The power of short videos is 9 times that of long videos?

Many people became excited immediately after seeing this conclusion: How was 9 times calculated? Why not 8 times or 90 times?

Stay calm! Readers who have read my previous long articles will understand that Wei Xi still follows basic logic when writing! The specific values ​​are not important, what matters is the logic: how is 9 times calculated? A simple formula is: 3*3*3/3=9

Why is it calculated like this? ? This is where the topic of this article begins - comparing the underlying logic of short videos and long videos from four perspectives: content production, content consumption, content distribution, and content infectiousness!

Let me first state the conclusion:

First, compared with long videos, short videos are far superior to long videos in terms of content production costs, production population, production tools, and output richness. We assume this improvement coefficient to be 3;

Second, the consumer groups, consumption scenarios, consumption intentions, and total consumption time of short videos are several times that of long videos. We assume this improvement coefficient to be 3;

Third, the efficiency of short video distribution through relationships and algorithms is also stronger than the centralized distribution of long videos. We also assume this improvement factor to be 3;

Fourth, the shortcoming of short videos is their appeal and empathy, which are lower than those of long videos. We assume that the attenuation coefficient is 13.

Content production, content consumption, content distribution, and content appeal are independent and interconnected in the entire logical chain. They have a superposition effect , that is, they are multiplied rather than simply added. So we have the following formula: 3*3*3/3=9. The following is a detailed explanation of the reasoning process:

1. Production of short videos

How many film directors are there in China? The data from the China Directors Association is 349, and in the field of short videos, the slogan “Everyone is the director of life” is not an exaggeration;

We have no way of verifying how many Chinese actors there are, but I can be sure that even if the extras from Hengdian are included, the number of Chinese actors is certainly far lower than that of the Northeastern folks on Kuaishou.

The true story of a Hengdian extra chasing his dream in Derek Yee's movie "I Am No. 1" moved countless audiences and filmmakers. Today, Weibo, Kuaishou and Douyin have become another home court for many of them - life is a stage.

How long does it take to make a movie? Han Han's "Surfing the Waves" has compressed the overall production time of the film to the extreme. It took four months from the start of filming to the release, while it only takes 15 seconds to shoot a short video on Kuaishou!

In 2018, China produced 944 films and 330 TV series, with a total of 14,768 episodes. The average daily upload volume of Kuaishou videos in 2018 was 10 million. You read that right, this is the average daily upload volume!

Some people say that such a comparison is meaningless - most of the 10 million are "industrial wastewater". Putting aside the accuracy of this term, the implication of this sentence is that a small part of them are the essence of short videos. A small part of the 10 million is also a dimensionality reduction attack on three-digit long videos.

What's more, "industrial wastewater" is a label imposed by the self-proclaimed elites. For many people, this is their life itself. The forced division between "amateur" and "professional" is arrogant in itself . Those survivors of long video content shot in accordance with strict industrial processes cannot avoid the appearance of "Fuchun Mountain Residence" and anti-Japanese dramas. Isn't this another kind of "industrial wastewater"?

Before the rise of short videos, the language programs of the Spring Festival Gala were the focus of anticipation of audiences across the country. They even provided the laughs and buzzwords for the New Year - why? Because at that time, apart from the Spring Festival Gala, most people could hardly see crosstalk and sketches throughout the year. Deyun Club and Liu Laogen are not available in every place. Even in Beijing, the ticket prices of thousands of yuan are not affordable for everyone.

At that time, the people who could perform sketches and crosstalk were Zhao Benshan and Guo Degang. Now, Papi Jiang's stand-up crosstalk has a greater influence among young people than some Spring Festival Gala crosstalk actors, while sketches can be watched on Kuaishou and Volcano in a year and still not be finished. When you go back to watch the Spring Festival Gala sketches, they have become boring for most people.

Along with the rapid expansion of short video producers, the popularity of content production tools has also increased. Luo Zhenyu once recalled several important things that influenced him to leave CCTV and start his own business in 2011. One of them was that Canon's 5DMark2 dropped to 20,000 yuan, which shows that video production tools were still so important at that time. Today, "Office Xiaoye", who has 4.5 million Weibo fans, uses an ordinary iPhone to shoot his videos.

Along with shooting tools, editing tools and special effects tools have also gone from professional to mass market. A search on the AppStore shows that there are already more than 500 video apps. From filters to subtitles, from AR special effects to playback, from mixing to sound processing, all can be done quietly on a 6-inch mobile phone screen.

In addition to the output, the diversity of content has also soared. Our long-numbed values ​​and aesthetics have been cleansed by the domestic anti-Japanese dramas and "My Fair Princess". Even for well-made Hollywood blockbusters and American dramas, we can accurately classify them into a few limited categories one by one.

However, when we open Kuaishou or Douyin, we realize that the diversity of this world has actually surpassed our original imagination. Short videos have given ordinary people a way to gain a sense of existence. How many people learned through Dr. X’s article "The Cruel Story of the Bottom" that in prosperous China, there is still such a group of people who have always existed but have never had a sense of existence . The people should not have their eyes determined by a limited number of directors to decide what they can see . Kuaishou is the "Along the River During the Qingming Festival" of our time.

A Weibo account @李子柒 has more than 10 million followers. In an ordinary village in Sichuan, it shows you how idyllic life can be in China's rural areas. In the era of text, we could only get this by reading "Lost Horizon", and in the era of long videos, we can only get this through "That Man, That Mountain, That Dog".

If the writer didn't write it and the director didn't film it, we would never see such a lively and stunning side of this small village in Sichuan in the far east. Zhihu’s slogan – “Discover a Bigger World” is also extremely appropriate for today’s short videos. In a sense, long videos are art. Art originates from life and is higher than life, while short videos are life itself!

Robert Kyncl, vice president of global content partnerships at YouTube, has publicly predicted that by 2020, video will account for 90% of mobile Internet traffic, while this figure in China was 70% in August 2017.

The American magazine "Vanity Fair" once conducted a survey on "stars loved by teenagers". Half of the top 20 were Youtube celebrities. The commercial value and influence of short video celebrities are approaching that of traditional entertainment stars . In China, Papi Jiang's agent Yang Ming is also Angelababy's agent.

Angelababy and Papi Jiang's common agent Yang Ming

In fact, we can find the development path of short videos and long videos in the changes in the production of text . Before the Internet liberated the media, the texts we saw were written by reporters and writers. Today, how many of the texts we see are still written by reporters and writers? Text as a medium today is short video of tomorrow.

Of course, there are only a few people who can continuously produce high-quality short video content. Bloggers who can continuously produce content like Papi Jiang are one in a million. The reason behind this is that although it seems only two or three minutes, the switching of shots, the writing of copy, the control of facial expressions, the creation of atmosphere, the control of rhythm, and post-editing are a complex and time-consuming project . This is why Papi needs many working days to update one post.

Just like Weibo has given everyone the right to write, there are still very few people who can really write just 140 words. However, this does not hinder the enthusiastic expression of bloggers in various fields, thus forming the diverse vertical content ecology of Weibo today.

So, I am not comparing the superior horses of short videos to the inferior horses of long videos. In fact, there are more inferior horses in short videos. I just want to say: when there are enough inferior horses in short videos, the competition between horses will give birth to enough superior horses. And for most people, they just need a suitable inferior horse.

2. Content consumption of short videos

Before the popularization of mobile Internet, the most common carrier for consuming videos was television. From rural aunties in Zhumadian, Henan to greasy middle-aged uncles in Xicheng District, Beijing, they all faced the same TV screen . Note: when the aunties were working and the uncles were taking the subway, they could not consume videos - the aunties did not have mobile phones at that time, and the uncles had Nokia N97s and had not yet changed to 3G cards.

Now, things are changing - from the fields in Zhumadian to Xidan Station on Line 4, everyone is giggling at the videos on Kuaishou, Douyin, and Weibo. The only difference is that the aunt is using a Redmi Note 5 while the uncle is using a Huawei P30 Pro.

There are two important meanings behind this: consumption time is more fragmented, and long videos are not suitable for fragmented consumption; consumption scenarios are more diverse. In the past, you had to sit in the living room or in front of the computer to watch, but now you can watch it anytime and anywhere - the Internet speed is faster and the 4G fee is lower. Do you feel sorry for the money? Free data card delivered to your home!

Weibo's free data SIM card

If a person's day is divided into three eight-hour days: 8 hours for sleeping, 8 hours for working, and 8 hours for living, then the consumption of both long and short videos must occur during the "8 hours of living". The characteristic of the "8 hours of living" is that it is highly fragmented in both time and space. This is the scene logic that short videos are superior to long videos in the consumption dimension.

Of course, it is inevitable that some people will watch videos during the "8-hour workday". Short videos are undoubtedly the best regulator for lengthy meetings and boring discussions. The creators of short videos have long been aware of this kind of consumption habits - they thoughtfully put huge subtitles on the videos so that you can deal with all kinds of serious occasions quietly.

In addition to the changes in consumer groups and consumption scenarios, compared with long videos, people's brains are also quietly changing when consuming videos. Huxley, author of Brave New World, said: "People will gradually fall in love with industrial technologies that make them lose their ability to think."

Yes, our thinking is indeed being transformed by the Internet. The Internet allows us to jump from one link to another, and search engines make us tend to give up memory . Mobile phones are the biggest tool for transforming the human brain after language, books, television, and computers.

People are unable to think deeply, and we begin to pursue pleasure and excitement at a faster pace. The threshold of our brain stimulation is increasing, and mobile phones are redefining the rhythm of our brain's pursuit of stimulation . When I was in college, I had a sense of ritual when I opened a movie. Nowadays, in many cases, I will involuntarily drag the progress bar forward when watching a movie. I simply cannot stand the slow pace!

The cover of a short video determines the click-through rate, and its importance is self-evident. Unlike many video software that allow the most exciting frame of the video to be set as the cover image, the cover of Kuaishou’s videos is basically the first frame of the video.

The motivation behind this design is: don’t give me a prelude for short videos, go directly to the most exciting part of the video, users can’t wait! The basic contradiction of content consumption has become the contradiction between people's increasingly fading patience and the slow and lengthy pace of content.

Entertainment is not the death of the enemy. It has brought real happiness to people . The relaxation you get from working under high pressure for a day and going to a spa in a club in China World Trade Center is no different from the relaxation a young factory worker gets from walking off the assembly line and watching some funny videos on his mobile phone.

Small town youth contributed to the 1.9 billion box office of "Ex-Files 3"

The entertainment life of rural aunties, assembly line workers, and small town youth was once ignored by entrepreneurs who only focused on consumption upgrades, and short video apps have become a concentrated outlet for the fragmented time in their ordinary lives. What are fundamentals? Of China's 1.3 billion people, 900 million are rural residents; the population with college education or above only accounts for 8.9% of the national population; this is the fundamentals!

3. Content distribution of short videos

Short video production is the Ren meridian, short video consumption is the Du meridian, and what connects the two meridians of production and consumption is content distribution. The improvement in distribution efficiency is undoubtedly a concentrated annotation of the power of short videos.

The "three horses" of content distribution are: editorial distribution, relationship distribution, and algorithmic distribution - corresponding to "editors decide what you watch", "people you follow decide what you watch", and "machines decide what you watch" respectively. This is a process from centralization to decentralization, and also a process of rapid efficiency improvement. Among the three horses, it is obvious that "algorithmic distribution" is now going the fastest and furthest.

When I was in junior high school, our Chinese teacher asked us to read "Youth Digest". I also read it at that time, but I was ignorant and only read a column called "Youth Wind Chime" in each issue. Because this column was dedicated to love stories, I thought at the time, how nice it would be if the entire magazine was filled with articles about "Youth Wind Chime". This is the disadvantage of centralized distribution: everyone is the same.

Today, if I want, I only need to follow a bunch of emotional accounts on Weibo or click on emotional hot articles on Toutiao, and the homepage of my feed can be all "Youth Wind Chimes", which will undoubtedly be more suitable for "my" taste.

Compared with long videos, social media such as WeChat and Weibo also provide high-quality infrastructure for relationship distribution. Today, when we open any short video APP, the sharing button will be placed in an extremely obvious position. After watching "Operation Red Sea", I can only send a sentence in the WeChat group: This movie is too real and exciting! However, after watching a wonderful video on Weibo, I can directly share the video to a group or forward it with one click, and the secondary dissemination can be completed within 3 seconds.

Kuaishou's share button

The trend of artificial intelligence has been hyped by the media for a long time, and the most mature application and the one with the highest actual efficiency improvement is undoubtedly AI content distribution . From Toutiao to YouTube, from Facebook to Kuaishou, the "motherly love algorithm" that recommends whatever you want to watch has fundamentally driven the length of content consumption.

Every click you make is a training for the cold deep neural network behind it. The more you look, the more it understands you. It even understands you better than you do. Algorithms are the mind-reading technology of our time.

For short and long videos, the improvement in distribution efficiency can be called a revolution. In the movie era, the release schedule determined what movies we could choose, while TV series were a list of pre-arranged programs.

Except for the 30 million people who visit Douban Movies, all other netizens can only look at the same old theater schedules, TV listings and video website homepages. There is no difference between the aunties in Zhumadian and the uncles in Xicheng.

After I finished watching "Crazy Stone", no one would have told me that I could also watch "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" . However, in the era of machine-distributed short videos, you have endless video streams waiting for you, "finish this glass, there are still three glasses."

In the era of long videos with limited quantity, the centralized "80/20 rule" ignores the differences in individual interests; while in the era of short videos with massive clips, the decentralized "long tail theory" allows everyone to taste the chocolate that suits their taste.

If centralized distribution is the planned economy of the traditional era, then algorithmic distribution is a vibrant market economy, where click-through rate and viewing time play a decisive role in resource allocation.

More importantly, algorithms will continue to evolve. The smartest minds in the world are studying how to capture more of your online time through algorithms. After applying Google Brain's deep learning algorithm, YouTube's recommendation algorithm has dealt a heavy blow to cover parties and clickbait titles. In the past three years, the time users spend on YouTube has increased 20 times.

My father told me during the Spring Festival: "Xigua Video is a really good APP. It contains a lot of video clips about Chairman Mao. It should let today's young people take a look at the era we lived in." I turned around and glanced at the TFBOYS' MV in my niece's Xigua client and smiled.

4. Content Infectivity of Short Videos

Having talked about the three advantages of short videos, let’s now talk about its shortcomings. From a pure content perspective, what are the essential differences between short videos and long videos? ? I think it is "long videos that create the world" and "short videos that record the present."

No matter it is a movie or a TV series, they are all creating a complete world - this world is an extremely complete chain from character conflicts to emotional atmosphere, from environmental settings to plot development. Although there are bad movies and TV series, it does not mean that they are not creating a world, but only that the world they create is not successful enough.

"Creating a world" and "recording the present" are different. The ultimate goal of "creating the world" is to hypnotize the audience and immerse them in this world . Therefore, "out of play" is the most intolerable bug in film and television art. Even in the anti-Japanese drama that we complained the most, the simple and ignorant crowd will still be brought into that war-torn era by the poorest special effects. However, short videos don't care about "out of play" or "into play", because it is not a play at all, but life itself.

The advantage of long videos lies in their empathy ability - what is empathy? Psychologists explain that empathy is first recognizing the emotional state of others and then "copying" their emotional state.

Empathy can be described by a popular lyric: "Because I love your love, because I dream your dream, my sadness is your sadness, and my happiness is your happiness." For example, when we watch "The Pursuit of Happyness", Will Smith's persistence in adversity will infect every audience who has experienced difficulties, and we will naturally put ourselves into the real situation of the protagonist at that time.

Movie "The Pursuit of Happyness"

The fallen heroes, fallen beauties, resolute warriors, and indomitable little people can all touch the softest nerves in our hearts. We care about their fates, and we want to know how the plot will develop next.

The anxious mood of watching the next season after finishing one is the best annotation of the appeal of long videos, so the audience is willing to pay for "Game of Thrones". Netflix's market value has now reached a terrifying 130 billion US dollars. Among Chinese Internet companies, only Alibaba and Tencent have a higher market value than it.

I divide the audience's video watching state into "high arousal state" and "low arousal state". Long videos are "high arousal state" and short videos are "low arousal state".

What is a “high arousal state”? The high arousal state is when you finish watching "Operation Red Sea" and when you dream at night, all you can think of are the bloody scenes and deafening gunshots in the ruins of Monaco. It awakens the deep subconsciousness in your brain, while the "low arousal state" of short videos can never do this.

Long videos are active consumption, short videos are passive consumption . I will buy a ticket for the midnight premiere of Nolan's new film a month in advance, but I won't set an alarm for the next video of Office Ono. You should know that on the night when the seventh season of Game of Thrones premiered, the traffic of the unspeakable American website Pornhub dropped by 4.5%. What is a rigid demand? This is the urgent need!

It must be pointed out that it is precisely because of the incomparable and huge advantage of long videos in the dimension of appeal that they can never be replaced by short videos. The rapidly growing online time of short videos is not snatched from long videos, but more because it occupies the time of boring pictures and texts while creating a part of the demand for fragmented time.

We see that Hollywood is growing, Netflix is ​​growing, the national box office is growing, the number of screens is increasing, and iQiyi is preparing to go public... The advantage of long videos in empathy allows them to enjoy the dividends of upgraded entertainment consumption, all thanks to my country's growing middle class.

Short videos will continue to advance rapidly due to the three factors of the fragmentation of national entertainment time, the diversity of national creation, and the high efficiency of algorithm distribution, swallowing up the fragmented time that does not belong to us in the first place .

"From its inception to its explosion, the next five to ten years will be the golden period for short videos" - said Ding Feng, founder of Ergeng.

Author: Wei Xi

Source: Weixizhibei