Alipay is on par with Douyin and WeChat

Alipay starts again

How far is Alipay's new story?

Douyin started e-commerce, and WeChat embraced Channels. Alipay, which is also a national app, has gradually lost its sense of existence on the Internet.

Even this year's "Ji Wufu" activity is difficult to save Alipay's activity. According to QuestMobile's data, Alipay's average daily usage time during the Spring Festival was 7.8 minutes. This is the one with the lowest usage time among mainstream apps with more than 50 million daily active users.

In terms of consuming users' time, Douyin's results are 10 times that of Alipay, and WeChat is 8 times that of Alipay. The user's time, to a certain extent, is a concrete manifestation of the user's attention and an important source of Internet traffic.

Another key statistic to measure an app is how often it opens. In this indicator, Alipay still does not have an advantage. As a payment tool, Alipay's average daily launch is also in the range of 2-4 times, and WeChat has achieved 15-20 launches with the attributes of social software.

The WeChat Pay function built into the WeChat app is taking the lead in the payment field with WeChat's longer usage time and more open frequency. In 2021, WeChat Pay accounted for 88.5% of the market in offline scenarios, while Alipay ranked second with 88.4%. A gap of 0.1%, regardless of the difference.

But a year later, WeChat Pay has expanded its advantage by 2.5%. During the year, no decisive product features were born. Alipay began to lag behind its rivals in payment, and it was inseparable from the increasing differentiation of its APP.

Entering 2023, Alibaba finally realized the importance of Alipay. Began to make frequent moves, trying to reverse this situation, and even wanted to find a new key to the Internet in the 20-year-old Alipay.

Late reports reported that Ant Group's Alipay business group recently started the largest executive rotation in nearly 7 years. Alipay's multiple departments, vice presidents and senior directors have changed. The most significant change is the establishment of the Digital Products Division and the Alipay APP Division.

Before that, on March 24, Alipay added a "Take a Look" card on its homepage to provide users with short videos and live broadcast content. After the user clicks, they can jump to the life channel to play the video.

This is a big step in Alipay's "TikTokization".

The news on March 28 pointed out that Alipay is also working in the direction of WeChat public accounts and mini programs: Alipay Life Account fully opens the "fan headlines" function to improve the interaction efficiency between merchants and fans.

Changes in organizational structure must reflect changes in business goals. Alipay may usher in an opportunity to return to the center stage of the Internet.

The traffic logic of the Internet

Alipay does short videos and live broadcasts, is there still a chance?

The same question was asked by WeChat and Channels in 2020.

At that time, the general attitude was to wait and see, doubt, and in the face of the boom of Douyin Kuaishou and Tencent's repeated defeats in the field of short video, it was difficult for the most optimistic observers to give a positive answer.

In the midst of a disappointment, the video number completed the cold start with the big hand of several concerts.

The ability of Channels to flow freely within the WeChat domain fully explores the traffic potential of WeChat's 1.2 billion monthly active users: Channels allows WeChat users to interact through likes and comments, and can also be easily forwarded to moments and chat scenarios, shared with friends, and re-disseminated.

More content creators smelled the business opportunity and settled on Channels. Under the Matthew effect, the video number ecology has gradually improved, and a shocking counterattack has been completed in terms of market share.

In 2022, the total usage time of Channels has exceeded 80% of the total user time of Moments. Ma named the video number as Tencent's "hope for the whole village."

However, looking back at the development path of Channels, its successful experience cannot be well transplanted to Alipay.

WeChat's huge traffic pool is the most critical element of the success of Channels. Looking at the entire range of Alibaba's products, the corresponding energy cannot be found.

In other words, although the core purpose of Channels is to retain users, create traffic and ultimately complete the commercial monetization of WeChat, at the beginning of its launch, this content platform still needs massive traffic feeding to change user habits and establish a new traffic system.

But whether it is Alipay, AutoNavi, or Taobao, Tmall, either there is no logic to generate traffic, or it is simply a big user who consumes traffic.

In fact, as early as 2020, Alipay tried to transform. On March 10 of this year, Alipay held a partner conference, and Hu Xiaoming, CEO of Ant Financial, announced that "Alipay will build an open platform for digital life and focus on the digitalization of the service industry".

At this time, Alipay's mind was focused on the field of local life, trying to share a share of Meituan's cake. Alipay added multiple entrances such as takeaway, food and entertainment, hotel accommodation, and civic center at that time to try to compete with Meituan. However, the double defeat of word-of-mouth and Ele.me, coupled with Alipay's innate inability to drain traffic, made this attempt quickly hit the rocks.

No matter how much the APP public domain traffic is released, it cannot win back the favor of merchants, and the market share of local life has been declining. At the beginning of 2022, the word-of-mouth catering business shrank from 40 cities directly operated in the past to 11 cities.

The traffic pool itself is not broad and deep, and the platform cannot attract high-quality merchants to cultivate for a long time. The Matthew effect, in which the stronger the stronger, is sharply amplified by the traffic logic of the Internet.

Alipay seeks change

Since July last year, Alipay has upgraded its life number again and placed the entrance of the newly launched life platform in the C position on the homepage of Alipay. Graphics, short videos, live broadcasts and other content are presented on the homepage of Alipay in the form of information streams.

In order to further enrich Alipay's video content, in February this year, Alipay began to support merchants to configure live cards directly from brands, providing users with services such as pre-live appointment, live broadcast viewing and post-live playback.

At the same time, Ant Group reached a comprehensive strategic partnership with NBA China, and NBA video content landed on the Alipay platform.

In March, Alipay tried to reopen a path from content drainage to traffic conversion, help merchants carry out fan operations more efficiently and accurately, and open up the public-private domain linkage model: content creation, public domain recommendation, private domain precipitation, and fan recall.

In terms of content creation, the restrictions on creation forms are broadened, and multiple forms such as short videos, live broadcasts, and atlases are further supported, so as to promote the quality and quantity of platform content with creative freedom.

Open Alipay's core public domains such as the life channel, homepage card, and payment success page to boost high-quality content. On the one hand, it will enhance the attractiveness of high-quality content merchants, and on the other hand, it will update its image and build Alipay into a content-friendly platform.

Improve private domain positions such as life numbers to help brand merchants achieve private domain precipitation. Merchants keep consumers in private domains, while Alipay stores content scenarios and consumption scenarios on the platform at the same time.

The recently launched fan headlines complete the final piece of the puzzle: precise marketing content, recall users, and improve fan engagement and conversion efficiency.

This model improves the internal ecology of Alipay and provides a more complete infrastructure for merchants, talents, MCNs and other subjects. It is worth looking forward to whether the short video can reverse the tool attributes of the Alipay APP.

As Alipay focuses on content and rebuilds super apps, large and comprehensive super apps have become the focus of giants, and Internet users compete for the second half.

Author | Old electricity