Analysis of Himalaya audio content operations!

The author has conducted an in-depth analysis of Himalaya's audio content from the overall structure to the column settings for everyone to learn and refer to.

01 Industry Overview

According to iMedia data, the user scale of China's online audio market reached 425 million in 2018, and it is estimated that by 2020, the user scale of China's online audio market will reach 542 million.

The author believes that thanks to the explosion of knowledge payment and the way of acquiring knowledge based on audio media, more and more users are trying online audio services.

Entering 2019, although the market growth rate has gradually slowed down, the industry's performance remains strong as content becomes richer and more comprehensive.

Next, the author will briefly describe his understanding of the industry from two aspects: development momentum and development trend.

1.1 Development Momentum

The development of every industry has its driving force behind it. The emergence of the online audio market can be linked to online video and knowledge payment.

Compared with online videos, online audio is considered to have advantages such as fewer scene restrictions, stronger information attributes, lower production costs, and stronger emotional atmosphere.

Regarding the rise of the knowledge payment wave, a generally recognized driving force for its development is class anxiety, that is, users hope to alleviate the anxiety brought about by social progress by paying and screening out high-quality learning content, and gain class recognition, social resources and new knowledge.

In addition, factors such as the rise of the self-media industry, technological development, and the refinement of industrial division of labor have also simultaneously promoted the development of knowledge payment.

Paid online audio and video courses, question-and-answer rewards, and paid tools together constitute the knowledge payment industry.

1.2 Development Trend

1.2.1 Diversification of service scenarios

According to iResearch Consulting's classification, the development history of China's online audio is divided into the podcast era, the mobile era, and the full-scenario era based on listening channels and carriers.

The full-scenario era means that in addition to smartphones, online audio covers all life scenarios through hardware system upgrades and optimizations. The coverage of scenarios can effectively increase the user's online time, awaken silent users, and solve the pain point of low user activity.

Since 2017, with the development of the Internet of Things and hardware technology, major audio platforms have accelerated the pace of scene coverage. Among them,蜻蜓FM has achieved the most remarkable cross-border cooperation.

According to Phoenix Finance, as of July 2019,蜻蜓FM has built-in 37 million smart home and wearable devices, including smart speakers from brands such as Xiaomi Xiaoai Speaker, Tmall Genie, and Baidu Xiaodu, smart home products from brands such as Hisense, TCL, and Haier, and wearable devices from brands such as Apple and Huawei.

In addition,蜻蜓FM has cooperated with many car manufacturers and TSP manufacturers including Ford, Volvo, BMW, Audi and other brands, and the number of cars supporting the listening of蜻蜓FM audio content has reached 8 million.

Unlike蜻蜓FM, Himalaya, which is at the first tier of the audio market, chose to develop its own smart speakers and launched its first Xiaoya AI speaker in June 2017, connecting users and content with its own content resource reserves and AI smart recommendation technology.

In December 2018, Himalaya launched the Xiaoya Nano speaker and bundled it with a one-year Himalaya VIP membership, further integrating hardware and content.

From this, we can see that Himalaya hopes to create a closed-loop user service, achieve full-chain profitability through full-scenario actions, and explore new profit models in the audio market.

1.2.2 Market competition becomes more complex

The main forms of online audio include four categories: audio programs, audio books, audio live broadcasts, and online radio stations. The content covers multiple aspects such as the second dimension, education and training, health and wellness, history, and travel.

With the entry of more players, platform forms have diversified, the industry structure has continued to expand, and audio, video and text together have formed a content service matrix.

Figure 7 is a partial list of network audio platforms currently on the market.

• Comprehensive audio platform: Comprehensive audio platforms led by Himalaya occupy a major position in the market, but the entry barriers of comprehensive audio platforms are high and require a large amount of content support, so the possibility of new players entering is relatively small.
• Audio live streaming platform: The audio live streaming platform represented by Lizhi features live streaming interaction and voice social networking, and the platform’s main income comes from live streaming rewards. The up-and-coming Klala was launched in September 2016. Focusing on "virtual idols + voice actors + novels", it is committed to becoming "the first voice actor live interactive platform in China" and carving out a share of the audio live market segment.
• Vertical audio platform: Maoer FM, as a vertical market audio platform, was founded in 2014, focusing on two-dimensional audio of ACG-related content. It was acquired by Bilibili in November 2018.
• Audio knowledge platform: The purpose of this type of platform is to transfer knowledge. Audio is only provided as a carrier and is generally supplemented by text, video and other explanations. For example, Zhihu Live and Douban Time, which advocate fragmented learning methods, monetize knowledge. As a carrier of knowledge, audio has the characteristics of convenience. The author predicts that more professional knowledge platforms will join the audio market in the future.
• Comprehensive reading platform: The rise of the audiobook market has driven the transformation of traditional reading platforms. In order to prevent user loss, platforms such as WeChat Reading, QQ Reading, iReader, and Shuqi Novels have all added "audio reading" function options to their reading interfaces.
• Other platforms: In addition to the above traditional categories, the "audio background playback" function of Tencent Video, iQiyi Video, etc. (that is, users can choose not to watch the video and lock the screen to listen to the sound), and the "radio live broadcast" function of NetEase Cloud Music, QQ Music, etc. (that is, audio live broadcast function) are classified into other platform categories. It can be seen that with the rise of the "ear economy", more and more platforms will try audio services.

The complexity of the market means that existing market players not only need to compete with homogeneous rivals in the online audio industry, but also need to be wary of user diversion brought about by reading platforms, knowledge platforms, video platforms, etc.

As the layout in technology, marketing and other aspects becomes more mature, personalized content ecology and diversified pan-entertainment business will be important explorations for online audio platforms to meet challenges. Each platform will become more diversified in content and business based on the social attributes of users, to help the platforms consolidate their competitive position in the market.

1.2.3 Market Segmentation

According to Nielsen data, in 2018, the exposure rate of online audio programs was 47.55%, accounting for 82% of the size of Internet users, indicating that the audio industry's market share has reached a bottleneck period.

Under this circumstance, major platforms began to cultivate niche markets and explore vertical fields, such as the huge children's consumer market brought about by the two-child policy, the celebrity market under the fan economy, and the small town youth market in third- and fourth-tier cities.

02 Overview of Himalaya

As a unicorn in the audio industry, Himalaya has massive content resources and is far ahead of other comprehensive audio applications in terms of indicators such as the number of active users, penetration rate, and usage time. Its user penetration rate is 62.8%. In June 2019, the number of monthly active users was 73.192 million, far higher than other platforms.

2.1 Development History

Through analysis, it can be seen that after 2016, Himalaya began to enter the field of knowledge payment, and realized user growth and audio payment through top audio programs, festival creation, VIP subscription models and other methods.

After entering 2018, Himalaya began to layout in segmented fields and launched the "Himalaya Story APP" (now renamed Himalaya Kids) for the children's market in October 2018.

In June 2019, popular star Yi Yang Qianxi became the first spokesperson for Himalaya, and launched the paid program "52 Questions about Youth" and a series of membership gift packages. As of September 3, the number of subscriptions to Yi Yang Qianxi's program reached 154,460, ranking 40th in the overall music history ranking.

2.2 Service Content

Currently, according to statistics from Himalaya's official website, in addition to its huge online audio resources (a total of 22 columns and 305 subcategories), Himalaya also provides C-end user services such as malls and community services.

The mall has opened up multi-scenario services and achieved profitability through content bundling. The community’s attempts show that Himalaya is trying to extend users’ online time and achieve transformation based on social interaction in order to cope with the market complexity trend mentioned by the author.

Next, this article will focus on analyzing the audio content of Himalaya based on the data of 19,315 audio programs collected on September 3, 2019.

03 Analysis of Himalaya Audio Content

This article conducts a descriptive analysis based on the data collected on the Himalaya platform on September 3, 2019.

Data collection steps:

1. Taking Ximalaya's 22 audio columns as units, we captured all audio programs sorted by "most played";
2. The data captured for audio programs include: column, program name, number of programs, number of plays, number of subscriptions, and tags;
3. Finally, we obtained 19,315 audio program data items from 22 columns, of which 1,179 items were audiobooks, the largest number, and 257 items were movies and TV, the smallest number.

The author hereby solemnly declares that all the data are public data on the Himalaya platform, and are only used for writing this article and have no other purpose. All analysis in this article is only the author’s personal opinion.

In addition, since the total data of each column is inconsistent and it is impossible to determine its proportion in the Himalaya content library, this article does not compare the total number of column plays and total readings.

3.1 Column Analysis

The following four tables are data comparisons of Himalaya's various columns. Table 1 and Table 2 are statistics on the number of top 1,000 columns ranked by the number of plays and subscriptions, and Table 3 and Table 4 are comparisons of the average number of plays and average number of subscriptions. It can be seen that:

(1) In all four tables, audiobooks rank first, which shows that audiobooks are the top audio column of Himalaya.

Among the top 1,000 programs in terms of playback volume, audiobook programs accounted for 41.8%, and a survey conducted by iMedia Research in the first half of 2019 showed that 45.9% of netizens often listen to audiobooks. The two data are similar, which indirectly shows that Himalaya's user preferences are consistent with the market.

However, audiobook subscriptions account for only 27.8% of the top 1,000 list, indicating that the user stickiness and attractiveness of Himalaya audiobooks need to be improved.

It should be noted that only about 25.0% (calculated by the author based on the crawled data) of the audiobooks on the platform are paid. In the list of top 50 audiobooks by playback volume, VIP audiobooks accounted for 45.0% of the total number of audiobooks on the list, but the subscription rate (number of subscriptions/number of playbacks) was less than 0.1%.

From this, we can see that Himalaya hopes to encourage users to become loyal members of the platform by making high-quality audiobooks VIPs, but the conversion effect remains to be seen.

(2) In addition to audiobooks, columns such as children, humanities, foreign languages, crosstalk and storytelling, and education and training constitute the second tier of content;

These columns have the following characteristics: ① large market demand, ② IP or top programs, and ③ mainly focusing on imparting knowledge. They are the backbone of Himalaya.

①Children

In the top 1,000 list of playback volume, children's programs ranked second only to audiobooks, accounting for 14.8%. Among them, "Mi Xiaoquan's School Diary", "Goodnight Mom's Bedtime Story", "【Yi Xiu Ge】Children's Proverb Stories", "Baby Bus·Bedtime Stories | Children Aged 4-7" and others have been played over 100 million times.

It can be seen that the children's column has emerged with top anchors such as Mi Xiaoquan, Yixiuge, and BabyBus, and its high-quality programs also continue to attract traffic to the column.

In terms of average playback numbers, children's programs are second only to audiobooks, with the average playback number of a single program exceeding 20 million. This shows that the consumption potential of the children's market brought about by the two-child policy cannot be ignored. Data shows that in 2020, China will welcome 3 million more newborns than expected.

Apparently, Himalaya is not very satisfied with the data of this column. In an interview, it stated that children's audio has not been well developed on the Himalaya APP.

In order to better develop this vertical field, Himalaya developed an APP in October 2018 with a simple interface that meets the needs of the children's market.

②Humanities

The humanities column has gathered many KOLs, such as: Dong Qing, Gao Xiaosong, Ten Points Reading, Readers, etc.

In the top 10 list of broadcast volume, humanities columns took 3 seats, namely "Xiao Shuo 2018", "Guanfu Dudu" and "Shangguan Wenlu Reading Club", but in the top 1000 list of broadcast volume, they only accounted for 5.6%, indicating that the humanities columns already have exclusive head brands, but lack mid-level brands, which affects the overall effect of the column.

However, in terms of the top 1,000 subscription lists and the average number of subscriptions, the humanities column jumped to second place, indicating that Himalaya has a considerable number of user groups willing to continuously listen to the humanities column.

The column has a user market and appeal, but operations may need to think about how to build mid-level brands and amplify the voice of the humanities column when there are limited top brands.

③ Foreign Language

The average number of subscriptions for foreign languages ​​ranks fourth, but the average number of views ranks lower. In addition, there are only 24 and 79 programs in the top 1,000 in terms of playback and subscription numbers, respectively. Among them, the best-received program, "Spoken English Practice Everyday", has only been played 190 million times since its launch in 2014, with an average daily playback of less than 100,000.

This shows that the user group has a demand for learning English, but Himalaya currently lacks top foreign language programs to attract traffic, and users find it difficult to find high-quality foreign language programs among the complex content.

It is worth mentioning that Himalaya launched the official account "Himalaya Foreign Languages" (now renamed "Himalaya Foreign Languages ​​FM") in 2017 and began to delve into the foreign language learning market.

However, data from Xinbang shows that the average number of article readings for this public account is only 3,284, and the estimated number of active followers is 56,916, which is far from the top public accounts for foreign language learning. It can be said that this public account has failed to help Himalaya attract people in this vertical field.

④ Crosstalk and storytelling

The crosstalk and storytelling column has gained a certain amount of public attention thanks to its top figures Shan Tianfang (deceased), Guo Degang and Deyun Club.

It is worth mentioning that among the top 1,000 list of playback volume, there are 86 crosstalk and storytelling programs on the list, of which 82 are these two leading programs, which clearly demonstrates their user appeal.

To this end, in 2018, Himalaya also cooperated with Guo Degang to create an IP program - "Guo Lun".

However, as other comprehensive audio platforms introduced crosstalk masters, Himalaya's advantage in crosstalk and storytelling content weakened.

The entry threshold for crosstalk and storytelling is high, and there are a limited number of famous crosstalk masters in the market. Therefore, the column cannot be satisfied with simply moving content, but should be characterized and IP-based through methods such as "creating stars" and "creating festivals."

⑤Education and training

In 2016, Himalaya started to move onto the fast track of knowledge payment with the program "Speak Well". As the "founder", the education and training column covers a wide range of areas, including 22 sub-columns such as entrepreneurship, law, management, and marketing, and has gathered celebrities such as Cai Kangyong, Ma Dong, and Li Yinhe.

Let’s compare the Himalaya IP program “Kangyong Tsai’s 201 Emotional Intelligence Lessons” and the paid course on the Get APP “Wu Zhihong’s Psychology Class”.

"Tsai Kangyong's 201 Emotional Intelligence Classes" was launched in November 2017, with a total of 201 lessons, an original price of 198 yuan, a group price of 99 yuan, and 1.277 million subscriptions; while "Wu Zhihong's Psychology Class" was launched in July 2017, with a total of 333 lessons, a price of 199 yuan, and 263,000 subscriptions, which is 20.6% of Tsai Kangyong's classes.

However, according to data from Bidachun Consulting, the average monthly active users of Himalaya APP in the first quarter of 2018 was 75.529 million, while the average monthly active users of Dedao APP was 3.730 million, less than 5% of Himalaya.

In addition, apart from this IP program, the average number of subscriptions for Himalaya's education and training column paid programs is only 245,000. Therefore, it can be seen that the education and training column needs to further tap into the paying group from the massive number of users through high-quality programs.

The concept of paying for education makes users tend to pay for authoritative and exclusive courses. The author believes that this column is an important area for knowledge monetization. Currently, the user data performance of this column in Himalaya is average, and the content of paid programs is partially homogenized. It should cultivate user payment habits by creating high-quality PGC and user incentive systems.

(3) Music, emotional life, entertainment, and headlines constitute the third echelon, which meets universal public needs and increases user activity.

The column is mainly free programs. Except for the entertainment section which currently has no paid programs, music, emotional life, and headlines are all partially paid.

① Music

The column is mainly free programs, with a payment rate of 8%. The current paid programs mainly focus on teaching professional music knowledge, such as "Tian Yimiao: Is Classical Music Difficult?" and "Learn to Sing with Gong Linna".

It is worth mentioning that the column "Yi Yang Qianxi: 52 Questions about Youth" created in June 2019 began to build celebrity economy and enter the fan market. It can be speculated that the music column will expand from professional knowledge and music sharing to younger star programs, but whether star programs can bring higher returns remains to be tried and tested.

②Emotional life

The average playback volume of the emotional column is 4.92 million, ranking 8th, which shows that the column has a certain audience.

A word frequency analysis was conducted on the program name and labels of this column, and the top ten hot words were healing, psychology, love, emotion, beautiful writing, romance, marriage, prose, women, and life. Therefore, it can be inferred that married women are the core audience of this column, and in-depth exploration of the needs of this group will help increase the activity of the column.

③Entertainment

As the name suggests, this column is mainly for entertaining the public. Its main purpose is to provide entertainment information, occupy users' fragmented time and increase user stickiness.

The user usage scenario is: User A is bored in his spare time and does not want to bother listening to knowledge programs, so he opens the Himalaya APP and clicks on "Jiao Zi Lai Le". From then on, he fell in love with this funny program and would open it to listen to it when he has nothing to do.

Therefore, although the column has no IP programs to promote it vigorously, and it is difficult to find entertainment programs in the top 1,000 program list, the column's average playback number is as high as 12.268 million, ranking fourth.

④ Headlines

The full name of the headline column is Headline News, which includes programs such as Fresh Express, Nandu Express, News Breakfast, News Express, and Rehu Zhihu. Its main purpose is to provide real-time information and cultivate the habit of "if users want to know the latest news, open Himalaya to listen to the headlines" to increase the opening rate of the APP.

The column's current paid programs mainly include explanations of national knowledge such as "Old Cannon Cui Ge Talks about America", ball knowledge such as "Huang Jianxiang: Xiang Talks about the World Cup", and sports lottery knowledge such as "Bundesliga Sports Lottery Practice". The number of program plays is not high, and I guess Himalaya does not expect to earn user fees through this column.

(4) Columns such as IT technology, the second dimension, radio dramas, fashion and lifestyle, business and finance, film and television, radio, health and wellness, automobiles, history and travel, and opera clearly constitute the fourth echelon of content, which can also be considered the long-tail demand echelon.

The establishment of these columns will help Himalaya become the "Taobao of the audio industry", meet the long-tail needs of users, and tap into the profit points of this vertical field. Due to space constraints, this article does not review each column.

3.2 Analysis and Summary

Through analysis, the author divides the audio content of Himalaya APP into 4 echelons:

The first tier: As a leading audio column, audiobooks improve user loyalty by making exclusive copyrighted content VIP.

The second echelon: Children, humanities, foreign languages, crosstalk, education and training and other columns are important areas for knowledge payment. They cultivate users' payment habits by creating IP programs, launching exclusive apps, and operating exclusive public accounts.

The third echelon: The main purpose of columns such as music, emotional life, entertainment, and headlines is to meet universal public needs, increase user activity, and occupy users' fragmented time.

The fourth echelon: The fourth echelon of audio content is used to meet the long-tail needs of users and create a large and comprehensive audio platform.

The above four echelons are indispensable, but their operational focuses are different. Interestingly, in terms of column subscription rates, the fourth tier has the highest subscription rate. On the contrary, the subscription rate for audiobooks is only 0.6%, but the overall subscription rate is only 1.4%.

On the one hand, Himalaya needs to strengthen the quality control of audio programs, conduct special analysis on programs with high playback volume but subscription rates close to 0, and rectify or remove unqualified audio programs; on the other hand, it should actively guide users to subscribe and give full play to the stickiness of the subscription function.

In general, Himalaya’s audio content is rich and diverse, but with such a rich variety of categories, we need to think about how to allocate resources and cultivate each column to ensure adequate exposure of high-quality content.

In addition, Himalaya has an advantage in the number of users, but how to differentiate its content from other comprehensive audio platforms based on intensive columns and ensure that users do not leave is also an urgent problem to be solved.

Insufficient articles

This article only conducts a simple analysis based on some of the content data of Himalaya, and gives some targeted opinions on its columns and audio content. The opinions need to be further verified.

In actual decision-making, only by combining user portraits, user behaviors, user feedback and competitor behaviors can real content optimization suggestions be given. That is, the user's listening history and user behavior on different devices and in different scenarios are recorded based on the user ID, and intelligent recommendations are made based on massive content. This ensures that high user activity is maintained through deep customization of user needs, and ensures full exposure of high-quality content.

Author: Simao

Source: Bu Er's Operation Notes" (ID: gh_f4c7ec729097)