In-depth analysis of the operation and life cycle of Tik Tok short videos!

Table of contents

1. Product Background

• Product Introduction
• Product development history events
• Competitor Introduction

2. Product Development History

3. Product Iteration Analysis

• Phase 1: Exploration
• Phase 2: Initial Growth
• The third stage: rapid growth
• Stage 4: Maturity

IV. Conclusion

1. Product Background

1. Product Introduction

In recent years, China's short video market has entered a period of rapid development. Many Internet giants have entered the short video market, and a wide variety of short video products have emerged. "Tik Tok" is one of the most representative products.

Douyin was launched in September 2016. After a brief exploration, it quickly became popular and soon succeeded in breaking through the siege and becoming as famous as Kuaishou, the leader in the short video industry. Since November 2017, its download ranking in the photography and video category of the AppStore has surpassed Kuaishou to become the first (it occasionally dropped to second place) and has remained so to date. As can be seen from Figure 1, Douyin is currently ranked in the top 20 in the AppStore's overall ranking.

Figure 1 Real-time ranking of TikTok on the AppStore in May 2019 (Source: Qimai Data)

In such a fiercely competitive market, there must be a reason why Douyin, which has no first-mover advantage, was able to quickly break through and become the industry leader. Next, we will analyze what makes this product so special from the two aspects of version iteration and operation.

Product positioning: 15s music short video social tool

Slogan: Record a beautiful life

Main users: Based on the current product features of Douyin, its main user groups and the needs they meet can be analyzed as follows:

1. Self-media, internet celebrities, stars, anchors, etc.: They have a certain influence or strong creativity, and increase their personal (or team) brand influence by publishing high-quality content, accumulating fans and reputation, and obtaining partial income at the same time.

2. Online store operators and third-party product operators: increase the visibility and influence of third-party products or commodities and achieve traffic diversion.

3. Active senior users: They have a strong desire for self-expression, like to share, imitate and publish high-quality videos, hope to gain attention, and also like to watch videos with interesting content.

4. Ordinary users: They do not like to create or express themselves, and spend their free time and relax themselves by browsing and watching videos of interest.

Figure 2 Screenshot of Douyin’s key product page (Source: Kuchuan)

Based on the above main users and usage scenarios, Douyin’s solution is shown in Figure 3 and Figure 4 from the perspective of core business logic and product function structure respectively.

Figure 3: TikTok’s core business logic

Figure 4 The main functional structure of Douyin

2. Major events in product development history

Since its launch, Douyin has been making great strides after a brief period of exploration and has become a dark horse among all products. Next, let’s take a look at the major events that the dark horse Douyin has experienced in its history (source: IT Orange, Internet).

Figure 5 Major events in the history of TikTok

3. Introduction to Competitors

Tik Tok’s current product positioning is a social tool that focuses on music short videos and has a live broadcast function. Therefore, I believe that its main competitors are as follows:

1. Kuaishou: The former "GIF Kuaishou" was transformed into a short video community in November 2012. After the successful transformation, it mainly serves as a platform for users to record and share production and life content. Users can browse, watch or upload their own short videos. It is one of the biggest competitors of Douyin in the short video field.

2. Weishi: A short video creation and sharing platform under Tencent. Its main function interface and operation method are very similar to Douyin. Users can log in directly through their QQ/WeChat account, and the short videos they shoot can be shared simultaneously to WeChat friends, Moments, and QQ Space. With the traffic diversion from two ace products, WeChat and QQ, Weishi is also a strong competitor of Douyin in the short video field.

3. Meipai: A short video community with live streaming function that was launched before Douyin. Backed by the strong traffic import from Sina Weibo, it easily achieves tens of millions of daily active users and over 100 million daily playbacks. However, Miaopai’s ability to generate its own traffic is relatively poor, and its traffic is overly dependent on Sina Weibo. It currently appears that its development bottleneck is relatively low.

As shown in Figure 6, although Douyin ranks first in the photography and video field of AppStore for most of the time, Kuaishou and Weishi, which follow closely behind, occasionally surpass Douyin to become the first place. Although Meipai poses less threat to Douyin than the former two, its performance in the photography and video field is also quite good.

Figure 6 Comparison of the ranking of Douyin and other major competitors in the AppStore (Source: Kuchuan)

2. Product Development History

Based on the data from TikTok’s launch in September 2016 to May 2019, we compiled the following two charts. According to Figures 7 and 8, we tend to divide Douyin into the following stages for analysis:

Phase 1: Exploration

The time period is from September 2016 to July 2017, and the corresponding versions are 1.0.0 to 1.4.6. As can be seen from Figures 7 and 8, Douyin has carried out many version updates during this period, but the total number of users has increased very slowly.

Phase 2: Primary Growth

The time period is from May 2017 to April 2018, and the corresponding versions are 1.4.0 to 1.7.9. This stage lasted for one year, during which TikTok developed rapidly as a whole and the number of users increased dramatically.

The second stage: rapid growth

The time period is from May 2018 to November 2018, and the versions are 1.8.0 to 3.4.0. Based on the user base developed in the previous stage, although this stage lasted only 6 months, Douyin successfully doubled its user base.

Stage 4: Maturity

The time period is from December 2018 to May 2019, and the versions are 3.7.0 to 6.0.0. After the accumulation of the previous three stages, although Douyin's overall functions and operations have become mature, its user base is still growing rapidly in this stage. Judging from the growth trend, it still has room for growth in the future.

Figure 7 Estimated daily download volume of Douyin APP on iOS (Source: Qimai Data)

Figure 8 Douyin App’s total Android downloads and product version iteration path (data source: Kuchuan)

3. Product Iteration Analysis

In the following analysis, we will conduct an in-depth interpretation of the growth of Douyin APP based on the above division of the four stages, combined with the product iteration content and operational dynamics of Douyin APP.

Phase 1: Exploration

1. Main Iteration Content

Based on the historical versions of Douyin's growth process, the author sorted out the main updates of its versions as follows:

Figure 9 Details of the first phase of Douyin version iteration

Compared with other short video products, Douyin was launched relatively late, and at this stage there were already relatively mature short video products (such as Kuaishou). Therefore, how to temporarily avoid the edge of the current industry giants, save yourself from the fate of premature death and lay a solid foundation for yourself to have a place in the field in the future is the most important thing in the first stage of Douyin's launch.

Judging from the above iteration information, in the early stage of launch, Douyin’s version iteration mainly focused on two major directions: improving user experience and attracting new users.

Various bug fixes have been made to make the product run more stably; optimization of the page, shooting process, and loading speed allow users to shoot videos more conveniently and watch them more smoothly; the music library, filters, special effects, sound quality, picture quality, etc. have been comprehensively improved to make the overall tone of the product cooler and more trendy; in terms of attracting new products, support for sharing to Meipai, and finding friends through address book, QQ, Weibo, etc. has better achieved traffic diversion; the name change to "Tik Tok Short Video" is also to fit the characteristics of the target users, so that users have a clearer understanding of the product, which is conducive to brand building and diffusion in the later stage of product development.

Despite the small number of users, Douyin has adhered to the agile development model of small steps and fast progress since the first stage, which has well polished the core functions of the product and laid a good foundation for the surge in user volume in the later product growth stage.

2. Major operational events during this period

The author sorted out all the marketing activities that appeared on Douyin official accounts from its launch to April 2017 as follows:

Figure 10 Major operational events of Douyin in the first phase

It can be seen that Douyin actually carried out very few commercial operations during the exploration stage. There were almost no marketing activities to promote the Douyin short video APP in the first few months after its launch, so almost no one knew about Douyin during this period. It was not until Yue Yunpeng’s reposting incident in March 2017 that Douyin gradually came into the public eye. Afterwards, celebrities such as Deng Chao and Hu Yanbin joined the group one after another. Douyin’s trend of striving for a larger market share by focusing on product operations became increasingly obvious.

3. User Reviews

Figure 11 Overall user ratings of TikTok on the AppStore in the first phase (Source: Kuchuan)

Figure 12 Details of some negative reviews of Douyin on the AppStore in the first phase (Source: Kuchuan)

Due to the limitation of total number of users, there were few comments on Douyin short videos in the early stage of product launch, and the overall proportion of positive comments gradually increased with the iteration of Douyin. However, from the few negative comments, we can still find the main problems that Douyin has at this stage: the mode is similar to musically, crashes, inability to log in and other unstable operation problems; therefore, the author speculates that Douyin’s relatively intensive bug fixes during this period are also to solve the problems exposed in the comment area.

4. Phase Overview

From the above details of version iterations and operational events in the early days of Douyin’s launch, it can be seen that, in the absence of first-mover advantage, Douyin did not choose to blindly expand its market share in the early days of the product launch, but instead attracted and activated a small number of users, and carried out targeted repairs and solutions to existing product problems.

At the same time, based on the product positioning of "a music short video community focusing on the new generation", we patiently polish the core functions of the product, continuously optimize the product's performance and user experience, and lay a solid foundation for future development.

During this period, Douyin also figured out its own market positioning and survival strategy, that is, it could achieve its first wave of market competition through differentiated competition with relatively mature short video products such as Kuaishou, and with the support of strong operations.

Phase 2: Initial Growth

1. Overview of key versions

Based on the historical versions of Douyin's growth process, the author sorted out the main updates of its versions as follows:

Figure 13 Details of the second phase of Douyin version iteration

From the iteration details listed above, it can be seen that Douyin is still making every effort to optimize product performance and enhance user experience at this stage.

Douyin is still constantly fixing bugs for the product itself; and updates such as 3D jitter watermark, stickers, cool props, beauty, panoramic camera, AR camera, hair dyeing effects and dance machine have created cooler video gameplay for users, better meeting the actual psychological needs of the target group of "young people"; the Douyin story function has been used to reduce the difficulty of video shooting for users; the "dislike" mechanism has been added to utilize its advantageous algorithm to strengthen personalized recommendations for users; Douyin live broadcast has been launched to meet the different needs of various users; in addition, the reporting mechanism has been improved to strengthen content management; support for Weibo homepage binding has achieved traffic exchange with Weibo, and the private message function has strengthened interaction between users.

Among the iterative content, it is worth noting that the emergence of its private message function shows that Douyin has begun to pay attention to social interaction between users. As a music short video community, if it only has attributes such as coolness and fun, it can be easily replaced by other products. Social networking (especially social networking among acquaintances) can solve this problem very well, because social relationships among acquaintances can give users a better sense of belonging and identity, which can better "stick" users and increase their frequency of use. Therefore, Douyin’s product positioning has gradually changed from the original “music short video community focusing on the new generation” to “15s music short video social tool”.

2. Major operational events

Figure 14 Major operational events of Douyin in the second phase

It can be seen from the information compiled above that Douyin has made comprehensive efforts in product operations during this stage.

Its first TVC advertisement was launched, which was cool and eye-catching; it cooperated with many popular variety shows such as "I Want to Sing with You", "High Energy Youth League", "The Rap of China", and also landed on "Happy Camp" and "Day Day Up", which attracted a lot of attention from young people;

The launch of Lu Han's new song and the invitation of Angelbaby, Wu Yifan, Dilireba, Yuan Shanshan and a large number of original musicians to join and serve have achieved a large number of fan diversion;

Its two phenomenal H5s, "Famous World Paintings" and "Searching for Idols", quickly went viral on WeChat Moments, bringing huge energy to TikTok.

In terms of cooperative promotion, we also cooperated with well-known companies such as Airbnb for brand video advertising, launched hip-hop-themed bicycles with Mobike, launched a short video competition with Pepsi, and launched food videos with COCO Haidilao;

In addition, its own various online and offline operations such as "Million Heroes" and "Tik Tok idou Night" also attracted a large number of new and old users.

Simply put, at this stage, Douyin is spending a lot of money, inviting the most popular stars, participating in the hottest programs, and doing the coolest activities. After the number of users has accumulated to a certain level, it will slowly begin to monetize the traffic through joint promotions with enterprises.

3. User Reviews

Figure 15 Overall ratings of Tik Tok in AppStore during the second phase (Source: KuChuan)

Figure 16 Details of some negative reviews of Douyin on the AppStore in the second phase (Source: Kuchuan)

From the above screenshots, we can see that in the middle and late stages of this stage, as the number of users increased, the number of user comments on Douyin surged, and the proportion of positive comments increased as time went on.

From the few negative reviews, we can find that the main problems that Douyin has at this stage, in addition to the inevitable stability and compatibility issues such as unstable operation and crashes, there is also user dissatisfaction caused by the irregular closure of the comment area; an even more difficult problem to solve is the low content quality brought about by the surge in the number of users, inaccurate closures and other content review issues.

For a product whose content production ends are "UGC+PGC+OGC", the accurate blocking of vulgar content is an inevitable and very difficult problem to completely solve. At this stage, Douyin is also actively responding to this new problem by improving the reporting mechanism and other iterations, but the current results are still unsatisfactory. If the number of Douyin users continues to increase, it will need to invest more energy in solving this problem.

4. Phase Overview

1. In general, during this stage, Douyin has been making full efforts from iteration to operation, and the user activity has been significantly improved. According to the author's analysis, the three main factors that contributed to the rapid growth of Douyin at this stage are as follows:

1. Iterative development model of small steps and fast progress: The overall iterative updates of Douyin are actually very intensive, and the problems raised by users can always be solved quickly; in addition, new functions can be continuously launched based on the actual development situation and the real needs of users.

2. Differentiated competition with strong rivals: At this stage, the leader of short video should be Kuaishou, but Douyin chose to enter the short video market with a different attitude from Kuaishou - that is, the centralization of content, avoiding the edge of mature products without violating its product positioning. The correct entry attitude allowed Douyin to develop rapidly and in an insidious way.

3. Accurate and powerful product operation plan: In this stage, Douyin has invested heavily in sponsoring various variety shows and TV Spring Festival Galas, introducing first-line celebrities, and various cool and trendy online and offline activities. Its purpose is only one, that is - young people who love to play. Douyin targeted the high-density gathering places of this group of target users, grasped the inner pain points of this group of young people, and carried out a large number of precise operations. It can be said that it really put its huge investment to good use.

The third stage: rapid growth

1. Interpretation of key versions

Based on the historical versions of Douyin's growth process, the author sorted out the main updates of its versions as follows:

Figure 17 Details of the third phase of Douyin version iteration

For every C-end product, retention is always more important than attracting new customers. After experiencing rapid growth in the previous stage and accumulating a large number of users, Douyin began to pay more attention to user retention and activity.

As mentioned before, after a product reaches a certain level of maturity (cool, fun, and attractive enough), it can further satisfy users' psychological needs through social networking, making itself truly irreplaceable. Therefore, in this stage, the iteration direction of Douyin has changed from simply focusing on bug fixes and improving user shooting experience to focusing on social relationships between users, such as private message emoticons, private message voice, QR code functions, personal background pictures, and friend notes.

The introduction of these functions has greatly enhanced the social attributes of the product, which can better meet the social needs of users and enable Douyin to achieve the transformation from a "music short video community" to a "music short video social tool."

2. Major operational events

The author sorted out the operational events of Douyin during this stage as follows:

Figure 18 Main operational events of Douyin in the third stage

We can see that after the previous stage of growth by spending a lot of money and having a large number of users, Douyin's operating model began to differ, that is, it began to monetize traffic through its own large number of users. Such as city promotion and joint operations with enterprises. This not only increases the popularity of Douyin, but also brings it very lucrative revenue.

3. User Reviews

Figure 19 Overall user evaluation of Tik Tok on AppStore in the third phase

Figure 20 Details of some negative reviews of Douyin on the AppStore in the third stage

With a large number of users, we can see that the overall evaluation of Douyin has not decreased with the increase in the number of users, but has gotten better and better. This also indirectly shows that it is moving steadily on the right path.

The main reason for negative reviews at this stage is still the product stability experience, including the unreasonable closure of the comment area, excessive advertising content, and the balance between vulgar content and content review.

The comment area is a very important module for the short video community. Therefore, if it needs to be closed in advance due to special reasons, Douyin is better to notify users in advance and inform them of the closure time. As for the negative reviews with a lot of advertisements, it can be said that it is a must for every content-based product to monetize. Although there are negative reviews, we can see that Douyin’s total number of users and user activity have not decreased because of this incident. Therefore, these negative reviews cannot hinder Douyin’s path to traffic monetization.

As shown in the picture, a large number of negative reviews appeared on September 1 and the following few days. The reason was that the Douyin internet celebrity "Li Ge" publicly sold her WeChat account on Douyin, which caused strong dissatisfaction among users and led to collective negative reviews. It also exposed the low quality of some internet celebrities.

When a content product's overall functionality and market share have matured, how to make its content appeal to the general public without being vulgar and how to encourage key users to lead the overall user base to establish correct values ​​become primary considerations in product content operations.

4. Phase Overview

During this stage, Douyin began to realize a large amount of traffic monetization through various corporate joint operations and city promotion activities. While bringing huge profits to itself, it also achieved continuous growth in the number of users by strengthening its own social attributes, and ensured the retention of new users through good user experience and social atmosphere.

One thing worth noting is that with the strengthening of its social functions, Douyin also launched its new slogan at the beginning of this stage - "Record a beautiful life". This means that TikTok will gradually remove the centralization of content and replace it with a decentralized development model, which will make it possible for TikTok to start a self-growth model for users.

Stage 4: Maturity

1. Major version overview

Figure 21 Details of the fourth phase of Douyin version iteration

The basic functions and modules of the product have become mature after several previous periods of development, and the product operation stability is also good. Therefore, the functional iteration of the products in this period mainly started to launch various new functions such as AR brush, casual shooting, passionate drummer, orange face, AR text, etc. Through a variety of new and fun small functions, the user stickiness is increased, and the number of users is achieved through self-growth by relying on its own high-quality attributes.

2. Major operational events

Figure 22 Main operational events of Douyin in the fourth stage

After entering its mature stage, in addition to monetizing traffic to create profits for itself as in the past, Douyin's operational activities have also begun to intervene more in the field of public welfare to build its own brand and social influence.

3. User Reviews

Figure 23 Overall evaluation of Douyin users in the fourth stage

Figure 24 Details of negative reviews from some users on Douyin in the fourth phase

Figure 25 The overall rating of Douyin on the AppStore (Source: Kuchuan)

At this stage, the proportion of positive scores in the overall evaluation is quite high. Among the few negative reviews, problems exposed are that some users are not popular and there are too many advertisements. In fact, it is related to Douyin’s current operating model. It may be necessary to find a better balance between centralization and decentralization. As for advertising, Douyin also needs to find a better solution between subsequent traffic monetization and user retention.

4. Phase Overview

At this stage, Douyin, a 15s music short video social tool, has begun to enter a mature stage and has a certain self-growth capability. The driving force behind its self-growth mainly comes from its excellent user experience and good product reputation. Good product reputation can make Douyin spread better, and excellent product experience and a good social atmosphere can ensure the retention of new users.

IV. Conclusion

Throughout the development process, the main reason why Douyin has been able to stand out among many short video products is that it has a good grasp of the rhythm of its growth cycle, which can be specifically divided into the following points:

1. Differentiated entry from major competitors

When Douyin first entered the short video field, it chose a completely different entry method from the industry leader Kuaishou (decentralization, weak operation), namely content centralization and strong operation and promotion. Differentiated entry competition allowed Douyin to survive and quickly gain a foothold, which laid the basic conditions for its subsequent rapid development.

2. Steady iteration rhythm

Douyin is very stable in its function iteration path, and the agile development model is fully reflected throughout the entire life cycle of Douyin. In terms of overall direction, focusing on its tool attributes in the early stage is conducive to attracting new users, and focusing on its social attributes in the later stage is conducive to retention and self-growth. Seizing the core needs of products in different stages of development and iterating is also an important condition for Douyin to break through the siege.

3. Easy collection of operational strategies

The flexible operational strategy is also an important factor in Douyin's success that cannot be ignored. Low operation → large investment in operation → cooperative monetization → monetization + brand building. When it is time to reduce investment, reduce investment; when it is time to strengthen operations, carry out large-scale "fast, fierce and accurate" bombardment on the target group, then harvest traffic and build your own brand, achieving a full harvest of traffic, revenue and brand.

It can be said that so far, Douyin, with more than 250 million daily active users, has firmly established itself as the leader in the short video field; and judging from the current user growth, its growth curve still has an upward trend. It can be expected that it will continue to develop in the next period of time before it will usher in its peak period.

At present, Douyin is still in the product maturity stage. In the next period of time, it is very likely to further realize the commercialization of its own traffic by continuing to cooperate with third-party companies for promotion and introducing cooperative merchants. This may result in users being exposed to content with too much and too complex advertising content, causing a large number of users to switch to competing products and worsening the market competition environment. Therefore, Douyin should pay more attention to the activity level of old users.

In the next product iteration, Douyin can open a dedicated entry channel for third-party e-commerce sellers, which can not only reduce the pressure of short video content on the homepage, but also strengthen its own e-commerce platform attributes and create a more complete Internet ecosystem for itself.

In terms of operations, Douyin can still continuously carry out joint promotions with enterprises or government agencies, supplemented by some operations with public welfare attributes, to continuously improve user activity while strengthening its own brand awareness, maintain the continuous growth of the number of active users as much as possible, and delay the arrival of the peak. Will the current mature stage just be the “third growth stage” of Douyin? Let's wait and see.

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Author: Zelin

Source: Zelin