The content ecology and business logic of Tik Tok, Kuaishou, Weibo, and Bilibili

This article analyzes the content ecology and business logic of Douyin / Kuaishou /Weibo/Bilibili, focusing on their user portraits, platform ecology, and fan relationships.

Today we will mainly study the content ecology and business logic of the four content communities: Douyin, Kuaishou, Weibo, and Bilibili.

Departure:

01&02 Kuaishou&TikTok

Since the two are direct competitors, I will compare them together.

Douyin has 300 million daily active users and 500 million monthly active users (according to the latest official announcement from Douyin), with revenue of more than 20 billion yuan in 2018.

Kuaishou has 200 million daily active users and 400 million monthly active users (according to the latest official announcement from Kuaishou), with revenue of more than 20 billion yuan in 2018.

1. Crowd portrait

Many people may think that Douyin and Kuaishou are two completely different groups of users based on their intuitive perception, but the data shows that the user profiles of Douyin and Kuaishou are very similar.

There is not much difference between the two anymore. It is not as clear-cut as before, where Kuaishou is low and Douyin is trendy.

When a product is large enough, its previous characteristics will become less and less important, because the original niche product cannot enter the mass market, just like Beijing's sesame sauce and Chongqing's hot pot. Because the taste has become "unauthentic", it has become popular among the public.

1. Content style

Kuaishou’s is more casual and original, without the need for deliberate embellishment for the sake of refinement. The content of Tik Tok is more dramatic.

Kuaishou tends to focus on rural life and various aspects of life, while Douyin's content tends to focus on fashion, entertainment, and news.

1. Platform ecology and fan relations

Kuaishou focuses more on "people"; Douyin focuses more on "content".

What this sentence means is not that the people on Douyin are not good or the content on Kuaishou is not good, but that the two platforms have different focuses.

The functional design of the product represents the difference in values ​​between the two products:

Kuaishou's interface design and APP functions are very simple, the learning cost is very low, and the usage process is simple: you can watch videos by opening the APP, and you can post videos by clicking the upper right corner.

For ordinary users, being able to watch and send videos smoothly is enough to meet their needs.

Kuaishou is a product with sentiment. It insists on universal access and allows everyone to be seen, even if the content is not of high quality. Kuaishou is more like a community with ties, so the culture of old friends and family culture are formed in such a soil.

(The comment section of Kuaishou is very friendly, without any arguments or quarrels)

Tik Tok is a highly operational product with great ambitions and strategic insights. In order to solve the problem of efficient UGC content ecology, Douyin uses algorithms to increase top traffic, so it is easy to create top internet celebrities.

So when you open TikTok and see all kinds of exquisite young ladies, it is equivalent to defining the standard of beauty for you, but this reduces the creative desire of ordinary users.

I used to be able to shoot a 15-second video however I wanted. But now, when I see a cool template, I find that my videos are not as good as others, so it takes me several hours to shoot a 15-second short video. There is no desire to record your life.

1. Moreover, Douyin and Kuaishou are not just single products, they have their own content matrix

Douyin has Xigua long videos, Huoshan is competing with Kuaishou to expand into the lower-tier markets, and Pipixia is a collection of popular content.

Kuaishou also has Kuaikandian, which is a collection of popular content. The information content that allows you to earn gold coins by reading is comparable to Qutoutiao and Jinri Toutiao, and Kuaishou Express Edition is a collection of exquisite content. to verify the content mode.

1. Commercialization

Kuaishou’s revenue is live streaming > advertising > e-commerce.

Kuaishou’s revenue in 2018 exceeded 20 billion, most of which came from live streaming, and its commercialization was very restrained.

But in mid-July this year, Kuaishou announced that it would accelerate commercialization, saying that its commercialization revenue target for 2019 was 15 billion.

Advertisements include information flow ads, work promotion (formerly fan headlines), topic tag pages and other products.

At the e-commerce level, Kuaishou Store was launched, and the "Kuai Live" platform was internally tested. At the same time, it was connected to third-party platforms such as Youzan, Taobao, Tmall, and Wudi Zhanggui. JD.com and Pinduoduo also announced their connection to Kuaishou Store.

Douyin’s biggest sources of income are advertising > e-commerce > live streaming, with advertising accounting for the absolute majority.

In comparison, Douyin’s revenue of more than 20 billion yuan almost all came from marketing. Among them, hard advertising including information flow, splash screen and other advertising forms account for the majority, while advertising products such as challenge competitions and star maps that are combined with content also have strong premium capabilities.

In order to enrich the shopping cart gameplay, the Douyin platform has also launched official topics, expert super topic customization, Douyin live broadcast, Douyin Everything Festival and other shopping cart gameplay.

Douyin has officially launched its own store entrance on the influencer’s homepage, allowing users to enter the influencer’s personal store to shop.

03 Sina Weibo

In 2018, Weibo had approximately 462 million MAUs (monthly active users) and 200 million DAUs (daily active users), but its operating revenue was only US$1.72 billion (approximately RMB 11 billion), a year-on-year increase of 49%.

1. Platform ecology and fan relations

At present, everyone's perception of Weibo is that it is the headquarters for entertainment fans, the place where major emergencies are released, and a media app with hot news (especially gossip news) as its core.

Although it is a social media, almost no one makes friends on it.

In users' daily lives, Weibo's influence is completely incomparable to WeChat, Toutiao, Douyin, Kuaishou and the like.

Some people say that Sina Weibo is a portal website disguised as a "social media" and "information streaming media", but it is more direct than the portal websites of the past: it bypasses traditional media and allows the parties involved and self-media to directly disclose information.

1. Weibo Hot Search

The core function of Weibo is its hot search. Since it aggregates a large amount of hot content, hot search has naturally become the most powerful traffic entrance for Weibo. Of course, it is also an important way for Weibo to realize its commercial value.

Hot searches have always been a standard feature of mature social content platforms in information flow products. Tik Tok and Zhihu have also set up various hot search lists.

This is the top 50 trending searches on Weibo that were studied: 24 of them are about social and current affairs news. Entertainment 18. 6 funny ones. 2 ads.

However, Weibo hot searches have always been widely criticized. Hot topics do not require much thinking and only convey emotions, so people tend to forget them quickly within two or three days.

Various marketing accounts have manipulated the rankings, causing a lot of false information to flood the hot lists, which is extremely misleading in guiding public opinion.

However, this centralized mechanism of strong exposure does allow some ordinary people’s events to be reported and seen.

For example, regarding the missing girl in Hangzhou who was taken away before, the media had all kinds of wishful thinking and fake news in order to attract attention.

But on the other hand, it is precisely this strong attention that has allowed this case to be pursued to the end.

The participation method that is infinitely close to zero threshold and the "participation-oriented" listing mechanism make it easier for Weibo to truly reflect the public issues that people care about, and it is also easier to supervise and promote the events themselves.

So this is the irreplaceable nature of Weibo.

Weibo's core competitiveness lies in its rapid dissemination as an entry point, which has formed the line of celebrities, stars, and hot topics, and from this line has formed a surface of diverse content and diverse users, thus building a "media ecology."

It’s just about finding a balance between “being seen” and “becoming a borderless forum for public opinion”.

04 Station B

1. Platform ecology and fan relations

The popular content and mashups on Bilibili are all popular games and anime. It also focuses on high interactivity, and will have new gameplay and new features.

For example, a plot selection function was launched in July, allowing users to choose the direction of the plot.

Different characters, plots, and endings are triggered based on different choices, allowing users to participate in setting the direction of the plot and experience the fun of participating in plot interactions.

Compared with Tik Tok and Kuaishou, Bilibili is more closed and vertical, has stronger user stickiness, and has many offline two-dimensional activities.

1. Commercialization

In the first quarter of 2019, Bilibili’s financial report disclosed that it had 30 million daily active users and 101 million monthly active users. In the 2018 fiscal year, Bilibili (hereinafter referred to as "Bilibili") had total revenue of 4.13 billion yuan and a loss of more than 500 million yuan. Revenue mainly comes from four major sectors: mobile games, live streaming and value-added services, advertising, and other income.

Up hosts are the producers of high-quality content on Bilibili and an important part of Bilibili’s operations. Only by helping them monetize can we retain up hosts with high followings.

Bilibili once contacted some up-hosts to open small stores within the site, so that users can shop directly on Bilibili without jumping to external links. However, the sales volume of stores within the site is generally not high, and operating costs will also increase.

The reason may be because it breaks the purity of the content.

By cooperating with Taobao, Bilibili directs viewers to the expert store officially launched by Taobao for up-masters.

At the same time, the shopping logo is weakened. It will not appear when the user plays in full screen. The shopping logo will only appear when the user clicks on the screen. This can reduce users' aversion to commercial content.

Zhihu also has the same problem.

Zhihu started commercialization in 2017. In the first half of 2018, its advertising revenue increased by 340% compared with the same period last year, but it was criticized by many users.

Zhihu could have made some of the most-liked answers available for a fee and shared revenue with the authors; or it could have increased the proportion of advertising placements, but Zhihu did not choose this crude path to increase revenue. Zhihu is still looking for a decent way to monetize.

How to achieve commercial monetization without destroying the community atmosphere is a question that all content communities should think about.

Author: Squinting Sour Beans

Source: Sour beans