Why has Kuaishou, which is considered "absurd and vulgar" by everyone, become so popular and become the king of short videos?

1. What is Kuaishou ?

1. Basic Introduction

• Type: short video sharing app
• Content: Life

2. Our general impression of Kuaishou

In the eyes of people in first- and second-tier cities, Kuaishou represents vulgarity, lowness, and absurdity . The picture below shows a commonly seen video on Kuaishou.

3. The popularity of Kuaishou

Below is a set of data reflecting the popularity of Kuaishou.

The above chart shows the ranking of short video apps from 2015 to 2016. Kuaishou ranked third in the short video ranking in 2015, and jumped to first place in 2016 and 2017.

The above figure shows the ranking of daily user growth of the top 10 vertical short video app apps in terms of market penetration in January. Among them, Kuaishou's daily user growth is stable, at about 95.6, only slightly behind Xiaoying, and its development trend is good and stable.

The above picture shows the daily usage frequency ranking of mainstream vertical short video apps per user, among which Kuaishou has an average daily usage frequency of 2.1, ranking first.

The above chart shows the top 10 ranking of vertical short video apps by market penetration in January, among which Kuaishou has the highest market penetration and dominates the vertical short video field.

The above data all reflect Kuaishou’s dominant position among short video apps. So the question is: why are so many people using Kuaishou even though it is so “vulgar”? What exactly is Kuaishou? What magic power allows it to spread like wildfire step by step?

2. What exactly is Kuaishou?

1.What exactly is Kuaishou?

(1) Product positioning: A social sharing application for short video production, sharing, and browsing, which meets the needs of ordinary users to record and show interesting moments in life.

(2) Product function introduction:

The following figure is the first-level interface of Kuaishou:

The following figure shows the product function architecture of Kuaishou:

Then, if we analyze from the user's perspective, there are three main types of user operations on Kuaishou:

A. Browse videos

• Follow: Displays videos of influencers you follow, arranged in reverse chronological order.
• Discover: Personalized recommendations based on your browsing habits and publishing time.
• Same city: The videos of people in your city are displayed in the same city, and the order of arrangement is recommended by interest; users who have paid will be arranged at the front; then they will be arranged in reverse order according to the time and the popularity of browsing.

B. Photography

Edit the video frame by frame and choose your own cover.

C.Menu

Drawer-style navigation leaves enough space for video display.

Now that we have understood Kuaishou’s product positioning and functions, let’s move on to the “highlight” and analyze the background and real reasons behind Kuaishou’s popularity.

3. Analysis of the background and reasons for Kuaishou’s popularity

1. Social background of popularity: New residents enter the Internet society

Social and cultural stratification is an objective reality that cannot be changed by anyone's will. Generally speaking, it can be divided into the upper and lower classes, with the boundary being cities and rural areas.

(1) Social background:

A. In the past three years, there has been a surge in the popularity of smartphones, a reduction in the price of data traffic , the spread of WIFI, and an improvement in the quality of life in rural areas.

The quality of life in China's rural areas has been greatly improved in recent years. With the price reduction of data traffic and a series of measures introduced by the State Council to popularize the Internet in rural areas, it has become much more convenient to access the Internet in rural areas. At the same time, Wi-Fi coverage in rural areas has also greatly improved, and Wi-Fi has even become a standard feature of many village shops, barber shops, and restaurants.

Since 2015, the penetration rate of smartphones in rural areas has also achieved explosive growth.

Mobile phone companies actively seizing the rural market

B. Consumption upgrade in third- and fourth-tier cities:

• In the past few years, people who had gone out to work have returned.
• Industrial upgrading of fourth-tier cities themselves.
• The rise of the post-90s population. This group has a stronger desire to consume, which has also driven consumption upgrades in third- and fourth-tier cities.

(2) The current situation (dilemma) of new Internet residents:

There is no place for them in the already relatively sound Internet society, and the huge differences in values ​​​​and knowledge make it difficult for them to integrate into the existing circle.

2. Analysis of the reasons for popularity

(1) Selection of market user groups: Focus on the Diaosi user group, that is, the non-mainstream market (underdeveloped areas, rural areas, third- and fourth-tier cities, and urban-rural fringe areas) that accounts for the vast majority of China's population.

The following figure shows the user structure of major short video platforms in China:

According to data from QuestMobile: In April 2017, Kuaishou had 41.72 million daily active users, and the total number of daily active users in the four first-tier cities was approximately 10 million. This shows that at least 73% of Kuaishou platform users come from non-first-tier cities. This is mainly due to the demographic structure of contemporary China, with only about 7% of China's population living in first-tier cities. Therefore, most of Kuaishou's users come from lower-tier cities.

These low-tier users also have their own shopping, social, and entertainment needs, and they are also integrating into the mobile Internet . The difference is that they are not integrating into the high-end mobile Internet that is connected with Silicon Valley, but the mobile Internet that meets their needs and satisfies their interests and demands. They need communities and products that describe their rural life, working life, and reflect the logic of life and daily emotions of the grassroots. Kuaishou meets the entertainment needs of young people in fourth-, fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-tier cities and rural areas for self-presentation and content sharing. This is also an opportunity for Kuaishou to grow into the video community with the highest concentration of users in China's non-first-tier cities.

The popularity of Kuaishou reveals the gap in Chinese society; its unique market entry point has gained access to vast untapped virgin land on the Internet. This can be described as an atypical, reverse growth story of a Chinese Internet product - the vast majority of Internet products in China have penetrated from first-tier cities to second-, third-, and fourth-tier cities and rural areas.

(2) We identified the essential psychological demands behind the needs of the user group and satisfied the suppressed “desires” of the grassroots people.

Zhang Xiaolong said that great products should meet people's emotional needs and satisfy human greed, anger, and ignorance. Any demands that have not been deconstructed and penetrated are rogue pseudo-demands and must be attributed to the most essential human nature. And the demand comes from the understanding of current life trends.

A. The need for respect and attention

The picture below is an illustration of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The fourth level is "esteem needs", which includes self-respect, respect for others, respect from others, confidence, and achievement.

The need for respect can be divided into internal respect and external respect. Internal respect refers to a person's desire to be strong, competent, confident, and independent in a variety of situations. In short, internal respect is human self-respect. External respect refers to a person's desire to have status and prestige, and to be respected, trusted, and highly regarded by others. Everyone hopes to have a stable social status and requires that personal abilities and achievements be recognized by society.

What Kuaishou does is to provide every user with a stage to express themselves equally. In the [Discover] and [Same City] sections, as long as users post videos, they have the opportunity to be seen by tens of thousands of people, and everyone is equal. And unlike Weibo's model of using KOLs as the core to increase the number of users, Kuaishou is de-KOL and decentralized. It allows users not to chase celebrities, become followers and accessories of KOLs, but only use Kuaishou as a platform to record and showcase themselves.

B. Curiosity

People always have the curiosity to find and explore new things. This is human nature. [Discover] and [Same City] satisfy users' desire to peek into other people's lives in a very rough way.

C. The inner desire to penetrate the social class barrier and integrate into urban life

The internet helps tens of millions of Chinese migrant workers who leave rural areas for urban jobs stay in touch with relatives and classmates, but it does little to help them truly integrate into urban life, researchers at Tsinghua University have found. In fact, they are eager to integrate into urban life.

D. Group conformity: Group effects are easy to spread, people tend to follow trends, and the group IQ is lower than the individual IQ.

Human beings are social beings. Living in certain social groups, they are influenced by the group's attitudes, values, religious beliefs, customs, culture, ethical norms, public opinion, interpersonal communication, rules and regulations, etc. Individuals hope to be accepted and affirmed by the group, gain role recognition, and avoid being abandoned and denied by the group. In this psychological state, individual behavior always tries to be consistent with the majority behavior of the group as much as possible. For example, when everyone around you is playing King of Glory, there is a high probability that you will follow suit and play along. The principle is similar. This user group sees everyone around them having fun using Kuaishou, so they will naturally follow suit. As a result, Kuaishou became a wildfire.

(4) Kuaishou’s persistence in its original positioning

The original intention of the Kuaishou team in making this product is to record the world and provide everyone around them with a tool to record and share their lives, to record the best memories of each individual's life. Every little bit , fragment of life, joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness can be recorded and shared with everyone.

In order to stick to this original intention, Kuaishou has made a lot of efforts. For example, go to KOL and decentralize. This point has been mentioned earlier. Kuaishou did not adopt the same celebrity-centric strategy as Weibo. It did not allocate resources to users with more fans, did not design levels to classify users, did not rank users, employees were not allowed to contact users with many fans, and it did not sign contracts with popular live broadcasters on the platform.

The reason for these restrictions is that Kuaishou hopes to create a lightweight and casual atmosphere for the platform, where everyone on the platform dares to express themselves and share videos of their lives.

(5) Kuaishou’s product functions and designs are in line with human nature: strong restraint, fully personalized recommendation mechanism based on algorithms, and decentralization.

A. Functional restraint and minimalism.

It is reflected in the following five points:

1. Few functional modules : some functions that are considered indispensable by some mainstream social applications have been deleted or weakened.
2. No segmentation of video types : This helps users who are not good at using smartphones to use Kuaishou.
3. No forwarding feature is provided : Encourage users to focus on creating original content.
4. Hiding the private messaging function : On the one hand, it is to encourage users to share more content instead of spending too much time chatting on the platform; on the other hand, users will inevitably move to other mature social networks (QQ and WeChat ) in the end.
5. No separate live broadcast page is provided : Kuaishou only allows about 10% of users to broadcast live, thus weakening live broadcast to a subsidiary function. Because Kuaishou believes that live streaming is not a good way to record and share daily life, but only a supplement to user interaction.

B. Fully personalized recommendation mechanism based on algorithm.

The key to automatic recommendation lies in the degree to which the machine understands the rules. The algorithm designed by Kuaishou can understand video content, user characteristics, and user behavior , including content browsing and interaction history. Based on the understanding of the above information, the model can match content and users together. The more users we accumulate, the more data we have, and the more accurate the recommendations will be. And currently Kuaishou is focusing on optimizing smart matching.

The advantages of algorithm recommendation are:

• First, through the algorithm recommendation mechanism, all users and videos have the opportunity to be displayed on the "Discover" page, even if the user has only one follower. The more likes a video gets, the greater the probability of being selected by the machine.
• Second, by analyzing the user’s previous click, view, and like history, the algorithm can recommend videos and provide content on the “Discover” page based on the user’s previous preferences.

4. Kuaishou’s future development direction

1. The landscape of the short video battlefield

Currently, there are three major short video kings in the short video battlefield ( Meipai , Miaopai , and Kuaishou), with Kuaishou occupying the first place; various newcomers continue to pour into the market to seize market share and user volume, such as Weishi , Douyin Short Video, and Toutiao 's Huoshan Short Video .

2. Suggestions for the future development of Kuaishou

(1) Improve content and brand tone.

Kuaishou is currently the industry leader in the short video market, and its way forward lies in continuing to expand market demand. For industry leaders, the way to expand market demand is usually to find new users and new uses for products or to encourage existing users to increase usage.

Improving the tone of content can reverse market perception and help Kuaishou achieve commercial monetization; and ways to improve brand tone can be to advertise in higher-end markets and produce relatively high-end content.

(2) Join forces with large companies to gain access to their ecological resources.

In March, Kuaishou received an investment of 300 million yuan from Tencent. It is foreseeable that in the future, Kuaishou, with the support of Tencent, may be connected to the Tencent ecosystem and obtain the resources of Tencent to promote its development.

This article mainly analyzes the reasons for the popularity of Kuaishou from several angles. The author’s thoughts are not comprehensive. If readers have more ideas, please leave a message in the comment area.