In-depth: Momo, Weibo and Kuaishou, the three video giants will eventually face off

Weibo has a market value of 17.2 billion yuan, Momo has a market value of 8.2 billion yuan, and Kuaishou’s latest valuation is 3 billion yuan. They are all the most dazzling stars in the capital market in the past year. China's Internet market has never been able to accommodate a second place, and there will eventually be a battle between the three giants.

Recently, Weibo and Momo have regained their footing in the U.S. stock market after three years of silence. Looking at the three giants in the market that are currently promoting video strategies, in addition to Momo and Weibo, which have already been listed on the US stock market, there is also Kuaishou, which has not yet been listed but is developing rapidly. These content platforms have not felt the capital winter at all. Among them, Weibo has a market value of 17.2 billion, Momo has a market value of 8.2 billion, and Kuaishou’s latest valuation is 3 billion. They are all the brightest stars in the capital market in the past year.

These companies may seem unrelated, but they have the same driving factors behind them. They all leverage the live streaming and short video trends based on their original businesses, quickly develop video strategies, establish new content scenarios to retain users, and realize commercial realization in a timely manner.

China's Internet market has never been able to accommodate a second place, and there will eventually be a battle between the three giants.

1. Competition in the live broadcast field has basically ended, and the competition in the short video field has entered the mid-term

Today, live streaming is no longer a hot topic, and the competition among the heroes in this field is coming to an end. After a number of small live streaming platforms went bankrupt and shut down, Inke , the industry's representative product, was sold to XuanYa not long ago. Although Inke has also made many attempts to find its own breakthrough, it still cannot escape the crushing of giants such as Momo and Weibo that rely on direct conversion of their existing huge number of users. The competition in the live streaming field has basically ended, which once again proves that live streaming is more suitable as an infrastructure to improve the efficiency of social , entertainment, and media products. This infrastructure-based live streaming format is more likely to survive and become mainstream than independent live streaming products.

When reviewing the final outcomes of Yingke and Weibo Momo, we will find that the key to determining success or failure in the live streaming field is actually the accumulation of relationship chains. This is also the core competitive point of the final battle between the three video giants, who can accumulate more relationship chains, have more scenarios, and keep users on the platform for a long time.

As important components of the video strategy, live streaming and short videos are a pair of brothers. Nowadays, when looking at the social and content products in pan-entertainment scenarios where people interact with each other, the greatest significance of videoization is that it enhances the authenticity of this virtual world and greatly improves the efficiency of content consumption and social entertainment. Behind an online ID is a living person, not an uncle pretending to be a beauty.

Among the three video giants, Kuaishou has a relatively weak foundation. It started out as a GIF production tool and built a short video community, covering people in third-, fourth- and fifth-tier cities, forming a unique community temperament. Now it is also promoting the establishment of social relationship chains and the socialization of content platforms. This is the same idea as Yingke's attempt, and this road is difficult to follow. Momo is the exact opposite of Kuaishou. It is a social platform that expands content scenarios. The new scenarios are mainly live broadcasts and short videos. The social and video modules promote each other's conversion rates , pushing Momo's user base to new highs every quarter and also achieving a surge in revenue through live broadcasts. Weibo has the best foundation, so its market value is the highest among the three. With seven years of accumulation of weak relationship chains and diversified content coverage, Weibo's advertising value is continuously amplified by the feed stream format based on attention and interest.

2. Advantages and disadvantages of Weibo, Momo, and Kuaishou in the video competition

1. User scale

Weibo has 340 million monthly active users, Momo has 85.2 million, and Kuaishou has 100 million monthly active users. Overall, Weibo is far ahead. The monthly active data of Momo and Kuaishou are also in the top 20 in the entire Internet circle. The scale of users is the prerequisite for the implementation of the video strategy. The original user accumulation of these three companies actually has little to do with video, but they all suffered from user growth bottlenecks and monetization difficulties in the early stages.

So when we look back at the competition in the live broadcast field, when Weibo and Momo have completed the original accumulation of users and directly launched the live broadcast function to form a linkage with the original main business, Inke is still struggling to accumulate users from scratch, and the cost of acquiring customers remains high. This is a ruthless crushing of user scale. The same situation will also occur in the field of short videos. Toutiao has begun to focus on short video functions and divert some existing users to the short video module, which will crush products that only focus on short videos. When Baidu started its information flow business, it placed the business on Baidu Mobile, which already had hundreds of millions of users, and claimed that it surpassed Toutiao in just three months.

2. Video scenes and product temperament

Weibo's video scenes are designed to enrich the content of the Weibo platform, Momo's video scenes are designed to improve social efficiency, and Kuaishou has transformed from a pure tool product to become the largest short video community in China. All three companies have enriched their product content through video scenes.

For products with community attributes, temperament is very important and determines the height of the ceiling to a certain extent. Many people’s stereotype about Tieba is that there are too many primary school students, which creates a ceiling for Tieba. The reason why Weibo has 300 million monthly active users is because it has a relatively neutral temperament and covers all sub-sectors. It has both elites and grassroots people. It is almost a microcosm of the entire society. The users on Weibo are like the world. Momo has a certain stereotype in many people's minds. People dare not say publicly that they are Momo users because they will be considered as people who like to "date". Therefore, before the live broadcast, the number of active users of Momo encountered a bottleneck. But after starting live streaming, a new product temperament was established. You can watch live streaming on Momo, which makes the product more neutral. This is much more effective than whitewashing the product through advertising back then. In terms of product quality, Kuaishou has encountered more problems. After Dr. X's article "The Cruel Story of the Lower Class: The Truth about a Video Software in Rural China" went viral, everyone knew that this is a short video platform where many users from third-, fourth-, and fifth-tier cities and rural areas tend to behave "strangely". Many people think it is low. This is the dilemma brought about by Kuaishou's product quality.

3. Social relationship chain

Weibo and Momo carry users' social relationship chains. Some social relationship chains already exist before watching the live broadcast or short video, while others are newly established after watching the live broadcast or short video. Although they are all weak relationship chains, if we analyze them solely from the perspective of video scenarios, the relationship chains constructed by Weibo, Kuaishou and Momo are actually completely different. Live streaming on Weibo is more of a relationship chain between the broadcaster and fans, which is one-to-many. The same is true on Kuaishou. On Weibo and Kuaishou, this action is called following. In addition to the relationship chain between top influencers and their fans, live broadcasts and short videos on Momo can build a one-to-one relationship chain between long-tail broadcasters and their audiences.

4. Monetization efficiency

Live streaming and short videos together form the basis of the video strategy. From the perspective of video emphasis, Weibo and Kuaishou have always focused more on short videos, while Momo is the only one that focuses more on live streaming. Therefore, among the three, Momo’s video strategy has the most direct impact on revenue. Live streaming has a strong real-time attribute. If the host that the user follows is not broadcasting live, short videos with recorded broadcast attributes are a good substitute. Therefore, while Momo is focusing on live streaming, it is also rapidly promoting the implementation of short videos.

80% of Weibo's current revenue structure is advertising revenue. Thanks to its 340 million monthly active users, the value of its traffic is widely recognized. Its video strategy is more about enriching platform content and active users, and does not make a direct contribution to revenue. 80% of Momo's revenue comes from live streaming. Videoization has not only enriched the platform content, but also brought direct revenue contribution. Kuaishou has not yet disclosed its revenue structure, but given its size, the pressure to monetize will not be too great. However, it needs to consider carefully whether to learn from Weibo to monetize traffic or from Momo to monetize live streaming scenes. The monetization scenarios have not been fully explored, so although Kuaishou has a large number of users, its valuation is only 3 billion, far less than Weibo and Momo.

3. Prediction of the final battle

1. Momo and Kuaishou: Difficulty of Dimensionality Upgrading and Dimensionality Downgrading

At Momo’s analyst meeting, someone asked Tang Yan what the difference was between Momo and Kuaishou. To some extent, Momo and Kuaishou are doing the same thing, using short videos and live broadcasts as video content for users to consume, but in exactly opposite directions. Kuaishou expands its social attributes by starting with content attributes, which is a dimensional upgrade and is extremely difficult. Momo starts with social attributes to expand content attributes, which is dimensionality reduction, so Momo is very successful whether it is live streaming or short videos.

2. Weibo and Kuaishou: Temperament determines destiny

There is a certain overlap between the users of Weibo and Kuaishou. In the past two years, Weibo has been promoting the idea of ​​sinking users to the incremental markets in third- and fourth-tier cities, thus solving the bottleneck problem of user growth. However, due to the temperament of its product, Kuaishou does not have the potential for increasing user base. Users in first- and second-tier cities find Kuaishou low-end and are unwilling to use it. This is also the difference between dimensionality increase and dimensionality decrease.

More importantly, the difference in user spending power directly affects the choices of advertisers. When launching marketing campaigns, KA clients will choose platforms with better brand tone, such as Baidu, Toutiao, Weibo, Zhihu, and Momo. 80% of Weibo’s revenue comes from advertising, among which KA clients’ advertising budget has increased by more than 200%, which shows the importance advertisers attach to the platform’s tone.

3. Momo and Weibo: Can benchmark each other

In fact, Momo and Weibo have a very subtle competitive relationship. Since both have survived in the non-acquaintance social field outside the WeChat ecosystem , they have gone through a period of rapid user growth together, encountered bottlenecks together, stood on the side of Alibaba together (both companies have faded now), and chased the short video and live broadcast trends together to rejuvenate their second spring. Their growth trajectories are so consistent.

Sometimes I feel that Weibo and Momo are really similar, and can be compared with each other. Both are pan-entertainment ecosystems centered around content and social interaction. Weibo has a market value of 17.2 billion with 340 million users, and Momo has a market value of 8.2 billion with 85.2 million users. Momo has created half of Weibo's market value with 1/4 of its user base, which shows the high monetization efficiency of live streaming . The gap in market value also gives Momo room to catch up. In addition to live streaming, mobile games , mobile advertising , and value-added service scenarios are also worth further exploration. Especially in the field of social games, this may be the next scenario that supports Momo to break through 100 million monthly active users.

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