This explosive traffic platform, with its huge centripetal force, quickly attracted all the players in the "traffic production, operation , and sales" chain, allowing everyone to take what they need and reap the benefits. When I woke up, a Douyin dance video posted by "Dai Gula K" the night before was flooded with messages, "with hundreds of thousands of likes." What happened next was even crazier: she gained 5 million followers in 10 days, and by late May, the video had received over 8 million likes and 150 million views—she gained 10 million followers in just one month. Daigula K, who became unexpectedly popular, is an ordinary senior student at Shenyang University of Chemical Technology. He has learned a little dance and has a very nice smile. Two months ago, she was signed by the MCN agency Onion Video. Last year, the agency successfully incubated "Office Xiaoye" on Weibo, and this IP "reached 1 million followers on Weibo in a very short period of time." Nie Yangde, CEO of Onion Video, who has incubated several million-level IPs on Weibo and has been an MCN for two years, told the editor, "Now it seems that (Weibo) cannot compare with the traffic potential of Douyin." Like Daigula K, he was stunned by Douyin's ability to create hits and make ordinary people famous. This kind of luck is not an isolated case - the benefits of Douyin are being released in large quantities - there are many examples of people who have quickly become big internet celebrities known to the entire network through a few popular contents. Fei Qiming with 16 million fans, Zhang Xinyao with 10 million fans, Wu Jiayu with 7 million fans, itzGennyB with 3.8 million fans, etc., have only been on Douyin for half a year to a year. This was also the period when Douyin, owned by Toutiao , rose rapidly. According to industry insiders, as of April, Douyin's daily active users exceeded 100 million, approaching that of Kuaishou , and by the end of May, this number had risen to 150 million. Douyin’s traffic dividend is expanding - in 2017, adding 1 million followers in 3 months was a remarkable thing, but after the Spring Festival this year, this growth rate is no longer surprising. This growth rate finally made Tencent feel threatened. The two companies are on the verge of a war. Tencent blocked the traffic entrance of WeChat and adjusted its long-shelved Weishi project to a priority strategy. Ma Huateng and Zhang Yiming have had many exchanges on WeChat. According to an insider, "Zhang Yiming's words were very impolite." The conflict then spread to the public circle of friends . Since the 3Q war, no one has made Tencent so restless. 1. Tik Tok is fierceBefore this year's Spring Festival, among its three short video products - Volcano Video , Xigua Video, and Douyin - Toutiao decided to fully support Douyin. According to Jiemian, Toutiao has increased Douyin's marketing budget to 2 billion yuan, and has acquired top domestic iOS traffic such as Candy Crush Saga and Ledo Games . Among the three short video products of Toutiao, Huoshan Video originally seemed to be the most valued and the one that directly competed with Kuaishou, covering the largest area of users, while Douyin initially seemed to be a niche product: during its dormant period in the first half of 2017, Douyin poached about 300 celebrities from Xiaokaxiu , Weibo, musical.ly, and art schools, designed a variety of themes and gameplay, and carried out a cold start of content. Starting from this kind of fashionable and good-looking P UGC content driven by "pretty young ladies", the approach of strong operation and strong recommendation of top content is actually a different approach compared to Kuaishou. In August, Douyin’s daily video playback volume exceeded 1 billion; by the end of the year, the number of users had increased more than 10 times compared to six months ago. TikTok is fierce, and it really started to show its teeth during the 2018 Spring Festival. With an average daily budget of around 4 million yuan, Douyin is frantically buying traffic from various channels . At the same time, the Toutiao team, which is good at user growth , used extremely low-cost customer acquisition methods such as celebrities sending red envelopes and live answering questions to send Douyin to the top of the app store download list, where it has remained for a long time. Data from third-party agency QuestMobile shows that after the Spring Festival, Douyin's daily active users reached 62 million, an increase of 30 million during the Spring Festival, while Kuaishou's growth during the same period was 10 million. After the Spring Festival, this trend of spending money has continued to increase. A person close to Douyin told 36Kr : "Now the budget is 20 million a day to buy traffic and build all the channels you can think of." In addition, Douyin also spent a lot of money as content subsidies for celebrities. "Tencent Weishi took 3 billion, and Douyin can only be higher." After the Spring Festival, the term "two microblogs and one Douyin" became popular in the industry - WeChat, Weibo, and Douyin. Tik Tok is becoming a new traffic gathering place. In terms of scale, in the content + social track, the only ones ahead of Douyin are probably WeChat, QQ, Weibo, and Kuaishou; and in terms of growth, almost no one can come close to Douyin at this stage. “Perhaps in the next few years there won’t be a product that surpasses TikTok. There is enough money invested in it, the technology and operations are strong enough, the monetization ability is strong, and there are almost no shortcomings.” An industry insider told 36Kr. The celebrities on Douyin have become the most direct beneficiaries of Douyin's spending money to buy growth, especially around the Spring Festival, when Douyin celebrities experienced a phenomenal increase in followers, such as Daigula K. Mr. Xu, the owner of the public account " Late Night Fauci ", also opened his own Douyin account "Late Night Mr. Xu" before this year's Spring Festival. "After it opened, I hardly managed it. I just asked the operation to edit my existing videos and move them over. In three months, the number of followers increased to 1.6 million." In comparison, "深夜发媸", this public account with annual revenue of tens of millions, took four years to reach more than 2 million followers. Everyone is rushing in, trying to grow quickly before this wave of dividends fades. Institutionalized companies will be faster. Onion joined Douyin with dozens of its influencers in June last year, followed by Beike in July, and Dayu now has more than 70 accounts on Douyin. Some big Vs have just realized it. “One weekend in March, our operations department randomly uploaded a few videos as usual, and one of them went viral, with about 300,000 likes and 400,000 followers within a few days.” Ms. Xu, who had experienced the golden age of WeChat public accounts, was stunned. “That was the day I realized how crazy the users on Douyin are.” After May, she planned to move her main video battlefield from Weibo to Douyin. However, in addition to rushing in, people trying to reap this wave of dividends also have to figure out the logic of Douyin. 2. The logic of Tik Tok"Unlike Kuaishou's logic of pursuing random average distribution, Douyin is more inclined to serve content consumers and pursues providing them with efficient information matching." Jin Yechen, a partner of Gao's entrepreneurial service, told 36Kr. This is not only an effective means to retain users, but also a way for Douyin to control the right to distribute traffic. Tik Tok’s “sense of control” is changing over time. In the early days of "sense of control", there were more human traces. For example, during the cold start, the Douyin team spent a lot of time and energy to recruit celebrities, and each operator was tasked with recruiting people. On Christmas Eve 2016, as the first influencer invited to join Douyin, "Xue Laoshi" even received a carefully decorated Christmas tree from the Douyin team. At the same time, it is equipped with many "challenges" set by the Douyin team as well as the themes, gameplay, and music of the content. Douyin relies on mobilizing its contracted celebrities to produce content within this framework, thereby firmly controlling the tone and quality of the content. A person close to Douyin told 36Kr: "The official challenge is the KPI of Douyin's operators, so traffic tilt is inevitable." Not only that, Douyin regards the celebrities who joined early as "their own people" and will also provide a certain amount of traffic and resources for their good content. With the explosive growth of content producers and users, Douyin began to weaken manual operations and strengthen algorithms in the second half of 2017. Tik Tok’s recommendation algorithm also follows the logic of “macro-control”: traffic will continue to flow to popular content, and content with poor data or a tone that does not match the platform will lose the opportunity to be seen by more people. The videos that suddenly became popular are all the products of this set of recommendation logic:
In other words, it relies on small-scale testing to screen out those with excellent data and then recommend them on a large scale. Nie Yangde's experience is that if a video initially only gets one or two thousand likes, then even if you wait two or three days, the number of likes will only be that many - which means it will not be recommended. "10,000 likes is a threshold, and the next level is 100,000 likes." Nie Yangde told 36Kr, "If a video quickly breaks through 10,000 likes within one or two hours, its actual number of views should have reached about 5 million, so the probability of it reaching 100,000 likes is relatively high, and the subsequent data growth will be faster and faster." This content distribution algorithm inherited from Toutiao allows good content that has already shown its potential on the platform to quickly accumulate explosive energy like a snowball. Unlike WeChat public accounts, the ranking of Douyin celebrities has not yet been finalized based on the number of fans. The usage habits of Douyin users are still mainly to browse the "recommendation" page, which means that Douyin's algorithm and will can still greatly influence this ecosystem. But everyone knows that as Douyin has passed its strongest growth period and the structure of top celebrities, mid-level celebrities and a large number of ordinary UGC has gradually stabilized, the chances of becoming an overnight sensation on Douyin will become smaller and smaller. 3. The rules of influencer monetizationHowever, when it comes to making money, the celebrities on Douyin react much faster than when Weibo and WeChat first emerged. In June 2017, before TikTok really took off, Xue Laoshi had already taken his first advertisement. He was one of the first few celebrities on Douyin to start monetizing. With a trial mentality, Xue Laoshi, who had less than 500,000 fans at the time, priced one of his advertisements at around 5,000 yuan. Last September, when his number of fans exceeded one million, he raised his advertising price to 30,000 yuan per advertisement. What he didn't expect was that advertisers would readily accept it. After talking with a large number of advertisers, Nie Yangde found that everyone’s attitude towards short video marketing and Douyin is "anxiety with a little excitement, excitement with a little confusion." Although everyone is still a little confused about how to do it specifically, after more than a year of exploration, advertisers have at least determined that "they should invest." In the second half of 2017, apart from the two major areas of Internet and fast-moving consumer goods, there were not many advertisers entering the market. But "after the Chinese New Year, the number of brands asking for prices suddenly increased. Every day, people come to consult us about cooperation with celebrities on Douyin, which is several times more than before the New Year," said Nie Yangde. Investing in celebrities is the first reaction of advertisers, just like investing in big Vs in the Weibo era and investing in big accounts in the WeChat era. "It's not difficult to get advertising on Douyin. Office Xiaoye's advertising is already scheduled until August." This has almost become a sweet worry for Nie Yangde. "Her biggest problem now is insufficient production capacity. We plan to assign her a dedicated Douyin production team next." In May alone, there were more than 10 advertisers behind Daigula K. According to the current offer from The Onion, this means that even if she only takes half of it, she alone can bring in more than one million in advertising fees for The Onion in May. "In the past three months, advertisers and advertising companies like us have been talking about TikTok. It became so popular so suddenly that it didn't give us the time to react and learn like Weibo and WeChat did in the beginning," a planner from an advertising company told 36Kr. At the beginning, everyone placed advertisements based on traffic logic. Xue Laoshi’s quotation last year became a model, and a saying has emerged in the market: one Douyin fan is worth three cents. A person close to Douyin told 36Kr that since October last year, Douyin's operations have been actively communicating with the influencers they are working with about the quotation standards. “Because TikTok also wants to quickly establish a standardized market to promote the commercialization of influencers.” From a recent quotation given by Douyin for signing a celebrity obtained by 36Kr, we can see Douyin’s pricing idea: except for S-level big IPs, the price basically fluctuates around three cents per fan. According to a marketing director of an Internet company that has advertised on Douyin, Douyin S-level celebrities command a higher premium. "When Zhang Xinyao had 7 million followers, his price was 360,000 yuan per post." However, as more and more celebrities are sharing the traffic dividend of Douyin, the granularity of advertisers' demands is also becoming finer, and the standard of "three cents per fan" is quietly changing. Liu Fei, CEO of Beike Video, has his own logic: the number of fans is just one dimension, and pricing also depends on the positioning of the IP and the type of content. "Compared with a comedy IP with 1 million fans and a technology IP with 200,000 fans, the price of the latter is definitely higher than the former." In his opinion, the personalization and segmentation of IP are very important. If a big V with very mature personal style and works takes advertising on Douyin, the pricing will be quite non-standard. Although Mr. Xu has only 1.6 million Douyin fans, the quotation of this "grass-planting expert" has reached 100,000 yuan per post. Even so, "a while ago one of our advertising agencies told me that your Douyin pricing is too cheap." Compared with the "two microblogs", the price of Douyin is still low - Mr. Xu's WeChat two messages (with pictures and text) are quoted at 150,000, and the customized video content on Weibo can reach 300,000 per message. And her fans on these two channels are not much higher than that on Douyin. Selling goods, this path that celebrities on Weibo have taken may be more effective on Douyin, which uses short videos as a medium. With 4.4 million followers, Yeshi Xiaoge is a food celebrity. After Douyin opened Taobao shopping cart links for a group of celebrities in March, he started selling customized beef sauce. According to staff from Dayu, the MCN agency that Yeshi Xiaoge signed with, the highest daily turnover reached 70,000 yuan a few days after the sale went on sale. While advertisers are still confused, there are more ways to make money than just selling traffic. “Package several IPs together, add a full-case planning, and you can do brand exposure and sell products. This way it’s easy to negotiate a higher price.” Nie Yangde told 36Kr that Onion, which has been working on Douyin for less than a year, has already negotiated two annual Douyin framework cooperation deals worth tens of millions. 4. Underwater businessBut in addition to the visible data, the uncertainty of Douyin has given advertisers hope - what if their ads can become a hit? Qiuhan, co-founder of Answer Tea, has been very busy recently. This milk tea shop, located in Wanda Plaza in Erqi District, Zhengzhou City, has generated tens of millions of views with two Douyin videos that had no production costs, and has also brought in 249 franchise stores across the country. Soon after, Qiuhan received a lot of invitations to give lectures on how to do Douyin marketing. There are many such cases of “making money out of nothing” on Douyin, and they directly boost sales:
These cases suggest that with the help of good ideas and content, it is possible to go viral even without spending a penny, relying on any big Vs, or even without taking the initiative to come up with ideas yourself. "Everyone wants to create a hit product." A planner at an advertising company is both excited and anxious. “If I can do two great cases on Douyin, my voice in the circle will be completely different.” But her peers all saw this opportunity and were secretly competing with her. She was so anxious that she recently bought a membership in an institution that provides Douyin marketing training, and she takes extra lessons after get off work. Many people want to find traceable patterns in the "accidental popularity" cases of Douyin. "Looking at the most popular challenges and content themes at the moment, such as seaweed dance and doula dance, and then creating creative content and content on the same subject is most likely to hit the machine-recommended tags and gain traffic." Ben told 36Kr that after the video has a certain volume, it can be directed to one's own WeChat, Weibo or Taobao store through Douyin. He runs a marketing training organization called "Douyin Tui". Individual students pay 365 yuan for membership and business students pay 999 yuan for membership. "We are a team of three people. We only have labor costs on a daily basis. Our monthly income is at least 200,000 yuan, and it is growing all the time." For the students, his role is nothing more than helping them observe and analyze TikTok. In order to do this better, he also found a way to get in touch with the operations of Douyin and obtain internal information as soon as possible. This is very important. As TikTok gradually increases its efforts to limit or even delete advertising content, someone needs to tell content producers where "TikTok's bottom line of tolerance" is. At the same time, the gray army of fake traffic on Douyin has grown at a faster rate than ever before. But the difference from Weibo and WeChat is that skillful Douyin traffic inflating can drive real traffic to continue to increase - for example, when a video has received 10,000 likes, the video may be thrown into a larger traffic pool. On the promotional page of the brushing company, the words "send you to the hot list of Douyin" touch people's hearts. "1,000 likes 10 yuan, 1,000 fans 12 yuan, 10,000 views 15 yuan." A traffic-boosting company gave its Douyin quotation to 36Kr. This company relies on QQ groups and WeChat groups to maintain an "underwater world" of about 300,000 people. From Weibo, WeChat to Douyin, it is nothing more than constantly increasing channels. At present, the price difference of Douyin inflating volume among various companies on the market is not much. Some "considerate" merchants directly give a package price for a video: 488 likes + 8,000 views + 120 shares + 300 fans = 25 yuan. Of course, these are all manual labor prices. Machine brushing will be even cheaper. "But people with experience told me not to use machines to increase the number of followers, as it is easy for Douyin to detect it and block the account if it is discovered." A WeChat merchant who just started a Douyin account told 36Kr, "Even if you use manual bots, there are some tricks, such as bots that are slower and don't let the system detect any abnormalities in your account. If your budget is really limited, it is safer to mix manual and machine bots." Some people want to use the power of the Internet water army to leverage traffic and become popular, but some people just want to "rob traffic." In the eyes of people who are serious about content creation, those who rely on shoddy content and inflated traffic to attract advertisers are like "traffic robbers." “They accept all kinds of advertisements and keep the prices very low. If there are more people like this, it will affect the entire advertising ecosystem of Douyin, and will also affect the volume and price of orders we receive.” A celebrity with 1 million fans is very angry. In fact, these people are not much different from the "number-making party" who focus on graphic and text content on content platforms such as WeChat, Weibo, and Toutiao - the content is copied and pseudo-original, and the traffic is a mixture of real and fake. 5. “Strong Control Empire” Reaps 10 BillionIf celebrities, advertisers, and traffic-boosting agencies have all learned a lot from the monetization experiences of Weibo and WeChat, then TikTok is the one that learns the fastest and understands best how to reap the benefits. According to people close to Toutiao, Toutiao's OKR this year mainly includes two items: DAU and advertising revenue, which are 600 million and 50 billion respectively. “The completion of these two indicators depends largely on the performance of TikTok.” Looking back at the commercialization process of Weibo, during its initial peak period of traffic, Weibo itself did not make any money. Instead, it was a carnival for grassroots influencers and joke tellers. It took Weibo several years to gain control over the money-making process: it figured out how to take a cut from the advertising posts accepted by big Vs, and eventually turned itself into the largest advertising intermediary; it was only much later that it took control of traffic distribution and inserted advertisements, no longer allowing the feed to present a purely dependent attention relationship. Douyin not only knows how to make money, but is also strong in it: it controls traffic distribution, advertisers, and influencers. "The entire Toutiao product line was commercialized early, and it was done in one go, with a high profile. They have a very strong advertising sales system to ensure this," Jin Yechen told 36Kr. In addition, " TikTok 's ad loads and ad prices quickly reached their maximum. Toutiao's commercialization was a one-shot deal, without any slow testing." Spending money hard and then making money hard is Toutiao’s style. In the second half of 2017, Douyin started commercialization, less than a year after it was launched. 36Kr obtained a list of Douyin’s advertising rates for the second quarter of this year, which were significantly higher than those of other content platforms. Looking more closely, Douyin currently uses five main types of commercial resources: splash screen ads, information flow ads , customized challenges, sticker collaborations, and influencer collaborations, among which the first three account for the bulk of its revenue. "The actual price of the 240 yuan/CPM publication price after the discount is 60 yuan/CPM, but the price of the information flow of Toutiao's main app is only more than 20 yuan. Now the only information flow that is more expensive than Douyin is probably WeChat Moments ." A salesperson from an advertising agency told 36Kr. The same is true for splash screen ads. Compared with Weibo's rate of 1.09 million yuan per cycle, Douyin's 2.8 million yuan is more than double. Even so, advertisers still show strong enthusiasm for hard advertising on Douyin. According to Jiemian, Douyin sales staff were already very busy in March this year. The phone was bombarded with calls and the inquiries on WeChat were also overwhelming. A salesperson could get 5 or 6 advertising orders every month, with the unit price ranging from 1 million to 5 million. From March to now, Yang Huan's company has invested 10 million on Douyin. "Our number is not that high. Alipay and Xiaomi have invested more than 30 million each from the beginning of this year to now." Big Internet companies have spared no effort in their investment in TikTok. The premium space for non-standard resources such as customized challenges is even greater. The "brand challenge" is 2 million yuan, and the "official challenge" is 4 million yuan, both of which are actual transaction prices. Douyin is not responsible for planning, but is only responsible for providing corresponding recommended resources. Unlike the one-time dissemination of hard advertising, challenge competitions can trigger imitation and follow-up from UGC users, thus increasing the dissemination effect. This has made many brands eager to try it out. Yang Huan is the marketing director of a large Internet company. He started communicating with Douyin about the launch of the challenge in February, but even though the budget was in place, he could not buy any resources. "TikTok only sells 20 challenges every month, which sell out quickly. My needs have been scheduled for two months later." When it comes to making money, Douyin is very strong. "The price of the challenge has increased twice since the end of last year, and it will increase again in July." Yang Huan told 36Kr that Douyin has been frequently raising prices and reducing sales resources. "Moreover, Douyin recently removed some of the recommended resources originally provided in the challenge, just to make us spend more money on hard advertising." Tik Tok’s strength comes from its own traffic dividend and strong operational intervention logic. Usually, challenges initiated by individuals only have a few hundred to a few thousand participants, while challenges sold by Douyin can have tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of participants, because in the final analysis, Douyin's official driving force is the strongest, and Douyin is the ultimate controller of traffic. Douyin has also not fallen behind in the business of monetizing celebrities. Douyin has heavily supported and signed up celebrities from the very beginning, and now the celebrities have become its cash cows - Douyin can get a share of every advertising order they take. It can be said that Douyin itself is becoming a large-scale MCN organization, firmly grasping the celebrity resources with strong monetization capabilities in its own hands. "If celebrities accept advertisements through non-official Douyin channels, their videos will be restricted or even deleted once they are discovered, especially for non-top celebrities who have a weaker voice." Yang Huan, who is busy planning a challenge, recently discovered many examples of restricted traffic, so he honestly sought out celebrities signed by Douyin to cooperate with. The MCN agencies that cooperated with Douyin could not escape being "exploited". There is no consensus among the parties on the profit-sharing ratio between Douyin, its contracted celebrities, and MCN agencies. Some celebrities signed by Douyin told 36Kr that Douyin would not share their advertising revenue, but an MCN agency told 36Kr that the revenue sharing ratio between Douyin and them was 7:3. Most people in the industry believe that the most reasonable situation is a 5:5 profit split - Weibo's "micro-task" order-taking system adopts this ratio, and Douyin will also launch a similar system in late June. But there are still "gray areas" under strong control. "As long as we report to Douyin in advance when we accept private advertising, the operations staff responsible for our daily maintenance will usually turn a blind eye." A celebrity told 36Kr, "After all, the platform still needs to protect our interests in order to retain us, and they can't provide so many customers to feed us now." Douyin is very secretive about its current advertising revenue. Based on the actual transaction prices of all Douyin's advertising resources, 36Kr estimates that the monthly revenues from Douyin's splash screen ads, information flow ads, and challenge competitions are around 200 million, 500 million, and 60 million, respectively. Therefore, Douyin's current monthly revenue is approximately between 700 million and 800 million yuan. Taking into account subsequent growth, this means an annual revenue of nearly 10 billion yuan. This money-making ability is astonishing: Toutiao's advertising revenue for the whole of last year was 15 billion yuan, and Weibo's advertising revenue last year was about 6.4 billion yuan (US$996 million). However, TikTok is currently still at the stage where it spends more than it earns. “But with Toutiao’s capabilities, Douyin still has at least 50% room for commercial development, because models like e-commerce and live streaming have not yet been launched on a large scale,” Jin Yechen judged. At present, Douyin's ability to make money comes from its good cost-effectiveness - a sales representative of an advertising agency of Toutiao told 36Kr that one of its e-commerce clients put information flow ads on Douyin, "1 yuan can bring about 30 yuan in sales, which is quite satisfactory" - but more importantly, it has explosive growth. However, the explosive growth of Douyin in the past six months has gradually slowed down, the craziest bonus period has passed, and this traffic pool is no longer a pure depression. Now, with its daily active users approaching 150 million and almost surpassing Kuaishou, how far is Douyin from its ceiling? Douyin, which has achieved a 10-fold user growth in the past year, is now unlikely to continue growing at this rate. We learned from insiders of Toutiao that in the future, Toutiao will spend more efforts to support Xigua Video, as there is still a large blank market there - this is another city in the eyes of Zhang Yiming, the founder of Toutiao. Maybe, that will be the next Tik Tok. The author of this article @36氪 Zhang Yuxin is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting! Product promotion services: APP promotion services, advertising platform, Longyou Games |
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