Ten thousand words of practical knowledge | The secrets of UGC operation are all here

Today, let’s talk about UGC.

UGC is not a tool product, not a news client, not e-commerce or a game. It’s not enough to rely on good products alone (such as Zuji), it’s not enough to rely on business logic alone (such as Toutiao), and you can’t just yell at users to “come and leave a message” every day (such as Meituan)! UGC is an art , an art of building an ecosystem.

To successfully build a UGC product, you need to seize the opportunity, understand the path, and master the techniques .

Taking advantage

The birth and death of almost every UGC platform is accompanied by the changing waves of the Internet.

In 0X, most netizens were elites , and various chat rooms emerged. My Chinese teacher in high school was a well-educated scholar in his 50s who loved the couplet section in Sina chat room the most. Can you imagine? Every day, hundreds of people enthusiastically write couplets - A load of heavy mud blocks the road, and the teachers on both sides of the strait return with smiles.

A few years later, the web2.0 era arrived. The number of Internet users has further increased and they are becoming younger . Tianya and Mop, which focus on celebrity gossip and serialized novels, have become popular. In 2006, Dangnian Mingyue's "Things about the Ming Dynasty" was serialized in Tianya's "Drinking Wine and Discussing History" section, and the number of visits quickly exceeded one million.

At the same time, the increase in the number of Internet users made vertical forums possible. Abei founded Douban and began to slowly accumulate users. In 2007, Zhang Weiwei uploaded her new song "Rice Shop" to Douban. Ten years later, it became a hit with Lao Lang's performance on "I Am a Singer".

In 2005 and 2006, video UGC Tudou and Youku were launched one after another. In 2005, Hu Ge re-edited Chen Kaige's "The Promise" into a short video "A Murder Caused by a Bun", which became a hit. However, China’s short video production capabilities are too weak. For a long time, Youku Tudou could only survive by relying on pirated movies uploaded by users.

In the following years, the base of Internet users further expanded, and surfing the Internet became a part of ordinary people's daily lives . Online content is becoming increasingly fragmented .

In 2010, Sina Weibo was launched, and 4 years later it was listed on NASDAQ. Weibo has reduced the difficulty of creating content by limiting it to 140 characters. Text and images have been further integrated. Weibo-like products have created the action of "following", and content distribution has a whole new way: based on relationship chains.

In 2011, Apple's classic generation iPhone 4s was released, and Xiaomi 1 was released in the same year. The mobile Internet boom is coming.

In 2011, WeChat released its first version. The Moments was launched in 2012, and subscription accounts were launched in 2013. In the same year, the number of registered WeChat users exceeded 600 million. Become the App with the largest user base in Asia.

In 2011, Zhihu was launched, and registration was opened in 2013. Within a year, the number of registered users increased from 400,000 to 4 million.

During this period, a number of vertical UGCs, such as Parents Help launched in 2003, BabyTree established in 2007, and Qiushi Encyclopedia established in 2005, have completed mobileization and ushered in a new round of explosive growth. New types of shopping guide UGC such as Mogujie and Meilishuo have emerged.

After the wave of phone replacement in first- and second-tier cities, users in third- and fourth-tier cities also began to abandon feature phones and switch to smartphones.

In 2014, GIF Kuaishou was renamed Kuaishou, which expanded into short video tools and quickly expanded to third- and fourth-tier cities. Weibo, OPPO and VIVO also adopted the same strategy.

In 2016, Momo launched its live streaming business. Revenue that year exceeded $500 million.

The expansion of Internet users, the replacement of terminal devices, and the changes in the industry will all lead to the emergence of several UGC platforms. It doesn't matter whether it's early or late.

Youku was born too early. It was originally a short video UGC, but later became an OGC, making a living by purchasing film and TV copyrights and producing its own programs. Tencent Weibo started too late and had to end it abruptly.

The special thing about UGC is that the content is generated by users. Only a large number of users can form a UGC ecosystem. Therefore, the choice of timing is extremely important.

Taking advantage of the situation is a prerequisite for the success of a UGC platform.

Ming Dao

There are two most important principles for UGC.

1. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket

Investment emphasizes risk mismatch, while UGC emphasizes content mismatch.

If the users on the UGC platform are arranged from high to low according to the number of fans, we can get the following fan distribution curve.

Suppose there are two platforms with the following fan distribution, Platform A and Platform B, which one is healthier?

The answer is platform B.

For platform A, a small number of top content creators have gathered a large number of fans. However, the vast majority of user output is ignored. This creates two problems.

1) High platform risk

Once top content creators flee, they will take away a large number of users, causing the platform to paralyze.

2) Poor user stickiness

Ordinary users have no motivation to produce content and will only pay attention to top users. This one-way attention is not enough to form a relationship chain . The relationship chain is the core factor in improving user stickiness.

Therefore, Platform A is not actually UGC , but rather PGC in its purest form, with very weak social attributes.

Looking at platform B, the fan concentration is relatively weak, and the content generated by mid-level users is the backbone of the platform.

Therefore, the loss to the platform caused by the flight of top users is very small. At the same time, the content of ordinary users can also get a certain amount of exposure and even interaction. Everyone is more willing to contribute content, and user stickiness is higher.

Platform B is the real UGC .

So, whether it is UGC or not can be known by just looking at the fan distribution curve.

Platform A likes to compete for top traffic. In last year’s live streaming war, many Platform A spent huge sums of money to sign a few anchors with their own traffic and used all their resources to promote them. As a result, the anchor was poached by other platforms not long after, and the product's already pitifully small number of existing users was also taken away.

Don’t you think it’s embarrassing?

Zhihu has also done such an embarrassing thing once. At the end of 2016, Zhihu invited Li Xiaolai to do three consecutive live performances, using all the resources of the entire site, and a total of 225,000 people listened. As a result, after the live ended, Li Xiaolai made a product similar to the live called "Listen Together", and attracted a lot of Zhihu users through this live. Many Zhihu celebrities also complained about this incident.

Miaopai, Xiaokaxiu, and most live streaming platforms are typical Platform A.

Liu Xinzheng, vice president of Miaopai, once said: Although UGC contributes more than 90% of Miaopai's content, in terms of playback volume, the top-ranked PGC content accounts for 90%. The problem with Xiaokaxiu is the same. Celebrity performances attract a large number of users, but no one watches what ordinary users shoot.

Zhihu, Momo, and Kuaishou are typical platform Bs.

The backbone of the Momo platform is a group of mid-level content producers, and the top 10 guilds only contribute about 3% to the live broadcast revenue. The same is true for Kuaishou, which is why after Volcano Video poached MC Tianyou for 20 million, Kuaishou just smiled.

Behind the fan distribution curve is actually the platform's operating strategy, the core of which is the content distribution mechanism. The key lies in which user group the operation strategy and distribution resources are biased towards.

2. Exercise Restraint

For UGC, the most terrifying thing is the dilution of content. In order to avoid watering down, the operation of UGC often requires great self-control.

<After Zhihu opened registration, this kind of question was everywhere>

Maintaining restraint is reflected on three levels.

1) Product features

For several years, many people have called for Zhihu to support GIF, but Zhihu did not support it until mid-2017. The reason is simple: people are worried that the GIF images everywhere will damage the content tone of Zhihu and cause the product to become watered down.

Similarly, there has been no forwarding function in the Kuaishou App. Because they are worried that after forwarding, the top content will be forwarded in large quantities, traffic will be concentrated at the top, and the UGC attributes will be weakened.

2) Promotion rhythm

Every UGC has its own set of social rules , such as Bilibili’s barrage etiquette and Zhihu’s thank you for the invitation and no help. It takes time to become familiar with and adapt to this set of rules.

If a large number of new users pour in within a short period of time, they will generate a large amount of content that is completely inconsistent with the platform's tone, and interfere with the distribution of existing content through comments, likes, and dislikes.

At this time, old users will find that the content has become watered down.

Therefore, UGC is often quite restrained in its promotion rhythm. For example, Zhihu, Tianya, PMcaff, and Qiubai have all been using invitation codes to inform community users of their growth rates for quite some time.

3) Platform monetization

The key to monetization lies in its impact on user value . Creating or consuming user value, that is the question.

For example, advertising is a typical consumption of user value, so each UGC is very cautious about advertising. Zhihu’s native ads and WeChat’s Moments ads have been experimented for a long time and the experience is very complete, but the amount of advertising is still very small due to concerns that it will affect the user experience .

Momo tried live streaming in January 2016 and found the effect to be very good, but it was hesitant to expand the scale for fear of damaging the social ecology of the product itself. It was not until we found through data analysis that the social activity of users participating in live streaming was not affected, and even slightly improved , that we began to promote live streaming on a large scale.

In contrast, Tianya Forum allowed public relations and advertising companies to inject large amounts of water into the forum, and it also placed advertisements without restraint in a simple and crude manner, causing a large-scale exodus of old users. Many websites from the web2.0 era have successfully transformed into the mobile era. Tianya Forum, which claims to be the online home for Chinese people around the world, ultimately could not escape death.

3. Conclusion

UGC often fails nine out of ten times, and strategic errors are an important reason for this. The UGC strategy includes at least two points:

1) Ensure that traffic is not overly concentrated on the head through a reasonable content distribution mechanism

2) Maintain rationality and restraint in operations

This is to clarify the truth .

Excellent technique

To borrow Luo Pang’s concept, UGC is more like a seed. As long as you water it, it will grow. It is a friend of time , the longer the time, the greater the value. And the way you water it determines how it grows.

The establishment of each UGC platform is generally divided into four steps.

1. Find that group of people

There is such a group of people.

• They are often at the secondary level rather than the top level of the content pyramid and are not yet great.
• They have certain content output capabilities .
• They are passionate about this field and have been working quietly for some time.
• They often have a certain small circle , and sometimes if you can deal with one person, you can deal with the whole group.

This group of people are the real seed users .

You need to find them, please them, invite them to dinner, play with them, understand their preferences and needs, and stockpile your seed users.

2. Content initialization

At this stage, we need to solve the following problems:

1) Lower the threshold as much as possible

Lowering the threshold for content production, similar to channel sinking and dimensionality reduction, can help you avoid competing with existing UGC platforms for existing users and instead acquire new incremental users .

There are many ways to lower the threshold.

For example, tool reduction . Meipai allows ordinary people to shoot good videos, and has attracted a group of content producers who lack video production skills but have sufficient creativity. Lizhi FM has attracted a large number of radio enthusiasts by recording programs on mobile phones and storing them for free.

For example, the particle size is reduced . From blogs to Weibo, from long videos to short videos, the content granularity is getting smaller and smaller, and the cost of production and consumption is getting lower and lower. Weibo posts are easier to write than blogs, and short videos are easier to shoot than short films.

For example, social pressure is reduced . Snapchat's self-destructing messages, Kuaishou's low-key messaging, and Maimai's anonymous chat all reduce users' social pressure and make them more willing to produce content.

2) Content Standardization

Standardization often includes both soft and hard parts.

Hard standardization is the editor , which is a formal standard, such as the 140 characters of Sina Weibo, the soundtrack of Douyin, the video clips of Xiaokaxiu, and the scoring system of Douban and Dianping.

Review editor for Douban and Dianping

This standardization ensures the form and style of the platform content and also facilitates subsequent content distribution.

The soft part is the platform regulations and the standards in tone .

For example, after users register, Zhihu will educate and guide users on how to use the Zhihu platform through a series of official questions and answers.

How to set the standards and whether they are reasonable depends on the effort you put in the first stage (finding that group of people). At the same time, this set of standards is not static, but is gradually iterated with the evolution of the platform.

3) Content filling

In the early days of the platform, operators often had to manually fill in selected content, and at the same time guide seed users to produce content through topic operations .

After the content is produced, it is necessary to involve everyone in the company and get them to like and comment on it. Inspire your seed users to create more content through quick feedback and full respect .

The initial content and topics of a platform often determine its tone for a considerable period of time.

For example, Zhihu, initially its main content was Internet entrepreneurship, and the big Vs were programmers like "Deric Wan". The content was gradually enriched in the later period, and Brother Lunzi also turned into a tour guide, specifically giving likes to the girls who posted photos.

3. Content Distribution

When this group of people finally accumulates a certain amount of content, distribution becomes extremely important.

The most important secret of UGC is likes, comments, and attention .

My friend Xiao Ming created a comics public account, but it only has 5 followers. After posting the first article, I felt there was no hope and gave up. Half a month later, when I logged into the official account, I found a message from a cute girl in the background: Sister, why don’t you update? I love your comics so much! Xiao Ming was so excited that he burst into tears and stayed up late that night to write another article.

When I was running the public account "Jinlong Chats about Operations", the number of readers of the first few articles was in the single digits, and I didn't want to do it anymore. Suddenly one day, I found that every article had a like and a comment. When I opened it, it turned out to be my wife. She said what I wrote was great. This keeps me going till now.

Behind UGC is social interaction , and the most core need of content creators is the recognition of other users .

The distribution mechanism determines the exposure and matching degree, which in turn determines the number of likes, comments and attention different users receive, and ultimately determines the structure and tone of the community .

The flip side of the distribution mechanism is punishment , which is a decisive crackdown on content that violates regulations and does not conform to the tone, such as Zhihu's folding mechanism.

You will find that the substantial difference between different UGC communities does not lie in whether the users are low-class, how much feminism there is, or whether the girls are pretty. The distribution mechanism is the core of the content community.

Distribution is divided into on-site distribution and off-site distribution.

1) Distribution within the site

Everyone looks the same : Rankings and topics are typical in-site distribution. Topics are a great tool that can integrate and present high-quality content based on time and event nodes.

Thousands of faces for each person : feed flow × machine distribution = Thousands of faces for each person.

The basis for distribution includes interests, locations, relationship chains, popularity and manual recommendations.

• Interests: Almost all content apps require you to select several areas of interest after registration in order to distribute content based on interests.
• Location: Typical examples are Momo and Kuaishou. Location distribution has social significance, and information content naturally has regional attributes.
• Relationship chain: Build a relationship chain by following actions and distribute them.
• Popular: Exposure of currently popular content.
• Manual recommendation: Operations staff manually screen out high-quality and potential content for recommendation.

Each feed flow is a comprehensive result of the above basis. For example, the information flow on Zhihu’s homepage is a combination of relationship chain + interest (focused topics, fields, columns and favorites), while the discovery column is a combination of popularity + manual recommendations. Weibo information flow is popular + relationship chain + advertising.

User albums : content albums generated spontaneously by users, such as Zhihu's favorites, NetEase Cloud Music's playlists, etc. User albums enrich the content flow path.

2) Off-site distribution

As a tool for user growth. Off-site distribution is divided into user distribution and platform distribution .

User distribution refers to users spontaneously sharing content outside of the product, usually with WeChat friends or friends circles. User distribution is more particular about the form and timing of distribution. For example, the lyrics sharing of NetEase Cloud Music is great.

Share lyrics on NetEase Cloud Music

Platform distribution refers to the operator manually screening and packaging high-quality content, publishing it on various content or information platforms, or distributing it to users via email.

Platform distribution focuses on the dissemination of content. The smaller the granularity and the more popular the topic, the better the spreadability. Baozou Dashian always makes Wang Nima's classic quotes in the video into long pictures and spreads them on Weibo; Zhihu Daily has a lot of short answers and jokes, all for the purpose of reducing the granularity of the content.

Zhihu users spontaneously spread a long picture of Wang Nima and received 10,000 likes

4. Introducing more users in a rhythmic manner

The rhythm of UGC platform promotion is very important. After introducing a wave of users, it is necessary to conduct user education, cultivate more content producers through continuous topic operations and event operations, and improve the distribution mechanism.

Topic Operation of Douyin App

(V) Summary

The process of building a UGC platform from scratch is roughly as follows:

Find that group of people, and after fully understanding them, promote platform initialization, introduce this group of seed users, and after a certain amount of content has accumulated, introduce new users, gradually establish and improve the distribution mechanism, and rhythmically introduce more users through off-site distribution and promotion.

The above is the growth process of the UGC platform.

Monetization

When the platform reaches a certain scale, the monetization of top content producers becomes a problem that must be solved.

There are generally four ways for content producers to monetize. Subsidies, e-commerce & advertising, PR, and knowledge payment.

1. Subsidy: Platforms pay

In the early days of the platform, it has become a common practice in the industry to quickly attract content producers by providing cash subsidies.

Subsidies are generally calculated based on exposure, or another way of saying it is advertising revenue sharing. Not only UGC, but also Toutiao, Dayuhao, and many live broadcast platforms last year also adopted a similar approach.

There are two problems with this approach. First, you can't offer much money , but it's better than nothing and not enough to attract users to contribute original content to your platform. Most of the time, it is released on other platforms and then synchronized on this platform.

The second and more fatal one is that cash subsidies will attract a large number of freeloaders who will exploit the rules for arbitrage. When Toutiao's subsidies were high, many people registered thousands of Toutiao accounts in batches and posted articles by machines, making more than 10,000 yuan a month. Some accounts even manually or by machine capture content posted by other authors on other platforms and immediately post it on their own accounts, earning original marks by taking advantage of the time difference and defrauding cash subsidies.

For the platform, this will lead to the dilution of content on the one hand, and on the other hand, bad money will drive out good money, affecting the enthusiasm of original authors to output content.

<Ali Entertainment’s 2 billion plan>

2. E-commerce & Advertising: Merchants Pay

When it comes to e-commerce monetization, the best way is to connect the ecosystem . For example, Weibo & Taobao. Users can share Taobao products directly on Weibo, which will automatically generate a standardized Weibo post with text, pictures and an exclusive card. After other users click the card, they can jump directly to the Taobao page. The whole process was very smooth and convenient.

WeChat’s mini-programs can also help content producers monetize easily. The one that has done relatively well in this regard is Youzan from Baiya. For example, Huxiu’s mini program “Tiger Care” was created through Youzan, and it mainly sells office snacks and Huxiu peripherals.

For platforms that are not connected, content producers will also monetize through e-commerce, either openly or secretly. Many people on Kuaishou have directed their fans to WeChat and monetized through Weidian; the big names Ruofeng and 09 sell meat floss cakes and mouse pads during live broadcasts.

Appropriate advertising and product promotion can allow a platform to flourish, but when the platform itself seeks to monetize , these advertisements are equivalent to cutting off part of the platform's advertising revenue and will inevitably be suppressed.

When grassroots Weibo accounts were popular, big accounts would charge 50,000 yuan for reposting a Weibo post. In 2011, the grassroots account “ Weibo Funny Ranking ” made a profit of 15 million yuan a year.

After Weibo began to seek commercialization, it launched the micro-task system. Weibo big accounts must use micro-tasks to post advertisements, and the platform takes 30% of the profits. Violators will have their Weibo posts deleted or even their accounts blocked. Later, a series of information flow advertisements such as Fanstong were launched to help advertisers target users more accurately, making life increasingly difficult for grassroots big accounts.

3. PR: Public relations pays

It is a monetization method exclusive to UGC platforms, but it is limited to large and influential platforms .

When the Wei Zexi incident happened at Baidu, a certain company took on a job to whitewash the company and found a group of big Vs on Zhihu. At that time, many people said that such a job that would destroy one’s family lineage should not be taken. But some people still took it. In the end, a large number of users reported it, and even other big Vs directly posted screenshots of the group where they took jobs. The ending was that the big V who tried to whitewash the incident was directly banned by Zhihu.

On the other side of PR is paid deletion of the article. Some time ago, negative articles about LeTV were flying all over the place, probably because LeTV really had no money to delete the articles.

4. Knowledge Payment: Users Pay

Knowledge payment mainly includes two forms: reward and content payment.

Tips:

Rewarding is a non-compulsory act - an offering of love .

The value of rewarding lies not in the money, but in motivating content creators and creating a new user relationship - paying users . The stickiness of paying users is often much higher than that of ordinary users.

Of course, the rewards given during the live show are another matter.

Content payment:

Content payment is a new form of payment that began to emerge in 2016. It is generally divided into three categories: subscription columns, consulting services, and lectures .

Subscription columns are represented by Get and Himalaya. Generally, a column is subscribed for one year at a time. The format is one to many , and the marginal cost for content producers is zero. It is essentially a publishing model and is the first choice for top-level producers at the top of the content pyramid.

The consulting service is represented by Fenda and Zaixing in a one-on-one format and charged on a per-session basis. It has a high marginal cost and is the choice of producers in the middle of the content pyramid.

Lectures are represented by Zhihu Live, Yikui Tingting, Fenda Xiaojiang, Himalaya, and Huxiu Numa. The format is one to many , and charges are made by class. The marginal cost is 0, and both top and mid-level producers can choose it.

(V) Summary

For the platform, subsidies are a waste of money and will have to stop sooner or later, and they also have to guard against thieves. E-commerce, advertising, and PR will all dilute content. Only payment for content can have a positive impact on the platform. While helping content producers to monetize, it also contributes more high-quality content to the platform and increases user stickiness. It is indeed a good model.

That’s why Zhihu integrates Live, bookstores, paid consultations, courses, etc. into a market, and adds an entrance in the core position of the bottom navigation bar. This is also why almost all content platforms have launched content payment modules.

The reason is very simple, you will please whoever pays the money .

This is actually very interesting. At the beginning, we tried to copy the American approach and sell software. As a result, users simply did not buy into the software and pirated software was everywhere. So everyone just offers it for free , uses it to attract traffic , and makes a living by selling user attention . So at that time, the title, pictures, and keywords were all more important than the content itself. The key is to attract as many clicks as possible and sell traffic.

Finally, with the increase in per capita income levels and the development of mobile payment habits, people are willing to pay for content. The essence of paying for content is that users spend their own money to buy back their attention .

In just the past one or two years, almost all content platforms have introduced paid modules, VIPs of video websites have sold well, Tencent has won the Chinese agency of Monument Valley 2, and has launched independent games. It has become possible for paid games to survive without relying on advertising and various paid props. This is a good era for content producers and also a good era for UGC.

I wish all content producers can live with more dignity in this era.

The above is the secret of the UGC platform.