How did Volcano Video become the social iceberg of anxious headlines?

It’s no longer news that Toutiao has entered the social networking arena. Products such as Wei Toutiao, Douyin , and Huoshan Video have also caused some waves of varying sizes. As for why Toutiao is "eager" to enter the social field, it can be summed up in one sentence: Toutiao is anxious, and social networking is the best medicine to solve its anxiety.

Recently, Huoshan Video, a product incubated internally by Toutiao , announced that it would provide 1 billion yuan in subsidies for short videos. MC Tianyou, who has 20 million fans, also announced that he would join Huoshan, which was a huge success. In fact, in September last year, Toutiao CEO Zhang Yiming announced that Toutiao would enter the short video (PCG) market. As of April 2017, the average daily playback volume of Toutiao videos reached 1.6 billion, an increase of 60% compared to September 2016. Toutiao has achieved remarkable results in its PGC short video layout. Sun Zhi, product manager of Volcano Video, said that Volcano is a product mainly targeting another UGC short video track.

The shorter and more fragmented the video is, the less complete the content is, and the more it tends to be towards self-expression and interaction. Different from the 5-minute PGC short videos that Toutiao originally supported, the Huoshan short videos, which are only 15 seconds long, have gone beyond the content distribution nature of the Toutiao platform and penetrated into the "social" field.

It’s no longer news that Toutiao has entered the social networking arena. Products such as Wei Toutiao, Douyin, and Huoshan Video have also caused some waves of varying sizes. As for why Toutiao is "eager" to enter the social field, it can be summed up in one sentence: Toutiao is anxious, and social networking is the best medicine to solve its anxiety.

1. Anxious headlines

Anxiety 1: An urgent concern: slowing growth

With a valuation of tens of billions of US dollars, user usage time second only to WeChat , and a top unicorn... Toutiao, which was established just over four years ago, has been making great strides. However, it has now encountered a growth bottleneck: QuestMobile data shows that from November 2016 to April this year, Toutiao's daily active users were 65.55 million, 66.69 million, 68.96 million, 74.38 million, 74.78 million, and 75.21 million, respectively - judging from the data, the growth rate is indeed slowing down.

As an early entrant into the mobile Internet content distribution battlefield, Toutiao has greatly enjoyed the dividends of smartphone growth and software pre-installation. However, these two dividends are gradually fading. Before reaching the ceiling, Toutiao must plan early and look for possible new traffic growth points - one of which is social.

WeChat has proven that "social networking is a basket that can hold anything" - the success of WeChat official accounts alone is enough to show that content consumption within social products is a very promising thing (of course, it can also be said that WeChat official accounts have cultivated such user habits - because the result is the same for Toutiao). Toutiao supports Volcano Video. After it reaches a certain level of traffic, it may feed back traffic while distributing it through the relationship chain. This may be one of Toutiao’s hopes.

Anxiety 2: Future Troubles - Shallow Moats

The initial signs of a slowdown in growth are only a temporary solution, but the anxiety about traffic loss is the deeper reason why Toutiao is betting on social media. This anxiety comes from Toutiao’s shallow moat.

We use WeChat to chat and Zhihu to find high-quality content, but there is no such thing as "reading information on the headlines". Comprehensive "information platforms" naturally have the problem of too much content replicability (Toutiao first started out by crawling data from other platforms). Toutiao has seized the wave of self-media development and vigorously developed Toutiao accounts to enrich its own content ecology and create uniqueness. However, content producers often "submit the same manuscript to multiple places". Especially when the giants noticed the big cake of content distribution and invested heavily in it, the "homogenization of content" will become more serious - the result of the lack of unique content is low user stickiness.

The personalized recommendation mechanism that Toutiao has been advocating may be a moat. Toutiao’s personalized recommendations are good, firstly because of its algorithm technology advantages, and secondly because of its industry-leading advantage in user usage time - the more content users consume on the platform, the more the platform can portray their interests. However, both of these advantages are likely to disappear in the not-too-distant future.

First of all, it is the algorithm. Baijiahao , Tiantian Kuaibao and other players have already entered the battlefield of personalized content distribution. Compared with the technological accumulation of BAT giants, how great can Toutiao's technological advantage be? Secondly, on the issue of user usage time, Toutiao entered the market first and accumulated data very early. Through the mechanism of learning-recommendation-relearning, it has indeed formed a virtuous circle in increasing usage time. However, as the opponent exerts its strength, this advantage will gradually shrink. Especially after WeChat entered the market, Toutiao's anxiety has become even greater: WeChat will be able to effectively portray user interests based on the data accumulated on users' reading, liking, commenting and other behaviors during social activities (On May 17, WeChat increased the priority of the "Take a Look" function. A week later, on the 24th, Toutiao's newly launched version 6.1.6 opened the entrance to Volcano Video).

(6.1.4Android version)

(Android version 6.1.6)

The platform’s content uniqueness is low, and the advantage of personalized recommendations is likely to disappear. Under the siege of giants, Toutiao has to worry about the problem of traffic loss: in the future, if a user’s new mobile phone comes with Tencent News pre-installed, how likely is it that he will specifically download Toutiao?

Although a large-scale loss of traffic is only a possibility, it is necessary for Toutiao to make early arrangements. Social relationships can best retain users - an ID that is valuable to users and a well-established network of relationships will make them "reluctant to leave" - ​​Toutiao's social networking has become a natural choice.

In order to increase traffic and dig a deeper moat, Anxious Toutiao needs social networking.

2. What kind of social product does Huoshan “need” to become?

Social products can be simply divided into two categories: decentralized social and centralized social, with WeChat and Weibo being the typical representatives of each. Weibo’s strengthening of trending searches and recommendations for influencers are typical centralized social attributes, and are more media-oriented than social (of course, Weibo now hopes to strengthen its social attributes by strengthening mid-level users and launching features such as Weibo Stories). Centralized social products have weak relationship chains, but WeChat is the opposite.

It is no longer news that Toutiao is involved in social networking. In addition to Volcano Video, it has also incubated two products, Wei Toutiao and Douyin. Judging from their product forms that weaken user interaction, they are both social products with centralized attributes (I will not elaborate on this here).

In the long run, the product Huoshan Video will fill the gap in Toutiao's decentralized social products. From the current product form of Huoshan, which uses algorithms to make recommendations based on interests and distribute traffic to ordinary users, it is also in line with Toutiao's layout in the social track. At the same time, Volcano Video also needs to consolidate the social chain and strengthen the user relationship network by strengthening the presence of ordinary users, so as to dig a deeper moat for Toutiao.

3. With strong support, will the volcano go astray?

The huge investment in recruiting top anchors (MC Tianyou) and the large amount of subsidies reflected Toutiao's determination to promote the rapid development of Volcano Video. These strong support measures may bring a lot of traffic to it in the short term, but whether this is a good thing for this product is still a question worth discussing:

First of all, support the top anchors

As mentioned above, based on the needs of Toutiao, Huoshan Video needs to try its best to strengthen the social relationships between users (even if it cannot achieve the same level of strong relationship chains as WeChat), but this goes against the practice of vigorously supporting top anchors.

The reason is simple. If the user’s homepage is flooded with high-quality content produced by big Vs, will the user choose to forward the big V’s content or produce it himself? (The same principle actually applies when you fold the WeChat Moments to send long text) Should you choose to follow and comment on other ordinary users or big Vs? If ordinary users can gain high popularity by seeing that big Vs can simply produce content, but their own short videos are ignored, how much enthusiasm will they have over time?

Huoshan was able to poach top anchors like Tianyou from Kuaishou , not only because of the 20 million yuan that has not yet been confirmed, but also because of the "loose" relationship between the Kuaishou platform and big Vs: there is no basic maintenance, let alone support - MC Tianyou has nearly 25 million fans on Kuaishou, but Kuaishou CEO Su Hua said in an interview: "The Kuaishou team has never had contact with celebrities like MC Tianyou." This is unimaginable for other platforms.

However, a big part of the reason why Kuaishou can grow at a speed that is difficult for the outside world to understand is that its team has extremely implemented the concept of "recording the lives of ordinary people". Kuaishou's approach is actually of reference significance to Volcano - when the content of ordinary users is overshadowed by the light of big Vs, the relationship established will be a one-sided relationship of looking up to others, rather than a more sticky relationship network. Therefore, Kuaishou was equally calm when facing poaching, and Momo was equally calm when facing A Leng’s departure.

If Volcano Video wants to build a more sticky social network, it should strengthen the presence of ordinary users, encourage ordinary users to produce content on their own, guide ordinary users to follow, comment and other behaviors, and build a network of relationships - it can use big Vs to attract traffic , but its exposure needs to be downplayed.

As for the 1 billion yuan subsidy

Toutiao has brought the subsidy strategy it has always used to Volcano Video, and even the amount is the same... However, media and social media are not the same: Toutiao creators create content for the purpose of earning revenue (abandoning journalistic ideals), while on social platforms, users produce content more for self-expression, gaining attention and emotional feedback.

This is not to say that huge subsidies are useless. On the contrary, I believe that this money can enrich the content of the platform in a short period of time, but what Volcano needs is users to "share life" rather than "show off their special skills", because UGC content based on daily life expression can establish a more sticky network of relationships. At the same time, subsidies will also bury hidden dangers for the platform:

1. Subsidies are not a long-term solution . As short video social platforms have not yet found a good monetization model, once external subsidies stop, users who are used to "producing content to get money" will be discouraged.
2. The problem of platform tone : If users produce content for the sake of subsidies, it is inevitable that they will produce curious and vulgar content to attract people's attention. Although judging from the content of the platform, Volcano currently wants to attract users in fourth-tier cities and rural areas or even lower, compared to Kuaishou, which has been labeled as "LOW", Volcano still has a better chance of attracting higher-end users. However, the platform is filled with "performing for a living" content, which may still hinder the future expansion of Volcano.

4. Toutiao’s traffic entrance and its hidden worries

In addition to subsidies and poaching, the new version of "Toutiao" has also opened an entrance to Volcano Video, using its own platform to divert traffic to it: users can browse and watch short videos in Toutiao, and when they need to follow, comment, etc., they need to download the Volcano Video APP.

However, in the article “Where Did Toutiao’s Traffic Go” published by Huxiu on May 5, Toutiao’s “fighting with both hands” problem was mentioned: Toutiao took bigger steps in 2017, and the introduction of various new features will inevitably lead to new traffic distribution mechanisms - graphic and text creators on Toutiao complained that the number of readers was decreasing, because the growth of the traffic pool could not keep up with the expansion of the strategy - in the case of declining income, graphic and text content producers must carefully consider leaving the platform (especially when they cannot outspend Tencent).

At the same time, in addition to the issue of traffic allocation, whether putting so many things in an APP will make users feel "information noise" is also a question that Toutiao needs to think carefully about: recommending users to watch a group of people perform hard while they are reading newspapers, this story still doesn't make sense at the moment - after all, in the eyes of many users, "Toutiao" is just a news client.

For Huoshan, which currently does not have a good monetization model, it is a heavy responsibility to feed back traffic to the "Toutiao" app as soon as possible. Unlike Tencent, which can only make a "strategic" investment in Kuaishou, Toutiao is under greater pressure to monetize its traffic (last year, it sold 6 billion advertisements, and more than 1 billion had to be shared with creators), and it can't afford to spend money. But no one knows when Volcano Video will be able to repay the original debt. Before that, the problems mentioned above will always exist.

Toutiao needs traffic and a deeper moat, but it does not have deep capital to fight a protracted war under the siege of multiple giants. In this case, it is not difficult to understand the seemingly hasty actions taken by Toutiao to support Volcano Video (recruiting big Vs, giving subsidies, and providing entrances).

5. Final Thoughts

In fact, 90% of products need to use a “less restrained approach” to achieve a period of wild growth. However, when it comes to social networking, especially when it comes to creating social products with stronger relationship chains, it is not enough to just have traffic. Products like Xiaokaxiu and Zuji, which are like meteors, have proved to us that social networking requires a more accurate grasp of user psychology and interaction patterns, rather than betting the future on one or two functions or stars with their own traffic.

If Huoshan Video really wants to become a valuable and worthy iceberg of Toutiao, rather than a piece of floating ice, it needs to not only crudely introduce traffic, but also settle the traffic through more careful product design and refined operations . Big Vs and subsidies may be the only way to grow quickly, but beyond that, establishing a more complete ID system, strengthening the presence of ordinary users, guiding social interaction behaviors, and providing relationship sedimentation functions and tools are where Toutiao and Volcano need to focus their efforts in the future.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

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