Pinduoduo "carried" the short drama to bring the goods, Chen Lei stepped into the "minefield" to attract traffic

Text/Rui Finance Xu Jiumian

Jingdong launched Liu Qiangdong's digital human live broadcast with great fanfare, and Pinduoduo on the other side also quietly played its cards.

A few days ago, Pinduoduo launched an independent "short drama" entrance in the first-level entrance "Duoduo Video" at the bottom of the App's homepage, which is juxtaposed with "Live Broadcast", "Attention" and "Recommendation", which together constitute the second-level channel of Duoduo Video.

In the past year, although Pinduoduo has relied on the huge occupation of the sinking market and the soaring cross-border e-commerce under the money-burning marketing, it has outperformed competitors such as Alibaba and JD.com in terms of performance growth.

However, in the second half of the mobile Internet, with the increasingly fierce competition in the e-commerce industry, the traffic dividend of the platform has gradually disappeared, and the difficulty of attracting new customers has been increasing, and Pinduoduo is also unable to escape traffic anxiety.

Deepening content construction and mining new traffic in the existing market have become the direction of e-commerce platforms to alleviate traffic hunger.

In fact, in recent years, Pinduoduo has also been trying to build its own platform's traffic pool, reshape service scenarios to increase the number of active users in the app and the length of stay, and form an effective conversion, but from Duoduo live broadcast to Duoduo video, it seems that it has failed to make much splash.

At present, short dramas with tight plots, constant plot reversals, and dense cool points have shown strong attraction and have become a new password for traffic. However, it remains to be discussed whether Pinduoduo's increase in the weight of short dramas can really promote its content, revitalize the user stock, grab users' attention, and expand the traffic pool.

On the one hand, short dramas are also becoming the new favorites of Pinduoduo's competitors, Ali and Jingdong have also thrown real money into the track, and content platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu, Station B, and WeChat video accounts are also not giving up an inch of land. It is not easy for Pinduoduo to make a name for itself on the content side surrounded by wolves through short dramas.

On the other hand, with the rapid expansion of the short drama market, some problems and challenges have also been intensively exposed.

The uneven quality of content, sacrificing plot logic and social values in order to attract attention, is attracting scrutiny and rectification from regulatory authorities. Short dramas have entered a period of industry volatility, and how to develop healthily on the e-commerce platform to become a traffic antidote, rather than a hidden minefield, is also a problem that Pinduoduo needs to think about at present.

01

A short drama that was "moved".

"Filming in a week, going online in a month, and achieving financial freedom in one film", low investment, fast output, and high attractiveness, short dramas have created a lot of wealth myths in the past 2023.

In addition to the user payment of short drama content, short drama delivery is another major commercial monetization method, which includes brand placement, brand customization and other models.

At present, the short dramas launched by Pinduoduo are all free to watch. On content platforms such as Xiaohongshu, Pinduoduo has become a drama-chasing artifact that has been crazy "Amway".

Pinduoduo does not include the option of product links on the online short drama content page, or implant products in the short drama content. Instead, in the process of users watching short dramas, a short video with a product link will appear after sliding for about 9 episodes in a row, and you can enter the product details page by clicking on the link.

The products pushed are basically highly matched by the user's recent search and browsing records on Pinduoduo.

Compared with the implantation of products or links with goods according to the plot, the mode chosen by Pinduoduo weakens the degree to which users watch short dramas, and indeed helps users to extend their stay time unconsciously.

From the point of view, most of the short dramas and video content on Pinduoduo's online are released by experts or store subjects, and the promoted products are concentrated in household products, FMCG, personal care products and other popular products, with prices ranging from a few yuan to more than ten yuan, but the number of spelling orders is relatively large, ranging from 10,000 to hundreds of thousands.

The characteristics of low customer unit price and high order volume are obviously more effective for traffic conversion and sales.

After entering the Pinduoduo short drama channel, the system will push different types of short dramas, the page displays the title of the play, the number of episodes, the number of playback information, as well as interactive designs such as clicking to watch, like, comment, share, etc., and the user stays for 12 seconds without operation, and then automatically jumps to the full episode details page, and slides down to switch episodes.

At present, most of the short dramas with a large number of clicks and plays on the Pinduoduo platform are small programs specially created for vertical screens, with a length of about 1 minute and 20 seconds, and the full episodes range from 70 to 110 episodes;

Some analysts said that the audience of the short drama is quite compatible with the audience of Pinduoduo, and the circle of fans is not the main goal of Pinduoduo short dramas, and the focus is to retain the browsing time of fans.

However, in the short term, free skit watching may indeed effectively increase the number of active users in the APP, but at present, Pinduoduo's short drama ecology still seems to be "carrying" attracted by incentive mechanisms, rather than official production or procurement, which may become a hidden danger at a time when the awareness of intellectual property and original maintenance is getting stronger and stronger.

02

Traffic contention

In fact, free short dramas are not unique to Pinduoduo, and its old rival Taobao has launched Taobao Theater and also launched a column to watch short dramas for free.

In December last year, Pinduoduo's Duoduo Video began to launch the "Duoduo Good Drama Plan", supporting high-quality short drama content through recommendation weighting, traffic sharing and other models. It is not difficult to see that Pinduoduo still seems to have no intention of making its own short dramas, let alone doing MCN business. Compared with Ali and JD.com, its current strategic deployment of short dramas is still weak.

At the end of March this year, Taobao announced the 2024 short drama support policy, including tens of millions of funds, more than 1 billion traffic, and cooperative stars.

Compared with Pinduoduo, the short videos and short dramas built by Taobao are also more mature, and it has opened up a "theater" entrance on the secondary page of the "Shopping" section, which is divided into new film recommendations, Taobao's exclusive short films based on vertical screen short dramas, in-depth commentary, and selected recommendations.

At present, most of Taobao's self-made short dramas come from the works of professional MCN companies, and some traditional MCNs have also begun to enter the field of Taobao's short videos.

According to Taobao Live, in the second half of 2023, Taobao short dramas will begin to exert force, and within half a year, 15+ brands have been cooperated, and 20+ brand short dramas have been launched, of which 10+ short dramas have been broadcast more than 10 million. In 2023, the commercial conversion rate of its 12 Double 11 customized brand cooperation dramas will reach up to 30% after the audience.

In terms of content transformation, JD.com is actually one step slower. However, judging from the current strategic deployment and effectiveness, JD.com seems to be superior.

On April 10 this year, JD.com announced that it would invest 1 billion yuan in cash and 1 billion traffic as rewards to support short videos, attracting more original creators and high-quality content institutions to settle in; A few days later, Liu Qiangdong digital people started live broadcasting, and the number of views and transactions handed over by the debut show was relatively considerable, and there was no lack of discussion and out-of-the-circle.

In terms of short drama video content, the main body of the Jingdong platform is also mainly merchants, and the content mainly revolves around the brand promotion and commodity delivery of merchants, such as Han Shu's "Dress Up with Growth", Yang Yuanqing's "Green Silk Upper Forehead Map", etc. However, around the 3.8 Festival last year, Jingdong New Department Store cooperated with Kuaishou's ancient style short drama "Donglan Snow" to customize an exclusive extra.

03

Content-based road

In the early days, with the rise of "WeChat ecological traffic tilt + low-price strategy to target WeChat long-tail online shopping users", Pinduoduo has indeed captured a lot of traffic in the sinking market.

However, in business competition, if you don't advance, you will retreat. Competition in the industry has intensified, and Pinduoduo has been trying to build its own platform's content traffic pool, but trying multiple paths has not been effective.

In 2019, Pinduoduo began to get involved in the live broadcast business. At that time, it was a boom period for live broadcast e-commerce. In November of that year, it launched the internal test live broadcast e-commerce delivery project "Duoduo Live", and cooperated with the well-known mother and child V "Little Bao Ma Ma" to start the live broadcast debut. However, the data shows that the number of viewers of this live broadcast only exceeded 100,000.

On April 12, 2020, Pinduoduo invited the well-known star Marbury to parachute into the live broadcast room of Duoduo and held his personal live broadcast debut, recommending 6 basketballs under his brand for fans. However, with the blessing of the celebrity effect, the one-hour live broadcast process only attracted 21,000 views, and only 158 pieces of goods were brought in.

To this day, Pinduoduo has still failed to create well-known head anchors such as Li Jiaqi, Xiao Yang, Luo Yonghao, etc.

The development of the live broadcast business was not satisfactory, and during the epidemic, we tried to launch "Pinxiaoquan", that is, the orders generated by users and the order information that have been evaluated can be "selectively" synchronized to Pinxiaoquan, and all friends can browse it. However, due to the rough product experience, Pinxiaoquan failed to become a climate in a controversy.

Also in 2020, Pinduoduo launched Duoduo Video in a low-key manner, replacing the previous live broadcast entrance. Until the end of 2021, Pinduoduo began to provide a homepage first-level entrance for Duoduo Video to strengthen diversion and internal testing to some users, and it will be fully launched in February 2022. From the perspective of time, Pinduoduo is also one step slower on the road to short videos.

Initially, Duoduo Video also invited some MCNs and big Vs to enter the platform, but there were not many, and the overall style was similar to Kuaishou. To apply the usual way, Pinduoduo throws a lot of money to attract users, watch videos to get money or withdraw, but like "chopping a knife", it is full of Pinduoduo routines, and a little 0.01 yuan is issued in the early stage to absorb users, and the cumulative large amount of 20 yuan withdrawal is actually better to use a lot of time or place a large number of orders.

At the same time, the content on Duoduo Video is mainly transported, and the content creation ability is insufficient, and Pinduoduo has not been able to establish a differentiated advantage.

Compared with live broadcasts, the cost of short dramas is lower, and there is no need to bear high anchor pit fees, commissions and commissions. The characteristics of short dramas are indeed beneficial to extend the user's stay time in the APP, but there is still a lot of uncertainty about whether Pinduoduo can cross the content river by touching this stone.

At present, the competition for new users between content platforms and e-commerce platforms is becoming more and more intense. Pinduoduo has solved the traffic problem with the help of content, and has not yet explored its own way.