Text | New knowledge in the circle, the author | Lemon, editor | Moon sees
Byte's first battle in 2022 is the Spring Festival stall.
On January 17, 2022, Byte completed the last investment before the dissolution of the war investment department, the ticketing platform Shadow Tobon, was grabbed by Byte before the Spring Festival file under the command, in the Douyin movie ticket purchase page, Shadow Tobon dignified stepped on the cat's eye and Taobao ticket head, without concealing the support of Douyin.
The high ticket price of the Spring Festival stall did not successfully "save" the box office, and even dropped by nearly 2 billion yuan compared with 2021, but it brought opportunities to byte's shadow trotopia and once again adopted the classic opening of "subsidy". On social platforms such as Weibo and Xiaohongshu, tutorials with shadow tuobang "Xue Wool" abound, in order to "rub" the East Wind of the Spring Festival file, Douyin generously distributes coupons, and even users trade large ticket purchase coupons in the hands of Weibo and other platforms.
But Douyin is obviously in a hurry in the ticketing business, and on the black cat platform, the earliest complaint about Shadow Tobon is January 28, 2022, which means that in just twelve days, Shadow Topband has received more than 200 complaints. Most of the complaints are after-sales services such as non-refund and change.
Byte Entertainment's stalls are supported, but it is not stable, the cultural and entertainment business of the fine number festival, there is no project that can compete with Douyin, most of them are still in the initial stage, but the crisis has emerged. According to Reuters, nearly 70% of ByteDance's revenue in 2021 will be obtained by relying on advertising business. According to securities times and other media reports, in November 2021, Byte disclosed at the all-staff meeting held by the commercial product department that its domestic advertising revenue had stopped growing in the past six months.
Before "prying", byte has to consider how to survive. The cultural and entertainment landscape needs the nourishment of the content ecology, and incubating its own IP has become the most "money-saving" choice for creating a content ecology. However, in the face of the cultural and entertainment territory of the old predecessors, If Byte Entertainment wants to become the third pole, I am afraid that it will have to come up with something new.
01 Big entertainment is trapped in douyin
On January 20, 2022, ByteDance was disbanded from the war investment department, and the last investment three days ago may become a "masterpiece".
After the ticketing platform "Shadow Tuobang" and the comic platform "have been looking at comics" joined the Byte camp, the territory of Byte Entertainment began to appear, novels, games, videos, music and other businesses are orderly, looking at most of Byte's entertainment business, it seems to be around Douyin, hoping to rely on the traffic of Douyin to support other businesses, however, perhaps the existence of Douyin is too strong, embedded products are like a stone sinking into the sea one by one quietly. Looking around, byte's phenomenon-level products still have only one vibrato.
In the entertainment story, the medium-long video platform seems to be a necessary existence, and Byte has also placed high hopes on its own medium-length video platform Watermelon Video, investing a lot of money to purchase exclusive copyrights for many movies and TV series in order to attract users, and even spent a lot of effort to "grab" content creators with the B station of the same medium-term video platform, with the intention of creating a high-quality content creation platform like Douyin.
However, the huge "robbery" action did not bring more possibilities to Watermelon Video, perhaps Bete has lost patience, in November 2021, ByteDance announced the latest structural adjustments, headlines, search, encyclopedia and domestic vertical service business were all incorporated into the Douyin business sector, Watermelon Video is also among them.
In the field of games, Byte also had a story of vigor, in 2020, the board game "Little Beauty Fighting Landlord" exclusively represented by Byte became the biggest dark horse in the Spring Festival file, dominating the iOS free list for 10 consecutive days. However, according to media reports, Ohayoo's business has reached billions of dollars a year, but the overall situation is still at a loss, and in 2021, its commercialization leader directly stressed at the meeting that do not flow water for profits.
Since 2020, Douyin has launched the "Game Publisher Plan", the anchor can get a certain amount of income according to the video playback situation by releasing related game videos, and the first self-developed boutique female to game "HuaYishan Heart Moon" by Byte's game company Lingxi Interactive Entertainment is also on the promotion list.
At present, the game's related videos are as high as 179,000, and the total number of plays has exceeded 120 million times, with the help of The traffic advantage of Douyin, the game's publicity is overwhelming. However, in the total domestic mobile game revenue list of Cicada Master in December 2021, "Huayishan Heart Month" only ranked 25th, with a monthly income of only 4.35 million US dollars, even inferior to "Happy And Happy", but this is still the most profitable game under Byte.
In addition to games, the novel platform as an original IP library is also a "place where soldiers must compete", and Byte's free novel platform Tomato Novel has quietly become the second largest novel platform after reading, but bytes are not satisfied, coupled with the Jitter novel that was just listed in January 2022, there are currently six new paid reading platforms in Byte's hands, all of which are in the stage of "small lotus only showing sharp corners".
In the end, the problem is still in the IP. At present, the development of IP seems to be the unified idea of the entertainment market, and novels, music, film and television, and games are interlinked, fully tapping the commercial value of a high-quality IP. Byte also hollowed out its mind on the IP issue, through the form of short dramas, vibrato and tomato novel linkage, mining high-quality IP for monetization, in the stock market of short videos to find a new route. Some professionals have analyzed that the inclusion of "always reading comics" may also be to expand the "IP library" of bytes.
However, the content ecology established around IP may have become a cage for Byte Entertainment.
02 The old IP is exhausted, and the new IP is not splashed
Find a potential IP from the IP library, make it filmed, gamified, and sell its derivatives, like sharing a roasted whole lamb, each part can not be wasted. This is the development process used by the current content ecology, which is a somewhat standardized banquet and a work that can be seen as a reward.
The potential of a high-quality IP should not be underestimated, and the value behind it is difficult to estimate, in February 2022, Aiyouteng has announced that "Friends" is about to be launched. This old drama of more than a decade ago can still bring traffic to the video platform, and even the veteran player Warner has hoped to re-attract lost members through the reunion special edition of "Friends", and traffic anxiety has long existed in the Chinese market.
However, under the competition of long video platforms, high-quality IP content is no longer enough, and crazy investment in the purchase of copyright has also become one of the reasons for the loss of long video platforms. According to iQiyi's third quarter 2021 financial report, the cost of content was as high as 5.3 billion yuan, accounting for 69.8% of its total revenue. However, the traffic that video platforms rely on to survive still needs content to support.
"Throttling" is difficult to achieve in the traffic scramble, limited high-quality content, the price is rising, "open source" is the right way, so "self-made" has become the antidote to video platforms. In 2020, Reading Group announced that it will join hands with Tencent Pictures, Xinli Media, and Yuwen Film and Television to increase the development of IP, and the "2020 Blue Book of Chinese Online Literature" released by the China Writers Association also shows that in 2020, a total of about 28 million Chinese online literary works will be released, driving the total output value of the downstream cultural industry to more than 1 trillion yuan.
Explosive dramas adapted from online texts such as "Snow In the Sword Line" and "Beginning" have brought hundreds of millions of plays to video platforms, and high-quality IP such as "Douluo Continent" have also attracted the attention of many game manufacturers in addition to comics and film and television. On May 13, 2021, Yue Jianxiong, vice president of iQIYI, once again shared the IP business model of "one fish and more eating" at the iQIYI World Congress, and introduced the construction pattern of its literary ecology.
Digging deep into IP has become a unified posture of cultural and entertainment business, and byte entertainment is also difficult to escape the routine, after all, the idea of "buying, buying and buying" has been unsustainable, and if you want to survive, operating IP business is probably the most suitable choice.
At present, Byte's advertising business is in a bottleneck, its multi-platform advertising system pangolin, as an "advertising intermediary" platform, according to the "Late Post" report, as of May 2021, pangolin has occupied a 55% share of the advertising intermediary market, far more than Tencent and Baidu's advertising system, however, young giants are now beginning to be anxious.
Once BAT was the benchmark of the domestic Internet industry, now the big brother Baidu who pays attention to technology has gone to hard technology "never looking back", Ali's e-commerce business is booming, Tencent relies on game blood transfusion, not willing to show weakness in the content war of long videos, as a large enterprise with a "global" vision, where is the second curve, byte is still thinking.
The domestic advertising market has been frustrated, and many businesses have been blocked, while ByteDance still survived many obstacles to pull total revenue to a new height of $58 billion, with an average daily revenue of more than 1 billion yuan, which is really admirable and confirms the strong strength of this young giant. But it cannot be denied that byte's advertising revenue has stagnated, and doing a good IP business may be the best choice for byte.
Nowadays, Aiyouteng Has excavated the high-quality IP of the original novel platform through short dramas and other forms, and the mode of short dramas has lowered the threshold of "film and television", and more and more waist novels also have the opportunity to IP, such as the original novel of "This Male Protagonist Is a Little Cold", which once had only a few thousand reads, but after the short drama was filmed, it brought millions of fans to the actor who played the heroine.
The emergence of blockbuster short dramas allows video platforms to find a new "drainage method", although it is not enough to become a "money-making business", but in the traffic battle, mining IP is also essential. After all, in the stock war, "shouting" is also very important.
Relying on Douyin, Byte tears open a corner of the video platform and successfully leverages the status of traditional long videos with short videos, and if Byte Entertainment wants to become the third pole outside of Alibaba Entertainment and Tencent Pan Entertainment, then it is difficult to make a breakthrough by only following the idea of "mining IP".
03 Can only go the old way?
Entertainment stories abound, but there are not many that can be made into entertainment territory, and if you want to find a target, the range of choices is actually very small.
As one of the three giants of BAT, Baidu has also tried in the big entertainment business, but it was not until the end of 2021, after announcing the dissolution of the game department, that people suddenly realized that Baidu had also made games.
The defeat of Ali's great cultural entertainment is talked about, and the prosperity of Tencent entertainment often becomes a classic case, and the layout of Byte entertainment is more similar to Ali, and the resources in hand also take advantage.
Youku before coming to Ali, in love Youteng is still the boss, Ali's original novel platform Shuqi novel, has also had a glorious years, the market share once reached the first position, its hands of shrimp music has also had a war force, more than ten years of ups and downs, until the eve of stopping the operation of music players, there are still millions of users expressed reluctance.
The layout of Byte Entertainment also seems to have followed Ali's old path, in addition to finding and excavating high-quality content, it has also established cooperation with a number of film companies and MCN institutions, and after the introduction of the ticketing platform Shadow Tuobang, the infrastructure for content services has been more perfect.
If you look at it from the perspective of its business model, perhaps Tencent's pan-entertainment is more valuable.
Around this element of social networking, Tencent's cultural and entertainment territory is slowly unfolding, and the linkage between video, novels, games, animation, and music is similar to the byte"-flavored entertainment business, but the difference is that the social gene links the "Tencent ecology", while Douyin has not built a "byte ecology".
Ali's various advantages are collapsed in front of Tencent, Youku has been "downgraded" to Ali's "Sun Company", and Tencent Video is still "pro-son", and even merged with Weishi, which is about to make efforts in the short video track, in the novel platform, Tencent holds the reading text, ranking first in the market share of the novel platform, Tencent Music is also a well-deserved giant in the industry. As a new sharp, Byte is bound to kick the iron plate of Tencent in the future.
More importantly, relying on investment to supplement the territory, which was once the usual means of Internet companies, "banknote ability" brought a steady stream of "finished products" to the company, eliminating the long process of trial and error from the seed, and this strategic model has also become the "overtaking curve" of large companies. For example, the acquisition case that shocked the world at the beginning of 2022, Microsoft spent $68.7 billion to acquire Activision Blizzard, becoming the world's third largest game company in one fell swoop, and also took advantage of Blizzard's game experience to prepare to cut into the battlefield of the meta-universe.
However, also at the beginning of 2022, after completing the last investment in the entertainment business, ByteDance disbanded its own war investment department, "banknote capacity" no longer has room to play, byte's expansion speed will inevitably decline, the current territory is still incomplete, the future may have its own plans to incubate related projects, but this will become a "long-term" story.
In 2019, in the face of the continuous loss of Ali Entertainment, Ma Yun proudly said that it is possible to lose another ten years. Today's Byte is eager to try on the edge of big entertainment, and I don't know if Zhang Yiming and Liang Rubo also have this kind of arrogance, "allowing" the free development of cultural and entertainment business.
Standing in front of Byte Entertainment, there are two mountains of Ali and Tencent, but Byte Entertainment is still worth looking forward to, after all, this is an Internet uproar that has overturned the era of long videos.