The past, present and future of private domain traffic!

one

The concept of private domain traffic should come from Taobao players.

Please note the following picture

Taobao now uses content to attract traffic, and almost all of the content is related to your daily behavior (what you have viewed, what you have collected, what you have put in the shopping cart, what you have bought and sold), and all of this content is based on personalized recommendations.

Considering that these things are related to my privacy, I have mosaiced them all. At the same time, I also use this method to tell you where the personalized recommendation content module is - yes, Taobao even does not let go of the search bar.

Since the platform makes recommendations based on user personalization, it is difficult for third-party players (such as sellers, or Taobao influencers who earn commissions by creating content) to play a decisive role in traffic distribution. This is a bit like relying on luck for your livelihood.

Taobao calls this area public domain traffic. Correspondingly, there is a private domain traffic, which is in that "Weitao".

Weitao is a following system. For example, if you follow a merchant or an influencer, you can see the information they push when you enter Weitao. In Weitao, the platform rarely interferes with traffic - advertisements such as "Who Else Can You Follow" will be occasionally inserted into the information flow - in other words, third-party players can control this traffic.

This is called private domain traffic.

If we draw a strong and weak line between the platform's intervention in traffic, the more dependent it is on the platform, the more public it is, and the less dependent it is on the platform, the more private it is.

two

In fact, WeChat official accounts are also private domain traffic.

The traffic of public accounts mainly comes from two sources: direct push and user behavior.

The cornerstone of direct push lies in the number of fans. The more fans you have, the greater the number of opens. And fans are gained by your content management (regardless of whether your content is original or plagiarized). User behaviors include forwarding, watching, etc. And whether they forward and read it depends on your content management. It is difficult for users to take any action on content they are not interested in.

In the entire WeChat official account ecosystem, the platform intervenes in traffic (such as the selections in "Look", "Search", etc.), but it is relatively weak. Basically, WeChat official, in jargon, has extremely weak agenda-setting capabilities.

It is very rare to find such a Lao Zhuang gameplay in which the platform has such little interference in traffic among the famous Chinese Internet platforms. This is not entirely a value or ethical issue on the part of the operator, but is largely caused by the product form. The premise (necessary condition) of Lao Zhuang's gameplay is that the social chain must be extremely obvious.

Therefore, Weibo, which is called a social media, should also follow this pattern. But the reality is that Weibo has a strong ability to set the agenda. The hot search is manually operated, and some inexplicable content suddenly pops up in the user's timeline. It is no secret that if you don't pay the Weibo toll, you will be demoted. For a platform with a strong social chain, the more the operator intervenes in the traffic, the more disadvantageous it is for it. Weibo has really been like this in the past two years. . . (I’d like to discuss Weibo at length sometime. Its market value surpassed Twitter’s two years ago, and now it’s about one-third of the size of a human.)

All content clients, whether Toutiao or Tencent News, are using the public domain to crush the private domain, although they also have a set of attention systems. But without the social chain, it is impossible for the private domain to crush the public domain.

The biggest advantage of private domain traffic is that once you have it, the marketing cost will be extremely low. Fans on strong private platforms are your fans, but fans on strong public platforms are not your fans.

This is also quite obvious on TikTok - similarly, TikTok's social chain is not strong.

three

From the perspective of those who want to gain traffic, private traffic such as public accounts also has its disadvantages.

The first is that it takes a long time to cultivate a big account with a certain number of real fans rather than machine zombie fans - even if you just plagiarize every day - it takes a certain amount of time. When the economy is good, it is possible for machine zombie fans to fool ignorant clients into making some CPM-based placements. However, in the eyes of clients who require actual conversions when the economy is bad, machine zombie fans are meaningless.

In addition, WeChat officials are increasingly cracking down on plagiarism, and plagiarism is obviously more complicated than plagiarism and requires higher standards from operators.

The second is that everything will be wiped out once it is destroyed. From a certain perspective, the official account is a centralized traffic mountain. The official punishment measures of WeChat are becoming increasingly severe. If your account is lost accidentally, this mountain will no longer exist.

Finally, here comes the most crucial point: the prerequisite for communication between the official account and fans is that the latter initiates it. If fans do not leave comments on articles or send messages, it will be difficult for the official account to proactively communicate with fans. The only opportunity for communication is the daily update.

Those who want to gain traffic have turned their attention to personal WeChat accounts.

A personal WeChat account is also a traffic node, and Moments and groups are its traffic bases. Moreover, personal WeChat accounts do not have the three weaknesses of public accounts.

Generally, those who gain traffic have tens of thousands of personal WeChat accounts. If we calculate the number of friends in each account's address book to be 5,000, the total number is also quite large. The impact of a single personal account being bombed (that is, banned) on the overall situation is minimal.

Four

A relatively simple and crude approach is to use plug-ins to quickly boost the popularity of a personal WeChat account. For the main things that plug-ins can do, you can refer to the 36Kr article mentioned at the beginning of this article.

Once a personal WeChat account is established, the next tactic will begin: group control. Those who steal traffic have a large number of personal WeChat accounts and WeChat groups (for example, 1,000 groups of 500 people each), and use software to operate these 1,000 groups at the same time.

WeChat officials noticed this routine and decided to take action against it. The targets of the crackdown are mainly personal WeChat accounts that are rapidly fattened up using plug-ins. That’s why there is a rumor that 30 million WeChat accounts were destroyed overnight.

The 36Kr article even mentioned that WeChat banned 200 million personal WeChat accounts in the Philippines in one go - this number really surprised me.

This brings up the second weakness of WeChat official accounts: once destroyed, everything will be reset to zero. WeChat is not targeting a specific individual WeChat account, but a whole set of plug-in behaviors.

From the current perspective, under the severe crackdown by WeChat, I am afraid that this simple and crude method of fattening up personal WeChat accounts will be on the decline.

But this does not mean that private domain traffic is doomed.

There are other ways for those who want to gain traffic to develop a personal WeChat account, but the process will be slower.

five

There is a certain cost difference between platforms that mainly rely on private domain traffic (let’s call them private domain platforms, such as WeChat) and platforms that mainly rely on public domain traffic (let’s call them public domain platforms, such as Douyin). Of course, as time goes by, this cost difference becomes smaller and smaller.

The reason for the cost difference is that the platforms are at different stages of development. WeChat is an older platform, and the basic population growth dividend has ended, making it more difficult to gain traffic. In the past two years, the number of users on the Douyin platform continued to grow rapidly, so it was relatively easy to obtain traffic from Douyin.

Although maintaining a Douyin account seems to involve shooting videos and is more labor-intensive than writing, the cost is actually not high. I saw a video went viral, so I just copied it. There was no need to rack my brains to come up with the cost. It is hard to say whether this practice of performing according to an established routine is plagiarism or not.

Although there is significance in maintaining an account on Douyin, since Douyin is a strong public domain platform, its significance is far less than maintaining an account on WeChat. If you have a Douyin account with a million followers, but the platform does not recommend your content, the number of likes and comments reflecting the account's influence will be terrible. ——On the black market, the transfer prices of a Douyin account and a WeChat official account with the same number of fans are vastly different. The price of adding followers to a Douyin account and adding followers to a public account is very different.

Here we can see the cross-platform flow of traffic: Is it possible to obtain a certain number of fans through the Douyin account and transfer them to the WeChat platform?

The answer is yes. Douyin is indeed banning Douyin accounts from publishing on WeChat, but every policy has its countermeasures, and people will always come up with various ways to divert traffic to WeChat. It used to be a WeChat official account, and now it is a WeChat personal account.

Let's take a step back and say, if Douyin really doesn't work, can Kuaishou do the job? The dividends of Douyin and Kuaishou are gone. Is there a next platform?

From this perspective, strong public domain platforms are the traffic entrances, which ultimately direct traffic to strong private domain platforms, and strong private domain platforms are the key operational hubs. As for traffic entrances, just go where traffic is easy and cheap to obtain. Strong public domain platforms are really not scarce, and it seems that the only strong private domain platform is WeChat.

Many years ago, in various BBS, users would happily interact with each other by saying “Switch to QQ?”, which was essentially a personal communication (even if it was just for hooking up), but now it’s “Add WeChat?”, which is essentially the beginning of traffic operation.

six

It takes longer to develop a personal WeChat account, which means the cost will be higher. But this will eventually be reflected in the "price". Party A always has the need to promote sales. It used to spend 10,000 yuan, but now it spends 20,000 to 30,000 yuan. This is not a life-threatening problem. The price of the entire private domain traffic will indeed be raised, but as long as it is cheaper than conventional promotion methods (such as celebrity endorsements, such as head video advertising), it will be fine.

Most of the private domain traffic of personal WeChat accounts comes from real users, so one of its strong selling points is: authenticity is the key (those who can relate to this will follow suit).

So, this question arises: Who would become the target of group control when they have nothing to do after having a full meal?

Maybe I won’t – I don’t even have a large group of more than 100 people. Maybe you don't, but there are a lot of people in this world who do.

Think about the excitement of Pinduoduo helping to cut down the price.

WeChat has previously announced a figure that the average number of friends per user is 150.

What does it mean to have only 150 people in the address book?

I tried. Because my old account was blocked and I had to start from scratch with a new one, I went through several days when my address book only had one or two hundred people.

The silence makes you uneasy.

seven

The following video is for those who are interested.

Personally, I feel that it is difficult to use any powerful method to deal with this kind of routine.

The video openly encourages plagiarism, and people with a strong sense of morals will feel uncomfortable watching it. But to be honest, it's a question of text usage. Are you still so unhappy about changing it to “reference”?

Related reading:

1. Product operation and promotion: How to compete for traffic?

2. Community Operation丨The essence and gameplay of "private domain traffic" in 2019!

3. Product operation: 2 major ways to get started to accurately capture private domain traffic!

4. Promotion and marketing: A brief discussion on vlog’s brand marketing and traffic monetization!

5. User operation: user growth in the post-traffic era!

6. Online marketing promotion: How to spend big money? Fine-tuned operation of large traffic!

7. Is the popular “private domain traffic” really that powerful?

8. 9 thoughts behind private domain traffic, fission, and sinking market

Author: Wei Wuhui II

Source: Che Nitrate Collection (weiwuhui_com)