Table of contents:

1. Definition of concepts
2. Short video industry development status and industry layout
3. Basic concepts and understanding of growth
4. Short video customer acquisition channels
5. Specific case analysis

01 Concept Definition

The short videos discussed in this article refer to high-frequency video content played on various new media platforms, suitable for watching on the go and in short leisure states, and generally less than 5 minutes in length.

02 Development Status & Industry Layout

1. Current status of the short video industry

(1) Rapid market expansion

The rapid spread of short videos has led to a rapid expansion of its market size. While major short videos are creating huge traffic, their market size is also growing rapidly. With the announcement of 5G commercial packages by the five major operators in the fourth quarter of 2019, users' experience in consuming short video content has become more convenient and smooth, which has further promoted the development of the short video market.

(2) Rapid expansion of user scale

As of March 2020, the scale of short video users in my country was 773 million, an increase of 125 million from the end of 2018, accounting for 85.6% of the total Internet users. Especially during the epidemic prevention period in 2020, the demand for online cultural and entertainment increased significantly. During this special period, short videos have become a part of many people's lives, and the number of platform users has grown rapidly. The number of daily active users of Douyin during the 2020 Spring Festival holiday reached a peak of 311 million, an increase of 93.1% over the same period in 2019; Kuaishou ranked second with 177 million daily active users, an increase of 55.8% over the same period in 2019.

2. Industry market structure

(1) Panorama of the industrial chain

Around short videos, the industry has gradually formed a relatively complete industrial chain. It mainly includes platform operators, content producers, users, advertisers, and regulatory authorities. In the short video industry chain, the upstream of the industry is content creators; the downstream of the industry mainly includes short video platforms and other distribution channels, among which short video platforms are the main production location of short video content, and then multi-channel distribution is carried out inside and outside the platform.

(2) Overall development trend of short videos

2011 was the year when mobile Internet was booming. Thousands of apps were born that year, including GIF Kuaishou. In June 2013, Instagram added the 16s short video function. In August, Sina Weibo launched Miaopai. In September, LINE launched Weipian and Tencent launched Weishi. In December, Quwei Technology launched Xiaoying.

In May 2014, Meitu launched the short video community Meipai; in 2016, Douyin was launched; in 2017, Toutiao purchased the North American music short video social platform Musical.ly for US$1 billion and merged it with Douyin, and Douyin's users experienced explosive growth.

As short videos become more popular, more and more users, professional content producers and platform-level media have joined the short video competition, and 2018 has ushered in the first year of the short video explosion.

From 2019 to date, with the further penetration of short videos, apps such as WeChat, Bilibili, and Huya Live have enriched the short video content ecosystem, and short videos have gradually become an important part of Internet content consumption; at the same time, short videos have also made good progress overseas.

(3) Main players on the platform

The short video industry has entered a mature stage of stable development, and the competitive landscape has remained relatively stable. In addition to Kuaishou, which was the first to enter the industry in 2011, in the past two years, with the active layout of Internet giants, the main competitors in the short video industry also include ByteDance's Volcano Video, Xigua Video, and Douyin, Alibaba's Tudou Video, Baidu's Kuaishou, and Sina's Miaopai.

To date, Kuaishou and ByteDance's apps are the most competitive in the short video industry.

Douyin is positioned as an original short video distribution platform with a strong entertainment attribute. The product hopes that users will create interesting short videos to gain clicks and attention.

It tends to be "centralized" in video recommendation and traffic distribution, focusing on distributing traffic to the top players and those who create high-quality videos, emphasizing that the content created by users on Douyin is high-quality and spreadable. The more views and likes a video has, the greater the possibility that the video will be shared with more users. Therefore, you can see a large number of works released by celebrities and Internet celebrities on Douyin.

Kuaishou has always wanted to create a community and build a user relationship chain, distribute traffic in a decentralized manner, so that every person and every life can be seen, and all videos have the opportunity to be recommended to every user. Therefore, you can see a large number of works recording ordinary life on Kuaishou. The content is relatively diverse, but not necessarily of high quality.

03 Basic concepts and understanding of growth

1. Basic concepts of growth

Growth is essentially about getting more consumers to know about and buy or use the product . The so-called growth is actually a very broad concept. It can be achieved by continuously optimizing product details, increasing DAU and MAU, etc.; it can also be achieved by focusing on the organizational structure; it can also be achieved through communication strategies, etc.

However, although the dimensions of growth are broad and there is a lot of room for development, the essence of growth is to allow more consumers to know about and purchase or use the product.

2. Understanding the growth of short videos

As far as the growth of short videos is concerned, from a macro perspective, the cross-circle dissemination and explosive growth of short videos are actually achieved with super symbols. From the perspective of semiotics, Douyin and Kuaishou both belong to this type of super symbols.

In other words, the development of the short video industry itself is mutually beneficial with these super symbols. The emergence of super symbols or related species with super symbol potential has made the blue ocean prospects of the entire short video industry clear at a glance. Driven by the profit-seeking of various large capitals, more platform players such as Weishi and various small and medium-sized capital players, such as MCN institutions and the like, have joined in;

Going down one level, more capital-oriented entities will be involved, including KOLs who already have a certain influence in various fields of society, as well as "brewing KOLs" under capital guidance. Among them, different single high-potential individuals will grow into Internet celebrities of different scales.

In short, with the participation of different entities, the entire short video production ecosystem is becoming more and more large, systematic and complete, and its rich and colorful content attracts various types of "landscape consumers", which are what we generally call ordinary users.

Among them, many interesting phenomena occur. For example, in the domestic ecology where the discourse power of the "state subject" is more prominent, these short video super symbols that have gradually grown up in the private ecology will also be embraced by the "official mainstream", and then involve more "mainstream" subjects in more formal public spaces, further enriching the communication ecology.

It can be seen from this that studying the growth of short videos does not simply refer to the growth of one or several products, or the development of one or several companies; from the dimension of short videos themselves, we can think about it from the perspectives of practical application, communication, semiotics, sociology, marketing, and even politics and philosophy. Not to mention that if we abstract the growth of short videos into a popular culture communication phenomenon, we will have more room for thinking. What we have done today is merely to throw out some ideas for discussion.

Let’s go back to our research on the growth of short videos. In fact, we also considered many dimensions during the research process :

For example, at the strategic level, we can study the positioning, track, incremental/stock space, potential market size, etc. of short video products;

From the product level, we can study the details of the product, such as new customer acquisition and frequency increase strategies, such as push notifications, and even the evolution and expansion of product forms, how to find unmet needs, how to better meet needs, and how to seek product differentiation.

The operations level can study the fission of various activities, and the marketing level can conduct research in combination with various types of urban marketing communications, public marketing communications, county integrated media communications, etc.

However, in this sharing, we mainly focus on the data dimension, and at the same time make some supplements based on specific product growth cases.

04 Analysis of short video customer acquisition channels

1. Get users (cold start)

Today, the success of a product depends less and less on refreshing features and more and more on a successful growth strategy. "How to acquire users" is no longer just something entrepreneurs consider after they have a product, but the other 50% factor that can determine the life or death of a startup.

2. Common customer acquisition channels

The first step is to buy volume, usually through channel purchasing. This includes content consumption and content production tools.

The second is welfare. Welfare system = virtual & physical incentives + welfare acceptance + self-propagation.

Finally, there is content reserve. The specific path is: content production-content understanding-content review-content distribution.

(1) Content Production

This is the upstream of the entire link. Generally, there are three main sources: PGC, external crawling, and UGC. Therefore, at this stage, the main method is to crawl content as the main method and use UGC content as the auxiliary method to cultivate platform users to become mature video content producers in advance while ensuring that the content is consumable.

(2) Content understanding

After content is produced, it needs to be understood. In the early days of editing, content understanding mainly relied on content editors. Today, in the era of content explosion, it relies more on machines for understanding, which requires a mechanism that allows machines to quickly understand content.

(3) Content review

After the content is understood, it must be reviewed. Vulgar, pornographic, or value-incorrect content must not be distributed. Otherwise, the platform will be sanctioned by the government, and the phenomenon of "bad money driving out good money" will occur, causing the quality of platform content to decline sharply and destroying the content ecology of the entire platform.

(4) Content distribution

Ultimately, content is to be distributed for consumption, and the mainstream approach is to establish a recommendation algorithm system and let the algorithm distribute content.

3. User Account System

How to get users to leave more information is an issue that every product needs to pay attention to. If it is narrowed down to one question, it should be how users log in to this community product and build their own accounts.

The sooner users are made aware of this, the better it is for the product. Because once users form habits, it will take a lot of effort to make subsequent changes. Therefore, the issue of "getting more users to log in" must be kept in the mind of the product manager in the early stages, and more users must be allowed to log in and leave their accounts through product functions in a subtle way.

05 Specific Cases

Take Didi as an example here.

High-quality private car users have friends who have the same spending power and habits. Under this assumption, the breakthrough point is actually " How to get high-frequency private car users to actively recommend private cars to their friends without subsidies? Without subsidies, how to get friends to convert orders? "

For private car users whose income reaches a certain level, their sensitivity to general subsidy incentives will gradually decrease, and they also do not want to appear to be cheapskates.

In contrast , they firstly prefer to compare honors: they unconsciously like to show off that they are better than others; secondly, they have an altruistic mentality: the more they think they are powerful, the more they want to help others rather than profit from others. We can also learn from this kind of thinking and think about how to apply it to the growth of short videos.

Author: Zhang Fang, Ni Jiachen, Ma Xige

Source: AhaClub Internet Club