Author I Zhang Yi Report I E-commerce World
Have you found anything recently on Douyin:
Douyin has changed, and it is no longer the Douyin you were familiar with at the beginning!
Once, Douyin relied on dozens of seconds of short videos such as stuck points, long legs, and cross-dressing.
Now, the works on Douyin, which often have millions of likes, have changed their appearance, and the most significant common feature is that the duration is getting longer and longer.
How long is that? In June, a phenomenal work with more than 10 million+ likes gave the answer:
450 minutes, that's 7.5 hours!
Is the magic of short videos no longer there, causing the Douyin traffic password to change?
Or does Douyin think that now is the time to attack Aiyouteng's long video position?
7.5 hours! The longest video on Douyin has appeared!
On June 7, a blogger with an IP display in Jiangxi, @米三han, posted a new work with the title "I finished watching "Dream of Red Mansions" in one go".
At the beginning of the video, the author points out that the production took 5 months and a total of 450 minutes! Now the work has more than 12.2 million likes, and it is roughly estimated that the number of broadcasts may easily exceed 100 million!
Source: Douyin @米三汉
In terms of data, the work is definitely phenomenal. And perhaps the most interesting point of it is not how profound and subtle the author's analysis of the content of Dream of Red Mansions is.
It's precisely its terrifying 7.5 hours of duration, which is so surprising that when the editor swiped it at the time, it was hard controlled for dozens of seconds.
Especially when I finished revisiting a classic Spring Festival Gala sketch by Mr. Zhao Benshan, its progress bar still did not move, I knew that this was definitely a high-end game.
No wonder some sincere netizens posted a barrage saying "I watched it for 5 days", and some netizens questioned Douyin, "Do you call this a short video?" In the end, everyone unanimously agreed that this is "the longest video on Douyin".
After the explosion, the author worked hard and successively released many works such as "Reading "The Legend of the West Chamber" in one go", "Reading "Journey to the West" in one breath", and "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" in one breath.
And this series of videos is basically more than 6 hours long, and the number of likes ranges from hundreds of thousands to more than 1 million.
Up to now, the blogger has accumulated more than 4 million fans by relying on 40 (only public) video works, and the traffic may have already exceeded 1 billion+.
The ultra-long video became popular,
Is it a love of netizens or a rebellious mentality?
In fact, Mi Sanhan is not a blogger who makes super-long videos on Douyin.
Last year, Douyin blogger @杨利辉 released a series of works "26 hours to thoroughly understand the five dynasties and ten countries", and blogger @一小包子 also produced "226 minutes of in-depth interpretation of "Three-Body Problem"" and "240 minutes of in-depth interpretation of "White Deer Plain"" and other long videos, and the traffic data is very good.
Source: Douyin @杨利辉
The question is, in the era of mobile Internet that pays attention to short, flat, fast, timely and exciting, why can these long and long videos become popular? From the perspective of users and netizens, the e-commerce world believes that there are three reasons.
First, the super freshness created by the super contrast allows netizens to discover the "new world".
Since Douyin started in 2016 and exploded in 2017, the core factor of its fame for nearly 8 years has always been to rely on short and fast short video content to meet the needs of users to "use fragmented time to relax, entertain, and pass the time".
Therefore, in the past, "1 minute to explain a movie, but also to divide it into three episodes" is Douyin's traffic password.
However, people are aesthetically fatigued. When traffic passwords become a well-known routine across the network, the user's interest threshold will also increase.
At this time, Mi Sanhan went the opposite way and appeared in front of the public with a long video that scared people to death, which was undoubtedly full of attraction.
Second, based on the attractiveness of the first point, ultra-long videos provide netizens with an alternative emotional value.
For example, netizens who are "anti-bone" regard ultra-long videos as a new object for relieving and playing memes.
Some netizens directly launched the "challenge of watching it in one go" in the comment area under the video, and netizens across the country used this way to achieve cyber carnival.
For another example, the appearance of ultra-long videos has become a hypnotic artifact for many netizens.
Some netizens bluntly said that they slept by playing super-long videos, but it took three days to hear that Baoyu saw Daiyu for the first time.
There are also witty netizens who found that they just got up to move bricks after 7.5 hours of broadcasting.
Third, many netizens do have a learning mentality and want to gain knowledge from high-quality videos.
When an ultra-long video that has been carefully created for 5 months appears, perhaps many people's first reaction is "This author is very attentive, we can't spoil good things." ”
In fact, the e-commerce world has observed that the content creators of ultra-long videos are researchers, enthusiasts or scholars in the fields of literature and history.
Returning to the work itself, you and I must admit that compared with entertainment content such as beautiful women rubbing edges and funny plots, these ultra-long videos can be described as full of dry goods, quite in-depth and unique interpretations.
To put it bluntly, these works have a high gold content.
Since the development of the Internet, there has never been a shortage of people who want to chew on a certain aspect of knowledge through others. Therefore, when brushing up on these long videos, many people will subconsciously "like and collect first", and then watch them carefully when they have time.
Douyin has long been eyeing long videos!
As a master of algorithm technology on the Chinese Internet and even around the world, behind the popularity of ultra-long videos, it is inevitable that the Douyin platform will be fueled by the cause.
Or it can be said that Douyin has been eyeing the big cake of medium and long videos for a long time!
In 2019, Douyin issued new rules allowing creators to upload videos of 5-15 minutes; In June 2021, Douyin launched the "China Video Partner Program", spending 2 billion yuan to encourage platform creators to produce Chinese video content.
Douyin Video Partner Program Source: Douyin
In September 2023, Douyin made a strategic adjustment and renamed its medium-long video app "Qingtao" to "Douyin Selection", and the content is highly focused on "knowledge popular science content" and "high-quality content".
All the actions show that Zhang Yiming has long been aware of the limitations of short videos - Douyin can enter the giant industry with entertainment short videos, but to maintain its "dominant" position, high-quality, nutritious medium and long videos are the key.
And the first cover character of Zhang Yiming's medium-long video strategy is Li Ziqi, who has disappeared for nearly 1,000 days and is expected to return by countless people!
Around 19 years ago, Li Ziqi, who first became popular on the Internet, walked into the sight of Douyin, and then helped him become the top stream of the whole network!
Like Mi Sanhan, Li Ziqi's single work creation cycle is generally long, some can exceed 1 year, and all of them are high-quality works; The difference is that Li Ziqi is walking in the style of "China's beautiful pastoral".
Subsequently, Douyin took copyright content such as "movies and TV series" as the starting point, and directly connected with Aiyouteng. The landmark event at that time was that Douyin won the copyright of the movie "Embarrassing Mother" starring Xu Zheng, and played it on Douyin and Watermelon Video for free.
After that, Douyin focused more on the development of live e-commerce and became a new e-commerce giant in one fell swoop.
It is not until now that the phenomenal popularity of the ultra-long videos of Mi Sanhan and other authors has made us discover: Zhang Yiming has never relaxed his snatching of the medium and long video content market!
At present, Douyin's medium and long video content has become a climate, and further resources and traffic may be invested in the future.