some extent. On the one hand, weakening the influence of the past families with goods, so that more grounded grassroots anchors appear; on the other hand, for the loyal users of Kuaishou, watching people buy goods will even be greater than on-demand shopping, focusing on "trust", such as providing trust cards for merchants, improving sales for consumers, and upgrading counterfeiting in supervision, these strategies are essentially the maintenance of the e-commerce ecology.

People are always happy to discuss the superiority of Douyin and Kuaishou, but the truth is that when the Internet enters the stock era, whether it is daily active data or GMV, it may no longer be able to measure the distance between the two, because the distance between Douyin and Kuaishou may not necessarily be who comes first, but to do different things, which requires us to have more imagination.

The Year of Change

For Douyin and Kuaishou, going up against the wind has allowed them to grab the dividends of the old times, but where the next outlet is, there is no accurate answer. Reflected in the business organization level, the organizational structure behind Douyin and Kuaishou has been continuously adjusted in the past year.

In November last year, ByteDance issued an internal letter announcing organizational restructuring, after Seven, the head of Douyin, who was previously responsible for Douyin's products, operations and local life business, was left with only products under his command, while the current head of operations, Yoyo, reported to Zhiying, and Li Ran, the head of local life, reported to Han Shangyou, which was speculated by the outside world that Douyin's local business exploration was not ideal.

In terms of business, Toutiao, Watermelon, Search, Encyclopedia and domestic vertical service businesses were merged into Douyin. This means that Douyin has officially become the core business of ByteDance, breaking the situation of traffic competition on byte platforms in the past, under the rhythm of further diversification of short video content, the content display form on Douyin will be more dimensional, and the trend of concept blurring may be further highlighted.

On the other hand, Kuaishou, the internal structure from the functional to the division system, the formal establishment of the main station production and transportation line, the main station product department, operation department, user growth department, game ecology, search and other businesses to close, at the same time, the e-commerce division, commercialization division, international division, game division and other four major business departments also began to take shape.

Going to the sea and games may become the new focus of Kuaishou, and the "big industrial belt" and "big brand" mentioned in the public strategy of Kuaishou e-commerce last year will also push the supply chain problems hidden behind live e-commerce to the front of the stage, which can't help but make people think: whether short videos can become a strong link between the Internet and the physical industry, or just a Goldbach conjecture.

The story line behind this may have to go through 2022 to gradually become clear.