Product analysis of Kuaishou, Douyin and Weishi!

The article conducts a comparative analysis of the short video products Kuaishou , Douyin and Weishi from four aspects: content distribution, content production, community atmosphere and monetization channels, and explores the factors behind the continued widening gap between Douyin and Kuaishou.

As the most popular content form nowadays, short videos have an industry penetration rate of over 70% in just two or three years, completing the early traffic accumulation and opening up the road to commercial monetization.

Since August 2018, in just one year, the number of monthly active users of Kuaishou and Douyin has widened, from 20 million at the beginning to 120 million today. From the perspective of product design, what differences have determined the continued widening gap between Douyin and Kuaishou?

1. Content Distribution

Content consumers and content producers have different requirements for content distribution. Content consumers hope that the content they see is what they want to see, and this type of content is mostly verified and high-quality content.

Content producers hope that their content will be seen by many people, and the quality of these contents will vary. What should short video platforms do to satisfy both the content consumers’ demands for content quality and the content producers’ demands for content distribution?

1. Discovery Page Distribution

The discovery page is the most commonly used distribution page by content consumers. Its responsibility is to provide users with personalized, high-quality content. The accuracy of its content recommendations determines the core competitiveness of the platform and the length of time that content consumers stay.

To achieve accurate recommendations on the discovery page, two requirements need to be met: one is to have high-quality content, and the other is to understand users' personalized needs. Kuaishou and Douyin both have a large amount of high-quality existing content, but they use different strategies to understand user needs.

Immersiveness of Tik Tok and Weishi

Douyin has always been unique from the beginning of content production and platform operation, and has accurately positioned itself as a trendy culture platform for music, short videos, and so Douyin’s user groups have consistent content needs.

It can accurately determine what kind of content its users need, so it can more aggressively choose immersive content display methods in content distribution, presenting content directly to users instead of asking users to choose the content type first. Coupled with its own powerful algorithm, its advantages in judging users' personalized needs in the later stage are more obvious, so that content recommendations are no longer limited to the platform's tone.

Advantages: Simple interaction, users directly consume the value of content;

Disadvantages:

1. High requirements for content quality;
2. Requires strong ability to understand user needs;
3. The tolerance rate of user retention is low;

Kuaishou waterfall flow

Kuaishou's discovery page displays multiple types of content in a waterfall flow. Users can choose the content they are interested in from multiple types. The platform judges the user's interests based on the user's selection and then makes content recommendations. The reason for doing this is that Kuaishou has richer content types and its user groups have very different characteristics. It cannot judge user needs as accurately as Douyin. The display method of distributing multiple types of content has a higher tolerance rate for user retention. The disadvantage of this is also obvious. If you choose content that suits your interests based on the content cover, you may miss out on high-quality content, which is not conducive to the distribution of high-quality content.

Advantages:

1. Display multiple content types simultaneously;
2. Quickly filter the content you are interested in;
3. High user retention tolerance rate;

Disadvantages:

1. Recommending content by cover makes it easy to miss high-quality content;
2. The recommended content types are more likely to be single;
3. Content creators need to put effort into cover design;

1. Follow Page Distribution

The core value of the distribution method based on user relationships is a sense of identity. In addition to the recognition of content, there is also recognition of relationships. I follow you because the content you produce is interesting, and I follow you because you are my friend. The distribution of follow-up pages also brings more monetization possibilities.

What determines the frequency of use of the Follow page is not the quality of the content but the amount of new content, so the content distribution strategy of the Follow page should focus more on disadvantaged content producers and encourage their creation.

Weight distribution of Tik Tok and Kuaishou

The content distribution of the Douyin and Kuaishou follow pages is related to the weight ratio of the content creation time and the content quality. The closer the time, the higher the ranking; the higher the content quality, the higher the ranking. The content recommendations in the follow page are related to the follow time and the content release time. No content recommendations will be given after the follow time or the limit time is exceeded.

Weishi subscription distribution

Weishi focuses more on content brand building in the distribution of follow-up page content, and the distribution resources are tilted from the content itself to the content brand. This distribution method is more beneficial for KOL building, but not very friendly to ordinary UGC content. Moreover, the interactive method of playing in a row consumes a lot of user attention.

1. In-city distribution

For content consumers, the geographical location of content in the same city is more important than the content quality. Content consumers will not refuse to use this function due to content quality, so ordinary UGC content can obtain traffic in same-city distribution, which plays a very important role in verifying the quality of content in the early stage.

Because the overall quality of content in the same city is not high, in terms of content display, choosing Kuaishou's waterfall flow method is more advantageous than Douyin's immersive method. Users can prioritize filtering content that they are interested in instead of directly consuming low-quality content.

Channel Distribution (Weishi)

The channel distribution feature of Weishi is to classify and distribute short videos by content type. This distribution method is conducive to users browsing specific short video content and is very beneficial to the development of PGC content with obvious characteristics. At the same time, the disadvantages are also obvious. Channel distribution inhibits the creation of other types of content and is not very friendly to UGC content with rich types.

1. Summarize

The three distribution methods each carry different responsibilities. Distribution on the discovery page is to retain users and meet their needs, distribution on the follow-up page is to retain users and create more value, and distribution in the same city is to direct traffic to ordinary UGC content and encourage content creation.

Douyin and Kuaishou have done a better job in balancing the distribution of PGC and UGC content, providing both abundant traffic for PGC content and a growing soil for UGC content.

Weishi pays more attention to the distribution and brand building of PGC content, and pays less attention to the production incentives of UGC content in its functional design. The absence of UGC content makes it difficult to create the platform's own content core, which is also very detrimental to the healthy development of the platform.

2. Content Production

In terms of content production, the three companies are similar. Their core functions are to design interesting content plug-ins, enrich content quality, reduce the difficulty of content creation, and improve content production efficiency.

1. Video Recording

• Time limit: There are two types of video shooting time for Kuaishou and Douyin, one is within 15 seconds, and the other is within 60 seconds. 15 seconds is enough to tell an interesting story without being too long; 60 seconds can tell a complete story.
• Video templates: reduce the difficulty of content creation, allowing everyone to participate in content creation and enjoy the fun; the template types of each company are different. Kuaishou Weishi’s template types cover a wide range of scenarios, while Douyin’s templates are few in number but have a strong tone.
• Material plug-ins: Interesting material plug-ins increase the fun of the content and make it easier to produce interesting content;
• Beauty and makeup: Let anyone have the confidence to produce selfie video content, lowering the threshold for content production;
• Background music: the soul of the content. A piece of music that matches the tone of the content is more important than the content itself.

1. Karaoke (Kuaishou)

The most popular type of short videos are music cover videos. Distinctive personal appearance and attractive voice are what everyone aspires to have, so they can become popular. However, karaoke does not have video content, it does not conform to the value characteristics provided by the short video content format and is difficult to be recognized by users.

1. Interaction (Micro Video)

The interactive function of Weishi is a very unique function that allows users to participate in content interaction and increase the value of the content.

However, single interactive content cannot last long. Users will get bored after consuming too much of it. The added value of the content is limited. Like material plug-ins, it needs to be updated frequently. However, the development cost of video interaction is higher than that of material plug-ins, which is not worth the cost.

1. Long picture (Kuaishou)

The content format of long pictures plus music is also easy to attract some users to consume. Compared with video content creation, this content format is easier to create, which lowers the creation threshold and meets the creation needs of some users. However, this content format consumes more attention of content consumers and can only meet the production needs of some content producers as a niche demand, and cannot adapt to the content consumption needs of the general public.

3. Community Atmosphere

The essence of community-based social products is to establish user relationships through content accumulation, and the creation of community atmosphere also revolves around content. By comparing the content IPs of Kuaishou, Douyin and Weishi, we can find that the content that is closer to life and inspires empathy will attract more users to participate in comments and likes. Such content is the key to creating a community atmosphere, and most of this content comes from UGC.

Therefore, the core criterion for measuring whether the atmosphere of a short video community is good is the UGC content productivity. Users’ willingness to produce UGC content that is in line with the platform’s tone is a manifestation of a good platform atmosphere.

How to solve the problems of UGC content production and UGC content consumption?

Make ordinary users willing to produce UGC content

• Lower the threshold for content production and make it easier to produce content;
• Excellent content distribution mechanism allows users to watch even low-quality UGC content;
• The content produced is liked, commented, followed, and forwarded by users;

Make users willing to consume ordinary UGC content and not have a bad user experience due to low content quality.

• In-city content distribution based on location relationships;
• Attention distribution based on user relationships;
• Distribution of topic content operated by the platform;

Building a distribution channel for low-quality UGC content that does not damage user experience is the key to community atmosphere operation and a breakthrough for short video APPs. Letting short video content distribution return to content value and relationship value is the core of video community atmosphere operation.

4. Monetization channels

There are many ways to monetize short video content communities. The monetization logic is also based on the production and dissemination of content, covering multiple upstream and downstream industry roles. The current mainstream ways to monetize short video content are:

• Advertising diversion: monetization through traffic exposure, such as end-to-end video advertising distribution, splash screen advertising, and advertising space on apps;
• Selling distribution traffic: Providing distribution traffic when distributing content, such as Baidu PPC, Douyin DOU+, etc.
• E-commerce monetization: Provide traffic entry for online celebrity e-commerce short videos, and guide users to purchase products;
• MCN cooperation: provide platform resources to upstream MCN organizations to achieve monetization;
• Live streaming monetization: Live streaming gifts, emoji mall, e-commerce traffic diversion, traffic sharing, etc. are all ways to monetize.

Author: Yixuan Ling

Source: Yixuanling