Station B OGV is testing Chen Rui's patience

Author: Xiao Rong, Editor: Jia Xin

An animated version of "The Three-Body Problem" made the B station OGV lose a lot of face.

On March 4, the animated version of "The Three-Body Problem", which had been suspended for two weeks, was relaunched, and the Douban score was nailed to 3.9. More than 50% of viewers gave a 1-star negative rating.

If you count the "China Qitan", which opened high and went low, the two blockbuster works of station B OGV (professional organization production content) in the opening year were only less than half successful.

In 2020, station B's "Wind Dog Boy's Sky" (hereinafter referred to as "Wind Dog") relied on more than 300 million views a month and 3 million + barrages, occupying the hot lists of major media and opening the sky of self-made dramas.

This is the debut of the self-made film and television drama of station B, and it is also the pinnacle. Since then, Station B has gathered all six vertical categories of OGV (Professional Organization Production Content).

Entering 2023, the two works of station B are unfavorable, which naturally makes people pay attention to the results of station B OGV.

How much weight does the OGV content of station B have? It pays more attention to the pendant category, can it lock the user's heart with explosive content like iYouteng? Under the background of new IP competition, how much room for imagination will there be for OGV content on station B? This article attempts to answer these questions.

One, four or two thousand pounds

Speaking of station B, the first thing that comes to mind must be the "UP master".

By the end of 2022, the average monthly active UP owners of station B have reached 3.8 million. These UP masters are the main source of content works on station B. At present, more than 90% of the content of station B is PUGV (user-made video), that is, the work of the UP master, both "Back Wave" and "Second Uncle", which became popular last year.

The existence of the UP master gives station B a strong community attribute. The content produced by UP, that is, PUGV, is not only the cornerstone of the entire B station platform, but also conceals the flashpoints of B station content.

There is already a huge UP main team, why should station B do OGV?

The first reason is related to the action of station B to go to the quadratic.

Station B, which made its fortune by relying on the second dimension, naturally has a large number of fan drama (that is, Japanese animation) work resources. According to the statistics of the B station UP master, before May 2014, "fan drama" was the community with the highest cumulative broadcast, far exceeding other communities.

But the management of Station B is not satisfied with these. CEO Chen Rui mentioned in an interview that "small countries and widows are happy, but you are a paradise and you will also be killed by strong ships."

In recent years, whether it is the company's management or users, it has become inevitable for Station B to break the circle on the basis of the two-dimensional and find a new content enrichment platform.

In order to reach more users, there must be more works on the platform. Relying entirely on the UP Master self-awakening is obviously too slow to wait, and OGV can play a leading role.

The second reason is related to the early success of Station B in the field of fan drama.

Unlike iYouteng's routine of relying on popular film and television to win over the audience, the OGV of station B begins with Japanese animation, then domestic animation, documentaries, then variety shows, and finally film and television dramas.

Fan drama is the field of origin of station B. It was also decided that the first step out of the drama was domestic animation. In the years since 2014, the number of monthly active users of domestic animation has gradually caught up with and surpassed that of Japanese dramas.

Such success, coupled with the breaking of variety shows such as "Rap New Generation" and Station B's New Year's Eve party, gave Station B the motivation to move forward in OGV.

The third reason is related to the UP master.

The original purpose of OGV was to synergize with PUGV. The breaking of the circle of an OGV work will bring new users, and it can also allow the original UP owner to find the wind vane of creation.

Based on the content-driven community attribute, Station B used to be the best place for the long-tail spread of popular dramas. There are UP main production clips, and there are users to follow the trend to discuss. Even if the feature film is not released on station B, the user's discussion and secondary creation can bring a lot of heat.

Then, if Station B's own OGV works can break the circle, in addition to the fans outside the station, the original UP owner also has the motivation to produce related content circle fans.

The explosion of a "new generation of rap" has given more UP the impetus to produce rap content. After the program was broadcast in 2020, the number of rap UP hosts stationed in Station B increased, and related works also increased.

Second, the bottleneck: small and beautiful, difficult to break the circle

Since the era when film and television IP was discovered by capital ten years ago, whether it is movies, online dramas or long-form video platforms, they all hope to make such a business: relying on explosive works, absorbing users to pay for watching, or accelerating the sale of peripheral derivatives to leverage the platform's revenue.

Although the blockbuster does not necessarily determine the final profit of the content platform, the value of the blockbuster cannot be ignored for the content platform.

Quality content is key to keeping users engaged and can also generate significant revenue for the platform. The same goes for Station B.

From Q4 2020 to Q3 2022, the revenue of value-added services of station B (mainly composed of live broadcast, large membership income, etc.) has increased year by year, and its proportion in total revenue has gradually increased, from 32% to 42%. However, in the fourth quarter of 2022, the proportion of value-added services revenue of RMB2.3 billion in total revenue fell back to 37.7%.

From 2017 to 2020, on the basis of the original fan drama, Station B has completed the quadruple jump of OGV in four years in national creation, documentary, variety show, film and television.

In 2017, Station B invested in nearly 20 animation teams and participated in more than 50 animation works within one year, becoming one of the largest animation producers in China. In the same year, with the help of "I Repair Cultural Relics in the Forbidden City", Station B entered the field of documentaries.

In 2018, Station B further strengthened the layout of ACG ecology by acquiring NetEase comic assets and holding the first national innovation conference, while opening large-scale documentary self-production, and successfully launched two word-of-mouth works, "A String of Life" and "Those Things in History".

In 2019, "UP Main Metamorphosis" "Reckless! Transformer Brothers" and other series led by UP were launched, and Station B also opened the door to originality in terms of variety shows.

In 2020, "Rap New Generation" and "Wind Dog" marked the "circle-breaking" stage of variety shows and film and television dramas on Station B.

At present, station B OGV has six major categories, fan drama, national innovation (Chinese animation), film and television drama, movie, variety show, documentary.

But today's B station OGV faces two major problems: on-site and off-site.

In terms of the venue, the positioning of station B determines that OGV works are often small and beautiful works, with high quality and good reputation, but the number of broadcasts is difficult to become a hit on the whole network.

At the beginning of the planning of the 2020 Station B New Year's Eve Gala, Li Ni, COO of Station B, once proposed not to please everyone, but to young people like it.

This idea made the New Year's Eve party of Station B win the praise of "understanding young people very well", and the People's Daily and the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League have issued articles praising it. Afterwards, there were a lot of barrages of "make-up lessons" at the New Year's Eve party of Station B.

But looking back, the OGV works of station B often have neither the help of first-line top stars, nor the boost of traffic, completely close to the IP and program form of young people, allowing users and UP lords to generate electricity for love, breaking the circle is completely "casual". Overall, the number of broadcasts and influence are high and low, uneven.

Taking "Wind Dog" as an example in 2020, it finally won 300 million views, completely relying on the love and popularity of station B users, from inside the station to outside the station. As of press time, the show has reached 670 million views.

This also led to the number of views of "Wind Dog" becoming an unsurpassed Tianwang Mountain. In 2022, "Sanyue Has a New Job" will become the hottest self-made drama of the year on Station B - 290 million views, and it is difficult to hope that "Wind Dog" will be the back.

In terms of Douban scores, although "Sanyue Has a New Job" received a score of 8.4 points, surpassing the 8.1 points of iQiyi's hit "The World" and the 7.7 points of Tencent Video's "Brilliant Star, Moonborn in the Sea". However, in terms of the number of ratings, the 78,000 people in "Sanyue" are less than 20% of "Brilliant Star, Moonborn in the Sea".

(Broadcast volume source: B station official, Yunhe data)

Li Ni once said in an interview that IP, quality and ecology are the three cores of the self-made content of station B.

IP-based content requires that content can be continuously retained and has the value of content assets. Fine-tuning requires that each content represent an aesthetic or a vertical category of cognition. Ecology is to consider the upgrading of vertical content, support for UP main specialized content, and the subsequent development link of content.

Off-site, the era of live broadcast has arrived, and a new way of linkage has been found with the B station UP owner.

In 2022, the turnover of the value-added service business of station B will reach 8.72 billion yuan, with an annual growth rate of 26%, of which the live broadcast business has grown rapidly, and the annual revenue has increased by more than 30% year-on-year. The management also said that Station B will further enhance the integrated operation of live broadcast and video ecosystem, encourage more UP owners to become anchors, and convert more users into live broadcast paying users.

Compared with following OGV to produce content, UP owners obviously pay less for live broadcasting, although they also need to think about how to win the popularity of fans in advance, but after all, there is no need to work with copywriting and edit videos, and the process is much simpler. Moreover, after turning on the camera, as long as it is said well, someone will give a tip.

In terms of driving the UP master, the substitution of OGV is increasing.

Third, how much room for imagination is there in the content?

Station B wants to have more IP, and also wants to rely on self-made IP to create more explosive models.

In January 2023, Station B and Jinjiang Original reached a cooperation framework agreement, the two will cooperate on intellectual property rights, including but not limited to purchasing the copyright of multiple works (including literary works), and using the copyright for designated purposes (including but not limited to adaptation, information network dissemination, publicity and distribution), in the next three years, the purchase cost of the copyright of Bilibili's purchased works is about 40 million yuan per year.

It can be expected that Station B itself still wants to develop more IP and OGV works to maintain member stickiness and payment motivation.

Some media have counted 19 online animations that were registered and approved in February 2023. Among them, Station B alone occupies 8 parts.

The future of the IP field is nothing more than the direct purchase of copyrights and the two paths of self-made content. But on both roads, station B OGV is facing a lot of difficulties.

First, in terms of the investment in buying copyrights, the breakeven target in 2024 has been pressure.

At the earnings conference, Chen Rui said that increasing revenue and reducing losses and healthy growth of DAU (daily active users) are the two most important things for Station B in 2023.

Chen Rui still envisions relying on community and content ecology, "I think community and content ecology have always been our most advantageous competitive barriers, and they are also the basis for us to constantly cross the cycle. ”

Chen Rui said, "We are confident that the content ecology of site B can continue to produce good content, and we are confident that we can continue to produce the most attractive and talented UP owners on our platform." I think this is the core value of Station B. ”

But iQiyi's financial report has made it clear that at present, if you want to make a profit, reducing costs and increasing efficiency may be more important than explosive content.

In the middle of 2022, Station B was exposed to a new round of layoffs, and people familiar with the matter revealed that live broadcast, games, main site, OGV and overseas business departments were the hardest hit areas of this layoff.

Moreover, the cost of station B mainly comes from the share given to the UP master.

Station B's financial report shows that in 2022, the operating cost will be RMB 4.9 billion, an increase of 4% over the same period in 2021. This was mainly due to increased revenue share costs and content costs. Among them, the revenue sharing cost was RMB 2.5 billion, accounting for more than half.

This part of the cost is the key to maintaining the vitality of the UP master, and there is not much room for optimization. If you spend a lot of money to acquire copyrights, it will obviously bring greater profit pressure to Station B.

Second, in terms of self-made content, the competition of various platforms in OGV content has entered the "deep sea".

iQiyi and Tencent have said they want to find a breakthrough in self-made content.

iQIYI executives have given a clear summary of content strategy adjustments: abandon simply catering to content, abandon suspension content, give up obvious loss of money, and content that is not innovative. In the third quarter of 2022, 65% of iQiyi's online dramas were self-made content.

In an internal speech late last year, Ma Huateng also talked about adjusting the long-form video strategy and cutting non-boutique content.

Even the animation field on which Station B makes its fortune has a competitive figure.

Lin Lingling, general manager of iQIYI's animation division, revealed at the 2021 iQIYI World Conference that iQIYI plans to launch nearly 200 self-made Chinese comics within 3 years.

Compared with the above two, Station B is close to young people in form, but it may also be counterproductive because of form.

In the same "Three-Body Problem", the TV series launched by Tencent Video was full of applause, but the animation of station B was overturned and was full of controversy. The reason behind it is precisely that the animated version of "The Three-Body Problem" directly changed the character of the protagonist in the original work for the form of animation, and even ignored the plot.

A "Three-Body Problem", station B was taught to be a person by Tencent once.

More importantly, under the requirements of quality and ecology, station B must be careful and hit the success rate. It is neither possible nor necessary to fight to the death in variety shows, film and television.

IV. Conclusion

The small and beautiful B station OGV, whether for itself or for the entire OGV content circle, shows a new way of living.

However, this business model has never been able to promote the content ecology of station B to profitability in the stage of substantial expansion, and when all Internet companies now regard profitability and cost reduction and efficiency increase as their primary goals, "out of the circle is unfavorable", which makes people more worried about its prospects.

The value of the UP master cannot be lost, and how OGV can make the UP lord, and even the entire B station, have a better future and stand firm in front of the breakeven red line, is a problem.

From this point of view, the OGV of station B may be a marathon that cannot be run in the short term. Of course, this will also test Chen Rui's patience.