With 160 million monthly active users, how should Meipai develop into a platform?

Meitu Inc. recently announced its full-year results for 2016, with revenue increasing 112% year-on-year, but losses only narrowing slightly. However, what attracted me most were the data of Meipai . Against the background of Meitu's overall monthly active users of 520 million (not eliminating duplicates), Meipai's monthly active users reached 160 million, accounting for nearly one-third of the entire Meitu system's monthly active users. More importantly, the average time users spend on Meipai has reached a maximum of 36 minutes.

Judging from these two data alone, Meipai is already comparable to Weibo in terms of user scale (131 million monthly active users, 32 minutes online time). What remains is to prove the commercialization capabilities of its own Internet business (non-Meitu mobile phone part).

For Meipai, which was only launched in May 2014 and has been online for less than three years, it is not an exaggeration to regard it as the most promising product of the entire Meitu system. After entering the market as a short video shooting tool , Meipai has gradually accumulated an interactive community composed mainly of internet celebrities and beauty-loving female users , and officially started its commercialization layout in the second half of last year.

However, to realize the full potential of Meipai, Wu Xinhong, the founder and CEO of Meitu, may not be able to take any wrong steps.

1. Tools-Community-Platform Trilogy

For tool-type products, online time is a fatal reference dimension. You are not WeChat . The fact that you use your product and then leave means that the value of your product is limited: whether it is user value (for example, there is not enough content for users to consume), advertising value (no one cares who would be willing to invest in advertising?), or e-commerce value (what opportunity is there to sell goods if people leave?).

At the beginning, your users may only solve a small need through your tool. At this time, your online time is very short, for example, for Moji Weather , it is only a little over 2 minutes. Many tool products have this problem. The better ones may only last up to 10 minutes, but not longer, unless a community atmosphere is created during the use of the tool.

For early tool-type products, it is very important to try hard to make users "settle down" through the functions of the tool itself. In the process of using the tools, users may accumulate relationships (WeChat and Weibo) or content (Douban and Zhihu), and this type of accumulation is good accumulation. If news information is provided on Moji Weather, this is not a good precipitation, but is just forcibly added by the site.

When the amount of relationships and content accumulated through the tool begins to increase, a community ( social ) atmosphere may gradually begin to form on the product. For example, a small number of short videos uploaded by beautiful, funny, and talented video producers gradually began to appear on Meipai. As a result, there was more "content" to be consumed, which attracted more people to watch, and gradually formed some "relationships" of attention.

To a certain extent, this community (social) atmosphere will get out of control. It will slowly grow out of the hands of the manipulators and begin to have its own will. Manipulators can still guide the direction of the atmosphere, but they can no longer (and in fact do not need to) completely control the entire community.

But in this loss of control, all kinds of possibilities emerge. Users will pay attention to each other, please each other, and communicate with each other. Whether this is "mutuality" based on people or "mutuality" based on content. At this point, users no longer use the app and leave. Instead, they are attracted by relationships and content and stay a little longer. Some users who are most fascinated by the community characteristics even feel that the more they use the app, the happier they are.

At the same time, the online time will easily break through the 2-10 minute barrier and enter the 10-30 minute range. As I mentioned at the beginning, the product not only has real user value (rather than just use it and leave), but also has advertising value and e-commerce value. In other words, for a company, it not only has users, but also can generate income. Maybe it’s not profitable yet, but at this point the team has become a real company, not a “charity organization.”

At this point, some people became complacent about the wonderful community atmosphere and ended up turning it into a business: maximizing the value of advertising and e-commerce. In this way, the company will be able to thrive and be content with a small fortune, but greater opportunities may be missed.

In the complex interweaving of relationships and content (which generally exist together and perish together), platform-level opportunities are looming, and the chance to seize them is fleeting. I think for community products, the most important thing to build a platform is: can you enable the relationship builders and content producers in the community to truly earn considerable income through the community? At the same time, more importantly, the platform's business model is built on the basis of these people's income.

At this point, the platform was born. First of all, it has perfectly solved the user needs that were originally satisfied by the tool, and has generated sufficient relationships and content. These relationship builders and content producers rely on the platform to maintain monetization. At the same time, the platform's business model is built on the successful monetization of these relationship builders and content producers. The platform, users, and these creators and producers together push this business model forward to achieve a scalable and sustainable balance.

I will use three community (social) products as examples:

1. Momo is a social product for strangers. Two years ago, after forming a certain scale of monthly active users (approximately 60 million), it tried membership services, advertising and games . Each of these brought Momo a lot of revenue, allowing the company to turn losses into profits, but these cannot make Momo a platform company. It was not until live streaming came into being that the live streamers and the unions behind them began to view Momo as a platform where they could make money. Based on this, Momo’s revenue from live streaming really boosted its performance and also formed a platform ecosystem.

2. Zhihu is another example. After trying some advertising and e-commerce models that were not welcomed by high-end community users, Zhihu's strategic direction in recent years seems a bit at a loss. At this time, the trend of content payment happened to emerge, and the launch of Zhihu Live provided a way for "relationship builders and content producers" who worked hard to answer questions, including individuals and institutions, to monetize. Although there is no profit sharing now, I believe that the business model that Zhihu will build around this foundation will be scalable and sustainable. Zhihu started out as a niche community and has already begun to show signs of becoming a platform.

3. Douban is a good counterexample. According to public reports, Douban's daily active users once exceeded 50 million. However, after trying advertising and e-commerce, the company is said to have turned losses into profits. However, Douban has been lukewarm in recent years. Teacher Keso once expressed regret for Douban, believing that it was "getting smaller and smaller." After trying a number of strange business models, the only thing Douban has not done is to let Douban users make money, especially those high-quality reviewers of books, movies and music (who create the most relationships and produce the most content).

After building the platform, if we want to go one step further, if the company can build multiple platforms, an overall ecosystem will be formed.

Tencent and Alibaba , whose market capitalizations have both exceeded US$250 billion, have both found multiple platform businesses, so companies of this level can truly be called ecosystem companies. LeEco 's so-called ecological counterattack is a forced integration when the businesses of various platforms are not yet mature: on the one hand, it relies on constant storytelling and financing from the capital market to survive; on the other hand, the so-called platform businesses have not actually gone through the path from tools to communities, and the castles in the air are in danger of collapse at any time.

Baidu should be considered another kind of "regret". It has become a search platform, but missed the opportunity to become more platforms. Ultimately, it failed to form an ecosystem, and its market value now hovers around 50 billion. Behind it are platform companies with a scale of several tens of billions, such as JD.com , Xiaomi and Didi , waiting to catch up at any time.

2. Meipai’s product journey

1. Started as a tool

Meipai was launched on May 8, 2014. Born out of Meitu Inc., Meipai already had a preliminary community prototype at that time, but it was still a product mainly for video shooting. Different from the image retouching and beautification functions of Meitu XiuXiu and other apps, Meipai's innovative 10-second MV special effects attracted attention in China's short video shooting field as soon as it was launched.

Thanks to its excellent product capabilities, especially its professional graphics and image processing capabilities, Meipai's image quality at the time far exceeded those of its peers who were only focused on shooting short videos. It met the needs of users who not only wanted to shoot dynamic videos but also wanted to "shoot beautiful videos", and was especially popular among female users.

From the product iteration table of Meitu above, we can see that the initial iteration of Meipai was mainly centered around adding short video shooting and beautification functions. In addition to the 10-second MV function that helped Meipai win the AppStore Best App of 2014, other simple functions such as photo movies , sound recording, and video editing made Meipai one of the most popular short video shooting products at the time.

It can be said that until 3.0, Meipai has been working on making a more useful short video tool. In this way, it has attracted and accumulated a large number of users, and at the same time, it has precipitated content according to its original vertical channels and tag classifications, gradually increasing the app's opening time and video playback volume.

2. Community formation

As mentioned earlier, to become a community, it is necessary to solve the tool needs to the extreme and then accumulate relationships and content. As Meipai continues to improve its short video shooting and recording product functions, some people who use the fool-proof video shooting and editing functions have become popular on Meipai with their creative short videos. High-quality original short video content with vertical segments labeled beauty, comedy, food, and fitness has begun to accumulate, along with the fan users and relationship chains surrounding these experts and short videos.

Since then, a community atmosphere has gradually formed on Meipai. In October 2016 alone, the number of video views on Meipai exceeded 7.9 billion.

At the same time, Meipai App has also made a lot of product function updates around "relationships" and "content".

a. Relationship building

In order to accumulate more attention relationships, Meipai has made various attempts to distribute information and content within the community. The various iterations of the Meipai app 3.0 period are mainly centered around this core purpose. In addition to my main follow list, the community has added hot topics, strengthened the attributes of channels and tags, and categorized products around themes and interests. This is a common means of information distribution and relationship building in the community. When the community content is overloaded, it can help users efficiently find content of interest.

At the same time, in order to prevent the attention relationship from being overly established on a few popular top users, Meipai subsequently launched the two relationship distribution dimensions of "same city" and "latest", so that more newcomers with "potential" can be paid attention to. At the same time, it optimized big data intelligent recommendations to allow more video broadcasters to find viewers with the same interests and hobbies. In this way, new users can get good attention at the beginning, so that they can continue to be motivated to produce content and further consolidate relationships.

b. Content production

Under the existing short video system, the addition of the live broadcast function is also an important measure for Meipai to enrich its content system and establish a video social atmosphere.

Meipai quietly launched the live broadcast function when it was released in version 4.0. Its product positioning, in addition to increasing community content and improving online time, is to help Internet celebrities (who became famous online) and stars (who became famous offline) on the platform maintain fans and generate some revenue. The original content producers can interact efficiently with fans through live broadcasts, and good live broadcast content can in turn be edited into short videos and uploaded, further increasing the amount of content on the platform.

At the same time, we know that when the community atmosphere is initially formed and we have good data, such as tens of millions of monthly active users and 10+ minutes of online time, we can actually start to try revenue models such as value-added services, advertising and e-commerce. Meipai did the same thing without exception:

a. Value-added services

In June 2016, Meipai launched version 5.0, officially launched the props system, and focused on fan economy . In the subsequent live broadcast cooperation with the popular domestic idol group TFBOYS, TFBOYS and fans interacted for less than an hour, and the revenue from props rewards exceeded 290,000 yuan, becoming a classic example of fan economy monetization through live broadcast.

It can be seen that fans' demand for rewards to producers has existed for a long time in live broadcast products. According to Meitu's latest 2016 annual financial report, the total recharge amount of Meipai's virtual props sales business increased significantly from 1.3 million yuan in the first half of 2016 to 44.3 million yuan in the second half of 2016, an increase of more than 3,200%. At the same time, the average monthly number of paying users also increased from approximately 58,000 in the first half of 2016 to 225,000 in the second half of 2016.

b. Advertising revenue

In the third year after Meipai went online, it finally decided to start experimenting with advertising monetization. More places to display ads, in more formats. Meitu's advantage is that its user base is very pure, mainly high-end women, so first-tier brands are willing to cooperate with it.

According to financial report data, revenue from Internet and other businesses was 105 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 40.1%. This business accounted for 6.65% of total revenue. The growth of this business was mainly due to a significant increase in advertising revenue and a significant increase in revenue from the sale of virtual props on Meipai.

c. E-commerce

According to public information, Meitu will release two e-commerce platform products on March 29. Among them, the fashion sharing shopping community Meipu will adopt a social e-commerce model and form a linkage with Meitu's product matrix. For example, Meipai and Meipu can collaborate on two platforms, allowing users to directly import products into Meipu for purchase while watching Meipai short videos and live broadcasts.

Since the entire Meitu system has very precise targeting of beauty-loving women, its first-line brands such as Armani have strong intentions to cooperate. The styling experts on Meipai can open virtual buyer stores, adopting the "merchant-picture-expert" model, while allowing the styling experts to match products between different brands more freely, set their own prices, and earn income. At the same time, users can also post their matching needs on the platform, and experts will be responsible for answering them, which further consolidates the attention relationship.

3. Platform Road

As mentioned before, advertising and e-commerce can indeed make a company make money when a community atmosphere has been established and user data is good, but generally speaking, the ceiling will be reached soon. Monetization cannot improve the user scale, which means it cannot expand the boundaries of the community.

If you want to find the maximum possible boundaries of your community, you actually have to rely on the relationship builders and content producers in your community, help the key relationship builders and content producers in the community monetize, and build a business model around this monetization, and the platform will take shape.

In addition to continuing to deepen its monetization capabilities in value-added services, advertising, and e-commerce, the direction the Meipai team is currently taking is very close to the previously mentioned idea of ​​"promoting the community to become a platform" and "helping influencers monetize and then the platform monetizes itself."

Meipai's ultimate ecosystem should be more like China's Instagram, providing more popular life content, and then helping influencers accumulate fans and earn considerable economic benefits. At the same time, the platform itself can also have good commercial income.

Meipai later launched the short video support plan and Meipai University this year. One is online, and the other is offline, and both are launched to better monetize "relationship builders and content producers."

According to media reports , Meipai is about to launch a support platform for original UGC short video talents, aiming to effectively connect brands, fans and talents. For influencers, the support platform can better help them find marketing brands that suit their positioning. For brands, it is easier and more accurate to find influencers and their fans who are in line with their brand positioning, better convey their brand value and communication effects, and collaborate in marketing. Through this precise matching on both ends, these "key relationship builders and content producers" can earn scalable and sustainable economic benefits.

Offline, Meipai launched Meipai University last year to guide the growth of Meipai's top influencers. As one of Meipai's offline links to support the growth of video creators, Meipai University holds offline video content entrepreneur salons to allow experts and fans to exchange experiences in video shooting, live broadcasting skills, and interactive methods. This offline communication itself has become a part of content production, and has solidified the relationships in the community.

Meipai's efforts to help influencers realize their wealth have already begun to operate successfully. @HoneyCC, which once sold 30,000 pairs of jeans through a short video on Meipai, is one example. After Meipai video influencers have completed the process of building relationships and producing content on the Meipai platform, the next step is to monetize on a large scale and sustainably together with the platform.

3. Conclusion

The three steps of tools, community, and platform are not difficult to say, but each step is actually like walking on thin ice. When continuously moving to the next stage, a large number of companies fall in the darkness before dawn (Tianya Campus), only a small number can continue to succeed (Weibo Momo), and there are also companies like Douban that are stuck between community and platform and are lukewarm.

Can Meipai, which is helping its influencer users to monetize, find its own scalable and sustainable business model and become the next platform? Let us wait and see.

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

This article was compiled and published by @刘胖胖(Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting! Site Map