Image source @ Visual China
Text | Slightly larger reference, the author | Xiao Man, Editor | field
Every time a day passes, a long video is more "dangerous".
After a long winter and turmoil, for the major long video platforms, there is only the most life-saving straw left in their hands: "explosive models".
What is a "blockbuster"?
It is a fortuitous success to build a foundation of type exploration.
Before the launch of "The Hidden Corner", no one predicted that the realistic suspense theme would bring fire and fog theater; after the launch of "Beginning", everyone realized the localization transformation space of the time loop model.
But what does long video do?
Copy, copy, copy again.
"Misty Theater" continues to introduce new works, with bigger actors, more well-known IP, and more vigorous publicity, but in exchange for more unexpected street throwing.
When it has gone through a golden period of development for ten years, the only thing that domestic long video platforms have learned is that they will not learn any lessons from the lessons of failure.
Since its inception, as a long video website for content construction, it has been injected with a simple and crude "collective replication" gene.
iQiyi first disrupted the market with sky-high copyrights, and other platforms have kept up with the "copy" game; "White Night Pursuit" opened a wave of platform self-control, so everyone rushed up to the road of self-control; short videos rose quickly after the rise of profits, and everyone blamed this in unison that this was the culprit that led to their own losses.
The decade of long videos battling the woes of profitability is actually a decade of constantly seeking solutions for themselves.
In this collective blind carnival, there is no long-term vision and planning, only short-sighted interests and disputes.
What does such a long video platform rely on to make a profit?
01 "Morph" Alliance
Recently, Douyin officials issued a statement denying the infringement of "Chosin Lake".
The statement said that the alleged infringing content was part of the cooperation between Bona Pictures, the producer of "Chosin Lake", and the official publicity cooperation with Douyin, and the total duration was not 30 minutes, only less than 6 minutes.
Since april last year, the long video website jointly encircled and suppressed the short video, the dirty water of copyright has begun to frequently splash on the short video, and the "accidental injury" of catching wind and catching shadows like "Chosin Lake" has not been in the minority.
In fact, "factional struggle" has a long history in the development of video sites.
On March 12, 2012, Youku and Tudou, the two largest video websites in China at the time, officially announced their merger.
For a time, public opinion was in an uproar.
Zhang Chaoyang first posted on Weibo: "Our Sohu video has become absolutely second", and Gong Yu wrote: "Breathe a long sigh of relief, finally, a better tomorrow is suddenly clearer." ”
Just a month later, the video site "huddled together for warmth" was revived.
Sohu Video, Tencent Video and iQIYI jointly announced the joint establishment of the "Video Content Cooperation Organization" (VCC).
According to the agreement, the three parties will achieve resource interconnection, platform cooperation, in-depth cooperation in the field of copyright and broadcasting, and purchase high-quality video copyright content at home and abroad.
Sohu Video CEO Deng Ye said that the copyright content purchased by VCC is funded by the three parties in accordance with the proportion of 1/3, and the top 20 popular film and television works every year, VCC will basically go to the joint purchase and jointly broadcast on the tripartite platform.
At that time, many people in the industry were happy to see this cooperation model.
The "copyright war" that began in 2011 has led to a rise in the copyright price of head content, and more and more video websites have fallen behind because they are unable to keep up, such as PPTV, Thunderbolt, LeTV and so on.
Pictured: Screenshot of a PPTV page
Nowadays, it seems that the various alliances between long videos, whether it was the former long video alliance or the later Youaiteng, their role is not to promote the benign development of the industry, but to drag the video website into a deeper inner volume.
Their purpose is not to establish a healthy ecology, but to jointly fight against the "Big Mac" Youku potatoes until they drag each other down.
The alliance system built for interests will eventually disintegrate because of interests.
The essence of VCC is to further expand the discourse power of the platform side by monopolizing the strategic resources of the film and television industry, and directly squeeze out the small platform while expanding its own content living space.
Gong Yu once broke the development concept of the video platform:
"This is a game of rich people, play when you have money, automatically quit when you don't have money, and die if you don't buy it."
Throwing money at it becomes the only way for long videos to survive.
In 2015, after Ali acquired Youku Tudou, "Youaiteng", which relied on the continuous blood transfusion of bat's three major consortiums, became the last three giants on the video track, and the rapid fall of Sohu Video also made VCC collapse.
Long-form video platforms hope to strengthen the blockade and monopoly of exclusive resources through copyright alliances, and they are optimistic that "the profitability of the video industry will no longer be a dream."
However, the continuous investment in the construction of copyright barriers has made them more and more distant from profitability, and they have not been able to achieve profitability until today, and even hope has become more and more confused.
After continuing to burn money with no hope, long-form video platforms have had to squeeze costs in recent years and started to make their way into self-made content.
However, the intervention of the whole process of the production and broadcasting chain has also allowed the platform side to have more right to speak, and Aiyouteng has laid out its own upstream industries to further strengthen the vertical monopoly of the market.
Blockbuster self-made dramas are difficult to predict, and if you want to rely on blockbusters to survive, it is impossible for long videos in distress.
Therefore, starting from 2021, the long video giant Youaiteng has set up a new "copyright alliance", sniping at B stations and short video platforms horizontally, harvesting upstream and downstream entities in the film and television industry vertically, and further strengthening the monopoly of content resources.
The monopoly hegemony of such long videos has actually caused public outrage in the group.
In March 2021, an open letter titled "I Like the Fair and Upright Look of the World" began to go viral in Weibo and WeChat circles.
The author of the open letter is veteran producer Yang Li, who accused the three major platforms of joining forces to suppress the purchase price of the series, so that the TV series "If You Are Okay is a Sunny Day" directly lost the way to online broadcasting.
In the letter, she bluntly rebuked: "What the platform does is to expect an absolute monopoly on the TV drama industry." ”
From the VCC of ten years ago to today's "Copyright Alliance", there is only one iron law between long video platforms:
There are no eternal allies, only eternal interests.
After Baidu was unable to support investment, iQiyi began to gradually move closer to Tencent through online dramas such as "Qing Yu Nian" and "Son-in-law".
While suppressing the short video platform in the market, while vigorously developing their own short video products, for long video, the only thing they want to do is to return to the era when there was no opponent.
At that time, they can have an absolute monopoly, they can lower the price with the upstream copyright, and they can raise the price with the downstream members, so as to strive for greater profit margins.
However, past facts show that this is just a naïve idea of "holding the salary to fight the fire" and will never be realized.
02 "Abandoning independence" was born
How do long videos survive?
Waive exclusive copyright.
This is a reverse thinking, and it is the only new direction that can break the cycle of loss.
For many years, the root cause of the loss of long video is the high cost of procurement.
However, the increased competition for exclusive copyrights has directly boosted the salaries of producers, brokers, and publicity companies, which has also spawned the cultural chaos of traffic stars.
For example, when the TV series "Notes from the Tomb Robber" was launched, the price agreed between the producer and Youku was 24 million yuan, but then it was directly cut off by iQiyi at a price of 60 million yuan and won the exclusive copyright.
In 2016, when Tencent and Youku competed for the copyright of "Ruyi Chuan", the two sides negotiated 600 million yuan each to broadcast on the dual platform, but later Tencent believed that this drama would become the second "Zhen Huan Chuan", directly bidding 1.3 billion yuan to grab the exclusive broadcast rights.
For the three companies backed by the Internet consortium, this game of snatching exclusive copyrights continues to increase the premium, no one is the richest, only who is richer.
The long price tug-of-war has also made the loss hole of long videos bigger and bigger.
As a result, we saw Zheng Shuang's sky-high salary of 160 million yuan; we saw the traffic stars who cut pictures, stand-ins, and read numbers; and we saw the shoddy production of destroying the original work and hot eyes.
Producing content with the mindset of capital operation is a dead end that has been repeatedly verified.
Capital is good at analyzing data, content is to pay attention to culture, the two have similarities and differences in the essential logic, with big data stacked out of the stars and IP, can only bring false traffic, can not get the general recognition of the public.
iQiyi, Youku, and Tencent Video burned out 100 billion yuan in ten years, but looking at the past, which S-level investment large-scale production of traffic dramas has really become popular?
Pictured: Screenwriter Wang Hailin
Screenwriter Wang Hailin said:
"In ten years, industrial upgrading has not been realized. 100 billion, did not produce excellent works. On the contrary, it eliminated the audience and cultivated a generation of brain damage, and the key is to lose money. ”
In the competition for exclusive copyrights, long videos show the blind fanaticism of rich and willful everywhere, and it is precisely in this crazy bidding that the platform side has seriously misplaced the value evaluation of film works.
Relying on the brush volume, water injection and anti-black of female workers in the rice circle, providing data optimization for traffic artists and their works, and then using traffic + IP to assemble film and television dramas, the production cost is forced to be infinitely compressed by the artist's remuneration.
This is the content ecology under the monopoly of long video platforms.
The so-called "S-grade works" actually only please a small group of people, and ignore the law of artistic creation, vainly trying to take only shortcuts in film and television creation, and can not achieve the real "out of the circle" effect.
Therefore, the membership growth of the long video platform is weak, the revenue space is compressed, and the internal corruption is serious, which ultimately damages the healthy ecology of the entire industry.
In 2011, LeEco bought the exclusive online rights to the TV series "The Biography of Zhen Huan" for 20 million.
Gao Fei of LeTV Video Said: "Only this solo drama, LeTV has received more than 3.6 billion yuan in traffic and hundreds of millions of yuan in returns. ”
After so many years, we have never seen a top-notch work like "The Biography of Zhen Huan", and the entire industry wants to be impetuous and make quick money, and no one is willing to do creation in a down-to-earth manner.
Ten years ago, long videos completely disrupted the market for exclusive rights; ten years later, long videos and short videos are still constantly competing for copyright.
Long videos are not profitable for a long time, is it all the fault of short videos?
03 The philosophy of "length and shortness"
After the rise of short video, the monopoly of long video platforms in all directions has been broken.
For long video platforms, the "scapegoat" of long-term losses has also emerged, that is, short videos.
But in fact, long before the rise of short video, long video has always faced problems such as a single profit model, weak growth, and long-term losses.
Short videos did not directly impact long videos, but on the contrary, the evil consequences of long videos perennial overdraft operations, which broke out in the past two years.
The regulatory authorities have vigorously rectified the rice circle culture, so that the long video platform has lost the whitewash of traffic, and the performance of various data has become more and more ugly, especially after cutting off the idol talent show, so that the platform's revenue absorption ability is directly dropped.
For long videos, the biggest enemy is always yourself.
Whether it is the simple and crude "copy success" logic or the "go it alone" copyright strategy, the long video has been pushed to a desperate situation step by step.
What is the essence of a video website?
A platform for content output.
Previously, Netflix released its fourth quarter of fiscal 2021 earnings.
Chart: Netflix Q4 2021 earnings
According to the data, Netflix's quarterly revenue was $7.709 billion, up 16.0% year-on-year, and net profit was $607 million, compared with $542 million in the same period last year, an increase of 11.9% year-on-year, exceeding market expectations of $374 million.
Starting as a Blu-ray DVD rental in 1997, Netflix has now grown into a global streaming giant, producing regular "blockbusters" from Love, Death, and Robots to Squid Games.
At the upcoming 94th Academy Awards, Netflix is once again the biggest winner, with a total of 27 nominations out of 23 awards, and has received the most Oscar nominations for the third consecutive year.
No one will question and question Netflix's content creation ability, and it is precisely with its strong originality and mature production system that Netflix can run wild in the era of the rise of short videos, and the number of global subscribers has successfully exceeded 200 million.
Short videos will not beat long videos, and excellent film and television content will always be the user's just need.
The premise is that you have to be good.
Domestic long video websites put the cart before the horse about content platforms, always trying to use exclusive monopolies to gain a competitive advantage.
Hundreds of millions of salaries have flowed to the accounts of traffic stars, so who should maintain the professional dignity of screenwriters, artists, props, and CCs?
In fact, with years of copyright competition, domestic long-form video platforms have long monopolized the online distribution of film, television and comprehensive content.
The internal price alliance formed by the head minister video platform can directly determine the price and platform of the film and episode webcast, and as long as one parent video platform objects, the filmmaker cannot distribute the copyright to other platforms, including short video platforms.
Some insiders said:
"The second right to create a short video is actually an additional fee on the basis of the normal sale of complete film and television copyrights by the filmmaker, which is actually more profitable for the filmmaker, and the user also likes it." However, many filmmakers have directly said that if the short video rights are sold to Douyin, then their cooperative relationship with all long video platforms may not be maintained. More typically, is the "Eight Hundred" and "Detective Chinatown 3" two popular movies, Douyin's offer at that time was higher than the long video platform, but still can not buy. ”
There is no doubt that the film and television rights that money cannot buy are just a means for long videos to suppress short videos.
Short video platforms such as Douyin have repeatedly found long video platforms to negotiate directly, and as a result, the other party has directly offered a sky-high price of 10 billion yuan, and the insincere negotiations have made the two sides unhappy.
If you can't change the "hegemonic" thinking and put the focus of your career back on content development, the loss of long video websites will continue.
The war of long and short videos could have been completely avoided, and to a certain extent, short videos can also play a positive role in promoting film and television works.
At the same time, short videos also directly pick out the "excessive water injection" of long videos, forcing the film and television market environment to return to rationality.
For the war of long and short videos, each other is not dead or alive, but closely related and closely related.
"Fight" to win short videos, long videos can be revived?
Obviously, the crux of the loss of long videos is not in short videos, but in their impetuous, radical and overbearing business strategies.
Headaches and pains, in the opposite direction, will only make the long video farther and farther away from the answer.