Edit | Yu Bin
Produced by | Chaoqi Network "Yu see column"
"My eyes are rulers, and I don't have to look at the replay." On the evening of February 5, a funny commentary by Wang Meng, a super top outside the Winter Olympics, made people once again impressed by this super commentator who "turned out", and remembered the platform Migu video behind it.
It is understood that Wang Meng is a retired athlete and the first "Triple Crown" in the history of mainland short track speed skating. During the Winter Olympics, as a guest commentator of the Migu Video Winter Olympics, he partnered with former CCTV supporter and sports commentator Huang Jianxiang, and used a unique commentary style to reflect the professionalism of his commentary and also reflect its fun, so it also became a super top stream, and the popularity during the Winter Olympics was even second only to Gu Ailing.
Wang Meng brought fire to Migu Video, and China Mobile behind it also ushered in a bumper harvest in the capital market. It is understood that shortly after the return to A-shares, China Mobile, the original stock price performance was flat, on February 9, but ushered in a limit, the day increased the market value of about 130 billion yuan; the next day, its stock price reached 68.4 yuan / share, a new high since the listing.
However, just as the so-called extremes of things must be reversed, the trillion-dollar market value of the Giant Mac is extremely rare in the market. While Migu video has made China Mobile soar in the stock market and become a phenomenon-level event for a while, it has also triggered the cruel reality of how to deal with the fading of the climax after the Winter Olympics.
After the Winter Olympics faded, migu videos returned to embarrassment
How eye-catching is Wang Meng? At the scene of the short track speed skating mixed team relay final, before the official announcement of the results, Wang Meng announced that the Chinese team won the first gold medal of the Winter Olympics by a slight margin, and the result was as he expected. Wang Meng also circled countless fans because of his "divine prophecy".
With Wang Meng's exit from the circle, Migu Video also ushered in a long-lost spring. During the Winter Olympics, data show that in the topic of Weibo #Wang Meng's commentary, there have been billions of reads and hundreds of thousands of discussions. The biggest beneficiary of the traffic is Migu Video, the broadcasting platform where Wang Meng is located.
According to statistics, the replay of the short-track speed skating competition explained by Wang Meng and the famous Huang Jianxiang on its platform has also risen, reaching as many as 73 million times, and many netizens commented below the video: "Specially download Migu, just for Wang Meng."
Naturally, the number of downloads of Migu videos has also soared, with daily active users gaining nearly 10 times more. However, as we all know, people's enthusiasm for sports stems from various events, but because the events are not every day, it is also destined that people's enthusiasm is also like the time of the event, which has a certain periodicity.
For example, the basketball forum Tiger Flutter, which once swept the whole network, has long appeared lonely and withered. Even how hot-blooded it was, how lonely it is now. This is also contrary to the Internet platform, from beginning to end, not only pay attention to the number of users, but also pay attention to the activity and stickiness of users.
Obviously, this is also the dilemma that Migu Video is in now. Although the Winter Olympics have increased the download volume of Migu videos, they are faced with the reality of a large number of users uninstalling and cleaning up memory after the event. The reasons for this are also manifold.
First of all, at present, the domestic video platforms, the first to none are iQiyi, Youku, Tencent Video (referred to as Aiyouteng), all of which have rich copyright content and hundreds of millions of users. Compared with such platforms, Migu Video is not very competitive.
For example, in terms of brand awareness and influence, Aiyouteng is backed by BAT Internet manufacturers, while Migu Music is behind the relatively traditional enterprise China Mobile. Therefore, in comparison, Migu lacks Internet genes and lacks more advantageous brand promotion channels.
In the early years, The Internet product "Feixin" laid out by China Mobile was also folded halfway due to the emergence of WeChat. The subsequent launch of Migu Music was also hit by the Internet giants, and it was not sullen.
It should be known that Migu Music was a professional company under China Mobile Migu Culture technology co., Ltd. with a total investment of 10.4 billion yuan. According to reports, its positioning is to operate a new media business with music as the carrier, serving nearly 1 billion Chinese mobile users, in fact, when the smartphone industry is developing like a day, Migu Music also has little sense of existence.
In contrast, the embarrassment of Migu's video is the same as Migu's music. For most Internet users who often watch videos, they may already be members of a certain family. Therefore, even if you need to watch the Winter Olympic Games, you will not buy Migu's membership. The reason is very real and cruel.
Because some users said that they were chasing some specific dramas or variety shows, but Migu videos did not. Some people also said that some film and television resources can only be viewed on the platform they purchased. Therefore, after watching the Winter Olympics, Migu videos appeared "redundant" in mobile phones.
In fact, video platforms often become a gathering place for media practitioners because there is a wealth of video footage there. However, practitioners also said that some of the video materials on Migu video are in "Aiyouteng", and there is also a lot of content on station B.
Therefore, there are very few users who are willing to pay for Migu video members, and the differentiated content of its platform is the live broadcast content that gets the live broadcast rights of various events, and perhaps only such users will pay for the service of Migu video for a long time because of the continuous viewing needs.
It is not difficult to understand why the heat of the Winter Olympics has faded at the same time, and the embarrassment of Migu music has reappeared. Before the Winter Olympics, Migu videos were unattended, and after the opening of the Winter Olympics, traffic soared. In fact, such a roller coaster-like user data rise and fall, is the norm of Migu Music, and when it lays out the sports content track, it may have been doomed.
According to the data, on the opening day of the 2018 World Cup, the number of daily active users of Migu Video exceeded 12 million, the number of new daily users exceeded 10 million, and the growth rate of active people in June exceeded 90%; after the World Cup, the daily active penetration rate of Migu Video even fell from 1.7% to 0.6%.
In July 2021, during the Tokyo Olympic Games, Migu Video had 36 million monthly active users, an increase of 14.55% month-on-month. After the Tokyo Olympics, Migu Video's users plummeted by 32.28% in September, leaving only 25 million.
This also has to worry about whether migu video's revenue-generating ability can offset its event broadcast copyright fees and operating costs.
Betting on the sports content track, the difficulty of monetizing Migu video
The cyclical nature of large-scale events has made Migu Video's platform attention fluctuate. Therefore, Migu's differentiated content has certainly brought it a short-term traffic boom, but it has also limited its commercial imagination.
As we all know, the vast majority of users really care about the game, the content, not the platform on which the game is broadcast. In this era of information explosion and content is king, if streaming media platforms cannot achieve the sustainability of high-quality content, their outcome can be imagined.
Image source: Migu Sports Weibo
Moreover, from the perspective of the industry market, the development of content platforms in recent years is not optimistic. It is understood that iQiyi's expenditure on content copyright alone has accumulated losses of tens of billions, and the asset-liability ratio is even higher. In 2021, for example, iQIYI's subscription membership increased by only 600,000 compared with 2020, reaching 103.6 million, an increase of less than 1%.
Such a growth rate also seems to mean that the content track has gradually revealed a bottleneck. Compared with the double-digit growth of Tencent's membership, the fundamental reason is the implementation of the national policy of restricting the culture of the rice circle, and its past popular talent shows have borne the brunt of it. Coupled with the impact of the external environment such as the epidemic, the cost and cycle of iQIYI's self-made content are uncontrollable, resulting in the sustainability of content updates cannot be guaranteed.
Through the above analysis, it is not difficult to see that the problem of Migu Video is very similar to the current situation of iQIYI, and even in comparison, its anxiety level is even worse than that of iQIYI.
From the analysis of the competitive situation of the content track, the competitive pressure encountered by Migu Video should not be underestimated. While the attention of various sports events has decreased sharply, the rise of two-dimensional culture has brought a lot of impact to traditional video media.
First of all, the platform represented by Station B, followed by game live broadcasting platforms such as Douyu and Huya, as well as Penguin E-sports, are all playing well in the cultural and entertainment industry. It is understood that as early as 2019, Station B spent 800 million yuan to buy out the exclusive live broadcast rights of the League of Legends Global Finals for 3 years, and even other game live broadcast platforms can only obtain copyright authorization through the form of content distribution.
In contrast, in addition to Migu Video's unique event content and lack of initiative in the distribution cycle, there are only a few other high-quality content. According to observations, in addition to the recent Migu video solo dramas, there are only two sitcoms, "Winter Olympic Family" and "Home and Wanshixing", which have a slight attention. Other new dramas basically do not have waves, and their layout and performance in variety shows are even less satisfactory, and even not worth mentioning.
Borrowing from foreign streaming media platforms such as Netflix and Disney, the content track originally had a very broad space. And video media is even more promising. However, in the past, communication operators that mastered hundreds of millions of user resources for voice calls have never seized the opportunity. The reason is that obtaining traffic through content is not only costly and difficult to retain, but also encounters the dilemma of commercial monetization.
For example, under the circumstance that the membership business is difficult to improve, Migu Video began to extend its business line, began to take advantage of the hot spots of the event, developed peripheral products and sold them online. Taking this Winter Olympics as an example, statistics show that users who pay attention to the Winter Olympics are generally young people under the age of 35. Among the users who pay attention to the Winter Olympics for "understanding ice and snow sports", the proportion of young users under the age of 35 is 71%.
Therefore, Migu Video aimed at this group of young people, and has launched a number of cute image handmade gift boxes, which were directly snatched up after being on the shelves. At the same time, there are Ren Ziwei signature throw pillows, athlete mouse pads, etc. Even after the pair of Wang Meng and Huang Jianxiang became popular, the "Maoxiang Hand Office" pre-sale was launched, and it is expected to be shipped in late May.
As the saying goes, the poor think about change. This seems to be the peak circuit of Migu Video, but it is not a helpless move facing the bottleneck of monetization. What people in the industry are most worried about is how to achieve sustainability in this "hot spot" marketing model. And once the heat of stars and talents fades, I am afraid that their commercialization will fall into a chicken feather.
It is foreseeable that the "improvisation" monetization path will still make Migu Video's potential commercial dilemma still follow.
epilogue
Sitting on China Mobile's nearly 1 billion user resources, Migu Video not only has a natural traffic advantage, but also can obtain the content broadcast rights of various sports events at the lowest cost.
However, perhaps because of its lack of sufficient Internet genes, or perhaps because the positioning of its content is "too" differentiated, sports content has brought it wave after wave of traffic dividends, but also to some extent limited its imagination at the commercial level.
Therefore, in the face of the pressure of continuous internal output of high-quality content, as well as the external competition for a variety of more eye-catching content, Migu Video's anxiety also lingers. Taking advantage of the successful planning during the Winter Olympics, the short-term surge in the number of users brought to Migu Video may not be worthy of Migu Video's surprise, but the experience of successfully creating explosive IP such as "Wang Mao" through the explanation may inject confidence and motivation into migu video in the follow-up. Therefore, it is not excluded that Migu Video will change the embarrassing fate of the past because of this battle.