Weibo, Meipai, and Douyin are all working together. Will dance be the next explosion point for short video content?

A chart I saw a few days ago caught my attention. Youku, iQiyi and Tencent Video , including the original team that created the hit IP "The Rap of China" this year, are all preparing to invest heavily in the production of dance (particularly street dance) variety shows next year.

(Information compiled from: Entertainment Capital Theory and related persons)

As the year of hip-hop is coming to an end, the four major TV stations and the three major long-video websites have all placed their bets on dance programs, which undoubtedly sends a signal: 2018 is likely to be a big year for dance.

Through the program sales status table, we can see that "Hot Blood Street Dance Crew" and Weibo have done a joint production, and according to relevant sources, Douyin is interested in sponsoring "This! Just Street Dance of China. At the same time, at a recent strategic launch conference, Meipai executives also stated that they will make vigorously supporting "dance" vertical content one of their important development strategies for 2018.

I think the reason why various short video platforms have entered the field of dance is mainly because these heavily produced variety shows, although ultimately presented to the audience in the form of long videos, are limited by the form of the program itself, and will lack a platform for interaction with terminal audiences in subsequent dissemination. Weibo, Meipai, and Douyin are communication platforms where domestic dance enthusiasts gather. They can carry out topic management, distribution and dissemination, secondary creation, and commercial cooperation around the program content itself. Many hot spots, hot items, and eye-catching effects in the program can be maximized and presented through their use, which just makes up for the shortcomings of long video websites.

Similar to popular shows such as The Voice of China and The Rap of China, street dance shows also have the following characteristics:

1. The audience tends to be younger and are mostly fashion lovers;
2. The contestants have distinct personalities, or the packaging has stories;
3. The overall audio-visual effect of the program is powerful;
4. It has been developing in a relatively underground way for many years, and a group of high-quality content producers (dancer and dance troupe) are eagerly waiting for an opportunity to explode.

Although street dance variety shows have been launched in the past few years, and the director of "The Rap of China", Che Che, has directed several street dance shows, they have never become popular.

Although the overall number of short video users and business scale in China are still growing, the head effect of short video platforms has become increasingly obvious, and the battle has begun to be decided by a few companies. Will their simultaneous competition for dance variety shows become a watershed in the short video war and drive a big explosion in dance content in 2018?

1. The premise for a content carrier to become popular is to find the most suitable content type.

From the earliest pictures and texts, long videos, and live broadcasts to the short videos that have become popular again in the past two years, we can see that the explosion of each content carrier is accompanied by finding the content type that is most suitable for dissemination through this carrier, and matching the entire business ecosystem behind this content type.

The three elements of carrier, content and business are mutually causal, which have gradually given rise to entrepreneurial dividends and investment opportunities for carriers such as pictures, texts, live broadcasts and short videos.

For example, pictures and texts are suitable for content with high information density, such as articles on science and technology and finance, as well as short paragraphs and funny comics. Content creators can directly attract fans and then try advertising monetization or paid membership.

Long videos, due to their length advantage, are more suitable for telling a complete story. The IP resources behind them and the supply chain of the entire film and television industry hold a key position, making long video companies particularly weak in commercialization after spending a lot of money to purchase copyrights.

Another example is live streaming, which is obviously more suitable for content that requires strong interaction. You can directly tip internet celebrities and beauties, you can pay for online courses, and game and sports live streaming also play an indispensable role in the two huge industrial chains.

2. Behind the popularity of short videos, what type of content is most suitable for it?

This is a very divergent thinking. I believe that there is definitely more than one type of suitable content. If you meet an awesome video host or content platform, you may be able to make something out of inappropriate content types. However, with video becoming a ubiquitous form of entertainment today, I believe that the dance content mentioned above is highly compatible with short videos as a content carrier on many levels.

1) Duration matching. A dance performance itself is very short, usually a few minutes or even tens of seconds. This is consistent with the length of time that short video content is most likely to spread, that is, the time that users can maintain their attention.

2) Pattern matching. Dance content can only be fully appreciated by viewers through video presentation, which is definitely not possible with pictures and texts. If it is a live broadcast, although there can be interaction, it is impossible to present the most essential content of a dance.

3) Commercial space. During the playback of short videos, the triggering points of dance content, including its professionalism, funny points, and even commercial implantation points, can be delivered to the audience in a dense and vivid way through the mobile phone screen. A dance performance can even be an advertisement in itself, truly achieving the goal of content being the advertisement and advertisement being the content.

In terms of the general discussion of several short video platforms such as content, users and fans, I am particularly optimistic about the commercialization of dance content on short video platforms. This field is similar to the underground rap field, and it has already reached a boiling point.

Strawberry Music Festival and Modern Sky have made a number of folk singers famous, and The Rap of China has made it possible for rappers to stop waiting and starving underground. So, what platforms can help domestic dance enthusiasts and dance groups in terms of traffic , content, fans and scale monetization?

3. How is the development of dance content on Weibo, Meipai and Douyin?

1) Weibo

As the most influential social media platform in China, Weibo has achieved great success in terms of users, content and revenue in recent years, which is reflected in its stock price: it has increased more than 12 times from its lowest point two years ago.

When you open the top dance topics on Weibo, you will find that street dance is already the top one. They have also started promoting Beijing TV's "Dancing So", even though the show itself has many flaws, such as using professional singers as judges for dance shows.

However, under the super topic of street dance on Weibo, we can see that the personal Weibo accounts of various dancers, the highlights of dance troupes and dance clubs, and the latest information about the street dance circle are all aggregated and summarized very well through the presentation of information flow . The overall topic reading volume has reached an astonishing 400 million.

For dance content that is more entertaining and requires users' attention and payment, using Weibo as a content output platform is a basic option.

From several other major dance topics on Weibo, we can see that most content producers who produce dance content, whether individuals or institutions, whether it is popular street dance or more niche dance styles, will publish their content on Weibo. Because this place is not only suitable for disseminating one's own content, but also can easily gather fans, so as to further explore the space for commercial monetization.

However, as a general content social media platform with more than 376 million monthly active users, Weibo is a large square that brings together a wide variety of content. At the just-concluded V Summit, Weibo’s top management released specific data, showing that there were as many as 25 content areas with monthly reading volumes reaching 10 billion.

And these 25 do not include dance. After all, the traffic of celebrity, entertainment and e-commerce content on Weibo is too huge, and the commercial ecosystem is also very mature. As for dance content, Weibo has not yet shown any special preference for it, making it a strategic development focus at the platform level.

But I think that for a large platform like Weibo, striking back after being attacked has always been its usual tactic. For example, after Fenda became popular, Weibo launched Weibo Q&A within three months, and its size was more than ten times that of Fenda. Regarding dance content, I think Weibo, a listed company with financial pressure, will wait for a suitable opportunity before making a large-scale entry.

2) Meipai

As one of the community products with the largest number of users and the highest level of activity under the Meitu system, Meipai’s monthly active users have exceeded 152 million. Even compared with the many short video products that have recently emerged, Meipai's users are young enough: a high proportion are those born after 1995, and feminine enough: the proportion of women in first- and second-tier cities is much higher than that of men (there is a lot of room for commercialization).

In addition to female users , young people who love fashion are also the main producers and viewers of dance content on the Meipai platform. As an important content category of the platform, Meipai has been deeply engaged in dance content for many years. The good community atmosphere has attracted many dance enthusiasts to share and communicate, making it the most active platform for dance UGC . Under the "Dance" topic of Meipai, we can see that the concentration of various contestants and dance content is also quite high.

It is reported that there are about 15,000 female dance enthusiasts contributing content to the Meipai community. Their content is mostly inspired by interactions with influencers, such as communication, imitation , and production of similar dance UGC content, which in turn enhances the atmosphere of the Meipai dance community. For example, this year Zhang Yixing released a dance video of the same name as "SHEEP", the title song from his new album, on Meipai, challenging everyone to #张艺兴SHEEP舞# and follow him to dance. Just 20 days after the launch of the event, more than 9,000 users followed suit, and the final Meipai topic #和张艺兴有戏# had over 280 million views.

In terms of content operation , in addition to basic maintenance of dance producers, Meipai also announced that it has signed cooperation agreements with 14 dance clubs. According to the official information released by Meipai, Yi Yang Qianxi, a member of the popular idol group TFBOYS, is one of its important partners at Jiahe Dance Club, where he learned street dance.

In my opinion, as a mainstream UGC short video platform, Meipai has three purposes for signing dance clubs: First, the vertical influence of top dancers and dance clubs cannot be underestimated. Through signing contracts, the platform helps dance clubs further improve their influence and revenue capabilities, thereby retaining talented people. Second, under the radiation effect of top dance masters and dance troupes, the platform can produce richer and higher-quality dance UGC content and create a community dance atmosphere.

Finally, as for commercialization, the commerciality of individual dancers is definitely not as good as that of institutionally operated dance troupes. Except for those with strong IPs, I think for most dancers who want to make a living in this field for a long time, joining a dance troupe similar to MCN is one way to go.

Another way may be to increase personal exposure through program invitations. For example, in dance variety shows such as "Hot Blood Dance Crew" created by the original team of "The Rap of China" mentioned above, many dance masters and dance troupes of Meipai will have the opportunity to be invited to auditions and later program cooperation.

In this process, Meipai took a route that is different from Weibo and Douyin. That is, through the influence of native content and community atmosphere, it launched a series of collaborations with dance variety shows based on contestants, account systems, content and dissemination. From the previous chart, we can see that Weibo and Douyin both used paid sponsorship to collaborate with dance variety shows. Meipai outputs pure content resources, which indirectly proves the recognition of satellite TV and long video websites on Meipai's influence on dance content. At the recent 2018 strategy conference, Meipai executives stated that they would use the entire Meitu system's "500 million resources, 1.5 billion Meitu users, and 10 billion traffic" to start from the existing platform's feminine ecology and fully support Meipai's dance content.

From a strategic perspective, Meipai is one of the short video platforms that places the highest priority on dance content, as can be seen from its support for the commercialization of dance content producers. In fact, dance short video programs naturally have good room for imagination in commercialization. They can meet the demands of brand advertisers: whether it is brand exposure, reading numbers, soft story implantation, brand product conversion , etc. of the program content, but also can be presented to viewers with a relatively good user experience . Traditional interstitial advertisements and simple corner marks can only express the brand, but there is no way to do narrative or emotion.

Since the launch of Meipai's advertising docking platform M Plan in May this year, the advertising videos produced by Meipai influencers have received a total of 600 million views, creating more than 240 million yuan in commercial value for all advertisers. In 2018, Meipai plans to fully connect Meipai dance talents through the M plan, fully amplify the value of brands and celebrities, and create practical business cooperation and monetization opportunities for dance talents and communities. Meipai conducted an attempt in November of this year. To cooperate with Tmall International's "Black Friday" promotion , Meipai invited popular singer and dancer Jackson Wang to customize a "Meow Dance" short video, and invited more than 10 Meipai short video experts to participate in the topic challenge through the Meipai M plan. It is reported that within less than a day after the relevant video was released, the topic #王嘉尔喵舞# received nearly 3.5 million views.

3) Tik Tok

Tik Tok emerged as a rising star in 2017. Its vertical screen display style on mobile phones is eye-catching. Of course, this also provides a lot of room for the display effect of dance content. In terms of content type, Douyin’s style focuses on magic, and its many special effects related to “shaking” are a bit like brainwash songs, achieving the effect of a hit.

The video content uploaded by users, after simple acceleration and screen shaking effects, creates a great visual impact on the audience within 15 seconds, giving people the feeling that they can’t stop listening to Douyin after watching it for a while.

Douyin, which was officially promoted only in January this year, has exceeded 35 million monthly active users in less than 10 months, and its average daily playback volume exceeds 1 billion times. Despite the traffic halo of Toutiao, this is still an amazing achievement today when the user dividend has disappeared.

In the early days, Tik Tok was mainly based on dance, but now it has gradually added some funny and lip-syncing content, which can be said to be a counterattack against its predecessor , Xiao Ka Xiu . The content of Douyin has always been dominated by ordinary people, or people who have received some enlightenment training, rather than a wave of influence led by famous celebrities.

At the same time, the product form of Douyin has always been relatively restrained. For example, it can only upload short videos of less than 15 seconds, which has an effect similar to the 140 characters of Twitter and Weibo. This makes the threshold for Douyin's content creation lower, but the effect of its dissemination is better.

Douyin's content operation is different from that of other companies. It is not divided according to the conventional content type, but is classified by topics formed by popular slogans in the form of jokes, such as #大长腿啊大长腿# and #蚁蚁舞#, etc.

However, behind this eye-catching operation mode, the limitations of Douyin's content types are still quite obvious. A friend who couldn't stop watching Tik Tok later complained to me that the background music was always the same songs, and if you watched the dance moves more, you would find that it was always the same moves, with only a different group of performers.

Therefore, after its magic, Douyin also faces the problem of how to expand its "content SKU". For example, it has just added a "Douyin Nearby" function, which is based on a same-city function similar to Kuaishou to increase activity and interest matching.

At the same time, although Douyin has made some commercial attempts such as KA branding and native video customization, it is constrained by the weak purchasing power of its user group (mainly college students), and no good cases have been seen in terms of conversion rate .

IV. Conclusion

This year can be said to be a big year for the competition between short video platforms and content. In addition to traditional short video platforms such as Miaopai , Meipai and Kuaishou, Momo , which was originally a social networking platform, also started to make short videos this year. For example, short video streams have appeared in tool products such as Xunlei , Baofeng Player, and even Baidu Cloud apps. Even JD.com and Taobao have begun to focus on short videos. Including a local life service product like Dianping, you will find that it has a video stream, and it is placed at a very high position.

So, what value do these short video contents bring to the platform? What should the platform do to fully leverage the role of short videos as a content carrier? Zhang Ying of Jingwei just said to the company he invested in a few days ago: "All light companies will become heavy in the future, and they must become heavy. Only by doing so can they effectively resist the entry of giants, and only in this way can they become big. Various companies have accelerated the expansion of their business scope. Traffic is getting more and more expensive today. To shift from the incremental market to the stock market, it is necessary to extend the user life cycle , more fully tap the value of individual users, and participate in the entire process of the industry to create a closed loop."

In my opinion, deepening content development in the vertical field of dance and providing services through MCN organizations is a process for the platform to move beyond the purely traffic-oriented mindset and start to "get heavier". It is also a process that helps the platform itself develop users and commercialize. Instead of becoming a growth monster with no bottom line, we need to calm down and promote the healthy development of the industry. Although there will definitely be doubts and pains along the way. But I believe that the process of sinking is the opportunity for various short video platforms to create solid commercial value.

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

Product promotion services: APP promotion services, information flow advertising, advertising platform