Kuaishou’s 2021—How to create private domain traffic?

Simon Sinek, the best-selling author who proposed the "Golden Circle Principle", once expressed the following view in a speech about the dilemma between the real environment and social networks: Trust is not formed overnight, and trust will not be formed immediately even when going through difficulties together. It comes from slow, steady continuity. We need to create mechanisms that allow these little interactions to happen.

Kuaishou also has a similar view: to create a more friendly and trusting ecological environment where users and creators can trust each other and socialize continuously. "If done well, we believe we can completely promote the next round of innovation in the 'trust mechanism', which may be an opportunity to reconstruct the consumption decisions of 1 billion users." Yan Qiang, senior vice president of Kuaishou, said in a speech yesterday titled "Kuaishou's Perseverance and Persistence."

On April 22, Kuaishou’s “2021 Photosynthesis Creator Conference” was held in Guangzhou. At the meeting, four senior vice presidents of Kuaishou, including Yan Qiang, Wang Jianwei, Xiao Gu, and Ma Hongbin, and business line heads were present. They gave speeches on content and product ecology, live e-commerce and commercial monetization, interpreted Kuaishou's concepts, and released new plans for 2021.

Kuaishou has been people-centric for ten years

Since the birth of YouTube in 2005, online videos have been transforming the content industry ecosystem. The original closed structure has been forced to reshape, and amateurs who have become famous overnight have emerged in large numbers. Although there was no "domestic YouTube" in the Internet era due to the immaturity of various conditions, the development of science and technology is non-linear. In the mobile Internet era, short videos have emerged, and China has also ushered in its own video giants - Kuaishou and Douyin.

While another giant chose "algorithm distribution", from the precise control of content production at the beginning to the support of targeted traffic, to ensure that the most attractive videos can be exposed to the most users to the greatest extent, Kuaishou chose a completely different path - by adding a distribution mechanism based on the Gini coefficient, every user's video can get the opportunity to be exposed, so as to ensure the universal access to traffic.

Yan Qiang believes: "Although algorithms are very powerful and can bring huge benefits to the platform, from a perceptual point of view, we do not think that everything in the future should be determined by algorithms, and we do not think that algorithms can override creators and creations themselves."

"Universal benefit" seems to be something deeply rooted in Kuaishou's genes. At first, Kuaishou was just a GIF tool. In 2013, after transforming into a short video community, Kuaishou benefited from two waves of dividends: the popularization of smart phones and the expansion of telecom operators into lower-tier cities. At that time, other giants were keeping a close eye on users in big cities, hoping to gain the upper hand by leveraging the voice of the "mainstream population", while Kuaishou was targeting users in small and medium-sized cities and towns that received less attention, wanting to "embrace every kind of life." Although it moved slowly and was once labeled "vulgar", after a few years, Kuaishou has established a strong community atmosphere and social relationship chain that is difficult for others to imitate.

Reflected in actual data, "universal benefit" means that more creators can gain benefits. Currently, 25% of Kuaishou’s users are creators, and more than 23 million users earn income through Kuaishou. Among the creators on Kuaishou with more than 10,000 fans, 55% have also earned actual income, and these figures are far higher than the industry average. Their identities are also varied, including professional institutions, industry experts, as well as truck drivers, fruit farmers and other real individuals around us.

"The trust and emotional connection between people are very powerful and valuable. Over the past decade, Kuaishou has always adhered to the product concept of putting people at the core and adhering to private domain traffic . After all, the platform does not produce content, the producers are the foundation, and we believe that 'whoever gets the producers gets the world'." Yan Qiang said.

Yan Qiang, Senior Vice President of Kuaishou

Create a healthy private domain ecosystem

Under the "people-centered" business philosophy, in order to build a friendly and trusting community, in addition to creating inclusive creations, Yan Qiang introduced that Kuaishou has also worked hard on ecological health and protecting the long-term benefits of creators.

First of all, the platform traffic is more inclined towards high-quality creators. In other words, Kuaishou does not want to be just a simple entertainment platform, but also wants to deliver positive energy and useful content so that consumers can achieve real progress. For example, life skills, how to cook a dish, learn a small life skill, etc. According to statistics, more than 20% of the traffic every day will be allocated to creators who "can set a good example for consumers", and the current proportion of high-quality content on the platform has doubled compared with the same period last year.

In addition, Kuaishou has completed the construction of a series of certification systems in key areas and completed the certification of 42,000 users in key areas. At the same time, Kuaishou has continued to protect originality and crack down on plagiarism. After the original creators join the platform, they can file a complaint to transfer the fans of the plagiarists to their original accounts. In the past year, the platform has handled and helped these creators regain 74.46 million fans based on verified complaints from the original creators.

Wang Jianwei, Senior Vice President of Kuaishou

Yan Qiang emphasized: "In the future, we will continue to build the platform's trust mechanism, improve the efficiency of feedback and complaints, comprehensively improve the satisfaction of our users and creators, and strive to eliminate every factor that may damage the trust of our platform."

For creators who have been committed to originality for a long time, the platform provides long-term and stable traffic support. On Kuaishou, more than 100,000 creators have been able to obtain stable and continuous traffic in the past five years. "No matter how the external environment changes, no matter how the popularity changes, they always have their own little world on Kuaishou, with a stable and lasting fan family accompanying them."

This continuous and stable support has also enabled many content creators to grow into high-quality creators. Data shows that 33% of high-quality creators can develop steadily on Kuaishou for more than 3 years. The "stability" here means: continuous output of works, continuous attention, and continuous growth and income. "In 2021, Kuaishou will provide 10 billion traffic and 1 billion cash users to support creators," Yan Qiang added.

The returns brought by the above measures, coupled with the improvement of product form: single and double column revision, and expansion of public domain traffic, are Kuaishou's eye-catching data. In 2020, after the launch of Kuaishou 8.0, the average annual DAU of the APP increased by more than 50%, and the average usage time per person increased by more than 17%. Including mini programs, Kuaishou's daily active users have exceeded 300 million.

Building a new trust economy

Today, short videos and live broadcasts have almost become "infrastructure", bringing opportunities to many industries. For example, general life areas such as e-commerce, automobiles, and real estate not only bring commercial value to users and platforms, but also promote the economic development of the entire society.

Take e-commerce live streaming as an example. When merchants adopt live streaming, it not only increases the amount of information transmitted, improves the efficiency of commodity circulation with a more direct way of contact, but also changes the "people-goods matching method", from "goods-oriented" based on brand to "people-oriented" based on interpersonal trust, especially for products with strong industry barriers and high learning thresholds; for non-standard products that value trust due to information asymmetry.

The "key" to opening up the above links is the fan economy based on trust - private domain traffic. Kuaishou has always been committed to protecting private domain traffic, with the aim of making it a source of income that creators can control.

Yan Qiang revealed: "In 2020, the private domain income of creators on the Kuaishou platform reached 40 billion, and it has doubled compared with the first quarter of last year. At present, Kuaishou's private domain traffic remains very active, and the fan reach rate of the content is as high as 62%."

This means that Kuaishou’s private domain traffic has high commercial potential. "The user interaction rate per minute on the platform is currently 12 times that of pure content consumption, and the monthly repurchase rate of e-commerce has reached 65%. The value of a single fan of some high-quality anchors has now risen to 135 yuan."

A typical case is the Kuaishou user "Erge Talking about Cars". "The group car activity initiated by him in a live broadcast once set a record of selling more than 288 cars, which is higher than the annual sales of a 4S store." There is no denying that Kuaishou's private domain traffic is becoming an effective resource for high-quality content creators to monetize.

Xiao Gu, Senior Vice President of Kuaishou

Based on the various advantages of private domain traffic, Yan Qiang put forward the strategic proposition of "trust economy" at the Photosynthesis Conference. In his opinion, the greatest value behind the private domain is to build a new trust economy "centered on algorithms, content, and social connections." These are also some of the thoughts of Kuaishou, a leading company in short videos and live streaming, on the industry.

"Looking back at history, from the era of small commodities to the era of products, to the era of supermarkets, and then to the era of platforms, every change in consumer decisions has been a particularly big business, and huge companies have been born. We see that the live broadcast era with trust as the core has the opportunity to reconstruct business trust, which may be the beginning of a particularly big era." Yan Qiang said with emotion, "This change brings richer and more diverse benefits to creators, and also allows every ordinary person to have a better life."

Regarding the outlook for 2021, Yan Qiang said that Kuaishou will directly enter the e-commerce 2.0 era, "upgrading from traditional shelves and public domains to content and private domains, and utilizing the open public domain, stable private domain and interesting content of the Kuaishou platform to efficiently convert and repeat purchases"; and is committed to making "scarce resources in the general life field benefit everyone", making consumer decisions simpler with more professional services; at the same time, the platform continues to work hard to enable people with various needs to know each other efficiently.

Ma Hongbin, Senior Vice President of Kuaishou

Looking back at the past ten years of Kuaishou, it is not difficult to find one thing: when a new generation of media rises, it is not only the way content is distributed that changes. The extended part of the carrier will also penetrate into all aspects of life and react on people's thinking and lifestyle.

Author: Xiaoxi

Source: Xiaoxi