Weibo has officially launched the V+ membership service. How is it operated and promoted?

On November 8, Weibo officially launched the V+ membership service. On a whim, I subscribed to "Lanxi's Notebook". After this week, my biggest feeling is: Is Weibo consuming big Vs and users?

1. Activities: #Focus on the powerful# on Double Eleven

On November 16, @微博小作家 released the results of the first V+ exclusive membership event: 21 big Vs from the top ten vertical categories gathered 30,000 V+ members in the four-day #Focus on the Powerful#, and the transaction volume reached 20,000,000 yuan.

As a feature that has been online for less than three weeks, the V+ exclusive membership is actually full of complaints. Only a platform-level application like Weibo can produce such an effect when the product is not yet formed. But no matter what, the entire event also has three obvious stages: warm-up, detonation, and closing.

1. Warm-up period: spectators and on-site tweets flood the screen

Starting from @来去之间’s Weibo post on November 2, many media outlets have used the gimmick of “there is a fee to view pictures on Weibo” to attract collective complaints from netizens, either explicitly or implicitly pushing this new feature that is about to be launched to the forefront. But most of the speculation at the time was limited to the charges for pictures, and some even joked that the photographer might become the biggest winner.

Starting from November 5, the first batch of big Vs invited to open the V+ exclusive membership function began to publish editorials and disseminate personalized event posters. During the event warm-up period, what you need to do is to push the event information by all means possible to let as many users as possible know: you are going to do something. With the Weibo platform and big Vs with millions of fans, traffic is naturally a given.

2. The detonation period: Even if there is a big V platform, discounts and lucky draws are still necessary.

Broadly speaking, V+ membership is an extension of previous paid subscriptions and paid Q&A, expanding the content available for payment to include Weibo, pictures, short videos , live broadcasts and any other content format you can imagine. The copywriting of big Vs is also very touching. For example, the headline article of @营养师顾中一: "I resigned from a tertiary hospital to do this", tells you his personal experience, explains from two dimensions of professionalism and popular science why he can do a good job in content, and finally calls to action: There are special offers in the first two days, and it’s only the price of two bottles of drinks a month!

Coinciding with Double Eleven, paying for this kind of content seems to be a legitimate and face-saving way for personal improvement. Users will not feel bad about spending a few dozen dollars to "buy knowledge", not to mention that most users are already fans of these big Vs.

On the activity page of #Focus on the Powerful#, functional modules include red envelope collection, immediate activation, and the turntable lottery at the bottom. Weibo once again made full use of the platform's existing functional advantages and joined forces with multiple big Vs to conduct Weibo retweet lotteries and "V+ member group" (automatically join after paying) lotteries. According to the official statement, the chances of winning the prize being a Weibo member are as high as 80%...Are you sure this is not a trick to guide users to become members and then pay for the renewal...

3. Closing period: In addition to the results that everyone likes to see, you can also brag about it by publishing more PR articles

On November 16, @微博小作家 released the results of the first batch of V+ members. In addition to the popularity of the topic and the considerable number of readers, the most eye-catching thing is the sales concept such as "Big V earned 20 million on Weibo on Double 11."

However, from my personal experience, I really cannot agree with the idea of ​​"highly active group members" because my V+ member group is like this:

In the first two days of joining the group, due to the continuous joining of new members, Weibo did not make any relevant statements about the group operation in advance, and the group capacity reached 1,000 people/group. In addition to a group notification to remind the group owner to airborne, the screening mechanism of group messages was approximately equal to 0. Users who were annoyed could only block the entire group message. Obviously, Weibo's main focus in the early stage was on negotiating cooperation with big Vs, and it did not have time to polish the product itself. The Q&A session, which should have been prepared when the product was launched, finally arrived at 20:37 on November 16.

Why did I list the specific time for the Q&A session? Because at 11:49 on the same day, Lan Xi, one of the first big Vs, gave a brief report and answered questions about his paid content service "Lan Xi's Notebook" on Weibo.

Weibo CEO @来去之间 commented: Weibo employees’ FAQ document is not as good as one written by a big V…

Netizen: If he writes well, he will become a big V himself. Why would he work for you?

2. Content: Paying is for selecting the best, but in the end you still have to find the entrance yourself

Let’s first take a look at which big Vs have been invited to open exclusive memberships——

(Note: Weibo officially stated that there were 21 big Vs participating in the first batch. During the statistics, it was found that a new person joined the event, so there are 22 people in total in the table.)

The above table conveys several messages:

1. The fields where big Vs gather are mostly finance, followed by health, science, beauty, information, etc. This should be the ratio allocated by Weibo based on previous user payment behavior.
2. Finance (in other words, stocks and securities ) has the highest average order value due to its high return on investment and entry barriers.
3. Although celebrities have the lowest average order value, based on official data, the number of users who purchased Xu Weizhou's V+ membership exceeded 1,000 in just 5 minutes. Moreover, the content produced by celebrities is mostly photos, videos, voice and offline activities , so their communities are more interested and it is easier to form a consistent topic direction.
4. In all fields, as long as you have high-quality content, you are welcome to monetize it.

So the question is, can the differentiation between paid content and free content be reflected?

As content payment has evolved to this day, what we pay for is actually that filtering mechanism, which needs to be screened and interpreted by people, rather than a set of algorithms, to help us select truly valuable content. Weibo's official product definition of "V+ Membership" is to encourage authors with quality content production to contribute incremental content more actively. Let us first assume that the content produced by this group of big Vs is indeed meaningful. How does the Weibo platform display this content?

It is not difficult to find that paid content is displayed in feeds , Weibo groups, big V homepages and Weibo groups. The "V+Weibo" grouping column includes all the big Vs you are following, forming a centralized presentation of content. The other three methods either involve too many steps or are difficult to filter through the massive Weibo stream, and are only suitable for attracting new users and regular browsing.

3. Users: Personal Brand and New Decentralized User System

V+ membership integrates Weibo’s current content payment products and membership groups, and provides users with decentralized membership services through a payment method centered on “big V”. This not only meets the users' need to acquire knowledge, but also meets their social needs of "being in the same group with big Vs". "Big V" can further screen out core users from paying users through V+ membership, cultivate core user groups while increasing revenue, and lay the foundation for transformation into personal IP.

——A PR article on Weibo

How to classify, arrange and highlight certain types of users is a problem that community-based products such as Weibo always face. This issue can be divided into two parts: how to protect, integrate and recommend user-generated content, and how to provide better services to the main content producers.

The strong stickiness of the community, from a third-party perspective, means forming a "content barrier", and as the source of content, it is completely natural for big Vs to become vested interests in this ecosystem. Previously, paid subscriptions were jointly commissioned by Sina and Apple, and big Vs could only get 1/3 of the settlement. What a rip-off. If you can't give benefits to the big V, why should you let them stay?

Therefore, for the core users, Big Vs, Weibo has adopted a new profit-sharing policy this time, changing the existing 50-50 profit-sharing model between the platform and Big Vs. 70% of the V+ membership income will belong to the Big Vs, and it is guaranteed that the "Big V" will be settled in the second month after the user purchases the V+ membership.

As for fans of big Vs, Weibo’s approach is to automatically add them to the V+ member Weibo group after they pay. The exclusive membership group that can be joined after paying is one of the rights and interests of V+ members. It can be compared with similar paid communities such as small secret circles and paid WeChat groups . It is also the most intuitive embodiment of V+ members' stratification of users. Weibo groups have three uses: synchronizing paid content; communicating with influencers in real time; and chatting with group members. As for the Weibo groups mentioned above, their current functions are still very confusing, which is a problem at the Weibo product level.

There seems to be nothing wrong with letting big Vs manage their fans based on the hierarchical logic of "ordinary fans-paying users-exclusive members". As V+ membership operations become more stable and the production of paid content accumulates, a Weibo group of 1,000 people can also be divided into active users, retained users and churned users. Ideally, this further user stratification is still... within reach.

It is undeniable that compared with previous payments based on long articles, Q&A and other content, users who purchase V+ memberships have a stronger stickiness to the big V's personal brand. The payment by duration also allows the content produced by the big V to be continuously delivered to the user's Weibo stream within a specific time period, thus forming a new user system with the big V as the core.

Capital focuses on profits, so Weibo allocates its top resources to top users, and ordinary users just watch the show. It’s just like the saying goes, “All the excitement is theirs, I have nothing.”

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

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