Get App Competitive Analysis

When I was studying competitor analysis , I found that most of the existing competitor analysis reports rarely mentioned how to choose competitors. This article takes the Get app as an example. Based on the data obtained from Baidu Index and Qimai, it selects direct competitors, indirect competitors and reference products from three angles: download volume and revenue, user groups and product tone, and product dimension analysis. The data charts in this article are all made by myself.

Purpose of analysis:

Investigate the core functions and current status of related products, analyze the highlights and shortcomings of products in terms of content, interaction, and functionality, and propose competitive strategies and plans based on this, serve as a reference for product iteration, and increase product market share.

1. Overview of content payment platforms

After the early explosive growth stage, China's paid content industry has gradually entered a stable development stage. The industry competition landscape has begun to become clear, and there are two major trends in general:

1. Comprehensive platforms (such as Himalaya and Zhihu) expand upstream and downstream to form a full industry chain model, while gradually strengthening the layout of the knowledge payment track;
2. Vertical application platforms (Dedao and Zaixing) expand horizontally, improve functions and optimize experience, deeply bind users, and form a complete business closed loop.

The formation of a comprehensive content platform requires a certain number of users. It is product-centric and has the advantages of a wide range of products and high operational efficiency. For users, it is easier to obtain target content due to the diversity of content. For content producers, platform traffic tends to head creators, while niche high-quality authors are easily overlooked. Therefore , comprehensive content platforms are user-friendly platforms that pay more attention to creator operation and management .

Vertical platforms are centered around a single user need. The platform content is determined and focused, making it easier to attract excellent creators and produce more good content. Therefore, the vertical application platform is a creator-friendly platform that pays more attention to improving user experience, providing a one-stop solution for all aspects related to this demand and deeply binding users.

It can be seen that the comprehensive content platform and the vertical application platform have different characteristics and focus points, but the two platforms can still be compared and learned from each other, and may be indirect competitors or references to each other.

Indirect competitors refer to products that have different product forms but similar target user groups .

From the perspective of indirect competitors, comprehensive platforms may focus on a certain segment to seize the vertical market segment; vertical platforms may also expand horizontally and develop into comprehensive platforms.

Reference products refer to products that are different in form and target group. They may not constitute a major competitive relationship, but are worth learning from and appreciating from each other.

From the perspective of reference, comprehensive platforms are more likely to attract top creators and thus bring in more traffic. Therefore, vertical platforms can consider introducing these resources based on their own circumstances to attract consumers to settle in. Vertical platforms have comprehensive functions and better user experience. Comprehensive platforms can refer to the interface, functions, and interaction designs of vertical platforms to improve user satisfaction.

This article will take the Get app as an example, collect 16 related products recommended by the app and major app analysis platforms, and conduct competitive product analysis by screening direct, indirect and reference competitors from the perspectives of download volume and revenue, target population and product tone analysis, and product form analysis.

2. Downloads and Revenue Analysis

The statistics of the classification rankings as of October 18, 2021 are shown in the figure below. The data statistics are from Qimai Data. The most important factor affecting the free ranking is the number of downloads, and the number of downloads on that day plays a decisive role; the main factor affecting the best-selling ranking is the total revenue of the app. The greater the total daily revenue, the higher the ranking, among which the weight of new revenue and new user paid revenue is relatively large.

The average daily revenue and average daily downloads for the past 30 days ending October 28, 2021 are plotted into a line graph, and the results are shown in the figure below.

The information in the figure can be converted as follows:

If the ratio of revenue to downloads is larger, it means that the user conversion rate of the app is higher and the user retention cost is lower. This situation usually indicates that the application has at least two advantages:

1. The content meets the needs of target users
2. The in-app functions and interactions can satisfy the user experience.

If the download volume is high but the download-to-revenue ratio is small, it may mean that the app has high customer acquisition efficiency and low customer acquisition cost. The application may have the following two advantages:

1. The marketing efforts are strong, the marketing methods are easy to reach users or the marketing content is easy to attract users
2. There are many ways to make profits. The income in the figure mainly counts the amount of user payments, especially the amount of payments from new users. Therefore, the download volume is very large. Apps that are very high on the free list may adopt a two-tier architecture. The app is used to attract users and obtain revenue in other ways (such as advertising).

The results of ranking the applications that meet the first category from high to low by revenue-to-download ratio are: Get, Chaos University, Uncle Kai’s Story Telling, Himalaya, Zhihu, and Lazy Listening.

The application that meets the second category is Tomato Listening.

3. User portrait and product tone analysis

By using Baidu Index to publish data such as age, interests, and gender distribution to create user portraits, analyze the high positions and status in interest distribution, and pay attention to the differences in age and gender distribution, we can gain insights into the target market and product tone of the application.

Crowd interest distribution data (upper left): Crowd interest distribution aims to reveal information such as " what people are interested in " and " what kind of applications " they will search for . This part of the data determines the overall tone of the app . For example, if most people who search for this app are interested in consulting, software applications, financial investment and other fields, it can be inferred to a large extent that this is a highly professional app for business people .

It can be roughly seen from the figure that interest in film, television and music is the highest and evenly distributed. At first glance, there is no correlation, but if you think about it carefully, you can draw the following conclusion: people are more sensitive to film, television and music than to text, and the development of audio and video payment for knowledge is in line with the expectations of the target population .

How much traffic can you get by relying on a single form of knowledge output? (While typing, I began to think about life silently...)

Next, we will group or analyze the 16 applications one by one by observing abnormal points, high points, low points, and inflection points, and finally summarize all the content.

3.1 Tomato Listening App

As shown in the figure above, the interest distribution of all interest points in the population portrait of the Tomato Listening app is lower than the industry level, indicating that most of the users of the Tomato Listening app are passive knowledge acquirers. The figure below reflects the gender distribution and age distribution of users of the Tomato Listening app.

Although Tomato Listening is classified as books in the app market, it is obvious that Tomato has found a relatively niche and unpopular category in audio reading. While all apps are scrambling to capture the youth market aged 20-35, Fanqie has captured the niche market of those aged 35+. Among all paid knowledge apps, Fanqie Changting’s market coverage of 40-49 years old is twice that of other apps , and its market coverage of 50+ is more than three times that of other apps .

3.2 Zhihu, NetEase Cloud Classroom, Yike Talks, 36Kr, Zaixing, Chaos University

From the perspective of interest distribution, the interest distribution values ​​of Yike Talks, NetEase Cloud Classroom, Zhihu, 36Kr, Zaixing, and Chaos University are all at high levels . It can be inferred that the user groups of these six apps generally have relatively strong thirst for knowledge and curiosity, and are active knowledge acquisition users . The gender and age ratio distribution is similar, and male users between the ages of 20 and 40 are the main user groups of these four types of apps .

Here, Zhihu and NetEase Cloud Classroom are classified into one category, and 36Kr and Yike Talks are classified into two categories. The differences are mainly reflected in:

• Zhihu and NetEase Cloud have a higher proportion of young users aged 20-29;
• In terms of interest distribution, 36kr, Hundun, Zaixing, and Yiketalks have higher interest in finance, economics, and consulting. It is reasonable to infer that these two apps have more business users.
• Users interested in "games" are only distributed on a few apps, with the highest distribution on NetEase Cloud Classroom and Zhihu.

3.3 Uncle Kai tells stories

Uncle Kai’s storytelling is similar to Tomato Listening, choosing to avoid the main battlefield and enter the market from a niche perspective. Uncle Kai's Story Telling is a children's reading app . As you can see from the picture above, Uncle Kai's target user group is young mothers aged 30-39 .

The products cover multiple scenarios of early childhood and children's education, including wake-up calls and coaxing children to sleep, audio books of famous reading materials, answers to the "100,000 Whys" question, original fairy tales, parent-child interactive schools , and derivative physical products such as story dolls.

3.4 Himalaya, Lazy Listening, Kuwo, Dedao, Fan Deng Reading, Qianliao

The six applications, Himalaya, Lazy Listening, Kuwo Listening, Get, Fan Deng Reading, and Qianliao, have little difference in user portraits. Their main target users are between 20 and 40 years old, and the gender distribution is relatively balanced. In the entire knowledge payment market where the average male users exceed the female users by 15% , the female users of Fan Deng Reading reach 54.88% , which is particularly conspicuous .

Judging from the distribution of interests, the tone of Qianliao, Get, and Fan Deng Reading Apps is more inclined towards knowledge acquisition, while the tone of Lanren Changting, Himalaya, and Kuwo Changting is more inclined towards entertainment and leisure.

The Beagle app has not yet been included in the Baidu entry. It is understood that the Beagle app is a global business consulting platform in the form of short videos on Douyin, which mainly provides services to business people and updates business information in real time.

3.5 Summary

Judging from the target user groups and product tonality, there is a large overlap between the Duode app and Fan Deng Reading, Qianliao, Yike Talks, Zaixing, Chaos University, 36Kr, Zhihu, and NetEase Cloud Classroom.

4. Product form analysis

In the third part, the report analyzes the target market and approximate demand of 16 products including the Get app. In this part, the product forms of the 16 products will be roughly discussed.

Product form refers to the specific form of satisfying a certain demand of the target market. With product form as the core, the platform is further split and summarized according to different dimensions, as shown in the following table.

Content generation models can be divided into multiple forms such as resource entry, UGC, PGC, CGC, OGC, etc. Resource entry refers to the acquisition of copyright resources such as books, movies, etc. The specific differences between terms such as UGC and PGC can be referred to other articles.

Content platform resources generally include external resources as well as more professional resources such as PGC and OGC. The main difference lies in whether there are UGC resources.

Platforms without UGC resources are more consultative and professional, have strict control over content, and present content in the form of advance planning + recommendation, or special collections. The core idea is to meet the needs of the majority of the audience as much as possible.

Platforms with UGC resources have weak control over content. They adopt clear rules to guide the user group to spontaneously produce appropriate content, and then screen the content for display. The core idea is to display as diverse viewpoints and content as possible to meet the differentiated needs of different groups of people.

4.2 Profit Model

The profit model determines the focus of the platform. At the same time, users can be classified according to the different profit stages of the platform (user consumption levels) (as shown in the figure below).

The results of splitting the 16 competing products according to the above dimensions are shown in the figure below (*The following content is from the author’s incomplete statistics and may contain a few errors or omissions).

5. Competitive product screening

5.1 Direct Competitors

Fan Deng Reading: Judging from the results of the target user groups and product dimensions, the Get app, Fan Deng Reading, and Qianliao are homogeneous products; from the analysis of revenue and download volume, the download volume of Fan Deng Reading is higher than that of Get, so Fan Deng Reading was chosen as a direct competitor of the Get app.

5.2 Indirect Competitors

Zhihu and Chaos University: The target user groups of Get, Zhihu and Chaos University are all male users between the ages of 20 and 40 with a high desire for knowledge.

From the perspective of application functions and positioning, Zhihu's application is classified as social, which is a social comprehensive knowledge acquisition platform; Chaos University's application is classified as education, which is a systematic business knowledge acquisition platform. Both may transform or become fragmented knowledge acquisition platforms similar to Duode by adding additional functions. Therefore, Zhihu and Chaos University are selected as indirect competitors of Duode app.

5.3 Reference products

Beagle: Beagle is an app that provides business information in the form of short videos on Douyin. It aims to quickly convey the latest business information and industry trends to users through 30-s short videos, allowing users to make full use of fragmented time to acquire knowledge. Its positioning is similar to that of the Get app. At a stage when content payment is shifting from pictures and texts to diversified forms such as audio, video, and live broadcast, exploring the operating model of Beagle may bring some inspiration to the layout of video content for the Get app.

Author:Peco

Source: Peco