In the era of digital economy, what is the value of short video platforms as a new carrier in driving employment? In response to this topic, the "Research Report on Promoting Employment and Creating Social Value on Short Video Platforms" (hereinafter referred to as the "Report")," written by the research group of the School of Labor and Personnel of Chinese Min University, was recently released. Taking the Kuaishou platform as an example, the report analyzes how the short video platform affects the employment system behind it through the business system from the perspective of employment, and measures the number of related employment opportunities driven by it. The calculation results show that the total number of employment opportunities driven by the Kuaishou platform is 34.63 million, showing the strong employment driving ability of the short video platform.
In addition, the report also relies on detailed and vivid research cases to comprehensively discuss the mechanism of short video platforms to drive employment and create social value from the three levels of individual employment, industrial development and regional revitalization.
Build a multi-level employment ecosystem, and Kuaishou will drive 34.63 million employment opportunities
In recent years, the digital economy has become an important economic form for the mainland to achieve high-quality economic development, and the number and value of digital platform enterprises have grown rapidly. The report pointed out that especially since the real economy was hit by the epidemic in 2020, the new technologies, new models and new formats led by digital platforms have demonstrated strong resistance to pressure and development capabilities, and have played an important role in alleviating economic downward pressure, stabilizing employment, and helping poverty alleviation and rural revitalization.
Among the many digital platforms, short video and live broadcast platforms, as a new carrier of the digital economy, have developed from the original AI-driven content creation platform to a comprehensive platform covering content consumption, knowledge dissemination, e-commerce sales, local life and other composite functions, which not only meets the social entertainment functions required by people's daily lives, but also has an important enabling upgrade effect on the supply side through various functions such as e-commerce and knowledge payment.
The report divides the Kuaishou business ecosystem into multiple modules such as live broadcast business, online marketing business, e-commerce and knowledge payment business, and open platform, on the basis of which the types of employment opportunities driven by Kuaishou are further divided into three categories: employment opportunities directly driven by the Kuaishou platform, employment opportunities driven by the Kuaishou e-commerce ecology, and employment opportunities driven by the content ecology, thus building a rich employment ecosystem of the Kuaishou platform.
(Figure: Kuaishou platform employment ecosystem)
According to the results of the report, the total number of employment opportunities driven by the Kuaishou platform is 34.63 million, of which 20 million are directly driven employment opportunities, mainly from the employment opportunities of content creators; the other is the employment opportunities driven by the Kuaishou e-commerce ecology and the content ecology, including 9.23 million employment opportunities driven by the e-commerce ecology, and 5.4 million employment opportunities driven by the content ecology, such as team employment, MCN institutions, live broadcasting guilds, agents, service providers and other institutions.
(Figure: Calculation of the scale of employment driven by the Kuaishou platform)
For the outstanding performance of the short video platform represented by Kuaishou in driving employment, Zhao Zhong, deputy dean of the School of Labor and Personnel of Chinese Min University and distinguished professor of Changjiang Scholars, believes that the short video platform expands the scale, breadth and depth of the market, reduces the cost of information matching, and increases the overall social welfare.
Short video platform in the individual employment, industrial development, regional revitalization to drive employment, create social value mechanism analysis
Behind the massive employment opportunities, short video platforms also create social value from multiple levels. The report points out that on the basis of promoting employment, short video platforms solve the relationship between "making cakes" and "dividing cakes" through the linkage of content, culture and governance. First of all, the platform expands personal employment opportunities through core business, enhances industrial integration and efficiency, promotes coordinated regional development, and realizes a bigger "cake". At the same time, through the governance function, the platform highlights the role of grassroots culture and trust culture in the operation of the platform, helps vulnerable groups to find employment, guides technology diffusion and assistance, empowers rural and central and western users to develop, and divides the "cake" on the basis of making the "cake" bigger. This process can be further decomposed into three levels: individual, industrial and regional, and the report takes the Kuaishou platform as an example for a comprehensive analysis.
(Photo: Employment promotion and social value creation on the Kuaishou platform)
Short video platforms expand employment opportunities for ordinary people
At the individual level, the short video platform expands employment opportunities by increasing the income of ordinary people, creating new positions, and improving the efficiency of employment matching through new forms such as live recruitment, while breaking through the work restrictions of traditional industries, helping vulnerable groups to obtain income and realize personal value.
For example, through core businesses such as short video, live e-commerce, and online marketing, Kuaishou has created new positions such as "Internet Marketer", "Trader", "Broadcaster", "Marketing Master", "Cargo Master", etc., to meet the new needs of consumers and improve economic efficiency in the process of replacing old formats with new formats.
The blue-collar recruitment platform "Quick Recruitment" launched by Kuaishou in January 2022 is to improve the online rate of blue-collar recruitment through live recruitment, and solve the pain points such as the authenticity, accuracy, timeliness and low efficiency of job search in the past blue-collar recruitment information. Recently, the China Employment Training Technical Guidance Center of the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security has also reached a strategic cooperation with Kuaishou, and the two sides will work together to promote labor branding and promote high-quality employment.
In addition to creating new jobs and improving the employment efficiency of blue-collar groups, Kuaishou has also expanded from online support such as traffic and publicity to the construction of offline parks, paving the last kilometer for the disabled to achieve employment with the help of the digital economy. Previously, Kuaishou donated 5 million yuan for the construction of the Shuangchuang Park for the Disabled in Junxian County, Hebi City, Henan Province, and planned to achieve the goal of driving 2,000 disabled people to employment every year through the park.
Short video platforms promote the development of digital industrial clusters
At the industrial level, the short video platform improves economic efficiency by reshaping the industrial chain, spawning new industrial clusters and revitalizing the traditional industrial belt, while the industry masters use short videos and live broadcasts to pass production technology to ordinary practitioners in the industry, leading the diffusion of supply-side technology.
At present, a large number of agricultural technology experts are gathered on the Kuaishou platform, and these talents and their fans (ordinary practitioners in the industry) constitute a technology diffusion network between producers, which has become a new way for agricultural technology dissemination and human capital accumulation, finding a new breakthrough for agricultural supply-side reform, and making ordinary practitioners who were originally in information disadvantages, geographical disadvantages and resource disadvantages become the biggest beneficiaries. In Kuaishou, there are 250,000 live comments every day, asking creators about agricultural technology; only the "spring ploughing live teaching" of anti-epidemic and spring ploughing has 22 sets of agricultural video lessons and 45 live courses, with 700,000+.
The Kuaishou live e-commerce company began to reverse customize the supply chain because of the keen capture of consumer demand and the rapid growth of the volume, improving the efficiency of the industry.
At the same time, Kuaishou live e-commerce has also promoted the formation of digital industrial clusters, which has further improved the efficiency of agglomeration, and brought transformation opportunities to merchants who were originally engaged in offline business, and promoted the revitalization of traditional industrial belts. For example, Linyi City, Shandong Province, the landing city of the Kuaishou e-commerce apparel industry belt, uses the short video platform to carry out live e-commerce to achieve digital economic transformation. As of 2021, Linyi has a total of 38 e-commerce industrial parks of various types, with more than 100,000 e-commerce practitioners. In that year, the number of registered users of Linyi Kuaishou ranked first in the prefecture-level cities in China; it had 3 Tens of Millions of Fan-level Kuaishou Anchors, 14 5 million Fan Anchors, and nearly 400 Million-level Fan Anchors.
(Figure: Cumulative number of live e-commerce enterprises in Linyi City)
The short video platform promotes rural revitalization and the development of the central and western regions
At the regional level, short video platforms add vitality to the traditional "sinking market" by developing characteristic resources and breaking the boundaries of time and space, and also rely on a series of actions such as the "Happy Rural Leaders" program to promote rural revitalization and the development of the central and western regions, narrowing the gap between urban and rural areas and the gap between east and west.
Gathered a large number of rural areas and users in the less developed areas of the central and western regions of the Kuaishou platform, with live broadcast rooms to replace the offline market, relying on China's developed logistics system, so that the origin and market proximity is no longer a restrictive condition for regional development; short video live broadcast breaks the separation of time and space between farmers and consumers, establishes a direct contact channel, so that farmers do not have to go through middlemen and directly receive feedback from consumers; at the same time, rural areas and the central and western regions play ecological and cost advantages, online and offline combination, the development of characteristic agriculture and tourism, Achieve a win-win situation between revenue and ecology.
In this process, the Kuaishou platform has solved the talent bottleneck in rural revitalization through plans such as "Happy Village Leader", attracted a group of digital youth with hometown feelings, Internet awareness, and technical ability to take root in the central and western regions, and used the platform to achieve entrepreneurship, shaping a new pattern of talent flow, and providing useful exploration for the application of the digital economy to narrow the gap between urban and rural areas and the gap between the east and the west. After nearly 4 years of planning, Kuaishou has supported more than 100 rural entrepreneurial leaders, with an annual output value of more than 50 million leaders and an impact of industrial development covering nearly 10 million people.
(Photo: Kuaishou "Happy Village Leader" plan timeline)
As one of the examples of the "Happy Village Leader" program to help rural development, Zhang Fei, the anchor of Kuaishou "Forget Worry Yunting", as the first secretary of Ganjiagou Village, Meixing Town, Xiaojin County, Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province, helped villagers sell 11,000 jin of apples, increase their income by more than 55,000 yuan, sell more than 300 kg of matsutake mushrooms, and increase their income by more than 60,000 yuan through the poverty alleviation method of Kuaishou short video + live broadcast. Relying on the Kuaishou platform, 109 people from 26 households in Ganjiagou Village have all been lifted out of poverty.
The report points out that the cake making and cake sharing behavior of the Kuaishou platform at the individual, industrial and regional levels are carried out at the same time, relying on each other, and transforming each other, which is a symbiotic relationship. The mechanism of the Kuaishou platform to drive employment and create social value has both universality and particularity due to the unique ecological culture of the platform.
The report further analyzes that Kuaishou users have the dual identity of consumers and content creators, the Kuaishou platform has a unique "old iron culture" and "semi-acquaintance social" model, as well as the kuaishou platform adheres to the core characteristics of fairness and inclusiveness, "decentralized" traffic distribution mechanism, etc., ensuring the inclusiveness and fairness of the Kuaishou platform, becoming the premise guarantee for promoting social value creation, and is also the key to distinguishing it from other Internet platforms.
In this regard, Li Lixing, a professor at the National Development Research Institute of Peking University and a young Yangtze River scholar, said that the development of the digital economy represented by the short video platform allows us to no longer rely on specific geographical aggregation, so as to develop more new formats and improve the operational efficiency of society.