Author / Millie
Edited / Kinder Road
The pictures in this article are from the Internet
Over time, many of the differences and controversies that existed in the past are gradually revealing the final answer.
The development of social media is a classic example of this. Short video platforms represented by Douyin, Kuaishou, etc. have grown into a new generation of traffic overlords in the past few years with wildfires, quickly competing for users and squeezing user time. Under the inherent cognition that traffic is equal to advertising, the market has believed that the basic disks of Weibo and WeChat are affected. This voice reached its peak in 2019, and the industry landmark event that occurred this year was that Douyin users exceeded Weibo for a longer time.
However, it is clear that this trend of alternating between the old and the new, and the trend of one after the other, has not been confirmed in the development of the next two years. According to data released in Weibo's march 3 financial report, the annual revenue was 2.26 billion US dollars, an increase of 34% year-on-year. Full-year advertising revenue reached $1.98 billion, up 33% year-over-year. At the same time, the adjusted operating profit in 2021 reached US$829.2 million, an increase of 43% year-on-year, the adjusted full-year operating profit margin reached 37%, and the net profit attributable to Weibo shareholders also increased year-on-year.
It can be seen that even in the era of short videos, Weibo has not been abandoned by users.
In the case of accurate data and obvious trends, why is there such a misjudgment?
The core reason for this is that there has been a significant deviation in the judging criteria. Although user time has long been an important indicator of the momentum of Internet product development, all the conclusions that come out of this research framework are "either one or the other, one goes against the other".
However, from the perspective of meeting user needs, such a setting is obviously one-sided. Users need not only audiovisual entertainment under fragmented time, but also a strong need to participate in social issues, understand social hotspots, and express themselves in the commons. Looking around, there is only one public social media platform in China that can meet the needs of users - Weibo.
Jitter feeds users through short videos that are constantly sliding away, and Weibo uses tags to respect users' freedom of participation and expression. The two are neither in conflict nor contradictory. From this point of view, Weibo is obviously irreplaceable.
In fact, in addition to the fierce industry competition, in the past two years, social media platforms have felt more deeply the drastic changes in the external environment. The impact of the epidemic, the adjustment of the market, and the policy guidance of the regulatory authorities have prompted the platform to continuously improve its own strategy. For example, in 2021, the regulatory authorities have issued notices many times to rectify the chaos in the rice circle and rectify the marketing number... Each governance blow undoubtedly puts forward higher requirements and stricter standards for all platforms.
In an uncertain environment, it is more of a test of the company's strategic determination and operational capabilities. What we are curious about is what Exactly Weibo did right in 2021 so that it can achieve double revenue and profit growth against the trend?
01 Ride through the storm of entertainment
In 2021, internet social media platforms collectively encountered a regulatory storm.
First, in June, the Cyberspace Administration of China launched the "Clear Lang" special operation.
In August, it further issued the "Notice on Further Strengthening the Governance of the Chaos in the "Rice Circle"", proposing to cancel the list of star artists, standardize the account of fan groups, etc., and clearly pointed out that it is necessary to "tighten the main responsibility of the website platform." ”
When the policy was issued, major platforms have introduced corresponding measures to respond to the guidance of supervision. Taking Weibo as an example, the first is the special action of the healthy ecology of the rice circle, cleaning up Weibo, banning accounts, successively launching special projects such as advocating network civilization and juvenile protection, focusing on increasing homogeneous malicious marketing and black public relations, network water army, etc., and then adjusting the hot search rules, reducing the proportion of entertainment content, and improving the diversification of hot search content.
However, it is undeniable that recreational content will still be the main force of content composition on social media. According to a "Global Internet Development Report" from Youmeng Big Data, nearly half of the traffic accounted for from entertainment content. Blocking is not as good as thinning, from the perspective of the platform side, in addition to short-term pressure drop entertainment content, it is more necessary to think about what kind of measures can be taken to have a normative and positive impact on entertainment content.
Weibo's initiative is to reconstruct the entire entertainment content operation ecology and realize the transformation of the model from the content supply side. The specific landing point is to shift from idol culture orientation to upstream work distribution operation, guide user attention from celebrity Internet celebrities to cultural and entertainment works themselves, create a circular link of output-consumption-dissemination, and realize the positive development of the industry, platform and user triangle.
Taking the 2022 Spring Festival file as an example, Weibo is first of all a one-stop way to open up the cat's eye to see and buy tickets, and gradually cover the whole scene of topics, search, information flow, video streaming, live broadcast, etc., to help the Spring Festival film to improve box office conversion, so that the radiation of related materials on the first day of pre-sale exceeded 160 million, the reading volume of related topics exceeded 3.3 billion, and the hot search of related topics exceeded 36 times.
Then dig into the content of the film itself, seeking a deep connection between the content and the platform users. For example, "This Killer Is Not Too Calm" starring Ma Li and Wei Xiang were interviewed by Sina Entertainment's original column "Langying Bus", #Ma Li responded to the question of the bad film # Ranked 4th on the hot search list, #Wei Xiang said that it was indeed ma Li's most tacit understanding # Ranked 21st on the hot search list, with a total reading volume of 490 million, and the number of interview videos played exceeded 27 million.
Through the verification of this series of operational actions, Weibo has found a new paradigm of culture and entertainment and precipitated an advanced methodology. "As the entertainment industry gradually adjusts to a work-centric ecosystem, Weibo entertainment traffic is expected to fully recover in the second half of (2022)," Weibo executives made optimistic expectations at the March 3 investor conference call.
02 Refactoring the user growth engine
Compared with Weibo's journey through the cultural and entertainment storm, more platforms are suffering from the long-tail impact of last year's cultural and entertainment rectification.
Taking Mango Super Media as an example, even if the number of effective members of Mango TV was handed over on January 21 to 50.4 million, an increase of 40% year-on-year, the unexpected financial data was still unable to reverse the market trend of continuous decline.
In the same regulatory environment, why do the market expect different expectations for Weibo and Mango? The main reason for this is that Weibo has been creating a rich and diverse vertical content, "eggs are not in one basket". According to the prospectus, as of June 2021, Weibo has 46 vertical areas of content such as celebrities, celebrities and entertainment, media, and games. Revenue growth is the result, the core reason is Weibo's deep cultivation in related fields, which constitute a gripper in addition to entertainment.
For example in the Sports section. During the Winter Olympics, Weibo and the Winter Games Center linked, all participants of the Chinese national team settled on Weibo, opened 176 athletes' super talk, athletes released more than 2500 blog posts, and the media tracked more than 2000 reports.
Set the "topic" to centralize specific people and specific events, and users can forward the discussion of the event through unlimited retweets such as terms, so that the voice of the discussion is constantly superimposed. The collision feedback of different circles and groups on the same event has always maintained a high degree of activity on Weibo.
Under the multi-angle presentation of the Winter Olympics by the athletes themselves, official institutions and professional media, big V and even volunteers, as well as the interlacing of multi-dimensional content such as wonderful clips on the field, sports knowledge science, mascot interaction, etc., the details of the Winter Olympic Games are fully reflected, which makes users' enthusiasm for the Winter Olympics unprecedentedly high, and the total number of related topics read exceeds 450 billion, and the total discussion volume is close to 300 million.
The activity and participation of users further enhance the commercial value conversion of traffic.
In the 2021 S11 event, after EDG won the championship in the early morning of November 7, the heat rose up, and young people in major universities, Internet cafes, squares and shopping malls cheered, and only a few hours later, the Weibo reading volume of "EDG won the championship" exceeded 2 billion.
Weibo later revealed that the hot search terms during the S11 period reached 419, the total number of related topics read exceeded 100 billion, the number of discussions reached more than 80 million, and Weibo users released 537,000 short videos throughout the process, with 8.06 billion plays.
The concept and industry related to "e-sports" have risen again, and more than 200 million pan-game users and more than 1,700 star users on Weibo have spontaneously spoken out for e-sports. Brands such as Lancome, Mercedes-Benz, KFC, and TCL also participated in the marketing of the event on Weibo.
The popularity of Weibo sports and games is by no means limited to the hot moments when the event is carried out. Data have shown that in the first half of 2021, among the dozens of vertical fields of Weibo, sports and e-sports hotspots have risen the most prominently, and the number of e-sports hotspots in the top ten has increased by 65%. That is to say, a solid sports and e-sports basic disk, as long as a certain event is launched, can burst out, forming a huge traffic pool, and then converted into Weibo's continuous growth in revenue. On the March 3 investor conference call, Weibo executives still gave optimistic expectations for the growth of sports and e-sports this year, and the underlying sentiment was that "2022 is a big year for sports events" and "e-sports events will be more mature." ”
In addition to adjusting the content operation strategy, Weibo has also made innovative changes in the way content interacts. For example, under the "hot spot + social" mechanism of Weibo, athletes can not only send pictures and video content during the Winter Olympics, but also parachute into super talk and participate in live broadcasts, which will close the distance with the audience to "face-to-face".
Through the dual grasp of content strategy and content interaction, Weibo can greatly improve user stickiness, thereby promoting user growth. According to the financial report, as of the end of the fourth quarter of 2021, Weibo's monthly active users reached 573 million, an increase of 10% year-on-year. Daily active users reached 249 million, up 11% year-on-year.
At the same time, this diversified ecology gives it the advantage of continuously attracting young people. In June 2021, according to Weibo's data analysis results, more than 75% of the monthly active users identified by Weibo belonged to Generation Z, that is, the generation born in 1990 or later, and they are also the main force of consumption.
Catching young people, Weibo has seized the future.
03 The revenue engine of "hot + social"
The rich business ecosystem attracts advertisers in different industries, and advertising is the key to the double growth of Weibo's revenue and profit.
Looking back at Weibo's revenue in the past year, 87.6% came from advertising, up to $1.98 billion, an increase of 33% year-on-year, of which non-Alibaba advertising revenue was $1.84 billion, an increase of 38% year-on-year. Among them, value-added services revenue also reached US$280 million, up 36% year-on-year.
You know, in the track of advertising, the competition is extremely fierce. According to Quest Mobile data, in the first half of 2021, in the advertising business of the media industry, Douyin advertising revenue once exceeded Weibo. It was followed by Kuaishou with 570 million monthly active users and 320 million daily active users. iQIYI's online advertising business is also the second largest segment of its total revenue, with revenue of 1.7 billion yuan.
In addition to short videos, the little red book, which also belongs to graphic social media, has the ability to compete for advertising business. Xiaohongshu has a large number of beauty KOLs and more than 200 million monthly active users, and advertising revenue is also its most important source of revenue.
It is undeniable that the video form + accurate algorithm push mechanism is more suitable for advertisers of small and medium-sized enterprises. As a unique square social media, Weibo has an incomparable strong exposure advantage, and is favored by big brand advertisers, which is a mandatory platform for brands to choose advertising.
Compared with other graphic and text social platforms, in addition to the traffic advantages of Weibo, it is more important to have rich formats and a balanced distribution of advertisers. For example, from October to November 2011, the skin care and beauty industry accounted for nearly 60%, and it was highly dependent on the FMCG industry, which also meant extremely high risk and instability. The balanced distribution of business makes Weibo not too dependent on a certain industry, and it is less affected by economic cycles and policies.
However, the key to Weibo's breakthrough lies in the core advantage of "hot spots + social", which makes brands want to go out of the circle and want to achieve brand building beyond popularity, and they can never bypass Weibo.
During the Winter Olympics, with the out-of-the-loop athletes such as Gu Ailing, Xu Mengtao, Su Yiming, etc., the brands of athletes signed in advance such as Luckin Coffee and Yuanqi Forest also took advantage of the marketing publicity. Through the hot spot to detonate attention, by the spokesperson's personal personality ability and other continuous circle fans, and through the social focus to promote brand promotion, the "hot + social" realization of the closed loop is completed.
Anta has chosen Weibo as an important partner in the Double Olympic Games, and the more in-depth cooperation is enough to see the indispensable role of Weibo social media in shaping the brand.
At the same time, Weibo is based on the interests and hobbies of young user groups, such as e-sports, games, fashion, beauty, etc. to form a rich circle layer and a three-dimensional KOL ecology, perfect business infrastructure, making brand marketing more "product-effective".
The refinement of the advantage of "hot spots + social" is not a day's work, Weibo through long-term operation and accumulation, master the delicate balance of social value and business value conversion, thus forming a new revenue growth curve.
The growth of revenue and profits, and then promote the operation of the content ecology, the closed loop of the ecology is formed. Neil Bozeman once said that the social changes brought about by a new way of disseminating information are by no means limited to what it conveys, but its greater significance is that it defines the symbolic way of a certain information, the speed of transmission, the source of the information, the quantity of the information, and the context in which the information exists.
As a way of information dissemination that has grown for more than 12 years, Weibo has not only become a unique mirror of information existence, but more importantly, it has formed a self-consistent and growing business logic. The industry may not be calm, but Weibo has reasons to be still.