Don't worry about defining the video number

Image source @@Visual China

Wen | Xinyan, author | Ye Jing, editor | Sang Mingqiang

In this year's WeChat open class, the video number stood in the C position.

This is not the first time Tencent has bet heavily on short videos. 4 years ago, the short video boom swept the Internet, Douyin, Kuaishou each occupied the mountain as the king, Tencent restarted Weishi and modified the line, and launched more than 10 short video services in one go, including quick-watch video, MOKA magic click, flash coffee, MO sound, next meal video, cat cake, yoo video, etc., but the latter is like a dou who can't stand up, and soon disappeared on the rivers and lakes, as for micro-vision, which is active in the first-line entertainment, it is not tepid.

Similar to the "Tencent does not do a good job of short video" voice after sound, tencent's short video products did not get the public's favor at that time. In this context, the 1.2 billion users rooted in WeChat, the video number adopted a cold start method to conduct quiet internal testing.

Deviating from public perception, the original intention of WeChat to launch a video number is to make up for the shortcomings in the WeChat ecosystem through a new short content media function. Backed by the energy field of WeChat itself, only half a year after the launch, the video number has a breakthrough, and Zhang Xiaolong himself has also marked a bit in the circle of friends.

This year, the action of the video number has become more intensive, and the concerts of Xicheng Boys and Mayday have been broadcast live, followed by the first paid NBA live broadcast room on the line, and several times in WeChat. This allows Tencent, which has been running in short videos for many years, to vaguely find the method of understanding.

First-mover, subject to people

The short video market first appeared, dating back to 2013.

Psychological research has shown that "vividness bias" makes people more sensitive to information that has visually significant characteristics. The sudden explosion of the short video industry is nothing more than three reasons: the accelerated pace of life has incubated the fast food effect of fragmented time; the self-media boom has intensified the interactive needs of both sides; and traditional graphics and texts cannot meet the rapidly changing eyeball economy of mobile Internet.

With the advent of 4G, smart phones have been popularized, and the mobile Internet has been wrapped in traffic dividends, giving birth to the earliest batch of short video APP. In January 2013, Xiaoying was launched, providing a variety of video editing materials such as filters, BGM, posters, etc.; in August, Sina Weibo built-in second beat application; Kuaishou, which had just transformed short videos, also ushered in Suhua in the summer; in addition, short video applications such as micro-shooting, micro-recorder, and Meipai also began to compete.

In this context, the traditional content production method has been subverted, people's catalyst habits have changed, and short videos with "short, flat and fast" characteristics have gradually become the fragrance of most players.

This opportunity, Tencent naturally will not be late.

In September of that year, Tencent released WeVision, considering cost factors and standardization, WeVision focuses on 8-second video, users can log in with WeChat, QQ and QQ mailbox accounts, and support sharing short videos to WeChat chat and circle of friends and other Tencent social platforms.

Within Tencent, Weishi is very favored, Ma Huateng once opened a number with the user name of "Pony", uploaded 4 short videos successively, and as of December of that year, it had accumulated 120,000 fans. Backed by QQ and WeChat at that time a total of nearly 1.2 billion MAU diversion, the invitation of a large number of Chinese and foreign stars and KOL platforms, coupled with the 2014 Spring Festival during the New Year's Eve video hundreds of millions of times, Weishi has unlimited scenery.

However, there is also traffic, and there is also traffic.

Tracing the origin of Microvision, the project was established by the former Tencent Weibo CPO Gao Ziguang, but after the latter left, Microvision was taken over by the Tencent Weibo team. At that time, Tencent Weibo had been strategically abandoned, and the team was distracted. At that time, the saying that "traffic competition turned to content competition" became the consensus of the industry, and Ma Huateng also acknowledged the importance of content as a commanding height in an interview.

In this case, Weishi was hurriedly placed to the strategic highland, the team followed the past Tencent Weibo playing style, inviting big V stars to stand on the platform, smashing hard and PGC strategy, but the highlight moment brought by traffic also buried the crisis: once the traffic dividend faded, there was no strong content support and scale of sticky users, even if more investment, it was equivalent to drinking and quenching thirst.

During the Spring Festival in 2014, after the popularity of micro-vision reached its peak, the update frequency of celebrity big Vs began to decline, followed by a decline in the activity of new videos and users, and in the second half of the year, Tencent decided to stop investing in Microvision, and the person in charge Xing Hongyu also chose to leave, and Microvision helplessly continued the fate of Tencent Weibo.

Intriguingly, two years later, the short video market ushered in a wave of peaks, with 50 million active users. That year, Kuaishou's iron has spread all over the northeast, the technology flow has begun to sprout in Douyin, volcanoes, watermelons, pear videos, etc. have also been launched, and when Tencent turned back to restart Weishi 4.0 in 2018, it was already "getting up early and catching up with a late set".

A bonus

In the eyes of the outside world, the video number is more like an important move for Tencent to compete for the short video market.

The Internet has formed a consensus: the more users of a product, the longer it stays, the greater the commercial space. The dispute between Byte, Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu is essentially a battle of attention, a grab for user time.

The shaking and fast explosion indirectly shook weChat's long-term position as the longest user. According to QuestMobile research data, in the first half of 2017, the total time of Tencent's APP accounted for 54.3%, and then fell continuously for three years, in contrast, byte, from 2017-2019, the growth rate of time accounted for more than 220%, at the same time, the head platform led by jitter and fast basically completed the traffic accumulation and is accelerating the commercialization process.

In the long run, Tencent missed the golden three years. Although the restart of MicroVision, but the recent major app stores slightly embarrassing downloads, has been shaken, fast far behind, after the circle of friends online video dynamics, but also failed to turn up a big wave.

On the "WeChat Night" in 2019, Zhang Xiaolong also mentioned short videos many times, "When the half-hour of the circle of friends is brushed, users will go to find other places to pastime, and short videos are the most popular choices." In last year's open class, he believed that from the perspective of consumption and personal expression, the theme of the content field in the next decade is video expression.

The birth of the video number seems to have become a mandatory question, and social and short videos are integrated and interacted, so as to make up for another gap in the WeChat ecology.

According to the statistics of a third-party video number's first-year hot list, the top 50 accounts account for 36% of the emotional category, music, life, education and funny account for about 10% each, and the food and travel photography categories account for less. Media information content and entertainment life and people's livelihood and other sections together, it can be seen that the video number is not a short video platform with limited audiences, specific groups and tones, but prefers a universal content square.

Then return to the functional aspect of the video number.

The first version of the video number function is relatively single, only built a similar public account ID system, the content performance is only a simple information flow, mixed with attention, friends anonymous likes, and system recommended content, can carry video content, live broadcast and Mini Programs, etc., the quality of recommended content is also not good.

Therefore, since the launch of the video number in 2020, the video number has been in a constantly new state.

Compared with other products in the WeChat ecosystem, the video number covers many traffic entrances of the WeChat ecosystem, such as public domain entrances such as search, look, hashtags, and recommendations; private domain entrances such as circle of friends, personal business card pages, private chat group chats, and WeChat status. In 2021, the video account and the official account home page were completed, and the video number PC end was launched, which also enriched the display scenarios such as enterprise WeChat and WeChat red envelopes.

Coincidentally, that year was the first year of live streaming with goods, and it was also the outlet for competition in the e-commerce field. The video number and the public account with fans and traffic foundation drain each other, coupled with the convenience of WeChat payment, WeChat uses its own complete ecology to form a commercial closed loop. Under ideal circumstances, weChat's original private domain traffic KOC, such as micro-business groups, can combine the video number with the circle of friends, convert the private domain traffic into public domain traffic, and carry out the user's private domain fission based on the social recommendation algorithm based on the video number.

Under this logic, a large number of creators have also poured into the video number.

Can the latecomers come to the top?

In last year's WeChat open class, "video" appeared 143 times, "video number" 58 times, "live broadcast" 40 times, and the status of video number in WeChat is also getting heavier and heavier.

If we regard the video number as a short video product, we will inevitably compare it with jitter and fast.

According to the "Sight Lamp Video Number List" series, current affairs news, military, parenting, and cooking videos occupy most of the top of the list. This has a lot to do with the wider range of WeChat native users.

From "Douyin, record a better life" to "In Kuaishou, embrace every life", the slogan at the beginning of the video number is "a platform that everyone can create", of course, this is not to say that the video number has no positioning. If Douyin is a happy field for young people with rich entertainment tone, and Kuaishou prefers to record the real life of lower-tier cities, then the ideal state of the video number should be a "national creation platform".

Based on its own ecological social recommendation mechanism, the richness of video content requirements will be higher, and as Zhang Xiaolong said, "no matter how small an individual is, it also has its own brand."

However, through fieldwork, a number of young users of short videos found that feedback such as "many videos on the video number I have brushed on Douyin" and "no novelty" reflects the lack of "native big V" of the video number, the dilemma of high content repetition and aging, coupled with the lack of platform traffic support, the definition of "instrumentalization", and the difficulty of grassroots videos to go out of the circle.

Therefore, whether it is from the main users of the video number, or the "memory killing" operations such as the Western Boys, Mayday, and the NBA, the video number seems to have realized that it is more popular with middle-aged and elderly people, and the main position is biased to the middle-aged and above level. As prefaced, it was originally used as a universal tool, and now, it is moving further and further away from its tonality.

The real beneficiaries of video accounts are those bloggers who use tools such as public accounts and mini programs, or have accumulated a certain number of fans on other platforms. Because the live broadcast of the video number has an appointment function, the ongoing live broadcast appears in the attention column, the live broadcast link can be forwarded to the circle of friends and WeChat group, and the video content is presented in the "subscription account" and occupies a complete page of "Take a Look". Compared with the previous use of third-party software to broadcast live requires multiple days of publicity, the reach rate of video numbers is higher.

Unlike Douyin, which can also expand exposure through the purchase mechanism without fans, the biggest feature of the video number is "private domain + public domain", which is still a pain point for ordinary bloggers. On the one hand, this means that the video number can be more vertically reached, and may eventually go to the niche "circle culture"; on the other hand, in the form of conversion, in addition to purchasing goods, there are also conventional strategies such as WeChat beans that can tip the anchor, and the added public account link can also be used as a drainage plate for knowledge payment.

How to use the giant ship of WeChat to establish a more national short content platform has become the expectation given by the video number, and whether the video number will become a platform or a tool in the future is still worth marking a question mark.