Short video competitor analysis

The short video field is undoubtedly the hottest content platform at the moment. The reason is not just the well-known immersive experience, recommendation mechanism, low creation threshold, etc. I believe that the essence of short videos provides a more efficient and creative visual expression tool. Producers can combine long video materials, interactive gameplay, hot topics, etc. to record life experiences and thoughts, and can also expand to imitation, editing, and secondary creation; consumers can quickly find content areas that they are interested in and watch to gain spiritual satisfaction.

This article takes Douyin as an example and compares it with excellent competitors such as WeChat Video Account and Xiaohongshu to deeply analyze the operating mechanism and product design of the short video content platform.

It mainly includes the following three parts: thinking about industry background and product positioning, understanding of the upstream and downstream business architecture of short videos, and optimization of distribution scenarios and consumer experience.

1. Industry background: The Internet has changed the way traditional media disseminate content + efficiency + profit model

Compared to the English newspapers we received every week when we were children, the MP3s we played during lunch break, and the news broadcast we watched on time for dinner, we no longer have to passively receive information. All kinds of content are actively or passively pushed to us through the Internet. The concrete manifestation of this communication change can be summarized into the following three points:

The change in communication methods is essentially a change in the form of interaction between people and content: the simplest interaction is the text-graphic interaction that is relatively easy to spread and intuitive, such as official accounts, Zhihu, Xiaohongshu, etc.; then there are videos with more complicated production cycles, such as iQiyi, Youku and Tencent Video, which break the monopoly of traditional TV stations on film and television dramas, short and medium video platforms that focus on interest circles and occupy fragmented time, such as Douyin, Kuaishou and Bilibili, as well as audio communities for scenes that are only suitable for listening to sound, etc.

Emerging technologies are bringing about changes in the way communication is done. When I was a graduate student, I designed smart headphone products using sensors and AR technology (the headphone can sense changes in brain waves and the environment to recommend suitable songs). It is conceivable that live streaming, VR, AR or other technologies will continue to change the way people interact with content in the future, bringing a more immersive, vivid and interactive experience.

The improvement in communication efficiency lies in the two-way interaction between creators and consumers: from the creators' perspective, the threshold for content production is lower and freer. For example, iQiyi's self-produced dramas have attracted some upstream professional production teams, and Douyin's special effects templates allow users to show their beauty anytime and anywhere; from the consumers' perspective, innovative distribution methods allow users to access content of interest more easily and efficiently, such as the currently popular recommendation algorithms and social network communications.

Under the pull of the platform, the interaction between users and creators is becoming more direct and in-depth, opening up space for everyone to express themselves freely.

The profit model has extended to a wider market: I believe that except for a small amount of high-quality professional content, the content itself has limited profitability, but it can bring huge traffic and retention.

When users watch content on different topics, they will inevitably develop related needs. Therefore, the current exploration and development of interest-based e-commerce, game live streaming, offline comic exhibitions, local food delivery, etc., all show that there is huge and imaginable space for content, and the rich money-making ability subsidizes creators and platforms, giving the core content ecology a solid development momentum.

2. Product positioning: Cultural concepts determine product positioning = user group needs + differentiation of content tone

The essence of a video platform is a carrier that connects people and video content. This connection relationship will eventually form the culture of the platform, which will determine the differentiated positioning of the product in the market, that is, what kind of core population it attracts and what kind of popular content it will contain. At this point, it is actually very easy to think about the relationship under the content platform:

• The core is the relationship between people and content, how to encourage producers to output rich and high-quality content to the platform, and how to recommend appropriate and high-quality content to appropriate users (which will be elaborated in detail in Chapter 4);
• Next is the relationship between people. This is actually very interesting because the root of the product is people. Users are connected through "like-minded" content. This can be a strong relationship between friends who pay attention to the same information, or a KOL who promotes certain content to fans in a one-way manner, or even a mutual appreciation between creators... Using like-minded content to precipitate similar people and expand to community atmosphere and social scenes is an area that WeChat and Douyin are currently exploring;
• In addition, the platform needs to manage the relationship between content, such as the labels and ratings of similar and homogeneous content, how to deal with consumption conflicts of different types of content, etc. This involves the construction and operation of the content pool, which will not be elaborated in this article.

The following summarizes the product positioning of the leading video platforms, specifically summarizing the characteristics and needs of their user groups, as well as the types of content they focus on to shape the platform's differentiated cultural atmosphere.

For example, Douyin users are mainly young users from second- and third-tier cities, fashionable young people who love beauty, pursue trends and sophistication.

Tik Tok uses rich and interesting special effects combined with climaxing music to satisfy these users' viewing and curiosity needs, and encourages them to imitate the handsome men and beautiful women in the center of the stage.

Kuaishou users are mainly young people from lower-income towns. They have low education and low income but also crave social attention. Therefore, Kuaishou is committed to creating real, interesting and down-to-earth content. The concept of "decentralization" allows more content about human life to be presented, which has aroused strong resonance among this group of users.

Why do different platforms want to give the public different psychological perceptions? Because culture itself is different, and human nature is to pursue differentiation.

One generation despises the culture of the previous generation, yet craves admiration and recognition from their peers. For example, people born in the 1980s prefer TV dramas and movies on themes such as palace, anti-Japanese war, and suspense, because this type of culture was the most frequently exposed to them when they were young, so they like to watch TV dramas on websites such as iQiyi, Youku, and Tencent Video.

Those born in the 1990s pursue individuality, are lonely but crave recognition, so emotions, fashion, life and other categories of content can be seen everywhere in the hot comments and hot lists of Douyin and Weibo; those born in the 2000s have been deeply influenced by the Internet since birth, they look mature but feel misunderstood, so the barrage of comments and ghost-like sound effects that flood the screen of Bilibili allow them to express their emotions in a covert and intense way and forget their loneliness.

Therefore, I think what content platforms do more is to discover the needs of these user groups and then design mechanisms to cater to the cultural choices of these groups.

3. Business architecture: How does Douyin balance the needs and conflicts of users on the content supply and demand sides?

Below, I refer to some industry reports and materials to sort out the relationship between Douyin’s current main business, platform and supply and demand side users. Because only by understanding their roles, needs, current conflicts and what they want in the future can we understand what strategies the platform uses to balance these relationships and what the product planning is.

Douyin balances the supply and demand of upstream and downstream users by providing major content categories and related services such as interests, advertising, live broadcasts, and commodities. To put it more concisely, Douyin's business structure is: taking the short video content ecosystem as the core, driving user growth and commercial monetization.

1. Content Ecosystem

For content creators, their needs are analyzed as follows:

• Regardless of the professional level, creators all want to gain more traffic and attention, and they want to do it directly, with high quality and high stickiness;
• Increase interaction and recognition with fans and receive feedback on content;
• Have more freedom of choice in content creation, copyright protection, and similar competition;
• More monetization opportunities;
• …

For consumers, their needs are:

• Rich, professional, timely, fresh and interesting content;
• The information, content and products of interest can be obtained efficiently and selected independently;
• Interact deeply with people you are interested in and share the same interests with;
• …

As a middleman, Tik Tok has the ability to provide creators with a large audience that matches the tone of the content, but the premise is that the content itself must be high-quality and popular, so there will be a problem of traffic imbalance in the head IPs, and long-tail high-quality videos will be buried in the massive amount of information.

At the same time, although the templates developed and challenge activities operated by the platform can attract a lot of attention in the short term, they also indirectly influence creators to produce a large amount of homogeneous content in order to gain popularity. Coupled with the centralized algorithm logic, it is easy for users to develop aesthetic fatigue from the same old things. Douyin may need to solve these problems by summarizing successful cases, improving creator support rules, optimizing algorithm recommendation strategies, and so on.

Secondly, in terms of the content itself, the platform hopes to monopolize some high-quality Internet celebrity resources and pursue scarcity to attract users, while professional organizations such as MCN prefer to publish on multiple platforms and channels to gain more exposure and value. Therefore, the platform will sign some exclusive agreements to monopolize high-quality creators, but this may involve disputes involving traffic kidnapping creators.

There is also the recent hot topic of "Tencent suing TikTok for infringement". The infringing secondary creation black industry should indeed be punished, and creative secondary creation should also be encouraged - but what is reflected behind this is the fierce competition between TikTok and Tencent, the two major long and short video platforms, for the same type of consumers and creators.

From a philosophical perspective, content connects people, carries their views and interests, and the influence of capital and power on the group's stream of consciousness is a mutual and very powerful force.

2. User growth

From the creators' perspective, the platform needs to provide traffic and financial subsidies to discover and incentivize high-quality content. Douyin and Bilibili have also developed editing tools to assist in creation. From the consumers' perspective, finding high-quality distribution channels based on stable user retention, finely analyzing user needs to supplement content or improve product strategies, designing fresh and interesting gameplay and activities to attract user participation, etc., will all help to increase new users.

At the same time, I think what makes community growth very different from other e-commerce products is that different user groups have different ideologies, and may even despise and reject each other. Will the introduction of a large number of new users cause a conflict in the cultural atmosphere? Will it involve the iteration of product positioning? For example, the successful breaking of the circle by Bilibili shows that the content segmentation and user relationship sedimentation are done very well.

3. Commercialization

For advertisers, their main needs are:

• Good advertising and marketing methods can quickly capture the minds of target users, with high ROI and conversion rates;
• A stable and standardized cooperation process with creators, agents, and platforms;
• …

For brand merchants, their needs are:

• Products can efficiently reach target users through live broadcasts/short videos, with high conversion rates;
• The advertising efficiency is high, there are many influencers assisting in the promotion, and the marketing activities are effective;
• Low commission cost and high net profit;
• …

It is difficult for advertisers to find creators who match their brand tone to help promote their products, so the platform acts as a matchmaker and helps creators monetize by providing standardized and transparent revenue sharing and stable traffic. Douyin's advertising cooperation is handled by a dedicated massive engine, and its business model is already relatively mature.

At the same time, Douyin e-commerce focuses on triggering users' consumption desire through interest-based content. It has achieved growth effects through live streaming by KOLs, marketing of low-priced goods, and creation of private domain groups.

Through the above analysis, we can roughly glimpse the development direction of the Douyin platform:

• Content construction: covering all aspects of life, pan-entertainment, pan-knowledge, etc.; acquiring more scarce and high-quality creators, and accumulating content with core competitiveness;
• Content dissemination: efficient and accurate distribution mechanism, active and high-frequency interactive atmosphere;
• Profit distribution: Based on the healthy growth of users, it has a diversified and powerful ability to attract more creative organizations, advertisers and merchants to settle in, and has more resource allocation capabilities and voice...

4. Content distribution: How to present the right content to the right users?

Improving content distribution efficiency and experience is the most important goal when reaching users. From the perspective of product design, I think we need to think about:

First, based on user needs, analyze what content different users are interested in and what are the real psychological motivations behind their interests?

Second, what are the user consumption scenarios for different distribution methods, do the corresponding functions meet the needs of their usage process, and can they provide a better audio-visual experience in interaction and information presentation?

1. User needs and motivations

Interests are diverse and changing, but they are all related to one's own experiences or interactions with the outside world.

The target user group mentioned above is the entry point for each product to capture the market in the early stage, but it is only the broadest user portrait. It needs to be further segmented and summarized based on massive data such as the basic attributes of specific groups of people and their browsing behaviors.

Therefore, I conducted research and summarized the most basic interest needs under limited conditions. I believe that the motivation behind users' attention to this type of content is closely related to their own emotional experiences from childhood to adulthood or recently, and secondly, their interest is triggered during social interaction with the outside world.

For example, the most mainstream consumer demand on Douyin is entertainment and leisure.

According to my own analysis of the scenarios, many times I open Tik Tok when I get home tired from overtime and want to relax. If I see a video of the seaside scenery, I will think, "Traveling is so comfortable, I want to go." If I see a VLOG of a campus blogger, I will think, "Did I have similar scenes when I was in school?"

Tik Tok’s core recommendation mechanism accurately awakens my memories of past or current emotional experiences through each video, which highly overlaps with my own experiences or concepts in a short period of time, so it arouses my attention and resonance.

Another scenario might be that colleagues are talking about entertainment gossip during lunch break, and you realize that you haven’t heard about it yet. The news information pushed on Douyin is very timely among major platforms, so you open the hot list or search for the topic directly, and as expected, you will find information with various interpretations.

This is what triggers immediate interest in the interaction with the outside world. In the process, I gain topics for chatting with friends, which is often called "social currency."

At this point, the content portrait that I’m interested in can add tags such as “travel”, “campus life”, and “entertainment news”. At the same time, tags with a relatively high degree of relevance such as “strategy”, “landscape photography”, and even cross-combination associations such as “graduation trip” and “celebrity-endorsed scenic spots” can also be recommended to me. So even though interests are diverse and changeable, they can also be simulated and predicted in various ways.

2. Consumption scenario and function analysis: Consider the path and experience of users accessing content

After sorting out the user demand scenarios and motivations, when it comes to product function design, I think the first thing we need to pay attention to is what are the core functions that distinguish competitors and what are their advantages and disadvantages - for short videos, what is the core consumption path connecting users and video content; the second is whether the process design, information presentation, and interactive experience are the simplest, most intuitive, and most interesting.

The following summarizes Douyin’s existing content distribution and consumption paths, and conducts an in-depth analysis by comparing it with similar functions such as Kuaishou, WeChat Video Account, and Xiaohongshu:

(1) Personalized recommendations: User consumption psychology is different in different recommendation scenarios

Recommended scenario: Just like entering a bookstore, users see at first glance the books they are most interested in or the best-selling books of the moment, then walk into the thematic area to scan and select, and finally choose a specific author/book to read.

Similarly, as the entrance with the largest traffic, the homepage information flow has the highest requirements for the richness, timeliness, accuracy, and surprise of videos when users browse.

Entering the classified channel, users are mainly interested in a certain vertical known field. The demand scenarios of topic pages and personal homepages are similar. Users want to browse the latest, most essential and most relevant content of the current topic/producer.

Recommended presentation format:

Information flow: The mainstream forms are full-screen immersive and double-column waterfall flow. The main difference between the two is the density and content of information carried on one screen.

Carrying a single video in full screen places higher demands on the recommendation algorithm, which must accurately match the user's interests and give people a stronger visual impact and experience; double columns are more conducive to quickly filtering content, but in the leisure scenario where the user's consumption purpose is unclear, the experience will be slightly worse.

Tik Tok emphasizes centralized design, while WeChat emphasizes openness and simplicity. Therefore, in the same full screen, WeChat will weaken the producer's title, avatar, attention, music, comments and other functions and place them at the bottom. Taking into account the compatibility with picture and text notes, Xiaohongshu will disclose the video title more than Kuaishou to help users understand the video theme.

Pay attention to the rhythm of information flow. Tik Tok does not support long-image browsing. It automatically plays text like a slide show. If the user does not finish reading, he or she will subconsciously swipe to the right but end up on the follow page. Therefore, the interaction is not very user-friendly.

In this regard, Instagram has done a great job. Static images surround dynamic videos. First of all, the structure is clear; then the user's visual focus is on the video, and then the beautiful pictures next to it.

Tags and collections: Content tags are used to aggregate content networks with the same theme, making it easier for users to understand relevant information, while collections are created by PUGC itself to string together short videos under the same theme and guide continuous viewing.

The content of Tik Tok's tags and collections is rich enough, but pop-up displays will block existing content and affect the experience. At the same time, the limitations of the title bar make it unsuitable to place many tags. For specific optimization, please refer to ins design and layout:

Hot list: The list needs to be combined with the high-frequency consumption content of the platform to improve more scenarios. It should not only represent the timeliness of hot searches, but also include weekly must-see short videos, local lists, emotional UGC lists, etc.

Recommend other information: In addition to video content, you can also recommend similar UGC, similar music, secondary creative content, comments and other attached information.

(2) Social network distribution: User relationships are a relatively high threshold

Advantages and disadvantages: Social distribution is a strong innovation method of WeChat Video Account since its launch in early 2020. From the "Development White Paper" released by Shideng, it can be seen that the video account has fully opened up the scene entrances of public and private domain traffic.

The initial version attracted many middle-aged people who were not users of Douyin or Kuaishou because they did not need to learn it a second time. They paid more attention to accounts related to emotions, life, and news. At this stage, the video account has become more of a business card for making friends and recording life and hobbies.

The strategic advantage of social distribution is to first use the social relationships of acquaintances to cold start in the same circle to screen the quality of content; then further spread it to a wider or even public domain traffic through social networks. However, the disadvantage of this link is that even if you are acquaintances with a strong interactive relationship, the content your friends pay attention to may not be the content you like. At the same time, when it comes to privacy protection, many people tend to browse silently without participating in the interaction.

How does Douyin do social distribution: Douyin has a huge user base, but the centralized approach makes the relationship between UGC and users more of a one-way output and strangers, without a deep interactive foundation, so the most basic user relationship required for social distribution is still being explored.

Therefore, Douyin first developed basic social functions such as chatting, video calls, emoticons, and watching together, so that users can accumulate sharing records, chat records, and acquaintance relationships on the platform. However, the amount of interaction in this part may not be very large.

I think that perhaps Douyin can leverage its existing content advantages and design some functions to guide acquaintances to share/@ and strangers in the same circle to interact on topics that are easy to trigger interactive discussions, such as emotional, gossip, and question-and-answer content, such as campus tree holes and question rankings.

(3) Search recommendation: using timestamps/tags to improve search efficiency

The search scenario is when the user clearly wants a specific type of content, which can be a user name or topic keyword. Users' demands are to obtain information efficiently and reduce the process of screening and filtering useless information.

Douyin has established an intelligent search system. For example, when you click search from the information flow page, it will automatically recommend keywords for the currently playing video. The search results page will add category recommendations and related associated word recommendations with high accuracy.

However, many videos only contain part of the information that users really need. In this case, users need to browse the entire video to search for effective information, or the video tags are incomplete, so useful content is not easy for users to search and see.

I think we can refer to Google's existing timestamp concept and the tagging editing methods of some existing bloggers, and open up the location tagging function to short and medium video creators. These tags can also be searched, which greatly improves the accuracy of search and recommendation.

(4) Following: Users need to be guided to express their strong recognition of the users they are following.

How to attract attention:

Following itself is an interactive behavior. The follow buttons of popular platforms will be placed next to the avatar, and even dynamic effects will be added to guide users to follow after they have consumed the video. For example, the follow button of WeChat Video Account is displayed after the short video is automatically replayed, which provides a simple interface and enhanced guidance through dynamic effects.

Zhang Xiaolong mentioned in the 2021 WeChat Open Class that the efficiency of content distribution after following is not as good as recommendation, because people’s curiosity about new things is always greater than the sense of gain from already following and owning content.

WeChat has made many designs to increase the attention consumption rate based on its own social distribution characteristics: for example, the "Frequently Read Public Accounts" function is placed at the top of the public account (which can be extended to people who follow each other/iron fans), and the attention videos are also integrated into the recommended information flow. Marking "Your attention" and "XX friends' attention" in the video are all effective ways to improve efficiency.

How to guide the expression of identity:

Following represents the user's strong love for the creator or video content and identification with the same circle. In order to enhance the interaction between users and creators, and between users, it is very important that the front end thinks about how to guide users to express their likes and recognition.

Take the ingenious design of the hot comment area of ​​NetEase Cloud Music as an example. It is not an ordinary like icon, but a "thermos bottle" icon, which allows users to express their approval of the hot comments by "adding boiling water" in an interesting way; if you keep pressing the like button on the Weibo blog details page, it can emit "dynamic light waves" and personalized expressions...

Therefore, I wondered whether the like button in the follow area of ​​TikTok could be made more interactive and personalized: for example, in response to news content that people strongly condemn, such as Wu Yifan's crime, whether the "love" could be changed to the icon of "throwing cabbage"; for frequently viewed creators' videos, a "one-click expression comment" function could be added to guide users to directly express their current mood and enhance the consumer experience.

(5) Classification: Too broad a classification is not very effective in improving distribution efficiency. Creative sub-topics are more attractive to users.

Classification means users browse under a clear theme/carrier category they want to watch. Users who choose to continue to consume a certain channel must have a certain basic knowledge and understanding of it, so they require richer, more vertical and professional content.

Therefore, not all content is suitable for classification, and too broad classification will not be very effective in improving distribution efficiency.

Therefore, Douyin does not emphasize major categories on the homepage like Kuaishou and Xiaohongshu, but combines it with search or rankings to allow users to find information of interest more efficiently. At the same time, creative subcategories can be given appropriate exposure in combination with user portraits, such as recommending creative handicrafts/manicures to fashionable ladies, and recommending automotive/technological knowledge to elite business men.

5. Final Thoughts

The above is my little PM’s thoughts on the short video content industry, business and products from all aspects. I believe that the design of content products at any level is inseparable from the understanding and insight into user relationships, demand scenarios, path experience and other aspects. This is also the entry point that I have been trying to analyze in depth throughout the article.

A good product requires not only in-depth knowledge and skills in the industry, but more importantly, it requires down-to-earth work in daily work, thinking about the overall essence, advice from experts and regular review. Maintaining a long-term and pure passion is a difficult but worthwhile thing.

Author: Chancy Meow

Source: Chancy Cat