The other side of information flow advertising: BAT’s data war

Social data, search data, and multi-line product data are important capabilities for BAT to seize the information flow advertising market in the future. Let us wait and see.

Kevin Kelly said, "Wherever the eyes go, money will follow." In today's Chinese market, fragmented reading has become the mainstream and the main scenario for domestic users to obtain information. It has become a highly watched money-making business model . The giant Baidu and major news clients have already made information flow a focus of change.

The year 2017 was even more turbulent. Baidu allocated 10 billion yuan in subsidies to Baijiahao , Alibaba Dayuhao was launched to connect the distribution of short videos and pictures, Tencent Mangzhong 2.0 allocated 1 billion yuan in subsidies, Yidian Zixun and Xiaomi OPPO formed a tripartite alliance to compete for the market, and the previously unknown NetEase News also suddenly "invested" 1 billion yuan in subsidies.

The above is just a glimpse of the opening of 2017, and the competition is expected to be more intense in the future. But on the other hand, it is an indisputable fact that national time is entering a saturation stage, the era of rough traffic growth will no longer appear, and the vertical and refined operation of traffic has become the current and future development direction.

The core of refined operations is to increase the value of unit traffic and improve the conversion rate of unit traffic advertising, and data is an important "chip". Therefore, the other side of the information flow advertising battlefield is also a data battlefield, in which BAT is the largest owner of data and may also be the subsequent winner.

Re-examining the value of information flow advertising from three data dimensions

1. Social data: User interest data is the key

The revenue from WeChat Moments information flow advertising has been quite impressive in the past two years. The first reason is naturally the large user base and sufficient traffic. On the other hand, the value of social data is also very large.

When Zhang Yiming was working on Toutiao, he started by collecting social data from all sides. He said, " Toutiao only needs users to log in with their social platform accounts, and the backend can use the data from the social network to quickly analyze their interests and then push news content that matches their interests."

To put it simply, social platforms are super-powerful reservoirs of user interest data. The platforms can dynamically obtain users' expressed moods and forwarded articles. This kind of data can be complementary to information flows that push content interests.

Weibo, a "social giant", has also begun to reversely build its own information flow distribution by leveraging its own user social data advantages that have been accumulated over the years, launching Weibo headlines to distribute information to users based on big data of users' interests. Last year, Weibo CEO Wang Gaofei said that information flow advertising already accounted for 50% of Weibo's revenue, while display advertising had shrunk to 30%, thanks to Weibo's mining of user interest data.

2. Search data: Advantages stacking effect

At the 2017 Marketing China Tour, Baidu emphasized Information Distribution 2.0, or the concept of a dual engine of “search + recommendation”. In my opinion, search engines are actually better at recommending information flows.

Generally, search engine advertisements will have their own keyword advertisements. Advertisers can accurately reach target users and acquire consumers by placing advertisements on Baidu.

Take Baidu as an example. For example, if a user searches for coffee machines on Baidu but does not buy them, and then logs on to other websites to browse information, he will find advertisements for featured coffee machines and pull him back to buy them. All of this is due to Baidu's precise advertising push capabilities. By "understanding" user search behavior data, it can complete precise recommendations and achieve the goal of moving from understanding consumers to influencing them.

Baidu Promotion , Alibaba Advertising Platform, and Tencent Advertising Platform are the three most well-known advertising platforms in China. However, Taobao mainly deals in commodity transactions and can only obtain users' commodity search keywords. From the data dimension, the sample dimension and data quantity are lower than search engines. In the information distribution 2.0 era, Taobao's information distribution is still limited to the e-commerce field. Baidu's information flow distribution is based on search. With more than 600 million users and 60 search response requests per day, it has accumulated massive amounts of data and has a natural advantage in distributing information on this basis.

Let’s talk about Baidu’s information flow recommendation ads. Based on the original search promotion, Baidu makes information flow recommendation ads, embeds the ads into its own content distribution, and makes precise ad recommendations based on understanding user interests and needs. Based on all the users' keyword search data, Baidu has a higher ability to mine user intent than vague social data. What users search for is what they need, so the unit advertising value that Baidu's data can create is much higher than social data.

3. Product line data, connecting is the key

BAT has a huge number of products: Baijiahao, maps, cloud storage, video, music and many other fields, basically all of which have BAT's product line layout.

Overall, Baidu has achieved the most thorough integration. Baidu announced early on that it would use artificial intelligence to integrate all its product lines. From a data perspective, this means integrating the user portraits of thousands of people under a huge user base, which is very useful for information flow advertising.

The second is Tencent. Tencent is mainly divided into the dual account system of WeChat and QQ, so it will create some distinctions, but it will not be too bad.

Alibaba's data penetration rate is relatively lower, because many of its products are acquired from third parties and are not its own products from the beginning. In addition, there are too many third-party login data that cannot be connected. Therefore, the penetration rate of Baidu and Tencent must be lower. This can be seen from the fact that UC's information flow ads have not yet been connected to Taobao products.

From the perspective of data moat

1. Content differentiation among platforms gradually disappears

Various platforms are offering subsidies to compete for content creators. For content creators, distributing content is not particularly difficult, and there are so many subsidies to be received. Therefore, in the future, various platforms will tend to be similar in terms of content data, and more competition will be placed on the collection of other data.

2. Social and search data have the greatest value for information flow advertising.

Social data can expose users' interests and intentions, explore more boundaries for information flow distribution, and achieve real-time and accurate advertising. The breakup between Weibo and Toutiao is precisely because everyone has seen this, and the greater value of WeChat lies in its advantage in payment scenarios.

Search is golden data that directly reflects user intent. Taking Baidu as an example, search is an active behavior after users have generated demand. The value of this data is more accurate and direct. In addition, in this context, search ads are based on the user's current true intent, so the unit value of ads is relatively high.

3. BAT’s product line data is a new fuel

In the era of refined traffic operation, various products under BAT have huge data value. They do not need to continuously expand their data dimensions like a single headline reading product, but can directly associate large amounts of data. Taking Baidu as an example, the use of data from platforms such as Baidu Mobile, Baidu Maps, and Baidu Nuomi in the advertising field cannot be underestimated after the data is connected. The larger the data, the more user tags there are, and the more accurate the pushed ads are. For advertisers, this means higher value for each unit of investment.

4. BAT's matrix products become the winners and seize the information flow market

In the era of information distribution 2.0, information flow is becoming ubiquitous. After the reading scenarios are expanded, the curse of low frequency of tool products can be further relieved, from low frequency to medium frequency or even high frequency, and more advertising value can be realized in one step.

Currently, products such as Baidu Mobile, Baidu Maps, Baidu Netdisk, QQ Space, and Amap already have information flow advertisements and are competing for the information flow market. Among them, Baidu's information flow advertising has been growing rapidly since its launch in the third quarter of last year.

Of course, other tool products may not be so lucky. For example, Moji Weather , which has 100 million monthly active users, has also added information flow advertising, but its performance is not very good. Last year, its total revenue was only more than 20 million, and all of these expenses came from information flow advertising. It is a bleak performance.

One of the reasons is that without the support of a data system of the scale of BAT, it is naturally impossible to achieve greater advertising value. So conversely, the data value of BAT products cannot be underestimated.

Conclusion:

The battlefield of information flow is, on the one hand, competing for user scenarios and establishing content barriers. However, as the total time of the nation reaches saturation, rough traffic operations are gradually entering the stage of vertical operations. At this time, advertisers will also require a higher input-output ratio. The future will also be a battlefield for data operations .

Social data, search data, and multi-line product data are important capabilities for BAT to seize the information flow advertising market in the future. Let us wait and see.

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