Previously, in March 2023, Ant Group's Alipay business group underwent organizational structure and personnel adjustments, including the establishment of a new advertising division. Subsequently, in August of the same year, Alipay officially launched the commercial promotion system "Lights" platform. And this series of actions was also regarded by the outside world as a signal for Alipay to fully start commercialization.
After more than half a year has passed, Alipay has recently disclosed the latest results of its commercialization to the outside world. According to the "Alipay Platform Business Vitality Report" released not long ago, the scale of Alipay's deliverable traffic has increased by 1 times in the past year, and the "Lights" platform has grown rapidly since it was launched for more than half a year, with active advertisers and active agents achieving 4 times and 9 times growth respectively, and also driving an average increase of 200% in the GMV of brand mini programs that place advertisements.
Since it chose to hand over this report card at this time, Alipay is obviously quite satisfied with it and wants to show its strength. In order to strike while the iron is hot, while showing off this achievement, Alipay also announced that the scale of traffic opened this year will be expanded by 1.5 times, and in addition to the search box on the home page of the App, the payment success page, the travel channel, the membership channel and other channels, the traffic of the video channel will also be opened. In addition, the "Lights" platform will be upgraded around traffic efficiency, AI technology applications, and industry solutions.
It is not difficult to find that Alipay is eager and determined to commercialize. In the words of Zhu Xing, head of Alipay's advertising division, Alipay should continue to increase traffic openness and efficiency improvement, strive to become a new qualitative growth platform in the market, and bring more deterministic growth to merchants.
In fact, as a super app with 1 billion users and a national app, compared with other large manufacturers, Alipay has been more cautious about commercialization. One of the core factors behind this is that the genes of its payment tools are different from those of other platforms, and they cannot replicate growth and monetization in the same way.
Specifically, despite having 1 billion users, Alipay's user base is undoubtedly large enough, but at the same time, it needs to be admitted that in addition to indicators such as DAU and MAU, an excellent Internet product inevitably needs to talk about user duration and other data dimensions to prove user stickiness.
Compared with the average daily user usage time of platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou, and Xiaohongshu, Alipay's strong instrumentalization attribute has made it fall into the dilemma of "running out and leaving". And because it is too close to the "money bag", Alipay's every move must be carefully considered. However, in today's situation of slowing user growth and intensifying market competition, Alipay must also revitalize its stock and assume the important task of "making money to support its family".
So how did Alipay break the game? From its upgrade of the life account to a variety of content forms such as short videos, live broadcasts, graphics and texts, to the opening of the life account and the mini program, to the realization of the transaction link from the live broadcast to the mini program, and the full opening of the UGC entrance. In recent years, Alipay has also followed the trend and continuously promoted the content of the platform, and continued to increase the content forms including graphics and texts, short videos, live broadcasts, etc., hoping to attract users' attention, improve user stickiness and usage time, so as to help the commercialization of traffic, and also use this to lay out live streaming and open up more commercialization possibilities.
According to the "Alipay Platform Business Vitality Report", the scale of the content ecology represented by short videos and live broadcasts has continued to grow, with the number of MCNs on the Alipay platform doubling and the number of live broadcast rooms doubling in the past year. And based on the financial + payment mentality that has been precipitated over the years, the previous constraint of "close to money" has also become the characteristic of Alipay's content. It is reported that the pan-financial business has become the fastest-growing content vertical category of Alipay in the past year, with the number of creators opening increasing by 6 times, and more than 150 fund companies and brokerages have settled in.
In addition to making up lessons on content, in order to help advertisers solve the proposition of refinement and finding deterministic increments, Alipay is not only continuing to explore its own traffic advantages, but also trying to find a path of differentiation.
From the current point of view, as the largest service-oriented super App in China, "strong service attributes" seems to be one of the differentiating characteristics of Alipay. According to the "Alipay Platform Business Vitality Report", the Alipay App currently has more than 8,000 services and more than 150 service scenarios, and nearly 700 million people use its life service mini programs every day. These people and scenarios that are closely related to various services naturally mean business opportunities, so they are also valued by many advertisers.
In addition to the "service" attribute, another characteristic of Alipay's traffic may be the gathering of vertical crowds. In the "Alipay Platform Business Vitality Report", it was revealed that as an App closer to service and transformation, Alipay has accumulated a wealth of people's minds in a variety of scenarios, such as students, car owners, financial management people, office workers and other vertical groups of people gathered here, and high net worth, youth, and segmentation have also become the three significant characteristics of users.
If Alipay can open these vertical groups that have not yet been fully opened to merchants through various products and tools, and then achieve full and accurate matching, it is naturally expected to greatly improve the conversion rate.
Of course, at present, Alipay is still in the exploratory period in terms of commercialization and content, and it is still facing many challenges. Compared with Taobao through train, WeChat Guangdiantong, Douyin giant engine, which are already very mature commercial platforms, "lights" are just starting now. Even in the selection of cooperative brands, according to Liu Zheng, marketing director of Alipay's advertising division, Alipay is currently more inclined to the field of fast-moving consumer goods, especially food and beverage, dairy products, etc., because these brands have experience in advertising and marketing, and their own needs are more clear, so that Alipay can better explore experience and create cases through "co-creation".
But it is undeniable that Alipay has made a good start at present. Although Alipay was often regarded as the last "traffic depression" of the mobile Internet, it may not be able to become the next highland in the future.
[The picture in this article comes from the Internet]