Editor's introduction: Some time ago, NetEase officially entered the Southeast Asian audio social market, trying to occupy a place. The author of this article analyzed in detail the next development of NetEase in the Southeast Asian audio social market and its measures, and interested partners took a look at it
The lively Southeast Asian audio social market has another audio bigwig.
In May and December 2021, NetEase successively launched heat up and KAYA Live, two audio social products, testing the water overseas.
In fact, the pace of NetEase's globalization has never stopped.
On the one hand, NetEase has frequently launched games for overseas markets, especially the Japanese market, in the past two years and achieved good results; On the other hand, game offices were established in Japan, Montreal, Canada, and Austin, Texas, USA; At the same time, NetEase is also actively engaged with companies or projects facing the global market, according to Crunchbase data, NetEase has invested in 35 projects overseas, of which 19 are leading investments.
However, as we can see, the current layout of NetEase overseas is still mainly concentrated in games or game-related fields. Of course, this strategy is determined by NetEase's basic disk. According to NetEase's financial report data, netease's total revenue in Q1 2022 was 3.7 billion US dollars, of which the game business contributed 2.7 billion US dollars, accounting for more than 73% of the contribution.
However, through recent market observation and list combing, the author found that not only NetEase Games, but also various businesses under NetEase are secretly exerting efforts. Take NetEase Youdao as an example, try to go to sea, layout live broadcasting, and force hardware, trying to grow into an all-round player.
As we mentioned at the beginning of the article, NetEase Cloud is also actively exploring overseas markets in addition to "trying to break the label of network cloud suppression, striving for more copyrights, exploring various test questions out of the circle, and testing the water music social".
However, unlike the big strokes of NetEase Games, NetEase Cloud seems to be more cautious about going to sea.
In May 2021, NetEase Cloud made the domestic paid chat "heart encounter" into an overseas version of Heat Up; In November 2021, he copied the voice social "Look Live" to kaya Live overseas.
Unlike audio social apps such as Litmatch and Livehouse, which have been facing overseas users since their inception, NetEase Cloud has chosen to directly copy the products and business models that have been "verified by domestic users" to the conservative overseas model.
According to Sensor Tower data, NetEase Cloud Overseas Publisher Account Cloud Village Limited (Heat Up + KAYA Live) received more than 1.3 million monthly downloads in May 2022.
According to Data.ai data, as of June 2022, Cloud Village Limited's double-ended downloads in Indonesia increased by more than 200% compared to November 2021. To some extent, NetEase Cloud has found its own "seed users" overseas.
But that alone, I'm afraid, is not enough.
A senior investor who pays attention to the direction of social pan-entertainment said in an exchange with the author that ""Heart Encounter" and "Look Live" can live well, thanks to the popularity of NetEase Cloud in China, and the monetization efficiency is not bad, and Heat Up and KAYA Live can survive for a long time depends on whether the product itself meets the needs of users and whether the monetization efficiency of the target market can reach at least the domestic level."
Therefore, we will try to analyze whether NetEase Cloud's way to the sea can change the audio social track competition pattern from the target market track competition of Heat Up and KAYA Live and the product and business model design of the two applications.
First, the crowded Southeast Asian market
According to App Growing Global, Heat Up's top 3 markets for creatives in the last 90 days were Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines, while KAYA Live chose Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.
Source: App Growing Global
Like many manufacturers, NetEase Cloud also regards Southeast Asia as the first stop to go to sea, and spends its main advertising budget on the Indonesian market, which is related to many factors such as Indonesia's large population base, users are accustomed to online entertainment and social networking and show a certain willingness to pay, mcN and anchor resources are relatively systematic, and so on.
But in fact, before NetEase Cloud entered the market, the audio and video social markets in Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia were already divided.
According to Data.ai data, social & pan-entertainment apps account for about 70% of the top 100 Google Play non-gaming apps in Malaysia and Vietnam, and about 50% in Indonesia.
Excluding nettext comic app| data source: Data.ai
From the perspective of NetEase Cloud's competitors, in the Indonesian Google Play non-game application best-seller list Top100, 19 products have direct competition with NetEase Cloud's two overseas products, and they are basically similar in the Vietnamese market. In Malaysia, it is even more exaggerated, with 32 products whose main use scenarios overlap with Heat Up or Kaya Live.
Whether it is in the field of audio social networking or in the paid dating track, NetEase Cloud must face these competitors who have grown up in the local market of Southeast Asia. According to Data.ai data, litmatch has been downloaded more than 2 times more than Heat Up and KAYA Live combined in the past six months, and its revenue is close to 10 times. Obviously, NetEase Cloud's globalization journey still has a long way to go.
However, the entire Southeast Asian market is not a black barrel without opportunities.
The first point to be clear is that although we usually regard Southeast Asia as a market, in fact, there are still 6 major markets in Southeast Asia, and the language, customs and culture, and entertainment ecology of each country are very different, so NetEase Cloud's strategy of choosing to focus on certain markets is correct;
Secondly, different countries also have their own interest preferences, taking the Vietnamese market as an example, after the accumulation of the past few years, everyone knows that game social products are running well in Vietnam, but in fact, Vietnamese users are also very keen on music, local music streaming App Zing MP3 and WeSing, StarMaker, Sing Now and other K song apps have achieved good results in Vietnam, to the music field, it is also to the track familiar to NetEase Cloud, If you can combine your own advantages with the market, it may also have some wonderful effects.
Third, due to the rapid development of the online social & pan-entertainment industry in Southeast Asia in recent years, the MCN, trade union and anchor industry ecology is very perfect, which provides convenience for the supply of live broadcasting. In addition, another major feature of the Southeast Asian live broadcasting industry is that the anchor is likely to be on the "TV station", and if this link can be opened, the situation of NetEase Cloud in Southeast Asia will be much better.
In addition, Heat Up and KAYA Live may also have a battle in products.
Second, paid dating and audio social networking can also play what new tricks
Although we mentioned earlier that NetEase Cloud is more cautious in choosing a mature domestic product model when going to sea, it is actually not directly moved, and some localization design has also been carried out when entering the Southeast Asian market.
1. Heat Up: The shell of serious dating + the kernel of companion chatting
Heat Up, which launched on May 10, 2021, has the best result being 45th in the total Google Play download list in Indonesia and 97th in the Google Play best-selling list in Vietnam, and the best results have occurred in the past month.
At present, Heat Up has 5 first-level menus such as matching, information flow, chat room, messages and personal homepage. Text chat, voice matching and video matching are the main scenes used by users, it seems that there is a lot of interaction space, and many users will take the initiative to send you messages, but in fact, non-RMB players in Heat Up can be said to be difficult to move.
It takes gold to send words to users, gold to send gifts, gold to match voice, and gold to match videos. For $100 per $0.99, voice calls at $15 per minute, and video calls at $40 per minute, "nagging 5 cents" happens all the time on platforms like Heat Up. Of course, users can also choose to open a membership to unlock the 660 free active messages per month.
However, unlike platforms such as Chamet, Lamour, and OmeTV, Heat Up has added common modes of Dating Apps such as LBS, user identity, and matching index to the platform, which may be related to the addition of employees with some Momo backgrounds.
Heat Up in addition to requiring users to fill in gender, age and other conventional information, but also encourage users to fill in height, weight, education, annual income, occupation and other information, and will be based on the information filled in by the user to set the degree of matching, according to the author's experience, the general matching degree will not be less than 80%, more than 90%.
And Heat Up also borrows some of the "intimacy" mode commonly used by slow social networking to encourage users to interact with each other, but unlike slow social interaction, as long as the interaction will increase the intimacy, every gold coin consumed on Heat Up will increase the intimacy of 0.1, really you and I have no chance, all rely on me to spend money.
Heat Up allows users to complete more information entry by matching encouragement and coin rewards. The more detailed the user profile described according to the Heat Up rules, the more chances of matching will be obtained, and more daily gold quests will be unlocked. Perhaps because of the limited monetization efficiency in Southeast Asia, Heat Up has also introduced ad monetization.
What's interesting about Heat Up is that it combines the usual pattern of serious dating with naked paid chat, trying to reduce the user's defensiveness with realism.
From the perspective of the male users registered by the author, under the condition that the author is "financial practitioner, 28 years old, graduate student, 182", in the "same city" section, most of the users recommended to the author are 18-25 years old, most of whom are students, salesmen, self-employed and other related occupations. Judging from the positioning and language of the other party, it is indeed a local user in Southeast Asia, and many users have selfies with headscarves.
2. KAYA Live: Outside of the chat room, try podcasts
KAYA Live, which went online on December 1, 2021, has not yet entered the top 100 of downloads or best-seller lists in any country, which has something to do with the later entry time and business model. At the beginning of April 2022, the KAYA Live team was still recruiting positions in China for overseas union operations, Middle East/Southeast Asia anchor expansion, overseas traffic acquisition and other related functions, and it has only been 3 months, obviously, KAYA Live is still in the early stages of development.
However, KAYA Live's voice social + podcast model is also quite interesting. At present, KAYA Live has 5 first-level menus such as Live, Sonic, Discovery, Messages and My, which have a high degree of overlap with its domestic version Look Live.
Although similar in appearance, there seems to be some difference on the kernel. Although Look Live has not changed much from other audio live streaming platforms for various reasons, Look's vision of providing a display space for more original musicians at the beginning of its launch still sounds very moving today.
KAYA Live does not seem to continue this vision overseas, choosing instead to combine voice live streaming, voice matching and podcasting. In the Sonic section, users have 10 opportunities to receive or send audio messages every day, the pattern is similar to a drifting bottle, KAYA Live also intimately translates subtitles for users, which is convenient for users of different languages and cultures to communicate, and users can freely choose whether to reply to text or voice back.
However, unlike the anonymous random social networking of drifting bottles, users can also directly talk to each other or follow each other through sound waves, and check the online status of the other party and the distance from themselves, and the sound waves posted by users will automatically synchronize to their personal homepage, although only they are visible. But from the author's personal emotional point of view, I feel that there will be some "shame"...
In the podcast section found, the system will recommend three podcast programs such as "Today's Star", "Hottest Play", and "Quality Works" to be recommended at the top of the Banner to encourage users to create excellent sound content. Users can freely record podcast content as short as 30 seconds and up to 1 hour, and can choose background music, upload covers, titles, topics, etc. according to their personal wishes. From the homepage, there are not a few users who participate in podcast recording, but most of them are personal behaviors, and the author did not find systematic, continuously updated podcast programs during the experience.
In summary, it is a bit of an exaggeration to say that it is stirring up the Southeast Asian audio social market, but it can also be seen that NetEase Cloud has entered the Southeast Asian market with sincerity and intentions, and as for the result, the beluga whale will be tracked for a long time.
Author: Xin Tong
Source public number: Beluga Whale Going to Sea (ID: baijingAPP), pan-Internet sea service platform.
This article is published by Everyone is a product manager cooperative media @ Moby Dick To Sea authorized to publish, without permission, it is forbidden to reprint.
The title image is from Unsplash and is based on the CC0 protocol