Cover image: Slow Play - Sara
Since WeChat's Spring Festival Gala red envelope became famous in 2015, major Internet giants have started the Spring Festival red envelope war. Not only Ali, Baidu, Kuaishou, Douyin, and JD.com have successively become interactive cooperative enterprises of the Spring Festival Gala, but Internet giants who are not sponsors of the Spring Festival Gala will also launch red envelope activities in the APP to compete for traffic peaks during the Spring Festival.
But now that the 2023 Spring Festival is approaching, not only the sponsors of the Spring Festival Gala have not been heard from them, but there are also few platforms for online red envelope activities; Taking stock of the amount of Spring Festival red envelopes in the past three years, 2023 has created a record low.
According to the observation of "slow play", the total amount of Spring Festival red envelopes is currently publicly counted, of which Alipay "Jiwufu" is divided into 500 million yuan, Baidu "Good Luck China Year" is divided into 800 million yuan, Kuaishou / Kuaishou Extreme Edition is divided into 2 billion yuan, Douyin "Ji 24 solar terms" is divided into 200 million, "Find Red Envelopes" is divided into 400 million yuan, and Watermelon and Toutiao are 200 million yuan each. If combined with the 2021 Spring Festival red envelopes totaling 12.2 billion yuan, and the 2022 Spring Festival red envelopes totaling 8 billion yuan, the Spring Festival red envelopes have fallen for three consecutive years.
The sharp "shrinkage" of Spring Festival red envelopes is also revealing various new problems faced by Internet giants - Spring Festival red envelopes are no longer a "new pull" nirvana, and user stickiness can no longer be maintained by subsidies. Although there are still platforms that have not given up the Spring Festival red envelopes, perhaps the platform and users have long felt that they are "inadequate".
The red envelope is shrinking, and the gameplay is more complicated
Taking stock of the 2023 Spring Festival red envelopes, the most intuitive feeling of users is that the amount of red envelopes has been reduced, and the gameplay routine has deepened.
Taking the peak of Spring Festival red envelopes in 2021 as an example, the amount distributed during the Spring Festival red envelopes was 500 million yuan for Alipay, 2 billion yuan for Douyin, 2.1 billion yuan for Kuaishou, 2.2 billion yuan for Baidu, 2.8 billion yuan for Pinduoduo, and 500 million yuan for Weishi. In contrast, not only have the number of companies now online Spring Festival red envelopes decreased significantly, but this year's amount of 600 million yuan for Douyin and 800 million yuan for Baidu is also a large proportion of "shrinkage".
E-commerce platforms such as Pinduoduo simply did not launch Spring Festival red envelope activities, but only carried out Spring Festival promotions in the form of platform subsidies and coupon discounts. For example, activities such as Pinduoduo's "10 billion subsidies", Jingdong's "New Year Festival", Tmall's "New Year Market", and Taobao's "Spring Festival does not close" are all creating shopping festivals and promoting the conversion of orders with commodity discounts.
In addition, the routine of Spring Festival red envelopes is also getting deeper and deeper. Except for the annual Alipay collection Wufu based on "AI sweeping blessings", the gameplay of other platforms is basically very complex, and embedded with a large number of internal diversion and brand advertising.
Baidu's "Good Luck China Year" activity rule is that users must collect 5 gold cards to synthesize 1 good luck card, collect good luck cards and then upgrade the blessing scene, and the bonus rules of different blessing cards are different. In addition, this activity requires "doing tasks" to obtain the number of card draws, one or two of the "do tasks" links are advertisements for low-interest loans, and the following column is mainly ads for Baidu maps, good-looking videos, and Baidu Tieba to attract traffic.
The gameplay of the short video platform is more complicated, adding many rules on top of the collection card to allow users to invite new users, create videos, team up with friends, and set up many interactive games to embed a large number of brand advertisements in winning red envelopes.
▲Image source: Douyin APP
ByteDance's Douyin and Watermelon video gameplay is similar, and they are both online a series of interactive projects that set solar terms, set off fireworks, and guess lantern riddles. Douyin's "Set 24 Solar Terms, 200 Million Points" campaign is named by Junlebao, and advertisers such as China Unicom, Leshi, Leng Sour Ling, FAW Toyota and other advertisers are added as partners, and if you want to get more card draws on the Jiqi Solar Saving Card page, you must download the Tomato Listen APP, and also set up an "amusement park" section in the "Find Red Envelopes · 400 Million Points" activity, and implant a large number of brand advertisements through small games such as finding red envelopes.
Kuaishou "Welcome Rabbit Annual Score of 2 Billion" activity is named by Feihe Dairy, and the amount of red envelopes looks quite attractive, but when users participate in it, they will find that the rules of the red packet activity are very complicated, and can basically be rated as "the most brain-burning Spring Festival red envelope activity".
The activity page sets up a series of games such as rabbit synthesis, offering the God of Wealth, pushing gold coins, collecting blessing cards, shooting New Year, garden party, etc., users need to synthesize a level 10 rabbit to receive 66 yuan red envelopes, "God of Wealth" starts to do tasks at 8 am every morning to get "offerings", "push gold coins" the highest score can be exchanged for 188 yuan red envelopes... A series of complex rules make it difficult for users to understand clearly, and it is very difficult to have patience to complete the task.
Spring Festival red envelopes are losing their appeal
In fact, the 2023 Spring Festival red envelope has indeed entered the stage of "form is greater than content", and the Spring Festival red envelope has lost its attractiveness to both platforms and users.
In the past, Spring Festival red envelopes were the source of traffic for Internet giants. In 2015, WeChat had more than 11 billion interactions with the CCTV Spring Festival Gala; From 2016 to 2022, Alibaba, Baidu, Kuaishou, Douyin, and Pinduoduo also cooperated in the Spring Festival Gala. Taobao gained huge traffic and transaction volume, Baidu APP rushed from 160 million to 300 million with the help of the Spring Festival Gala DAU (number of daily active users), and Kuaishou and the Spring Festival Gala also achieved the peak goal of reaching 300 million DAU.
But after eating a "secret recipe" for eight years of Spring Festival red envelopes, it has gradually begun to work. According to public information, in 2019, Baidu's "Good Luck China Year" used 1 billion yuan to bring a peak of 200 million daily activity in Chinese New Year's Eve, and only 2% was retained after 5 days; Pinduoduo also had insiders break the news to the media, sponsoring the 2023 CCTV and local stations New Year's Eve party, and the total transaction increment on the platform is not as good as the Double 11 promotion.
The inequality between the investment cost of Spring Festival red envelopes and the retention of transformation makes this event less attractive to Internet giants. This can be seen from the fact that Douyin and Kuaishou have chosen co-branded advertisers this year, allowing advertisers to share the operating costs of the Spring Festival red envelope activity and reduce the platform's own investment; The second is to retain the Spring Festival red envelope activity in form to meet the needs of live streaming and drainage on short video platforms, and to support the peak sales period of the Spring Festival through the traffic sticking to the activity.
Image source: App Store
In-depth analysis shows that while Kuaishou took advantage of the "2 billion red envelopes for the Spring Festival" to attract people's attention, it is also promoting Kuaishou e-commerce's "7 billion traffic and 100 million red envelopes to help merchants not close during the Spring Festival"; The "New Year Koi" in the platform's red envelope activity is also an exclusive section set up for the live broadcast room lottery, the purpose is to divert traffic for the host anchor through the cash red envelope lottery, so as to stimulate live broadcast sales during the Spring Festival.
At the same time, when the Spring Festival red envelope event has become an outright advertisement for Internet giants, the event is also losing its appeal to users. Just like the QQ "2023 Pre-Rabbit Like Brocade" Spring Festival Red Envelope themed event that Tencent belatedly launched on January 13, not only does not draw cash red packets, but the event page does not display the total amount of Spring Festival red packets. Users clicking "Fu Coin" will draw QQ Super Members, Super QQ Show, QQ Music Luxury Green Diamonds, Game Members and other "benefits", but if they click "Receive Benefits", they will find that they still need to pay for these members, and the "benefits" drawn are only discounts for members.
"QQ Spring Festival red envelope activity played for half a day, the only point to not discount the purchase of members' 'Fu coin' is QQ sports vitality value, used to enter the 'vitality carnival' page lottery, but click on the lottery to show that the draw is still QQ sports vitality value, and then pop out of the page prompts 'follow QQ sports public account to draw again', and instantly I lost interest in continuing to play."
A veteran user who has used QQ for 20 years lamented, "Now the routine of the Spring Festival red envelope activity is too deep, and I even feel that the operators of Internet giants fool users."
It is difficult for giants to pay for Spring Festival red envelopes
The biggest reason why giants are no longer willing to pay for the Spring Festival red envelope is the passing of the era of China's Internet traffic dividend. According to QuestMobile data, since 2018, domestic mobile Internet users have been maintained at more than 1.1 billion for 4 years. Since 2020, the monthly active users of China's mobile Internet have only increased by more than 10 million, and the monthly growth rate is only about 2%.
Taking stock of the user volume of Internet giants is not difficult to find - the traffic growth of super apps has reached the ceiling.
According to public data, the number of domestic users of Alipay has reached 775 million, the number of global users has exceeded 1 billion, and the number of monthly active users of WeChat has reached 1.263 billion in the 10 years since its launch. In 2022, Baidu APP monthly active users reached 628 million, Douyin users reached 842 million, according to Kuaishou 2022 third quarter financial report, the average daily active users of Kuaishou App reached 363 million in the third quarter, and the average monthly active users of Kuaishou App reached 626 million.
Under the premise that traffic growth has peaked, it is clear that the Spring Festival red envelope can no longer create myths. For example, iMedia Consulting's "2022 China Brand Marketing and Consumer Behavior Monitoring Report" analyzed, as the traffic dividend gradually weakened, the Internet dividend began to move from the traffic era to the stock era, mobile advertising ended the traffic competition, and the overall industry fell into a period of stable development.
Another key reason is that the Internet giants' wallets are deflated. Since 2021, Internet giants such as Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, JD.com, Pinduoduo, and Kuaishou have been continuously exposed to layoffs; There are reports that Alibaba's employees fell by nearly 14,000 in the first half of 2022.
Tencent and Alibaba's financial reports for the second quarter of 2022 also show that the former's total revenue was 134 billion yuan, down 3% year-on-year; The latter's total revenue was 205.56 billion yuan, down 0.1% year-on-year. The revenue of the two giants fell at the same time, which undoubtedly made people feel the chill of the "Internet winter".
When adverse factors such as shrinking market value and declining net profit bring huge growth pressure, Internet giants are "surviving with broken arms" by cutting new businesses, laying off employees and reducing costs. In such a difficult period, the intensity of paying for the Spring Festival red envelope activity naturally plummeted.
"Slow down" believes that the trend of further decline in the Spring Festival red envelope activity in 2023 is only the beginning of the Internet traffic dividend capping. If giants want to break through this "confinement", they must innovate new phenomenal products and create new traffic entrances. After Alipay and WeChat grabbed the payment market traffic, Taobao and Pinduoduo grabbed the e-commerce market traffic, and Douyin and Kuaishou seized the short video live streaming traffic, opening up the next "traffic battlefield". Only by making the Spring Festival red envelope a subsidy for "pulling new" again, rather than a huge and complex advertising space, can we truly regain the favorability and participation of users.
Resources:
(1) Quick information丨2023 Spring Festival red envelope strategy!
(2) The face and lizi of the Photon Planet丨Spring Festival Red Envelope War
(3) 36Kr New Media-Tech Planet丨Red Envelope War Extinguished, Spring Festival Golden Hour gradually became chicken ribs?
(4) iMedia Consulting丨2022 China Brand Marketing and Consumer Behavior Monitoring Report
(5) 36Kr - Value Research Institute丨2023, the Spring Festival red envelope war is quiet
(6) Sohu Technology丨Ali's revenue fell slightly, profit declined: In the first half of the year, the number of employees decreased by nearly 14,000, and cost reduction and efficiency improvement will continue
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