Why is Tik Tok rebelling against Tencent?

Toutiao and Tencent have recently started a fight over TikTok . In terms of market value, Toutiao is at least 10 times smaller than Tencent. But the reason why it still wants to resist Tencent is that Tencent has revived Weishi and banned TikTok links in WeChat Moments , thus strangling TikTok's traffic . However, being abandoned by Tencent may be a new turning point for Douyin.

After MD started fighting, DT also started fighting. The competition between Meituan and Didi over the frequency of local consumption is actually a typical business war, while the competition between Douyin and Tencent is a competition for traffic. In fact, the former cares more about winning or losing, after all, it involves market share and trading volume. The latter does not necessarily need 1 dollar or is short of 90 million, but hopes to have more allies morally.

I still admire Zhang Yiming very much. The only real small giants in the mobile Internet are these three TMD companies. Among these three, Toutiao has the largest traffic, was profitable the earliest, and has not yet taken money from Tencent. As for whether it has taken money from Alibaba , it is not clear yet.

Anyway, if you expect Wang Xing and Cheng Wei to negotiate terms or compete with Ma Huateng , there is no way. The mobile Internet innovation and entrepreneurship seem to be booming. Everyone saw the beginning, but did not expect the ending: more than 90% of the startups failed, and the remaining 9% took capital or money from giants and lined up to call daddy. Only Zhang Yiming is born with a proud character, and for this reason alone he deserves a thumbs up.

Even if Toutiao loses the lawsuit, it will not be a bad thing for Toutiao. After all, its market value is at least 10 times that of Tencent. It is a bit like an angry cat challenging a tiger. The size is very disproportionate, but it is more entertaining.

People are tired of watching the fight between dragons and tigers, and it seems that Tencent and Alibaba have reached some kind of tacit understanding to rest and recuperate - there is no need to fight unless necessary. As a non-stakeholder spectator, the correct way to watch the battle is: fight hard and don’t back down!

1. How did Douyin and Tencent start a fight?

From Toutiao’s perspective, Tencent’s revival of Weishi is itself a potentially powerful competitive threat to Douyin. Can it give its younger brothers some room to survive? Aren’t they known as the water and electricity of the Internet ? Why can’t we share the TikTok link on Moments and open it directly as a string of URLs? Isn’t this a typical case of treating Toutiao as if it were Alibaba?

Not convinced! So you say you have no dreams!

From Tencent's perspective, Weishi is just a defensive-level product in terms of traffic strategy. It has never been successful before, and it is uncertain whether it can be successful, but it is necessary. Toutiao publicly accused "Weishi of plagiarizing Douyin", but it is still a veteran in short videos after all. Can't it revamp it by borrowing popular styles and combining them with QQ Music elements? Didn’t Tik Tok also copy musical.ly? After acquiring it and making it their own, they can no longer be so arrogant and say that it is a product of algorithms that lacks values ​​and must cooperate with supervision.

As an outsider, perhaps it would be more objective to look at it from a product perspective.

Douyin's forwarding mechanism is highly dependent on Tencent, so that it can obtain incremental user traffic outside the App from the WeChat Moments with the highest traffic. For example, a friend who hasn't liked a post for a long time, who has finally recorded a short Douyin video , has to go and show his support. Based on my experience of posting on WeChat Moments, the number of likes for any personal pictures or videos I post is obviously higher than that for the articles and texts I write.

It can be imagined that in social scenarios, cute pets, beauties, children, etc. are more likely to attract attention. This is also the "ABC rule" in advertising, and these are the absolute strengths of Tik Tok short videos. Reposting to Moments can also wake up friends who haven't opened Douyin for a long time and get them back into the App. People now have an additional option of browsing Douyin in addition to browsing Moments.

Even if WeChat is not concerned about the safety supervision of short videos, it is understandable that it directly told Douyin: "I will no longer tolerate you taking advantage of others and laundering users in the circle of friends"; after all, Tencent cannot let go of its "open" attitude.

Moments, like QQ Space, is not the user’s private territory, but a place set up by Tencent. Many people look at it with this "illusion" and have caused all kinds of unhappiness in WeChat social networking. Douyin is challenging Tencent by taking advantage of this point, and it is the user's freedom to share with his friends!

To know how powerful TikTok is, some time ago, Axing went to an Internet finance company at night and saw many employees who were working overtime using their mobile phones to watch TikTok. They all looked stupid while watching TikTok, and some spoof music could be heard from time to time.

However, Douyin’s weakness lies in the fact that it has not yet had time to build a closed content consumption system among users.

Just like the content produced by public accounts and self-media can be shared in Moments, communities or private windows for reading, which Douyin friend can you forward the high-quality content produced in Douyin to? It can only be forwarded to WeChat friends. The previous Douyin forwarding icon was an ICO icon of WeChat and Moments. If I were the product manager of Douyin, I would do the same. It would be a waste not to make use of the WeChat traffic!

(Tik Tok does not have a closed self-traffic consumption system like WeChat)

It can be said that WeChat has been strangling the traffic of Douyin, which is why Douyin fiercely resisted the "WeChat ban". If WeChat blocks Weibo links, there will be no war because Weibo friends can @ and forward to each other, but Tik Tok cannot.

2. Douyin has no social relationship chain, so it is not a threat to WeChat

An article analyzed that the reason why WeChat banned Douyin is because Douyin's algorithm mechanism impacted WeChat's social relationship chain of acquaintances. If you think about it a little, you will find that Douyin and even Toutiao have no so-called social relationship chain at all.

Douyin relies on the platform algorithm to spontaneously recommend content to users, with a certain "compulsive attribute". You either click the red heart button or click the dislike button, either watch it to the end or not, but you have to watch it anyway. Douyin is now a closed communication scenario that advertisers like very much.

What users see has been preset by the algorithm in the homepage recommendations. After the curiosity mechanism of the brain is activated when scrolling down, the users are only friends who like and comment on the posts, and it is difficult to have "in-depth interactions" one-on-one. After WeChat and QQ users add each other, they can call each other "friends" even if they do not produce any content. The relationship between Douyin users is that of UP host and viewer.

(The daily routine of Douyin users is “rushing to the next one, very busy”. Douyin recommends selecting the best from a large amount of high-quality popular content with likes, and the Matthew effect is very strong)

Why do people think that Douyin and Toutiao will develop pan-social products? The reason for this misunderstanding may be that on the one hand, Douyin has social product functions such as "Nearby", "Follow", likes, and comments, but these functions are also available on live streaming platforms . Live streaming social networking is a false proposition, and it is naturally difficult for short video platforms to develop social networking.

On the other hand, it may be that both Toutiao and Douyin want to use the "social" concept to package themselves in order to increase their market value, so Douyin has been fighting with Weibo and WeChat. If Douyin had its own social attributes, there would be no need for it to conflict with Tencent. For example, Momo has social attributes, so when would it fight with WeChat?

So, as a short video UGC platform, is there any possibility for Douyin to develop in the direction of mobile social networking? Generally, in order to conduct peer-to-peer social interaction between users, the platform is actually "decentralizing" and reducing the platform operating factors. This is how it can simulate the complex relationships between people and form a mobile social ecosystem . Therefore, Tencent is the company that has the deepest understanding of Chinese nature.

However, Toutiao products are highly automated "strong centers" driven by algorithmic operating mechanisms, so it is difficult to make such products social. Weibo seems to be in a middle position. It was decentralized in the early days, but centralized operations became increasingly obvious later on.

The product with social attributes in the Toutiao system is "WeToutiao", and users' UGC can be forwarded and digested within the product.

According to Axing's experience in operating Toutiao , many readers recommended to me by Toutiao are mostly formed based on topic reading. These people are just onlookers formed by algorithm recommendations, and it is difficult to call them "fans". They are more like browsers; the stable fans form the stock traffic depending on their opening rate. For the vast majority of self-media and UP hosts, the content of Toutiao is more like the "Six Meridians Divine Sword" - the platform recommendation is extremely powerful; if the platform does not recommend it, it will be deserted; and you don't know when it will work.

WeChat has redefined social interaction, so it is the most in-demand product on mobile devices and users cannot uninstall it even if they want to. However, TikTok is still a pan-entertainment product, not a rigid demand, just like drinks can be replaced at will, but you cannot live without water; of course, you can say that you have been drinking more drinks and less water recently.

The growth rate of user time and registration volume of WeChat has reached its ceiling, while Douyin can still maintain an 18% month-on-month growth rate and a 48% month-on-month growth rate in user time. The Kuaishou defense wall built by Tencent can hardly withstand the impact of Douyin. This is what Tencent really fears.

(Data from iResearch Index)

3. Being abandoned by Tencent may be a turning point for Douyin

The speed at which Tik Tok surpassed its old rival Kuaishou in total user traffic was faster than we thought, which is why Kuaishou acquired Station A to introduce some two-dimensional content that young people like. The content on Douyin is of high quality and has greater potential than previous grassroots content.

WeChat used to be a time-consuming machine, and now it’s TikTok’s turn. Tik Tok has achieved explosive growth by relying on the high degree of forwarding of its content. It cannot always count on gaining customers from WeChat and Weibo. Tencent’s cutting off of its influence itself illustrates the success of Tik Tok. If it was just a small-scale operation, Tencent would not care at all.

After the battle between Douyin and Tencent, Douyin will inevitably adjust its product thinking and focus on the sharing incentive mechanism for on-site traffic to resolve the "Six Meridians Divine Sword"-like dilemma where UP hosts' content is sometimes popular and sometimes not. Continuously acquiring external traffic is only the focus of the early stage of product promotion . Now the internal traffic distribution of Douyin products and retaining more active UP hosts are the top priorities.

The author has noticed that the latest version of Douyin has changed the multi-screen display in the "Follow" column into a vertical screen display to strengthen the interaction between fans. After all, Douyin is still a "short video community" and Douyin can only solve the problem of daily active traffic in the community.

(How to make users transition from the home page to the follow page is the key to Douyin’s closed-loop traffic)

Douyin has a large amount of traffic, and some of its production difficulties are increasing and its production costs are getting higher and higher. MCN content planning teams have begun to move in, making its content Matthew effect more obvious. Douyin is an ideal channel for increasing fans, but it is unrealistic to expect strong connections to be formed between its internal users.

Currently, in the homepage recommendations, in addition to the popular content recommended by algorithms such as appearance, cute pets, pranks, and funny things, increasing the recommendation weight for short videos that users are interested in and have few likes may be a way to improve the situation. In order to gain attention for long-tail content, perhaps you can only download the Tik Tok video and share it on your Moments spontaneously. After all, Tik Tok users will still return to their Moments.

Conclusion

After the 3Q war, no other company except Alibaba dared to challenge Tencent. Zhang Yiming's courage is commendable in this regard. Toutiao's public relations combat effectiveness is very strong, and it has inherited 360's tough fighting style.

At the Wuzhen Summit last year, Zhang Yiming had dinner at the same table with Ma Huateng. This year, he will probably be Mr. Ma's guest of honor. If Alibaba acquires Toutiao at all costs, this is the situation that Tencent least wants to see.

The author of this article @靠谱的阿星 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

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