NetEase's secret to creating popular content!

How did NetEase achieve tens of millions of screen views through content upgrades?

What other forms and ways of playing H5 may create hot-selling products?

Is it too late to do new media now?

1. You may not understand the hot items at all

"Many people have a misunderstanding about hot products, thinking that 100,000+ means a hot product, but that's not the case." When talking about the concept of hot products, Wen Chutao believes that a hot product refers to content that is actively shared and machine-distributed in large quantities by users or platforms over a period of time.

For articles in public accounts, the majority of the reading volume of popular articles should come from "unfollowed users" rather than public account conversations. The distribution of article reading sources is one of the criteria for judging whether an article is a hit.

If an account has an average reading volume of around 10,000 and writes an article with a reading volume of 100,000+, then it must be a hit.

But if a big account with an average readership of 180,000+ writes an article with a readership of 100,000, then it would be a flop.

Therefore, the concept that “10w+ means a hit” is not valid.

"There is another misunderstanding about hot-selling products, which is that they are equal to going viral. In fact, going viral does not equal hot-selling products, and hot-selling products do not necessarily go viral."

WeChat is a social network among acquaintances, and swiping the Moments may be a small-scale circle of communication.

For example, "Today is the beginning of the dog days, I send you good luck and blessings, whoever opens it will be happy! 》 may be all over the circle of friends of a retired elderly person, and "Make your baby fall in love with English in 7 days, listen to the English enlightenment course for free at 398 yuan" may be all over the circle of friends of a mother. But they're clearly not blockbusters.

Some popular products will not be flooded in the circle of friends.

For example, the NetEase News H5 "One-minute Tour of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge" had a traffic of over 100 million, making it the H5 with the highest traffic on NetEase in 2018.

This H5 did not go viral in the circle of friends of those born after 1990. Instead, many parents and middle-aged people forwarded it to their friends or shared it in WeChat groups, gaining a lot of exposure with a dissemination cycle of up to 3 months.

This kind of point-to-point WeChat communication does not rely on the circle of friends and can also produce big hits.

2. To create a hit product, you must also choose the right direction

According to the value of the content, hot products can be divided into pure traffic hot products and brand content hot products .

Some accounts are good at taking advantage of hot topics and negative emotions to produce pure traffic hits. For example, articles such as "Serving the country for 40 years is not as good as AB being in a daze for one day", "A 17-year-old Shanghai boy decided to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge", "Agents are scrambling for housing resources, and drug trafficking doesn't make money as fast as this".

Most of this type of content is in consumer hotspots, has strong timeliness, weak content differentiation, and cannot bring about content reputation. It is difficult to bring added value to the brand when planning for commercialization.

Branded content hits are different. High-quality and popular content with a sense of exclusivity can more easily increase users' favorability towards the official account. Make the official account form its own IP and increase the attention conversion rate.

At the same time, this type of popular content has no time limit, is replicable, and can bring long-tail value.

GQ Lab entered the public eye with a commercial hit article titled "That Night, He Hurt Him." Afterwards, he copied the successful experiences one after another and gradually formed his own style.

Xin Shi Xiang also successfully created its own benchmark case for marketing planning with "Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou".

Therefore, to create a hit product, you must choose the right direction. The traffic obtained simply by riding on hot topics may not be valuable and may also be accompanied by risks. A blacksmith must have strong tools himself; it is better to create your own hot spots than to chase them.

3. No matter how many channels you invest in, it won’t be a hit

Some people may think that NetEase Dada’s H5 became a hit by relying on multiple placements and leveraging brand power. Actually, it is not.

It is true that channels are the detonating point for hit products. Choosing appropriate channels for promotion can make the detonating effect come earlier and the screen-sweeping momentum come faster.

After NetEase Dada's H5 is completed, it is usually shared on social networks and Moments at around 5 or 6 pm, and then posted on the NetEase News client the next day to expand the channel's dissemination range.

But for content to really go viral, it depends on the audience sharing it on their own initiative. Money can buy a few KOLs to repost, but it can’t buy a million people to share.

A true hit product has the attribute of sweeping the screen. For example, after NetEase Dada’s H5 “Unlock Your Ode to Joy Character” was launched, it attracted more than 20 million PVs on WeChat on the same day without being released on any platform channel.

Therefore, channels are only auxiliary tools for hot-selling products to go viral, rather than the decisive factors. No matter how many channels you invest in, it cannot guarantee that a product will go viral. If you want to create a hit, you should focus on creating high-quality content that is worth spreading.

4. What kind of content can impress users

In order to create a hit product that goes viral, you must truly understand your users and hit their forwarding points. Wen Chutao summarized three conditions for impressing users: social currency, mobilizing emotions, and exceeding expectations.

1_Social Currency

Social currency is a kind of capital for showing off. It can provide topics for conversation and help users increase their sense of presence.

For example, after taking the test H5 "Test your philosophical temperament", a personality analysis poster will be generated.

For users, the desire to understand themselves is irresistible, and the posters generated by the test can serve as a representation of their own personality.

The keywords "self-control", "rationality" and "calmness" are all used to beautify the user's image. After sharing, the user can show a perfect personality in the circle of friends.

2_ Mobilize emotions

When it comes to emotions, many people divide them into positive emotions and negative emotions . But Jonah Berger, the "Iron Professor" in the marketing industry, classified emotions into high-arousal emotions and low-arousal emotions in his book Contagious.

High arousal emotions include surprise, excitement, anger, anxiety, etc., which can easily mobilize user behavior. Low arousal emotions include sadness, satisfaction, etc. After watching, users just accept it and have no desire to take action.

Therefore, high arousal emotions are conducive to sharing, while low arousal emotions hinder sharing.

For example, H5 "She died after struggling for 48 hours and no one knew" tells the story of a little girl whose family was killed by a monster while she was being hunted crazily by humans. It made users empathize, feel angry, and actively share and forward the article, ultimately resulting in more than 20 million reads.

3_Exceeding expectations

User expectations are the demands that need to be met after users open the content.

When making H5, it is difficult for the planning team to predict the uncertain behavior of users, so they have to "leave blank space", break the established rules, and satisfy the user's fantasies.

Take "Sleeping Position Competition" as an example. In the early stages of planning, the team set up 60 decorative items, but only intended to provide users with 24 sleeping positions.

This is a fatal mistake. When users see the theme, they expect that this is an H5 where they can compete in sleeping positions, but the limited sleeping position options cannot satisfy every user's goal of restoring their real sleeping position.

Therefore, when designing, the team identified sleeping posture as the core element, and used skeletal animation to break through the limitations of options, allowing joints to move like real people and achieving 100% customization.

In addition, users will spend time writing forwarding messages when forwarding to their friends, so the Dada team deliberately adds a personalized text related to sleeping position to the generated picture, saving users time to think, providing convenience for users to forward messages, and bringing surprises.

Social currency gives users reasons to share, the mobilization of emotions makes users motivated to share, and exceeding expectations brings a sense of surprise, making sharing necessary.

If the content meets these three conditions, users have no reason not to share it.

5. Commercial advantages of H5

Popular H5 can bring a lot of exposure to the brand.

The H5 "Your New Year's Flag" co-produced by NetEase Dada and Happy Valley received a total of 33 million traffic after its launch.

The brand exposure of this H5 was mainly on the poster generation page. After the H5 was successfully screened, it also brought a lot of brand exposure to Happy Valley.

H5 can also achieve brand and effect integration.

NetEase Kaola's Julia series H5 "On the first day of work, NetEase dad taught me how to be a good person" received over 5 million page views within three days of its launch, converting into sales of 4 million.

"Pig Brain Triggers NetEase's Major Crisis PR" from NetEase Koala's Pig Girl series had millions of UVs, and sales from H5 alone amounted to 6.9 million yuan.

This H5 took 10 days from idea to launch, and the production cost was less than 200,000 yuan.

6. Create hot topics that hit hard on human nature

Pei Xueke, editor-in-chief of NetEase Dada, summarized five creative ideas for popular H5 topics: scale, circle, fun, usefulness, and sense of identity.

1_Covered population size

The scale of the population covered by a topic refers to the potential target audience of the topic. If the topic can cover 10 million people, the possibility of PV reaching 1 million is higher.

On the contrary, if the topic can only cover 100,000 people, then it is impossible to get 1 million PVs.

A common method to expand the coverage of topics is to use hot topics, IP addresses, and hot words.

For example, Dada’s “Sliding Towards Childhood” H5, in the early stages of planning, considered making a video game-themed H5 that would resonate with the memories of boys, but later considered that video games would resonate mainly with boys, and men’s desire to share in their circle of friends is inherently weak, so the H5 was unlikely to become a hit.

So the team changed the topic selection direction to childhood anime memories that have a wider audience. By borrowing big IPs such as "Slam Dunk", "Doraemon", "Sailor Moon" and "Detective Conan", it evoked many childhood memories of the post-80s and post-90s.

2_Understanding the circle of communication

Whether a plan can go viral does not depend on how many users the communication center can spread it to, but on whether the first batch of target users are willing to spread the message to the next batch of users after receiving it. Circle communication is the most effective way to break through this barrier.

Circles can be established based on region, age, industry, interests, etc. A narrow content circle will lead to limited dissemination.

But even so, once interest-based content has a large enough fan base and the ability to spread beyond circles, it will also produce explosive content in that circle.

Each of Dada’s popular H5s will target a specific circle at the beginning of planning.

For example, "The Breeding Manual" focuses on young female users born in the 1990s and 2000s who like cute things and have a girlish heart.

In order to impress this circle, many cute words are used in the copy, such as "little jio jio", "fried hair", etc. In terms of design, food with cute round eyes is used to create a fresh and cute visual atmosphere.

After this H5 went viral, data review found that young women born in the 1990s and 2000s indeed accounted for the highest proportion, which shows that the final circle group was exactly the same as the team's pre-conceived idea.

Only by breaking one circle can you break through other circles, and the breakthrough of the circle is the beginning of screen-sweeping.

3_Interesting

Interesting can be defined as a surprise: something the user thinks you should be like, but you are not.

For the same topic, finding an entry point that is different or contrary to conventional thinking will achieve unexpected results. In addition, the collision and combination of elements from different fields and the defamiliarization of familiar things are also common methods to make works novel.

For example, Dada’s H5 “A Brief History of the Two Sessions in a Small Space” connects the two unrelated things, the Two Sessions and stamps.

After screening and combination, the H5 is set so that when you click on the screen, the characters or background in the stamps will move with expressions.

NetEase News publishes an annual issue of "Entertainment Circle Picture Scroll 2018", which uses a humorous "picture book" format to review major entertainment circle events each year. Although it talks about major celebrity events in the modern entertainment circle, its scenes, character costumes and actions are all in ancient style.

The collision and fusion of modern and ancient elements creates imaginative fun. In addition, events in the entertainment industry themselves are hot topics, so it is not surprising that they became a hot topic on social networks.

4_ Useful

H5 can convey hot social topics in a novel form. When this valuable information is presented in the form of H5, users can obtain the information themselves and also want to share the information with their friends.

H5 "Missing Youth Zhang Yingying" uses the form of a comic strip, combined with text and parallax animation, to make the news "move" and truly restore the whole story of Zhang Yingying's disappearance.

This H5 not only helped users gain a deeper understanding of the Zhang Yingying case, but also enabled them to gain a sense of value in sharing useful information, ultimately achieving good traffic results.

5_Find a sense of identity

Resonance is an accurate insight into people's hearts. People tend to forward things that are highly relevant to themselves. When your H5 can make users exclaim "I'm talking about me!" "I've experienced it too!", it is successful.

These exclamations have one thing in common, which is "identification".

The emotion of reminiscence is one of the easiest emotions to resonate with, and its core is "nostalgia".

For example, "Slip into Childhood" and "Commemorating the 20th Anniversary of Harry Potter" both use familiar IP images, sound effects, and interactive links to recreate the situations that touched people at the time with these works, evoking nostalgia and thus triggering a wave of sentimentality.

7. Three creative sources for hot topics

Being creative may not necessarily go viral, but content without any creativity will definitely not go viral.

Teacher Pei Xueke shared the three sources of creativity of the DaDa team: material accumulation, critical thinking, and rapid iteration.

1_Material accumulation

American advertising master James Webb Young said in "How to Generate Creativity": Creativity is entirely a recombination of various elements. Creativity in advertising is often the result of people with "general knowledge" of life and events making new combinations of "specific knowledge" from products.

This creative approach used in advertising is also applicable to H5.

This does not mean that creativity is just a simple patchwork of various elements or a simple addition, but rather that new ways of playing are added on the basis of existing elements to make new breakthroughs.

For example, Dada’s H5 “Commemorating the 20th Anniversary of Harry Potter” has a senior “Harry Potter fan” in the team who is very familiar with the plot of “Harry Potter”, so the plot can be highly restored in details.

Based on the original work, this H5 adds some creative interactive forms, such as the "Golden Snitch" flying around in the book, disrupting the order of the text; after entering the magic classroom, users can draw "magic spells".

If there is no planner in the team who is very familiar with "Harry Potter", this H5 may not be able to quickly awaken users' memories.

Creativity is the recombination of elements. The more elements accumulated in your mind and the more familiar you are with the information, the more combinations and ways of playing you can think of.

2_Negation and self-denial

The negation of negation is one of the basic laws of dialectical materialism. When it comes to conceiving an H5 marketing plan, this law means that you should be skeptical of your own ideas.

After creators come up with an idea, they can easily become self-satisfied and think that their idea is the best, but often after careful consideration they find that there are still many shortcomings.

Idea creators may be trapped by their own perceptions and past experiences. So everyone can continue to improve their creativity while denying it.

For example, when the Dada team was planning "Hero", they first rejected two versions of the story content internally. During the third brainstorming session, they had differences in the interactive gameplay. To be on the safe side for the fourth version, the Dada team approached a colleague from a neighboring group to present the idea, but there was a misunderstanding between the two sides and the idea was aborted.

Finally, after several group discussions, the current plot and interactive effects of "Hero" were determined. After its launch, "Hero" received high praise from the industry and was awarded the title of "blockbuster-level H5".

3_ Rapid iteration

If you want to try some new gameplay and themes, but there are no cases to verify their feasibility, you can develop a lightweight H5 to verify the market.

By using the time it takes to develop a heavyweight H5 to develop several lightweight H5s, we can gain more experience and lessons while keeping the cost the same, avoid minefields, and focus on the right things.

For example, Dada’s first test-type hit H5 “Unlock Your Ode to Joy Personality” was a personality test based on the popular TV series “Ode to Joy” at the time.

Because the popularity of the popular TV series "Ode to Joy" was time-limited, it was impossible to give the team a month to make a high-cost, heavyweight H5.

The planning team finally chose a simple gameplay method of swiping up on a long image and clicking to select, in order to shorten the design and front-end execution time, and it was finally completed in 2 weeks.

After only half a day online, "Unlock Your Ode to Joy Character" received tens of millions of PVs.

The Dada team also discovered that to a certain extent, screen-sweeping has little to do with the size and weight of the content. As long as the creative and communication points in the H5 can impress users, the "short, flat and fast" lightweight H5 can also be popular.

Some people believe that "H5 screen-sweeping is dead" and there will be no more H5 screen-sweeping after the Spring Festival this year. But Dada's "Breeding Manual" severely refutes this statement.

In fact, as long as the social communication environment represented by WeChat exists, H5 will not disappear. Therefore, planners must always be sensitive to industry trends, constantly delve into content and innovate forms, in order to remain invincible.

Related reading:

1. Marketing Promotion: Where did the idea for NetEase’s hit H5 come from?

2. NetEase’s secret to making popular products: the ability to continuously create popular products

Author: DaDaer

Source: NetEase H5