Top ten keywords for new media in 2018!

The year 2018 has passed by in a flash. The prospects of the new media industry have become clearer, but the path of new media people has become more confusing. A lot of things happened in this year, and only we ourselves know the ups and downs of them.

In order to look back at the past and look forward to the future, Xinbang carefully selected 10 annual keywords. These words may not be mainstream Internet hot spots, but they are a microcosm of the new media industry in 2018.

Smooth out the bumps and make a road, fight through the difficulties and set off again.

Growth Anxiety

"In our place, you have to keep running to stay where you are."

Alice in Wonderland

This year, almost all new media people have been hearing a question: Where is the new traffic pool?

At the beginning of 2018, WeChat’s monthly active users exceeded 1 billion, and there were 3.5 million active public accounts. With the disappearance of the mobile Internet demographic dividend, the traffic ceiling for content entrepreneurs is gradually emerging.

It’s difficult to increase followers, difficult to acquire customers, difficult to reach 10w+… The cost of maintaining user stickiness is also rising. Some people even observed that the time it took for a well-known emotional account to reach 10w+ views after pushing a post was slower than in the past.

According to the monthly data statistics of Xinbang, taking WeChat official accounts as an example, the overall traffic of the top 500 large accounts has shown a certain decline.

The anxiety from the growth end gradually spread, so much so that at the beginning of the year the concept of "growth hacker" became popular again among new media people's friends. Whether in mainstream forums or shared privately, Dave McClure's growth model of acquisition, activation, retention, recommendation, monetization, and return has become a secret passed down by word of mouth among new media operators.

From a must-read for product managers to a must-master for new media operators, in the post-traffic dividend era, each of us suffers from "growth anxiety", constantly trying to break through ourselves, break industry conventions, and find better ways to grow amidst the grim anxiety.

WeChat Redesign

On June 20, WeChat officially launched a new version 6.7.0. In this revision, users can directly browse the messages of subscription accounts.

"Information flow" directly affects the opening rate of public accounts. Readers can check the latest tweets posted by subscribed accounts at any time. There are no more unread message reminders. Accounts of different sizes have the same traffic weight. At the same time, the steps for unfollowing accounts have been simplified, and accounts with less competitive content will directly face the risk of being unfollowed by users.

After the new version was released, according to the "China WeChat Top 500 Monthly Report" of the same month, the operating indicators of the top 500 declined across the board, and the number of likes dropped significantly. The sharp drop in data came from the tail accounts of the top 500. Among them, for the top 500 accounts with a New List Index greater than 900, the number of likes per article and the number of reads per article increased by 13.7% and 0.7% respectively. For the top 500 accounts with a New List Index less than 900, the number of likes per article decreased by 38.4% month-on-month, and the number of reads per article decreased by 3% month-on-month.

At the same time, the number of 10w+ camps in June dropped by 6, and the top 500 threshold index also dropped by 3.3 compared with May.

Comparison of June and November "New List | China WeChat Top 500 Monthly Report" data overview

But as WeChat officials said: "This revision is different from the recommended information flow. The subscription list still contains group messages from the subscription accounts that users subscribe to. The revision only optimizes the display of content, hoping to improve users' reading efficiency and experience. "

After the revision, not only the original ratio threshold and the number of first-time readings have steadily increased, but the data performance of mid- and long-tail accounts with a New List Index below 750 has also become healthier.

Some are happy while others are sad. No matter what, high-quality content will always be the future development trend, and WeChat will still be the best content entrepreneurship platform. Whether we like it or not, June 20, 2018 is the new media's "night when the comet came."

Tik Tok

Latest news: As of October, Douyin’s daily active users in China have exceeded 200 million, and monthly active users have exceeded 450 million , with a penetration rate of 33.8%, and it continues to maintain rapid growth. In January of this year, Douyin’s daily active users were only 30 million, with a penetration rate of 14.34%. At the same time, the overseas version of TikTok swept the application charts in the United States, Japan and other countries, with more than 100 million monthly active users overseas, making it one of the most successful overseas products in history.

Douyin uses the same algorithm distribution mechanism as Toutiao, accurately capturing user preferences, improving the sophistication of videos through filter beauty functions that exceed the level of similar products, and increasing user usage time with diversified video content.

At the same time, Douyin’s decentralized content distribution mechanism ensures that ordinary users always have the opportunity to become “overnight celebrities” and guarantees the priority of high-quality content dissemination.

Therefore, in just one year, a series of representative IPs have emerged on the Douyin platform, including Wen Wan, Li Ge, Liziqi, Tu Zi Ya, Qijiu Nao Ye, and Daigula K. It has successfully transformed from an initial dance short video platform into a fun and leisure platform for "recording a beautiful life".

At the same time, Douyin also actively absorbs PGC, celebrities and MCN to jointly build a content ecosystem and explore commercial paths. The launch of the Star Map platform, the opening of the shopping cart function, and the promotion of the live broadcast function all indicate a bumper harvest coming next year.

There is no doubt that TikTok is the number one traffic platform in 2018, you and I both know that.

On November 10, CCTV's "Focus Interview" program launched a new episode with the theme "Chaos in Self-Media". The program exposed six major chaos in self-media, which aroused widespread discussion and attention in the industry.

That evening, the WeChat public platform issued an announcement, announcing that it would crack down on vulgar content, online rumors, infringements, and falsification of reading volumes.

On November 12, the Cyberspace Administration of China officially announced that it and relevant departments have launched a new round of concentrated cleanup and rectification actions against the chaos in self-media.

During this special operation, the Cyberspace Administration of China summoned Tencent, Weibo, Toutiao and other platform owners, and dealt with more than 9,800 self-media accounts such as "Donald Says", "Fu Shouer", "Mr. Zizhu Zhang", "There is a Beam of Light", "Universal Welfare Bar", "Wild History and Secret Stories", and "Late Night Video" in accordance with the law. We must also resolutely prevent problematic accounts from being "reborn" using small accounts or "reincarnated" across platforms.

This action was not without warning. Between May and September this year, there were three acquisition plans targeting content marketing companies with a total amount of approximately 7.6 billion yuan, but they were eventually stopped due to inquiries from the exchange.

Behind the earthquake is the standardization of the new media industry, which is inevitably accompanied by the pain of transformation and the increase in costs during the upgrading process, but this is also inevitable for every emerging industry to mature.

On December 3, in order to encourage originality, WeChat began to trial run a collegial mechanism for complaints about "plagiarism". Yesterday, the first case of plagiarism on WeChat occurred.

Regarding the mechanism design of WeChat, the People's Daily published an article today (December 17) commenting on it:

"Increasing the intensity of identifying plagiarism is a proactive move and management innovation. But there is still a long way to go to cure this stubborn disease."

We-media is by no means a lawless place. Overnight, the era of "making quick money" in which we-media grew wildly came to an end. The era of barbarians is over and good times are just beginning.

Fission

WeChat fission, community fission, social fission, marketing fission... fission has almost become a new media discipline in 2018.

As the demographic dividend of mobile Internet disappears, skilled operators have already discovered that fission is a good way to attract new customers. Similarly, there is also a user funnel model: seed user-user fission-paid conversion.

Initially, fission was first combined with distribution, which started this massive fission topic in the field of knowledge payment.

In the early morning of January 17, many people’s Moments were occupied by “a festive red”. The secondary distribution mechanism and the mobilization of KOLs made NetEase’s opening class a hot topic. It attracted 130,000 people to sign up and pay within 12 hours of its launch, and eventually exceeded 210,000.

Then, in February, the Sanlian Zhongdu membership card was popular and was forced to close early; in March, the Xinshixiang marketing course continued to be popular and popular...

At the 2018 New List Conference, Wu Sheng shared his thoughts on the advancement and reconstruction of content value and mentioned that user evolution is divided into four stages, among which super users are an important group for realizing commercialization capabilities, and fission users can better help products and brands form self-channel capabilities and brand effects.

The purpose of fission is nothing more than to expand the traffic pool. With the promotion at the beginning of the year, the topic of "how to write marketing copy that users like" has become a popular topic in the new media circle, and behind it are many explorations of the decline in traffic.

At the platform level, Pinduoduo, which has 300 million users in three years, has become a model of social fission. On the other hand, Qutoutiao, which has been listed for 800 days, has successfully explored a points system and social fission strategy with the apprentice-recruiting model as its core, achieving low-cost new user acquisition through social fission.

This year, the focus on fission came to a closing statement at the end of the year.

"The so-called fission is a low-level routine" - Zhang Xiaolong said this at the just-concluded "2018 Tencent Employee Conference" and explained: Routines have been popular since ancient times. This is a stage for routines. If you want to use routines, please use more advanced ones.

Agriculture, rural areas and farmers self-media

In July this year, Toutiao held the first Rural Creators Conference. The Golden Rice Plan was announced at the meeting: in the next year, at least 500 million yuan will be invested to subsidize rural creators. At the same time, 30 "Three Rural Partners" will be recruited, and each partner will receive in-site traffic worth 1 million yuan.

Not long after, "Huanong Brothers" emerged with the phrase "So beautiful". After registering on Bilibili for a month, "Huanong Brothers" had more than 1 million fans and a single video had nearly 600,000 views. At the same time, the number of fans of "Food Writer Wang Gang" from Xigua Video exceeded 5 million.

As of now, the number of fans of "Rural Sister" who teaches people how to cook on the Kuaishou platform has exceeded 2.53 million. The public account "Pig Farming Family" that shares daily pig prices and pig farming information has a New List Index of 904 and has entered the top 500 of the New List 9 times.

In addition to these rural self-media people, a large number of platforms have also taken off by virtue of their high sensitivity to the rural areas.

Xigua Video has reaped a huge amount of traffic this year. Xigua Video's predecessor, Toutiao Video, was launched in May 2016. Its content is mainly PGC short videos, and it is positioned as a short video platform with personalized recommendations. It is reported that as of August this year, the number of Xigua Video users exceeded 300 million, with an average online time of 70 minutes per person and 4 billion daily playbacks.

On November 29, Douyin Short Video announced the official launch of the "DOU is a Beautiful Scenery in the Mountains" project, which will use Douyin as the main platform to help more poor areas with cultural and tourism poverty alleviation.

What has led to the rapid rise of rural self-media is not the arrogance of the city, but the simple and sincere content, a lifestyle that is completely different from that in the city, and people's beautiful yearning for a pastoral utopia.

Koi

From Yang Chaoyue to Xin Xiaodai, from the Chosen One to the Koi King, in 2018, a Koi storm swept across the entire social platform, exposing the confusion and anxiety hidden in the society.

As Fang Kecheng, a former reporter for Southern Weekend, PhD in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania, and a well-known self-media person, said in the "News Lab":

"The emergence of the Koi Worship Cult may mean that the anxiety index of the whole society has reached a high point."

Private domain traffic

Some people say that the era of private domain traffic has arrived, and this term was frequently exposed in the industry in 2018.

The opposite of private domain traffic is "public domain traffic". Yan Tao Sanshou explained in his Zhihu column that the so-called private domain traffic refers to users who can be used freely and repeatedly without paying, can be reached at any time, and are deposited in public accounts, WeChat groups, personal WeChat accounts, Toutiao accounts, Douyin and other self-media channels. Compared with public traffic platforms such as Taobao, JD.com, and Baidu, it belongs to the merchants' "private assets."

In May this year, Youzan, known as the "first stock in the WeChat ecosystem", went public. Its founder Bai Ya said, "Merchants that are really starting to think about how to make their business longer are all starting to enter the market for privatized customer assets, or the so-called private domain traffic." That is, the social ecosystem can cultivate private domain traffic.

For example, "Uncle Mana" operates dozens of private WeChat accounts to interact with his fans; "Yu Xiaoge" has circled core consumer users into 24 mobile phones and 2,000 groups; more and more emotional influencers have begun to add personal WeChat accounts at the end of their articles to guide users to settle in communities that are easier to control.

On algorithm-distributed platforms, such as TikTok, which has seen explosive growth in traffic, how to transfer users from "public domain traffic" to "private domain traffic" has become the core of refined operations.

Of course, at present, the ultimate destination is still WeChat public accounts and private WeChat accounts.

OMO

In November 2017, Kai-Fu Lee first proposed the concept of OMO (Online-Merge-Offline).

The cost of online traffic continues to rise, the big data system continues to improve, and some leading players have turned their attention to offline, and online and offline traffic has begun to converge in both directions.

"One" offline physical store

At the 2018 New List Conference at the beginning of this year, Norma, the founder of RiRiZhu, announced that she would move into offline business, marking the beginning of OMO for content entrepreneurship. In the second half of this year, online IP brands such as "Yi Tiao", "Rishiji" and "Shidiandushu" have opened offline stores. During the Double 11 period, the sales performance of "Yi Tiao"'s three offline stores totaled nearly one million.

On September 22, three offline stores of "Yi Tiao" opened simultaneously. At the end of October, "Rishiji" settled in Shanghai Shimao Plaza. A month later, Lin Shao announced that Shidian Bookstore began trial operation in Xiamen.

In the past two years, relying on strong brand and IP effects, many new media brands that originated from content entrepreneurship have chosen to move from online to the broader offline.

Among these, the transition from content matrix to e-commerce monetization is often the most important link in the three-step jump of "content-e-commerce-offline".

Following other monetization methods such as advertising, content e-commerce, and cross-border IP, OMO may be a new track for new media.

Content consumption

During the 2018 Himalaya 123 Knowledge Carnival, the total content consumption on the Himalaya platform reached 435 million.

At the New List Conference the previous year, Huang Zhizhong, co-founder of Miguo Culture and anchor of Himalaya, once said: "Knowledge is not valuable, only fun is valuable."

"Knowledge payment" and "knowledge monetization" have been hot words in the past two years, and "content consumption" is the advanced expression of the former two. As the content environment gradually evolves, users' payment psychology is changing from anxious payment to interest-based consumption.

The emergence of content consumption means that content monetization is no longer "selling anxiety" but a "personality carnival" for the whole nation.

Source: Newrankcn