Written by / Chen Chang
Editor / Dong Yuqing
On the evening of April 1, holding the mobile phone to watch Zhang Guorong's high-definition repair concert for more than three hours, the post-80s boy Xiao Cai could not sleep for a long time.
The concert was jointly initiated by Tencent and the copyright holder Poly Gold Records, and the live broadcast venue was not a TV or an Internet video platform, but was carried out in the WeChat video account.
This did not prevent the concert from quickly swiping the screen on April Fool's Day night. In the nearly 3.5 hours of the concert, fans like Xiao Cai from many parts of the country poured into the live broadcast room, and millions of people were online at the peak, with a total of more than 17 million viewers.
While tearfully remembering the idol's brother, many people realized that the concert seemed to allow the video number to find the traffic password.
In December 2021, Ireland's "West Side Boys" appeared on the video number of the world's first live online concert, attracting more than 28 million people to watch; across the Chinese New Year's Eve, the May antenna concert was viewed by more than 16 million people. In addition, musicians such as Zuo Xiao Curse, Gojo Ren, and Zeng Yike have also carried out "online concerts" on the video platform.
Since the outbreak of the epidemic, watching offline concerts has been a luxury, and the video number has seized this pain point of young people and moved the concert to be held online, which has played a certain circle-breaking effect.
Although several concerts are free, in the eyes of the outside world, this means that the desire for commercialization of video numbers has poured into the front of the stage.
After breaking the circle several times, the video number broke 500 million daily
It has been more than two years since the video number was launched in January 2020.
Inside Tencent, it has been obscure. Until seeing the Tencent financial report released half a month ago, people suddenly found that the "video number" was significantly more important - the keyword "video number" was repeatedly mentioned 13 times in the financial report, surpassing WeChat for the first time.
The video number's development plan was also included in the initial "Business Review and Outlook", which read, "2021 is a challenging year... We continue to make strategic progress in our business, including increasing the content creation and views of video numbers..."
In the earnings call, Tencent President Martin Lau said that in the future, it will continue to focus on business such as video numbers, and believes that they will have good growth in the future.
Tencent has not disclosed the specific number of users of video numbers, but according to the data of the Institute of Video Lamps, the daily active users of video numbers will exceed 500 million in 2021, an increase of 79% year-on-year, and the per capita use time will exceed 35 minutes, an increase of 84% year-on-year.
According to the "2021 Video Number Development White Paper", in September 2021, the daily active life of the Douyin department was 640 million, and the number of Kuaishou was 320 million. Gong Haihan, founder of the video digital marketing platform Baizhun, predicted that the video number is expected to reach 600 million daily active users by the end of 2022, surpassing Douyin.
Several sets of data intuitively show that with the powerful social traffic of WeChat and WeChat merging with 1.268 billion monthly active users, the video number has slowly grown unconsciously and threatened the position of the leader of the short video industry.
Pulling back the time to the end of 2020, the daily active video number is only 280 million, and the average daily use time of users is 19 minutes. In a year, the rapid development of video numbers, what factors have made it? In the eyes of some people in the industry, several screen brushing activities have played a key role in it.
The first time the circle of friends was brushed by the video number was at the end of 2020, when millions of people used the video number to live watch the Gemini meteor shower. That night, countless netizens left messages and made wishes in the meteor shower live broadcast room. It was also that night that a large number of friend applications poured into the WeChat of Li Zhenglin, the photographer who initiated the live broadcast of traffic rain.
But this live broadcast broke the circle, so that the video number team seems to have opened up the second pulse of Ren Dou. They have planned a number of phenomenal live broadcasts, including TVB "I Hang You Hong Kong Stars New Year Interactive Live Concert" a month later, with 30 million viewers," 27 million more online viewers of the West Side Boys Concert, 16.8 million people watching the New Year's Eve Sunday concert, and 15 million+ viewers of Meng Wanzhou's return to China. Then there is the 2022 Spring Festival Gala and the opening ceremony of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, and the number of viewers of the two live broadcasts of the video number exceeded 100 million.
For this tried-and-true drainage method, Wu Dailin, CEO of Shenzhen Siqisheng Company, told the "Finance and Economics World" weekly that the video number was first selected correctly on the user, "Xiyu Boy, Mayday, Zhang Guorong are all idols after the 70s, 80s and 90s, these people happen to be heavy users of the video number, and it is easy to get the resonance of more users with the help of feelings." ”
Xiang Kai, a young Chinese playwright director, introduced that in the context of epidemic prevention and control, large-scale concerts and other activities have been restricted, and netizens can only change to the online "cloud gathering" method to carry out entertainment activities, and the video number gives them the feeling of visiting the scene.
Don't underestimate the traffic lethality of online concerts, in the words of Zhang Xiaochao, head of the video number team, "In the case of the West City Boys live broadcast room, the highest number of online people at the same time reached 1.5 million, which is equivalent to the audience sitting in more than a dozen bird's nests watching the concert at the same time." ”
He said that the "video number + WeChat" payment will make tipping possible, there may be live/video payment, and in the future, WeChat video account will invite more musicians to live broadcast.
Although several events have achieved good results, the model of video numbers relying on concert fans is not entirely optimistic. Some industry insiders said that large-scale online concerts do not have normality, and people who open the video number with the purpose of simply chasing stars are very likely to leave after watching it, and it is difficult to convert into a high-viscosity user of the video number.
The next step in the video number, monetization on the agenda?
In any case, the increase in the volume of video number users and the change in Tencent's attitude have made the outside world more interested in the commercial monetization of video numbers.
In this financial report, Tencent clarified for the first time the direction and phased results of the current video number, and the three commercialization opportunities are short video stream advertising, live rewards and live e-commerce.
Prior to this, the monetization methods of major media for video numbers only stayed at the analytical level, and Tencent unveiled the veil.
Tencent's earnings report shows that social network revenue increased by 8% to RMB117.3 billion, driven by live video streaming services, paid video membership services and revenue contributions from the merger of Huya in April 2020. In the WeChat open class in January 2022, Tao Jia, a lecturer of the video number team, also revealed that the GMV of the video number live streaming with goods increased by 15 times compared with the beginning of the year at the end of 2021, and the average unit price of the live broadcast room exceeded 200 yuan, and the overall repurchase rate exceeded 60%.
Behind the initial results, people who pay attention to the progress of the change of video numbers should have already realized that the commercialization of video numbers is not achieved overnight, but the inevitable result of Long-term planning on WeChat, which has been expressed in several major updates of video numbers.
In October 2020, the video number was launched live, opening up the functions of the video number and the WeChat small store, which was an important step towards commercialization. In December of that year, the video number live broadcast added beautification, filters, wheat, gift-giving and other capabilities. In May 2021, the video number home page added new product classification, upgraded the product window function, and can be associated with multiple stores to carry goods; in December, the video number grayscale tested the "short video shopping cart" function, and the product link can be hung directly below the video, and the purchase page can be jumped with one click.
At the same time as these major changes, the video number access search, the circle of friends tag diversion, the information flow, the video number business card display on the personal page, the public account support one-click jump, weChat PC side support viewing and other functional adjustments.
Through these small changes, the video number continues to increase the sense of existence, expand the connection with WeChat users, even the Spring Festival red envelope cover, but also deeply bound to the video number, the bottom of each red packet cover is directly connected to the video number. According to the "2021 Video Number Development White Paper", the number of video number function updates in 2021 is as high as 59.
(Iterative changes of video numbers, figure / "2021 video number development white paper")
The first time the video number was publicly made public for users to pay for it was the NBA paid viewing program in January 2020. The game between the NBA regular season Jazz vs Warriors, the video number "Tencent NBA" was broadcast live through the form of payment. After the user enters the live broadcast room, he can watch for 3 minutes for free, and after 3 minutes, he needs to pay 90 WeChat beans to continue watching, according to the proportion of 1 yuan and 7 WeChat beans, this game needs to pay about 12.8 yuan.
The official video number did not disclose to the outside world how many people paid, but this shows that the commercialization attempt of the video number has been put on the table.
"In the future, paid sports events, concerts, and even some paid knowledge programs, such as New Year's Eve speeches, talk shows, etc., may be the commercial form of video numbers." It can be carried out through big data analysis to select the right project. Wu Dailin said.
For the commercialization potential of video numbers, many institutions are optimistic.
The research department of CITIC Securities believes that with the continuous enrichment and evolution of the video number function, the number of video number users in the future is expected to be comparable to the circle of friends. Huachuang Securities also gave the definition of "the restart of WeChat ecology in the video era" for the video account, and said that the video number will feed back Tencent's advertising, payment, game and cloud business in the future.
Since the trend of short video in 2018, no one doubts Tencent's dedication to short video. Some media have counted Tencent's layout in the short video track, and it has made as many as 17 product attempts. The most famous such as micro-vision, toss for a long time and finally failed to walk on the table with douyin, kuaishou PK.
The video number has also been not optimistic. Some creators once thought that the age group of video number consumers was older, the content was mainly emotional and life-oriented, and for a long time, creators could not find a suitable way to monetize. However, this problem has been alleviated to some extent with the expansion of the user base of video numbers.
(Photo/Visual China)
The video number is still an "incomplete" status
Zhang Xiaolong's "restraint" is well known. In the 2018 WeChat Open Class, Zhang Xiaolong specifically talked about his thinking on the principle of "decentralization" of WeChat, "We hope to treat users as friends, rather than as a group driven by us." We should not affect the existence of individual services, but as far as possible, let the more valuable services emerge on their own and be found by users, rather than us swaying."
WeChat gives the power of choice to the user. The video account in WeChat adheres to similar values as WeChat.
Compared with the public domain distribution mechanism of other short video platforms, the video number push is mainly based on private domains. The sharing under the video number entrance takes the like of friends as the most recommended dimension, and the content seen by users is mainly the content that the people in their circle love to watch. On the basis of friend recommendation, users can also actively click on the "Recommendation" page to obtain content according to the algorithm, the latter situation is similar to Douyin.
(Video number algorithm features, figure /GF Securities)
Zhang Xiaolong has publicly revealed that the video number has three tabs: followers, friends and recommendations, and the user's traffic consumption ratio should be 1:2:10. That is, a person should watch an average of 10 videos that are followed, 20 videos that are liked by friends, and 100 videos recommended by the system.
In the view of Long Gonghuo, CEO of Ruiyi Interactive, "The video number does not exclude personalized recommendations, the core problem is that the amount of training is too small, and the algorithm is inaccurate." According to his observation, in 2022, the video number will attack the algorithm recommendation, and correspondingly, the proportion of this part has indeed increased recently, and some operators have slowly been added to the video number team.
Wu Dailin agreed with this, and the video number is slowly moving closer to Douyin and Kuaishou, adding a "recommendation" function to recommend the creator's work to interested people, which is conducive to the creator's fans, rather than just relying on social relationships. In turn, Douyin is also aware of this, listing the video number as a competitor, and enhancing its social attributes through group building, daily and friend recommendation functions.
From the perspective of commercialization, the disadvantages of private domain genes to video numbers are as obvious as the advantages. "Douyin uses artificial intelligence recommendation methods to help creators achieve precision marketing for accurate people, which is easier to be recognized by merchants." The recommendation form of the video number relies on social + recommendation, and the accuracy is poor. Wu Dailin said. In other words, "The people in your circle of friends don't necessarily have the same spending habits, interests, and abilities as you." ”
In response to the live broadcast exploration of online concerts and sports events, industry insiders and users have said that they will not succeed in a short period of time, "The traffic obtained from watching the performance for free comes and goes quickly." Once charged, many people may choose not to watch it outright. Xiang Kai said. A basketball fan told the "Finance and Economics" weekly, "Most of the people who watch sports are boys, they are very good at finding pirated free links from various channels, Tencent Sports Super VIP 78 yuan a month, friends around them would rather buy the king glory game skin than spend money to buy VIP, will feel worthless." ”
Specific to the three monetization channels given to the video number, the general view is that due to the impact of the epidemic, enterprises, whether traditional or new media short video, are declining, and related expenditures are also decreasing, which is caused by the general environment. The live broadcast tipping and live e-commerce are undergoing industry standardization and rectification, and the video number has not yet formed a supply chain system of a certain scale, and the product pool is shallow, so it will not be the preferred platform for people with goods to realize.
In the 2021 financial report, Tencent said that due to the cold impact of online education and other industries, the company's advertising revenue has fallen sharply, and the information flow advertising of video numbers will be launched in 2022.
This is the commercial form that Wu Dailin is most optimistic about the video number. He said that as professional institutions have settled in video numbers, the quality of video number creation is getting higher and higher. However, referring to the way Douyin cooperated with brands before, it mostly focused on hitting awareness, with high costs and average sales conversion effects. In the future, whether there are still merchants willing to do these types of advertising, but also depends on whether the user data of the video number can match the target population of the brand side enough.
"Overall, the video number is still an evolving product." Long Gonghuo said, "Under the first-mover advantage of Douyin and Kuaishou, it is really difficult to talk about when the video number can replace the two." The WeChat ecosystem is more similar to the role of a supplement and a tool. ”
Just as Tencent's most successful short video product to date, the video number is doomed to be targeted from birth. How big is Tencent expecting it to monetize? How urgent? There is no way to know. It all depends on whether it is possible for the video number to quickly explore a unique mature methodology.