Source of this article: Times Finance Author: Li Ting
Source: Pixabay
The annual Spring Festival red envelope war has quietly kicked off again, facing the slogan of "dividing up x billion yuan" shouted by major Internet companies, this Spring Festival, have you grabbed red envelopes?
On the second day of Alipay's Spring Festival "Collect Five Blessings" activity, Cheng Xin (pseudonym), a white-collar worker after 95, quickly collected five Fu cards, only waiting for the lottery to be drawn that night Chinese New Year's Eve, and worked hard with all netizens to divide 500 million yuan in cash red envelopes.
Cheng Xin has been collecting Fuka for 8 years every year, seeing the difficulty of this activity, from "you need to spend money to recycle a dedication blessing" to "just scan the code and pay a payment". Last year, Chinese New Year's Eve night, when Alipay drew the lottery, she glanced at it and got 1.68 yuan. casually shared it with a friend, and the other party returned a screenshot of her and won 2.16 yuan. Although the amount is not large, Jifu Card has become one of the must-have social activities for Cheng Xin's Spring Festival.
In the Spring Festival of 2015, WeChat became the red envelope partner of CCTV's Spring Festival Gala for the first time, and the picture of a table of people holding mobile phones to "shake" and grab red envelopes during the Chinese New Year's Eve meal was still vivid. This set of gameplay once brought a total of 1.01 billion times to WeChat red envelopes in one breath on the day of Chinese New Year's Eve. This activity, which was compared by Jack Ma to the "Pearl Harbor attack", has become a traffic password in the eyes of Internet companies.
Alibaba, Baidu, JD.com, Douyin, Kuaishou and other companies quickly followed, in the matter of sending red envelopes during the Spring Festival, roll gameplay, roll difficulty, and total amount of roll red envelopes. However, the red envelope prize pool of hundreds of millions of yuan at every turn can no longer bring users as fresh as it did when it first debuted 8 years ago, the growth of Internet traffic has peaked, and large marketing expenditures may not be able to exchange tangible results.
Red envelope cooling: the total amount is cut and the peak is staggered
This year's Spring Festival red envelope battle came later than usual.
On January 4, only about half a month before the Spring Festival, Kuaishou marked the words "2 billion" on the App icon, accompanied by posters of artists such as Jackie Chan, Jay Chou, Di Li Gerba and other artists, only to unveil the curtain of this Internet festival carnival. In previous years, the timeline would be longer, and more than a month before the Spring Festival, the overwhelming red envelope marketing campaign had begun.
After 8 years of evolution, the Spring Festival red envelope battle is slightly tired.
In terms of the total amount of red envelopes, Kuaishou came out on top, with a total of 2 billion yuan, and the campaign lasted from January 10 to January 28. Inviting new friends to join the app, teaming up with friends to do tasks, daily check-ins, synthetic games, and card collection, after years of exploration, the game tasks of major platforms have gradually converged, and the gameplay has fallen into a bottleneck that is difficult to break through.
Douyin's total red envelopes have shrunk from 2 billion yuan last year to 400 million yuan this year, leaving only one-fifth of the original. Not only Douyin, but during the Spring Festival in 2022, Baidu, which lavishly threw 2.2 billion yuan in red envelopes, will only have 800 million yuan left in the total amount of red envelopes this year.
JD.com changed the red envelope activity of "the whole people blow up the New Year beast, divide 1 billion to press the year" to December 26, 2022 to January 15, 2023, and played a time difference with other platforms, ending the war early, and the total amount of red envelopes decreased by 500 million yuan compared with last year.
Source: Alipay event page
Compared with the variety of red envelope games on major platforms, Alipay has been collecting five Fu cards for several years, and users can sit and wait for Chinese New Year's Eve to share red envelopes on the same day. Even the total amount of red envelopes has not changed for many years, and it is still 500 million yuan.
However, in the process of collecting Fuka, Alipay adds some small changes every year. Popular metaverse gameplay has been added this year, where users' avatars can collect "blessings" to redeem prizes. For old users like Cheng Xin, it is not difficult to get started. On January 17, a week after the launch of the event, 116 million people have successfully collected the Five Blessings, and on average, each person can receive 4.3 yuan.
Overall, the above five platforms issued a total of 8.4 billion yuan in red envelopes on the entire network during the 2022 Spring Festival, but only 4.7 billion yuan this year, a decrease of nearly half.
In addition, Pinduoduo, which once took out 2.8 billion red envelope activities in 2021, has not joined the war. Although Xiaohongshu, Weibo and other platforms have launched Spring Festival red envelope activities, they are more low-key in comparison, and are not displayed separately on the homepage of the app, and the total amount of red envelopes is not indicated on the homepage of the event.
Users can't play, and big factory red envelopes also begin to become invisible
Having participated in the red envelope distribution activity for many years, Cheng Xin feels that he not only can't play now, but also doesn't understand anymore.
Often "a meal of operation is as fierce as a tiger, one sees two pieces of five", the process of platform tasks is getting longer and longer, but the red envelopes allocated do not rise, Cheng Xin is a little helpless: "The year before last, I got more than 60 yuan on Douyin, and last year I only got more than one piece." ”
In the view of Internet industry analyst Ding Daoshi, in the past few years, there have been too many routines, consumers realize that they are being used and marketed, so their enthusiasm for participation is not so high. After the threshold for participation in the event is lowered, even if tasks such as collecting likes and collecting blessings are completed, the corresponding rights and interests obtained are not proportional to the user's time investment.
Although it is difficult to please users, most companies still do not want to miss the Spring Festival node. The reason for this, Chen Liteng, a digital life analyst at the e-commerce research center of NetEconomics, said in an interview with Times Finance: "As the most important festival of the year, the Spring Festival brings together a huge user base, and the huge user traffic has also become a treasure mine for platform marketing and promotion, and there are many possibilities for value mining." ”
This is also the initial reason why Internet companies collectively focused on the Spring Festival file. Once upon a time, the Spring Festival red envelope, as an important means of attracting new Internet applications, coupled with the traffic of CCTV's Spring Festival Gala partners, became a marketing magic weapon for Internet giants to bet on.
WeChat, which was the first to bind WeChat Pay, red envelopes and the Spring Festival Gala, made WeChat Pay bind 200 million personal bank cards within 2 days through this plan, directly establishing its status on an equal footing with Alipay. Alipay, which wants to increase its social networking, gained 1.1 billion pairs of friends during the Spring Festival in 2016 through activities such as Ji Wufu.
In 2019, Baidu won the seat of the Spring Festival Gala partner, linking the red envelope task with its Baidu, Baidu Map, iQiyi, Du Xiaoman and other apps in an attempt to drive the overall ecological traffic, and users need to download several applications to meet the red envelope lottery conditions. While intercepting traffic, it invisibly increases the difficulty of the task and greatly reduces the effect.
The behavior of "sending red envelopes" has extended from the Spring Festival to the weekday marketing node. Lu Lu (pseudonym), who is engaged in the review work on a live broadcast platform, is responsible for reviewing whether the gameplay of such red envelope activities is reasonable, whether there are sensitive words, and whether there is any behavior involving pornography and gambling, "We also have to check whether the final number of winners is consistent with the rules they submitted, or whether the process may involve shady scenes, making everyone feel unfair." ”
Lu Lu told Times Finance that the platform she is on is small, and generally does not have hundreds of millions of yuan in large red envelope expenditures, most of which range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of yuan, mainly in line with daily operation activities.
Although the amount is small, the complexity of the red packet task will not be reduced. Lulu often looks "in the clouds" in the gameplay documents submitted by project colleagues, and can only read them hard, "If you see a point you don't understand, you have to ask them, and the other party will explain it to you alone."
After seeing more, Lulu is also well versed in the routine, "The commonality is that it is difficult, only a small number of users can go to the end, and then divide the so-called red envelopes, in fact, at most, it is dozens or hundreds." She remembers that once the event was designed, only 25 users were able to successfully complete all the tasks and get the opportunity to share the prize, and each person could get about 100 yuan.
In Lu Lu's view, similar red envelope activities on the platform have been done several times, mainly to attract traffic, but the attraction to players is not as great as imagined, and the changes in daily and monthly active users are not intuitively felt.
The skyrocketing user traffic in the event will come and go quickly if there is no suitable undertaking. According to the monitoring of the Guojin Research and Innovation Center, although mobile phone Baidu gained hundreds of millions of new users in the 2019 Spring Festival red envelope event, the retention rate remained only 2% five days after the Chinese New Year's Eve.
Later Kuaishou and Douyin repeated a similar fate, reaching a new high in daily active users during the Spring Festival and falling back after the festival. According to public reports, Kuaishou DAU once reached 280 million during the Spring Festival in 2020, and then fell to 250 million; in the 2021 Spring Festival, Douyin's DAU rose to 580 million and fell back to about 500 million, neither of which failed to repeat the glory moment of WeChat Pay and Alipay.
Source: App screenshot
Compared with the high-profile slogan of "divided x billion" in previous years, the red envelopes of many large manufacturers have also begun to become invisible this year.
Douyin typed the words "Warm Chinese Year" under the icon, the Alipay icon wrote "Gathering Blessings", and the Jingdong icon wrote the three words "New Year Festival", and did not put the red envelope bonus amount directly on the LOGO. In the past, the style of big manufacturers throwing thousands of dollars also attracted LeEco's self-deprecation, and in a crowd of red envelope apps, LeEco replaced itself with the icon of "owes 12.2 billion".
In Ding Daoshi's view, such behavior also reflects a change in corporate thinking. For example, major e-commerce platforms focus on "no closing for the New Year" this year, and delivery can also be made during the Spring Festival; Jingdong, Cainiao and other companies also announced that they will provide incentive subsidies to the remaining express brothers during the Spring Festival. Ding Daoshi said that companies are no longer only keen on red envelope marketing, but have turned to other marketing activities, trying to provide users with a sense of gain through solid behavior.
In the context of cost reduction and efficiency increase, billions of yuan of expenditure at every turn, but the return is not as good as before. As Ma Huateng, Li Yanhong, Liu Qiangdong and others appeared on the front line of the business, emphasizing the importance of focusing on the core and cutting unnecessary expenses, the big factories who were accustomed to spending money also began to clench their pockets and think about whether this red envelope was worth it.