"In the era of digital content explosion, as a shovel seller in this new content era, visual content production tools can be expected in the future."
Author | Zi, Webby editing | Man Man Week first image source: The Economist
During the epidemic, digital content consumption in the United States has exploded. In 2021, the proportion of people consuming video streaming content in the United States reached 83%, surpassing the proportion of TV viewers for the first time. More than 40% of U.S. Gen Z spend more than 6 hours a day on social media (Ins, etc.) and video streaming platforms (Netflix, etc.).
When the American people are immersed in the ocean of picture and video content, the content production tools behind it are developing rapidly: Canva completed a $200 million financing, a valuation of $40 billion Figma completed a $200 million Series E financing, a valuation of $10 billion YouTube's former rival Vimeo, after the spin-off of IAC, raised and listed separately, the market value was once close to ten billion US dollars Why are the rising stars still so optimistic when the industry has Adobe and Sketch giants?
canva
Lower the design threshold through materials,
A boon for non-professional designers
Founded in 2012, Canva's positioning is a threshold-free design service platform, making an ultra-lightweight visual content design tool, by providing a large number of pictures, fonts, illustrations, templates and other material libraries for users to select and combine, thereby reducing or even eliminating the professional threshold of design, making the creation simple and efficient, even without design experience can be easily designed through Canva. For both professional designers and design novices, Canva is extremely friendly, achieving the purpose of reducing design costs, improving design efficiency, and promoting the democratization of professional design.
Image source: Canva In 2019, Canva released products for the enterprise side, in addition to a larger material library, the enterprise side for the customer's brand and marketing needs, to create a one-stop management platform, optimize the team collaborative design process and the function of one-click content release on various social media. In the same year, Canva raised $85 million, valued at $3.2 billion. At present, Canva has won 85% of the Fortune 500 companies, with a valuation of up to $40 billion. Under the epidemic, with the significant increase in people's consumption of digital media content, Canva chose to accelerate the speed of transformation and expansion through mergers and acquisitions, and has acquired 3 companies since 2021.
Kaleido, an AI-driven image and video editor that complements the ability to produce content through AI technology;
Template library Smartmockups, enriching its own material library from UI/UX, social media, products, packaging, home, clothing and other dimensions;
Flora, a data visualization tool for the media and publishing industry whose clients include Guardian, LSE, BBC, British Council, FT and other media, enhances Canva's ability to meet new data visualization design needs on the one hand, and deepens its presence in vertical industries on the other.
Canva used her success to prove that design is no longer a designer's exclusive skill, but has become a more universal general skill, and that design tools should become "light" and "light".
Figma
Browser-based design collaboration tools,
Specializes in UI/UX
In 2012, ibm's software engineer to designer ratio was 72:1, since then the number of designers has continued to increase, by 2019, the ratio has dropped to 3:1, not only IBM, Linkedin and Dropbox have also undergone similar changes, Internet companies pay more and more attention to the design attributes of products, Figma not only successfully grasped this trend, but also realized that with the increase in the importance of product design, design is not only a matter for the design team, products, Departments such as user experience also need to be joined, and how to solve the synergy between the design department and other departments will be as important as the design function itself. That's why Figma has created browser-based design tools that emphasize real-time updates and seamless collaboration.
Image source: Figma team can design at the same time, and all relevant parties can also participate in the design, through messages, comments, annotations and other ways to collaborate, increase communication in the design stage can effectively reduce the design deviation and later rework, thereby improving the efficiency of the entire design process. After Figma, the "real-time collaboration" feature has undoubtedly become a must-have option for productivity tools.
Vimeo
2C转2B，
Focus on corporate video, a desperate opportunity
Vimeo was founded in 2004, in the early days, Vimeo's goal is to build a 2C video platform (YouTube), but due to the poor user experience led to slow user growth, no advertising and lack of stable revenue sources and other reasons, Vimeo in the competition with YouTube gradually fell behind, unable to reverse the decline, and gradually disappeared in the market.
Image credit: Times International
At the same time, the demand for video by enterprises is rising rapidly, the proportion of enterprises obtaining traffic through video in 2019 rose from 60% in 2014 to 80%, marketsandMarkets expects the enterprise video services market to maintain a good growth momentum, the market size is expected to exceed $25 billion in 2025, and the compound annual growth rate of 2020-2025 will reach 9.3%.
After the failure of the 2C battlefield, Vimeo aimed at the B-side market, when users tend to consume more pictures, videos and other visual content, enterprises also need to use new content forms to shape brands and promote products. There is demand, but there is a shortage of enterprise video content creation tools. So Vimeo officially determined the direction of B2B development, began to jedi counterattack, increase the ability for B2B video services.
Vimeo focuses on end-to-end one-stop enterprise video services. Vimeo's solutions can serve enterprises of any size (large enterprises, small and medium-sized enterprises and individual studios) and are suitable for various business scenarios, from video creation, collaborative management, video publishing several major sections to fully serve enterprises, not only to provide enterprises with easy-to-use video creation tools, but also to provide enterprises with a full range of services in video publishing, promotion and monetization. In 2021, Vimeo was spun off and successfully listed by IAC, with a market capitalization of nearly $10 billion.
Image source: Business Insider2C after the transition to 2B Vimeo not only began to steadily accumulate the number of enterprise customers, but also solved the previous revenue problem well. In terms of the number of customers, Vimeo's enterprise customers grew by 87% in 2020, the total number of signed enterprise customers was nearly 4,000, and the customer growth rate in each quarter was better than in 2019, while the number of individual users also achieved a steady growth of 24%, with the total number of individual users exceeding 1.5 million.
In terms of revenue data, the growth rate of enterprise customer revenue will reach 89% in 2020, and the net revenue retention rate of enterprise customers will exceed 100% in 2020.
Why do up-and-coming stars still have a chance?
Kevin Kwok, a former investor at Greylock Partners (Figma's early-stage investment arm), explains that "even slight differences in atomic concepts can lead similar companies to a different path."
What is the "atomic concept"? "The atomic concept is the core concept of building an entire product." It includes different aspects such as user positioning, product concept, abstraction level, etc. When the number of digital media content erupts geometrically, for different application scenarios, different user groups, and different content production needs, enterprises that innovate at the "atomic concept" level will also find a foothold and fight for a new world.
Summarizing the dazzling development path of Canva, Figma, and Vimeo, the following innovative trends in visual content production tools are worth paying attention to: videoization - content form upgrade AI - production efficiency improvement collaboration - collaboration ability enhancement scenario - empowerment of vertical application scenarios These trends have also been reflected in the investment and financing and mergers and acquisitions since 2021.
Adobe's acquisition of cloud-based video collaboration platform Frame.io, social media and content marketing platform ContentCal in 2021 to enhance the layout of video and vertical use cases; in 2021, SoftBank leads the image and video editing platform Picsart, which is valued at more than $10, betting on a low-threshold visual content production tool track;
Vimeo also acquired Two companies, Wibbitz and Wirewax, in 2021, to lay out AI content production and enterprise video application scenarios - among which Wibbitz is committed to creating an AI-driven short video content production tool, which runs on a browser and is an extremely lightweight video content production tool. At the same time, Wibbitz provides users with various materials, including templates, pictures, videos, etc. to reduce the threshold of creation. In addition to the technology applied to artificial intelligence, another feature of Wibbitz is that it can create specific video content that serves different application scenarios. At present, a unique video production scheme has been designed for content marketing, B2B marketing, e-commerce marketing, social media marketing and other scenarios, so that the short videos produced can play the greatest effect in the corresponding scenes.
Wirewax is an interactive video creation tool that goes a step further in serving the needs of enterprises, the core of which is to increase the interactive ability of video, providing enterprises with the ability to interact and communicate with customers through video, thereby increasing customer engagement.
Image credit: Wirewax
Wirewax is easy to use and easy to use, users only need to upload a video and add interaction points and enter content in the video, without editing the background code. Wirewax also supports tracking data after video release in the background, analyzing browsing and clicking data at interaction points.
With Wirewax, businesses can increase customer engagement and engagement rates by 20%-30%, and increase customers' willingness to spend more than 9 times. We have also observed the same dynamics in China, such as the startup Boolean Vector, which focuses on AI and data-based video generation, completed nearly $10 million in two rounds of financing in three months. Boolean vectors focus on AI and data mining technologies, automatically generate brand and SKU short videos for display and delivery, and use this as an entry point to create a global short video SaaS platform with a complete link.
Different from Wibbitz's algorithm generation technology, Boolean vectors combine brand marketing, access market data while using artificial intelligence technology, and the algorithm analyzes market preferences and trends through big data to produce video content that can effectively cause market feedback. With the help of Boolean vectors, brands can reduce the cost of video production by 90% and shorten the production time by 1 hour, effectively improving production efficiency for brands.
As a one-stop video service platform, Boolean Vector can not only provide productivity tools for the brand side, but also has the function of effect analysis and marketing management of video delivery, extending the scope of services from design to application link, tracking each video put into the market by the brand side and analyzing the marketing effect of the video, realizing scenario-based operation, thereby helping the brand side to improve the effect of marketing.
Its founder Wang Qing introduced: "Boolean Vector has a Chinese team that is well versed in the global market, and the team has advantages in short video, cross-border brand marketing and cross-technical cognition, which has more comprehensive and deeper service capabilities than overseas pure material creation tools. ”
From Wibbitz, Wirewax to Boolean vectors, the application of artificial intelligence in content production is getting deeper and deeper, and the content production tools at this stage have a clearer goal, which is closely linked to vertical application scenarios. In the era of digital content explosion, as a shovel seller in this new content era, visual content production tools can be expected in the future.
Reference: 1. US Media Consumption Report2: How Figma and Canva are disrupting Adobe
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