Short video + live broadcast + tens of millions of traffic experience review

March 2022 will be exactly three years since we started our business. When he started his business in 2019, he caught up with the short video track and accumulated more than 40 million short video fans on several platforms.

Because of the double reductions in the K12 business, we transformed into the general knowledge payment track last year.

Meanwhile, we in the K12 industry have always been relatively sensitive to traffic:

• In 2017, the Missionbao book delivery model was invented;
• I started making short videos in 2019 and caught the dividends of Kuaishou’s education.
• Last year, I also caught up with the natural flow of Tik Tok.

Looking back over the past few years, I would like to briefly talk about some of the experiences I have accumulated and some of the pitfalls I have encountered. There are still thousands of lessons to be learned here.

The following sharing is mainly divided into four parts: traffic, content, live broadcast, and IP.

1. About IP

1. IP is the operating unit of future content companies. What is an operating unit? It can be understood as offline stores.

2. IP is translated into English as intellectual property. Property rights also mean the formation of a certain asset. The core of IP is consensus assets.

IP=shared knowledge+assets

• "Sharing" refers to traffic in a specific circle, "recognition" means high recognition, and "assets" refer to products that can be monetized.
• The core of "sharing" is: the size of the traffic and whether it crosses circles. For example, Luo Yonghao has penetrated into multiple fields, including the technology circle, the Internet circle, and the education circle.
• The core of "knowledge" is: character recognition, which can also be understood as a label. The more tags you have, or the more unique they are, the more memorable they are. To give an extreme example, a unique pig (Zhu Jianqiang) may be easier to remember than a mediocre person's name.

3. It is difficult to create IP in some fields. The core reason is not that the track is not good, but that certain consensus labels have been occupied in advance .

For example, if I mention commercial IP now, how many can you think of off the top of your head? If there are more than 5, it basically means a red ocean.

4. What should I do if I find out it is the Red Sea? One is to change channels, or in other words, "different is worse than better."

From another perspective, if there are no celebrities in your field, then you must become famous as early as possible.

The first law of success written by Barabasi, an expert in complex fields: performance drives success, but when performance cannot be measured, social networks drive success.

5. From sharing, to knowledge, to assets, the difficulty increases. You will see more and more celebrities who became famous early, such as Cecilia Cheung and Zhang Jizhong, experiencing a second spring on Tik Tok.

The core is that they have "knowledge", but they just use new channels such as TikTok to create "commonality".

6. The real dividends of IP come either from occupying a blank market (rediscovering demand) or from differentiated supply.

7. Doing traffic and doing IP are two different things. One is a mobile business and the other is a sedentary business.

The core of traffic is user attention. Users will move with the migration of platforms, so it is not the same group of people who make different platforms popular.

A good IP is a sedentary business and can be popular no matter where it is. For example, Yi Zhongtian, even if he doesn’t do anything on social media, he will always be in the minds of users.

8. The difficulty in creating an IP is to find a methodology that suits him or her, and what is even more difficult is to go all in on the status of the IP itself.

After talking to teachers who are doing well in the industry, I found that many of them started their own businesses due to debt. One teacher who owed a lot of debt basically live broadcast for 8-10 hours a day for a while, or even longer. It is incomprehensible using normal physical logic.

9. Don’t fantasize about a 100% success rate in creating an IP unless you find the top IP.

The better the IP, like high-quality ingredients, does not require complicated cooking.

10. "Cognitive Surplus" published by Clay Shirky in 2011 is a great book. Everyone has cognitive surplus, which will be magnified in this era of short videos.

But the core of the algorithmic era is to create greater leverage, not to get something for nothing.

11. The emotional value that IP brings to everyone is also part of the content, especially for knowledge payment. Many people buy it not because of its functional value.

12. Can you survive by focusing on content instead of IP? Of course you can. The entire market is huge, so just find your own ecological niche.

13. The next proposition for the last wave of short video IPs is how to cross the cycle.

2. About content

1. Judging from the overall market trend, the biggest bonus at the moment is still the conversion of text, pictures and videos. If you look at it, short videos are the photocopiers of the text and picture era.

2. Short videos are the content portal for different industries, but the progress of each industry is different. For e-commerce companies, short videos are more like the video version of the product header image, and the live broadcast room is the details page.

For knowledge-based IPs, short videos are more like an autobiography, or a magazine, or a promotional leaflet .

In terms of monetization effect, autobiography>magazine>DM.

3. Short videos still follow the logic of “one video determines your life”; one popular video is equivalent to 100 normal videos.

English teacher Sydney once posted a video about 10 years ago which went viral and generated over 10 million GMVs.

From this perspective, the content industry has only three scores: 0, 60, and 100.

0 points means useless, 60 points means just average, and 100 points means a huge hit.

There is rarely an intermediate state for content, and the same is basically true for talent in the content industry.

4. Content has always been the way to grow with the highest ROI, from the popularity of paper in Luoyang to Musk’s Twitter. The ability to create high-quality content has always been a scarce skill.

As I wrote in the book "Advanced Operations", there are three types of endogenous growth. When fission growth shows signs of happening, it is either content or payment.

5. The core ability of short video production comes from topic selection. Many very powerful public account owners cannot make good short videos. The problem lies in the lack of expressiveness and insufficient investment.

6. With each wave of opportunities comes a new wave of people. In the short video track, the overlap between practitioners and friends of public accounts is very low. From those born in the 85s and 90s, they gradually became those born in the 95s and 00s.

In this wave of short video track, the natural advantages of those born after 1995 can be revealed.

They have two core advantages. The first is that they have no path dependence and dare to try. The second is good physical strength and good sense of the Internet.

7. When making videos, platforms prefer to add icing on the cake rather than provide timely assistance. Don’t go for the equipment party right away. We tried many devices and later found that what ultimately had an impact was the strength of the content.

Let me put it this way, even if you wear Nike's latest running shoes and the clothes with the lowest wind resistance, you may still not be able to outrun Bolt barefoot.

8. The importance of the track is above all else. Just as Duan Yongping said, good bussiness comes first and then good people.

If you choose the wrong track, you will suffer terrible consequences. Choose the right track and double your growth.

9. Is luck important? In the age of algorithms, luck matters a lot. I’ve seen a lot of videos that didn’t go viral the first time they were posted, but became viral for some unknown reason the second time they were posted.

But if you rely purely on luck you won’t be able to do it for long. Our logic is to assume that there is a bottom line value in the event of very bad luck.

Just like the basic playback volume of an account, instead of always thinking about reaching 10 million playbacks, it is better to increase the basic playback volume to 100,000 first.

10. Only the enterprise of the times, the same is true for accounts. Except for a very small number of accounts that have crossed the cycle, you rarely see accounts from 2018 and 2019 still active for a long time.

The same goes for short videos. Ten thousand years is too long, we must seize the day.

11. Don’t fantasize about the existence of a magic trick. Don’t watch others suddenly cold start a game and then find out a cruel reality. The right time, place and people are different, but sometimes they can’t be copied. It is better to copy the underlying logic than to copy the gameplay.

12. The role of good content is to provide free traffic, but if you want to reduce uncertainty, you still need to rely on delivery.

13. Rather than focusing on how to attract attention in the first three seconds, the focus of the industry will gradually shift to how to attract people’s lasting attention.

The threshold of users is being raised higher and higher. Either being extremely flashy (Liu Yexi) or being serious and truthful (Teacher Zhang) is likely to become the main theme in the future.

14. The easiest mistake in content creation is to think you are doing a good job. The essence is actually "being half a step ahead".

This sentence was said by Liu Shenleilei. You lead users to view content like a guide climbing a mountain. If you lead too many steps ahead, users will lose their way.

For example, when we were working on Kuaishou in 2019, we initially looked for many internet celebrity teachers, and even invited the inventor of the term "internet celebrity teacher" to collaborate with us, but it never took off.

Later I found out that this teacher was best at teaching the final questions in high school physics. Although there were many brilliant methods, there were basically no comments under his works.

The reason is that many of Kuaishou’s friends fail to get into high school. Even among those who do, more than 95% of them don’t even look at the last question.

Later, by directly using the form of text and image slicing and mixed dubbing, the team of more than ten people gained more than 20 million fans in half a year.

Because that’s the user’s aesthetic taste at that stage. Later in the second half of 2020, with the entry of large manufacturers, aesthetics were quickly upgraded again.

3. About Live Broadcast

1. The live streaming industry is a typical "migrant worker" industry. No matter how good you are, you still have to practice to gain true knowledge.

Of course, some people can make money from selling drugs, but many people are just running along with them.

2. Cognition is extremely important. I have made many mistakes before. For example, at the beginning, it was believed that the live broadcast audience was a subset of the short video audience, so people worked hard to gain short video fans. Many accounts only started broadcasting after they reached 500,000 fans.

But later I found that many fans only watch short videos and not live broadcasts. For example, among Kuaishou’s 300 million daily active users, only 100 million are live broadcast users. It is very likely that you have gained short video fans, not live broadcast fans.

3. On the algorithm platform, content is more like a fuel, and some good content can last for several days. If there is an explosion of traffic on short videos, be sure to broadcast it live in time. Live streaming is real-time fuel and requires physical testing.

4. There are businesses that only do short videos and not live streaming (hook-ups or diverting traffic to private domains), or businesses that only do live streaming and not short videos (live streaming square to increase volume). Both exist and can thrive.

But once one variable is removed, it means that the absolute threshold becomes lower and the competition becomes more intense. At this time, refined operations are needed.

5. Live streaming has created a new field (low latency and high intensity), which is more efficient than community operation in the education industry. However, because the live broadcast room is "randomly" viewed by users, the requirements for the anchor are one level higher than those for the main teacher.

Of course, it has to be divided into stages, and the industry is evolving in a more and more professional direction. The later period will basically belong to the era of professional teams, and it will become increasingly difficult for small individual businesses.

Just like when we tried to do educational live streaming in 2019, no teacher was willing to do it, so we found a few part-time teachers who could sell the classes just by shouting a few times. This was the basic situation in the live streaming room at the time.

But when we start live streaming on Douyin in 2021, the skills our anchors need to know will increase a lot.

6. There are many ways to play live streaming, such as short video streaming and square streaming. No matter which kind of gameplay you choose, there will be a certain period of "shelf life". You must be brave to try.

But without foresight, don't blindly expand the team. When the tide recedes, your swimming trunks may be washed away.

7. When doing square flow, the most easily overlooked thing is the track, that is, the TGI index of the crowd.

Big crowd, big spectacle. In the later stages of platform development, ecpm will definitely be controlled, and all commercial traffic will be collected. But if you can retain people and help the platform create value, the platform will still give you free traffic.

We tried to play natural flow on one track and the upper limit was only 20w, but after changing the track and trying with another group of people, it exceeded 40w.

8. The strongest ability of an MCN company is its organizational ability, because for many MCN companies, people are the only factor of production. Unlike fixed machines in a factory, people are (current) assets.

To run an MCN, you either have to control the goods or the people, and many of those in between will become cannon fodder.

9. In the current environment created by live broadcast rooms, low price is still the most effective killing weapon. If the low price isn’t enough, then the high-end personality will make up for it.

10. As I said in my personal growth article, if you want to grow quickly, information, cognition, action and iteration are all essential. Live streaming obviously places more emphasis on the latter two.

Just like cold starting an early account, if your strength is not that strong, you may need to start up in the early morning.

11. Under the current TikTok, except for B2B and a few vertical categories, there is basically no blue ocean track. If you accidentally discover a blue ocean track, be sure to trace its source, because it is very likely that others have already failed.

12. Be sure to pay attention to competitor analysis. A good competitive analysis is like hiring people for free to run A/B tests for you.

13. Respect the supply chain, respect the supply chain, respect the supply chain. Important things should be said three times.

14. For anchors, screening is more important than training. First screen for character, then screen for ability.

15. Live streaming is like an open-book test. It depends on whether you can cheat. And the tolerance for repeating this thing.

16. Just like the essence of Pinduoduo: it’s not that the things are cheap, but that users feel they are getting a bargain. The essence of knowledge-based live streaming is not to talk about the actual stuff, but to make users feel that they are talking about the actual stuff.

4. About traffic

1. Many businesses with tens of millions of profits cannot be said to have sophisticated operations, and their essence is still to discover channel or category dividends .

2. The essence of dividends is the inequality between supply and demand . Find a track with high demand and low supply. In the case of extremely low supply, the core is not quality but speed of occupation.

3. Many categories start with channel dividends and end with brand dividends. As the supply within the channel increased sharply, the track began to reshuffle. Some people can afford lower profits, or new product categories begin to emerge, and the track will reach a steady state for a period of time.

4. To generate high profits, a certain degree of monopoly needs to be formed. The highest level of monopolizing traffic is to directly define the category or define the aesthetic. Similar to how Yuanqi Forest defined sparkling water.

5. Timing is very important. He who knows the times is a hero. Trying the right thing at the wrong time is more painful than doing the wrong thing. So don't rush to shoot randomly, sometimes lying down is also a strategy.

6. Don’t review accidental successful experiences , many experiences cannot be replicated. I have visited many big IPs before. At first, I thought they were hard to talk to. After more than a dozen drinks, I finally found that many self-employed people succeeded by accident and had incomplete methodology.

If you just hear one person say something, imitate it immediately. Be careful not to go down the wrong path. For example, if there are five factors for success in something, but you only see three of them and miss the other two, you may become poorer the harder you work.

7. Instead of envying the top players, it is better to find those in the first tier of the industry to imitate and learn from, or learn from the hidden champions.

8. When operating new media, there is essentially no private sovereignty . No matter which platform you are on, you are a tenant. If you violate the landlord's rules, you will still be kicked out. Research policy is extremely important. One type is called explicit policy, which means the platform will issue an announcement to tell you which areas will be supported and which areas will be cracked down on. If the platform announces a crackdown, it is basically either a shady or gray industry, or you have missed out on some kind of gameplay bonus.

What is more important is to look at the platform's implicit policies and prepare more mobile phones. The platform will run a lot of grayscale tests, from large changes in column icons to small changes in algorithms, all are in the details.

9. Luck is luck, ability is ability . Only a few people can distinguish them clearly. Most people will only realize their abilities after experiencing hardships. It is important to make good institutional plans and not to test human nature. A bad system will turn good people bad.

10. The threshold for simply generating traffic has always been low. The key is whether you can find the greatest common multiple of the organization's capabilities from the low threshold, or make high-quality products to form a brand. This is the real threshold.

11. Don’t be superstitious about shortcuts or one trick. Instead of studying variables, it is better to think more about the underlying logic.

When I was working on the live broadcast square traffic, the traffic was always unstable. I consulted many teams at the time and looked for a definite value everywhere. For example, if the interaction rate exceeds X%, the attention rate exceeds X%, and the traffic will definitely increase.

This turned out to be very stupid. The reason is that, first, the data assessment of the platform has been changing, and second, the competitive environment is also changing. Instead of looking for variables, it is better to find the underlying logic and master the basic skills of anchor training.

12. Time machine is the best way to discover dividends , either across platforms or across industries. For example, in 2020, I found that many merchants on Kuaishou would compete with big anchors in the rankings, but they were all selling various clothes and donkey-hide gelatin supplements. I put myself in their shoes and tried to get big anchors to promote their courses. During that period, I looked for emotional anchors to connect with me every day, which directly reduced the cost of leads to less than 1/5 of the industry’s level.

13. How to discover bonuses. Small circles are extremely important . If you can enter a high-quality small circle, it will be worth paying.

I have always jokingly called myself a "walking leek" because it is very likely that a word from someone in the community will make your money back.

When I just started my business in 2019, I joined a sales community. People in the group said that selling clothes on Kuaishou was a great idea and there was a huge traffic bonus. At that time, no one in the entire education industry was doing Kuaishou, so we gave it a try, and unexpectedly, it became popular very quickly.

14. The second point to discover bonuses is to try to make friends with your competitors .

We often maintain a good relationship with our competitors. The core is that we cannot be competitors for life, and we all have the possibility of crossing industries.

If you stay open at the beginning, you will be able to get more information later, which will enable you to grow faster.

After working on Kuaishou for a few months in 2019, I found that the cake was too big, so I wrote an article to call on everyone to join in. A friend read the article and joined the game, and made tens of millions of profits in 20 years.

15. If you are fighting a battle for industry traffic, winning in the early stage depends on execution, in the middle stage depends on team organization, and in the later stage still depends on cognition.

16. Many friends always ask me, Huohuo, why can you go through many traffic cycles?

Whether it is official accounts, short videos, Douyin or Kuaishou, we have achieved some small results. In fact, the most important thing is to always maintain curiosity and keep iterating.

The core of change is constancy, seek those things that remain unchanged. I have experienced the changes in my entrepreneurial friends and the baptism of double reductions.

My current entrepreneurial philosophy is that living longer is more important than living better, so I believe in the power of belief and the power of steady progress.

This year we will focus on general knowledge payment. There will still be a small wave of dividends in this track. One point is that driven by short videos, the population and categories have expanded.

Some content cannot be disseminated in the era of pictures and texts, or the audience cannot understand it.

For example, Kuaishou has a course on how to raise toads, and Douyin has a course on how to teach how to move in the game of Honor of Kings that has sold tens of thousands of copies.

Another reason is that with the progress of the platform's commercialization, the improvement of ecpm is inevitable. Under the education of physical e-commerce, high-priced knowledge-based paid products have also sprung up like mushrooms after a rain.