The author | Wenbin
"The vertical screen cover function has been launched, and it is hard to notify all vertical screen anchors to update the pink version of Bilibili today and upload the vertical screen cover."
This is a notice posted in the live entertainment guild group of Station B. The staff below the notice also attached a detailed operation guide and said that after uploading the vertical screen cover, more exposure can be obtained.
Since the vertical screen of short video content, the vertical screen of live broadcast content of Station B is also accelerating.
▲Picture: The guidance document of the B station to the MAIN vertical screen of up
Nowadays, when opening the recommended content on the home page of station B, at least 2 to 3 of the 10 contents are in the form of vertical screens. Chen Rui mentioned in the earnings conference call in early March that the penetration of Story Mode DAU has now exceeded 20%, the proportion of user likes has reached 30%, and its penetration rate will exceed 50% or even higher in the future.
Short video Story Mode, which is the name of the vertical screen content inside the B station, these contents look the same as other content on the recommendation page, but after clicking in, you will find that this is a completely different form of content from the B station, the interface is similar to vibrato, kuaishou, and you can also keep brushing out new content.
For B station, horizontal screen, long content is like "Bilibili (゚- ゚) つロ cheers ~ -bilibili", has always been the cultural symbol of B station, but now, with the increase in the proportion of vertical screen content, this culture of B station is obviously being changed.
Horizontal or vertical screen, this is the choice of B station. However, when the B station becomes "short", when more and more vertical screen content begins to become the mainstream of the B station, what impact will they bring to the creators of the B station, or the creators outside the B station?
Vertical screens are advantageous, but survival of the fittest
"Why should I watch a short video on Station B? Isn't TikTok fragrant? Station B really doesn't want anything for money now. ”
This is the reaction of an LV6 user after talking about the vertical screen of the B station, and it is obvious that he is a little grumpy about the "shortening" of the B station. But from the creator's point of view, this doesn't seem like a bad thing either.
Media Qiqi mentioned in the exchange with the business data school that now the video content, the brand side of the most investment is Douyin and Xiaohongshu.
"Station B is generally long content, long production cycle, high quotation, customer to wait a month or two for a schedule." Coupled with the different atmosphere of Station B, the conversion rate will be lower. Qiqi said: "Compared with the commercial atmosphere of Douyin and Xiaohongshu, the user acceptance of what is brought is high, the conversion is good, plus Douyin and Xiaohongshu are short and fast content, the production cycle is shorter, and the quotation will be lower." ”
On March 20, there were media reports that a number of B station UP said on Zhihu that since the creator incentive revision of B station, the income has dropped significantly, and some UP owners have fallen by up to 90%. This also reflects the dilemma faced by B station UP in commercialization from the side.
Therefore, from the perspective of commercialization, the vertical screen mode launched by Station B to accelerate the transformation of guided content to a short and fast pace, which is actually more conducive to the commercialization of platform content creators.
Of course, the opportunity is here, and not everyone can get it.
"Although the content of the vertical screen is more conducive to the commercialization of creators, people who are accustomed to long content do not have the ability to do such short and fast content." The knowledge area UP master @ big candle with more than 840,000 fans on the B station said so in the exchange with the business data faction.
At the same time, the blogger in the science and technology district , @ Damao, also said that a large part of the reason why he chose to create content on station B was that he did not have the ability to do the short and fast content of Douyin.
Portrait and landscape screens, although only a change in the form of browsing, the impact on content creation is low-level.
"Vertical short content, horizontal screen long content, this is the development of video content since the development of user habits to determine, and can not change." @Big Candle said.
Take the well-known UP master @ Handmade Geng as an example, which has 6.33 million fans on Station B and 6.12 million fans on Douyin. In the case of similar fans, the commercial data faction randomly selected its recently updated 5 vertical screen content and 5 horizontal screen content performance on B station and Douyin.
▲Figure: Handmade Geng works data statistics
We found that the vertical screen content will be better in the vibrato effect, and the same horizontal screen content will be better on the B station.
That is to say, different content forms form different content styles, and eventually form different platform styles.
The staff of @Dale Chaoyong, a workplace short drama blogger with nearly 2 million fans in Douyin, also mentioned that in addition to Douyin, they had also put into operation on the Little Red Book, but some number data was good, the fans were fast, and some numbers were not even played. Obviously, whether the account can be fired or not has a very big relationship with the fit of the content and the platform.
Now Station B strongly pushes the vertical screen content, that is, the content that wants the horizontal screen, has a length and depth; at the same time, it also wants the vertical screen, short and fast content.
But the problem is that when the long and short content is on the same platform, the short content with a more distinct rhythm and light will obviously have a traffic advantage. This can be seen in the fact that Story Mode DAU penetration has exceeded 20% in just over a year, and it has reached 30% in the proportion of user likes.
In this context, long content and deep content are not only inferior to short content in terms of monetization ability, but also have no advantage in traffic and user time.
But the scope of this influence will also be limited, @ big candle believes that this change in the form of content affects more small and medium-sized UP owners, when the number of attention of a UP master reaches more than 200,000, the impact will not be too big.
But on the other hand, this also means that for a large number of up masters in the middle and tail of the B station, the future will inevitably face the choice of vertical screen or horizontal screen, long content or short content.
Traffic and commercialization of the baton
Although for the middle and tail UP main of the B station, the horizontal screen is still the vertical screen, which is a problem. But for Station B, this is a choice that doesn't take much time to make.
According to the financial report data, in the fourth quarter of 2021, Station B achieved revenue of 5.78 billion yuan, an increase of 51% year-on-year; in fiscal 2021, it achieved revenue of 19.4 billion yuan, an increase of 62% year-on-year. At the same time, in the fourth quarter, the B-station DAU reached 72.2 million, an increase of 34% year-on-year; the MAU reached 272 million, an increase of 35% year-on-year.
Judging from the financial report data, B revenue and active users have both maintained double-digit growth, which is also valuable in today's traffic peak.
But at the same time, the loss of Station B is also expanding at the same time. In the fourth quarter of 2021, the net loss of Station B was 2.096 billion, an increase of 148.40% year-on-year; the net loss of 6.809 billion yuan for the whole year of 2021, an increase of 122.94% year-on-year.
In the past, when the Internet environment grew at a high speed, exchanging losses for growth was a common means for enterprises. However, in the context of the peaking of Internet growth and the overall pressure of the external environment, this way of exchanging losses for growth is not easy to be accepted by the capital market.
Therefore, narrowing losses and achieving breakeven has become the top priority of Station B. But at the same time, the growth target of Station B has not changed. Chen Rui said: "We are still confident of achieving our previous target of 400 million MAU by 2023. ”
On the one hand, it is necessary to step up the narrowing of losses and achieve breakeven; on the other hand, it is necessary to continue to invest, so increasing income has become a problem to be solved at this stage of Station B.
In 2021, the main revenue of Station B will account for 26% of mobile games, 36% of value-added services, 23% of advertising, and 15% of e-commerce and others.
Among them, due to the impact of the suspension of the game version number and other reasons, the proportion of mobile game revenue of station B has continued to decline for many consecutive quarters. On the other hand, value-added services are affected by the continuous expansion of the platform and advertising content, and the proportion is gradually decreasing; and the proportion of revenue from e-commerce and other sectors is too low and it is difficult to provoke the burden of revenue growth.
Therefore, advertising has become the most important pillar for the sustained growth of Station B's revenue.
However, there are also some problems with the previous advertising revenue of Station B, such as Station B's commitment never to add patch ads, which has closed an important source of income. The ads in the information flow also have clear prompts, and the user's willingness to open and the efficiency of conversion are not ideal.
Therefore, vertical screen, more immersive content viewing form has obviously become the most important magic weapon for the sustained growth of advertising revenue of Station B.
In this regard, Chen Rui also repeatedly mentioned his expectations for Story Mode on the earnings call, hoping to build confidence for investors. For example, under the trend of vertical advertising, Story Mode's future promotion of products will bring about a vertical advertising mode, and will also bring more insertion scenarios of advertising content, and more advertisements can be added.
At the same time, the UP owner of Station B is also expected to improve the ability to commercialize, but it is still unknown whether short content will impact the duration and advertising of long content, or bring more traffic.
In April 2021, ByteDance expects the star map platform's advertising revenue to reach 8 billion yuan in 2021. In contrast, Station B did not announce the benefits of the Fireworks platform, but Chen Rui mentioned that by the end of 2021, the Fireworks platform has settled 22,000 UP owners and 4,200 merchants.
Obviously, compared with the byte star map, the fireworks of station B have a lot of room for improvement. But this also means that when the commercialization ability of the platform UP owner is further improved, this sector will also bring huge revenue to the B station.
Landscape and portrait screens, is that a problem?
In the eyes of some old users of Station B, the vertical screen is obviously a betrayal of Station B to the proud community culture. They are even angry about this.
But from the above we will find that to some extent, vertical screen is actually a common choice of B station and B station content creators, which can even be counted as many young users of new B station in recent years.
"The creators of a large number of story mode vertical video are the UP masters of our PUGV." This is what Chen Rui mentioned on the earnings call.
However, in addition to the UP master who actively changed, there are also UP masters who say that they do not know why the content in the form of their horizontal screen will become the form of short videos.
Of course, before discussing the "short video Story Mode mode", we must first clarify one thing, that is, although the "short video Story Mode mode" is a vertical screen, also called a short video, in the process of content recommendation, Story Mode does not have a clear distinction between horizontal screen, vertical screen, long content, and short content.
That is, any content of Station B can enter the information stream recommended by Story Mode, but the final form is displayed in a vertical screen.
From this perspective, we may be able to re-understand what Chen Rui said, that is, although a large number of Story Mode content creators are the UP owners of the PUGV of station B, a considerable part of them are still horizontal screen content, but only placed on the vertical screen page to watch.
Of course, in addition to the compatibility of B station's own content creators with vertical screens, the opening of vertical screen content has also attracted more cross-platform content creators. And these bloggers from the vertical screen content platform obviously know how to adapt to the content form of the vertical screen.
For example, the content creator @Shuainong Bird Brother, who recently went out of the circle on the B station, has accumulated more than 3 million fans on Douyin before. After recently starting to update on the B station, @Shuai Nong Bird Brother has accumulated millions of fans in just ten days. Today, @Shuainong Bird Brother has updated 20 videos on the B station, and the number of fans has reached 1.719 million.
Similar to @Shuai Nong Bird Brother, there are also @Shancheng Xiaosu Xun and @Bald Wu Yanzu. The two bloggers began updating on Douyin in 2017 and 2018, respectively, and have accumulated nearly 2 million and 1.4 million followers over the years. But in January this year, since the update on the B station, in just over three months, the number of fans of the B station has reached 2.74 million and 700,000 respectively.
▲ Picture: B station vertical screen content creator homepage, from left to right are @ Dale Chao Yong @Yamashiro Kosu Xun @ Shuai Nong Bird Brother
Of course, there are people who have eaten the cross-platform traffic dividend through content migration, and naturally there are also people who are unknown after cross-platform, and this part of the people may be the denominator of the larger number.
For example, the workplace short drama blogger @ Dale Chaoyong, who has nearly 2 million fans in Douyin, has updated 11 videos on the B station, except for the three or four videos that were initially updated with about 1,000 plays, and all the content behind it is only about one or two hundred plays.
@Dale Chaoyong staff told the business data faction that since entering the B station, they have not felt special traffic support. And they don't pay attention to traffic on other platforms except Douyin. "We're distributing across the platform now, and the main thing is to prevent others from moving our content."
@Dale Chaoyong staff told us that the reason why they do not pay attention to the traffic of other platforms is mainly that they do not rely on other platforms other than Douyin to make money. "B station is not easy to commercialize, the biggest reason why we do vibrato is that we don't have to worry about money, as long as we do a good job, there is a great chance of monetization."
"We generally cooperate with brands through the Douyin star map, and the brand is also divided according to the platform, a brand invests in you in Douyin according to a logic, and according to the same logic, it is not necessarily selected for you in the B station."
"We are mainly based on Douyin, other platforms are packaged to customers, so other platforms have no fans, traffic does not have much impact on us, if the traffic can rise, we are naturally happy to see it, no actually does not matter." @Dale Chaoyong staff said.
Some people regard the culture, atmosphere, horizontal screen or vertical screen of the B station as very important. But for others, it may be just a trivial matter.
Senior photographer Ah Bang told the business data faction that in his view, horizontal screen and vertical screen do not affect content creation, the difference may only be that the vertical screen adapts to mobile devices such as mobile phones, and the horizontal screen adapts to devices such as websites and PCs. Videos, in the beginning, may not have been long and short, horizontal and vertical respectively.
Previously, each platform brought the horizontal and vertical screens into different forms of content, and the vertical and horizontal screens also had more labels.
But in the future, as Chen Rui said: "The consumption scene of Station B must be multi-scene and multi-screen, which is not limited to medium-long video, nor is it limited to the performance mode of horizontal screen." It can have relatively short videos, can have live broadcasts, can also have vertical screens, in fact, storymode is a complement to the multi-scene, multi-screen strategy I proposed earlier, storymode is an extension of our consumption to light consumption, fragmented consumption. ”
This kind of judgment may not only apply to Station B, but also to more video content platforms.