Yesterday afternoon, Douyin short video announced important data so far this year at a music restaurant bar on Fangyuan West Road in Beijing - daily active users exceeded 150 million and monthly active users exceeded 300 million. The numbers quickly spread across the Internet, and it is certain that TikTok’s momentum is better than previously predicted.

In less than three months, this product achieved a daily active user growth of over 80 million, which should be another record in the growth of Internet products.

During the Spring Festival, the “Kuaishou vs. Douyin dispute” was still an explosive topic. QuestMobile data showed that the gap was obvious at the time: Kuaishou had more than 100 million daily active users, while Douyin was still in the tens of millions, only around 60 million. In an article after the Spring Festival, Jin Yechen, a partner of Gao’s startup service, summarized the relationship between the two as “Douyin’s ambitions and Kuaishou’s crises.”

Three months later, Kuaishou’s crisis was brought to the surface, and the difference between the square and the theater was gradually narrowing. Tencent is also stepping up its efforts to revive Weishi . Hidden behind the huge user base is not only the user time that has been snatched away, but also Tencent’s trump card – social relationships.

1. Douyin with generalized content

At the press conference yesterday afternoon, the organizer Douyin broadcast on a rolling basis those videos that had appeared on the platform and gained huge traffic .

For example, parent-child videos, videos of amateurs singing, and English teaching videos, these videos are carefully selected by Douyin. The purpose is obvious, which is to change the public's traditional impression of Douyin so that it is not just about handsome young men and women performing fancy shows.

The official provided a set of data. Before August last year, the most popular content on the Douyin platform was mainly singing, dancing and technical camera movements, accounting for more than 50% of the content. Currently, there are more popular contents on Douyin, basically covering 19 major categories, with music, dance, food, animals, sports, parent-child, travel and other categories accounting for about 5%.

Content generalization is the basis for expanding the user base. Douyin's main user group has increased from the early 18 to 24 years old to 24 to 30 years old users, and the proportion of users in this age group has now exceeded 40%.

When Douyin starts to expand the boundaries of its content, Kuaishou is the most nervous.

Kuaishou has achieved solid user growth . Without adopting strong content operations , its daily active users exceeded 110 million during the Spring Festival. A short video celebrity told Hedgehog Commune that when distributing content on various platforms, it is found that Kuaishou has the strongest user stickiness, high user activity, and each video will receive a good number of comments.

The user diversity brought by the rich content is Kuaishou’s barrier.

However, Tik Tok quickly turned the tide based on its strong entertainment tone. Kuaishou also began to defend. In a recent article in Caijing titled "Kuaishou, Douyin, the decisive battle between the leaders will take place this year", Kuaishou's product department and others came forward for the first time to be interviewed.

The information revealed is that Kuaishou has begun to form a content operation team. For example, by operating topics, content with the same theme on Kuaishou can be selected and formed into a topic tag on the search page.

In addition to topic operations, Kuaishou, which used to emphasize simple recording, has begun to have more entertainment-oriented content. Xiao Yang, who hasn't logged into Kuaishou for a long time, heard a lot of "Tik Tok pop songs" after logging into Kuaishou recently.

Xiao Yang's feeling is not wrong. Among the four new functions that Kuaishou is currently testing simultaneously, there is a karaoke function, where users can select popular songs, match the accompaniment, and record the corresponding songs.

Friends who frequently use Kuaishou will also find that Kuaishou has now added super filters, and the effects are not inferior to some beauty products. This product also begins to provide users with more choices, which are more fun and more beautiful.

The competition tracks between Kuaishou and Douyin have a higher degree of overlap.

As the two are getting closer in content, Douyin's single-screen switching and traffic pool recommendation mechanism seem to make people more addicted, so much so that parents have begun to raise objections. Douyin has recently launched an anti-addiction system.

Kuaishou is a product that respects user choices very much, but this seems to have become a weakness. After all, not all users can perceive the difference. The low threshold for use has become an opportunity for Douyin to grow new users.

2. Social Possibilities Behind 150 Million Daily Active Users

User size is the basis for the birth of social relationship chains. Both Douyin and Kuaishou have opportunities.

What does it mean to have hundreds of millions of daily active users? Sina Weibo , China's largest social media platform founded in 2009, announced in the first quarter of 2018 that its monthly active users reached 400 million and its daily active users reached 184 million, "becoming the seventh social product in the world to exceed 400 million active users."

If TikTok keeps growing, the gap in user base between it and Sina Weibo will get smaller.

Short video platforms are also well aware of the huge help that building social relationships can have in retaining users. The second function button at the bottom of the Douyin homepage is "Follow". When you enter Kuaishou, the first thing you see is the follow content rather than the recommended content. Both products have made obvious moves in polishing the social relationship chain.

At the press conference, Zhi Ying, general manager of Douyin's marketing, mentioned a piece of information, "According to subsequent market research, more than a quarter of users learned about Douyin through their relatives and friends. Social communication among relatives and friends is the main source of users' knowledge of Douyin."

According to her, Douyin already has the gene of "social networking among acquaintances". This is probably the fundamental reason why Tencent and TikTok are at war.

Li Liang, vice president of ByteDance Group, said in an interview with reporters yesterday that previously 10 million users were accustomed to sharing Douyin videos on WeChat , but later they were blocked. Although the product's user growth does not depend on WeChat, it will damage the user experience .

Half a month ago, Tencent announced that Beijing Bytedance Technology Co., Ltd. and Beijing Weibo Vision Technology Co., Ltd., the operators of " Toutiao " and "TikTok" series products , were involved in unfair competition, which had a serious impact on Tencent's reputation. From now on, it will formally file a lawsuit with the Haidian District People's Court of Beijing. At the same time, it announced the suspension of cooperation with Beijing ByteDance Technology Co., Ltd. and Beijing Weibo Vision Technology Co., Ltd.

Simply put, Douyin links cannot be shared to WeChat.

You can hear the conflict between the two sides in their words.

Before Douyin really began to form strong social relationships, users' time, which had already been divided by various Internet products, was forcibly squeezed into short videos.

A survey conducted by Aurora Big Data found that the average time spent by each TikTok user on TikTok is more than 20 minutes. One piece of data that can be used as a reference is that the 2016 WeChat data report shows that 50% of users use the app for up to 90 minutes.

Starting from seizing users’ time, Douyin has sufficient reasons and motivations to dig deep into the social relationship chain.

3. Will user growth hit a ceiling?

WeChat currently has 1 billion daily active users. In 2017, Kuaishou CEO Su Hua said that Kuaishou’s global daily active user target is 1 billion. Different product forms target different user bases.

The size of users determines the breadth of the social relationship chain. How far the short video platform will go is related to the attributes of the media product itself. Will it become a consumer product for some people like live streaming , or will it be a more popular entertainment-oriented social tool ? There is no clear answer yet. At present, the potential of short videos is far greater than that of live streaming.

Zhi Ying did not give a direct answer to the question of the possible user base that Douyin might reach, but she said that Douyin is still in its growth phase and has not yet hit the so-called ceiling problem.

She believes that the growth of Douyin in the past year "is attributed to many improvements and breakthroughs in the product. In detail, the full-screen HD experience upgrade, the "beauty" created by music, more sophisticated special effects filters and better shooting experience are the four most critical points."

Combined with her introduction in the second part of this article, Zhi Ying actually revealed two pieces of information. Douyin's user growth mainly relies on products and word of mouth. Tencent's blockade did not stop Douyin's growth.

ByteDance has shifted its focus to TikTok. 150 million daily active users is a signal sent by Douyin to the outside world and a shot in the arm for the market.

Not surprisingly, while announcing the daily active users, Douyin also took the opportunity to introduce the achievements of its overseas versions Tik Tok and musical.ly abroad. According to the public records of App Annie , a third-party market data agency, Tik Tok and musical.ly have successively topped the app stores in more than 40 countries around the world.

This is also a way to expand the user base. Kuaishou also officially launched an independent app for internationalization in February this year.

Unlike WeChat and QQ, short videos still have a lot of room for development overseas. The competition between Kuaishou and Douyin will continue overseas. Every time they capture an emerging market, the overall number of users will reach a new level.

Globalization is a keyword that ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming and Kuaishou CEO Su Hua both included in their company's 2018 strategic deployment.

In March this year, Zhang Yiming revealed at Tsinghua University that he hoped that global users would account for 50% within three years. Su Hua also mentioned recently that Kuaishou hopes to go global in 2018 to help people in other countries and regions around the world and promote understanding among them.

150 million daily active users is a phased victory for Douyin in the domestic battlefield. The two products have increasingly overlapping tracks, and their ambitions have long gone beyond the domestic market.

In the second half of the year, the war among short video platforms will continue.

This article was compiled and published by @铁林刺熊公社 (青瓜传媒). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

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