Weibo's three short video attacks

With 500 million yuan, Weibo has once again made a new bet, and the card table is still short videos.

Weibo recently announced the launch of the "Weibo Video Account Plan", which will distribute 500 million yuan to creators in the next year and give more traffic. In the past year, Weibo has continued to increase its investment in short video business, from launching the content social platform, the Chinese version of Instagram "Oasis", to launching the short video product "Planet Video", and then to the recent launch of the video account.

In the battle of short videos, Sina Weibo once stood at the top, investing US$1.9 in Yixia Technology Company, which owns three star products "Miaopai", "Xiaokaxiu" and "Yizhibo", and thus took the top spot in the domestic short video market. However, even with the support of these three star product matrices, this popularity only lasted for three years.

Earlier, Weibo’s short video products were more tool-oriented. Neither Miaopai nor Xiaokaxiu have been able to generate social attributes within their own product ecosystems, but instead have served as tools for video shooting and production. The real distribution and dissemination have moved to the Weibo ecosystem, which has limited the development of Weibo's short video business.

Since the birth of Miaopai in 2013, Weibo has launched short video products three times in the past seven years, trying to break through the video content field, but has never found the right direction. This time, Weibo is re-entering the market with Video Account and Planet Video, vowing to take back the throne of the most "time-killing" social media from the short video platform. What new story will Weibo tell?

In 2020, users' short video time will exceed mobile games

Weibo declined after only 3 years, its first battle started high but ended low

In 2013, when Miaopai was first launched, its status could be called the "son of Weibo". At that time, some media even said that this was a new product that Sina promoted "with all its strength". Sina Weibo invested in Miaopai's parent company, Yixia Technology, early on, and as a result, the product became a built-in application of Weibo as soon as it was launched.

This year, WeChat launched the Moments and Public Account functions one after another, dealing a heavy blow to Weibo with more stable social relationships and new social attempts. Weibo's activity level once dropped by 9%, the biggest drop since its birth in 2009, and was seen as Weibo's first crisis.

There is no doubt that the sudden emergence of Miaopai has injected strong competitiveness into Weibo.

Similar to the traffic generation model of blogs and Weibo in the early years, a large number of celebrities have joined and encouraged UGC users to use it. Miaopai also has the ability to operate hot topics in the same vein as Weibo.

Anyone who used Weibo in 2014 will surely not forget that the “Ice Bucket Challenge” on Weibo is almost a classic benchmark case of “viral” communication. From celebrity artists to entrepreneurs, internet celebrities, and even ordinary people, they are all conveying their love and care for ALS patients through short video relays in bathrooms, swimming pools, outdoor spaces, and even at company entrances.

From here on, Miaopai entered a period of rapid evolution. According to the latest data, the Weibo topic #IceBucketChallenge# has a total of 4.572 million contents and has been read nearly 5 billion times, which was extremely popular.

In 2016, Miaopai has grown into a benchmark in the short video industry. In March 2017, third-party data company Analysys released a report showing that Miaopai took the top spot in the domestic short video market with a user penetration rate of 61.7%. Weibo is gaining momentum and its stock price is soaring. In terms of revenue, video revenue accounted for 18% of Weibo’s advertising revenue in the first quarter of 2017.

When Miaopai first became popular, there were very few products that used short videos as their main form. The only two short video apps that can really be called names are Miaopai and Tencent Weishi. Kuaishou is still just a GIF production tool, and Douyin will not appear until three years later. Miaopai took advantage of the favorable conditions and developed rapidly.

In fact, Weibo’s short video weapon is not limited to Miaopai. After the “Ice Bucket Challenge” craze, Miaopai established an “Innovation Department”. In 2016, the "lip-sync" performance short video product "Xiao Ka Xiu" was born. Driven by many celebrities such as Jiang Xin, Zhang Yishan, and Xu Zheng, Xiao Ka Xiu became popular and once topped the AppStore free list.

However, the Xiaokaxiu team soon realized that this type of short video that emphasizes imitation and interpretation is not friendly to ordinary users. It has a performance and even appearance threshold for content producers. The videos are mostly shot and produced by celebrities and experts. The vast majority of users are just watching, and there are not many ordinary people who actually shoot and share content. The product is not universal, which also led to Xiaokaxiu being gradually forgotten.

In 2013, when Kuaishou was transforming from a Gif tool to a short video product, it faced a sharp decline in DAU, but given the general trend of the short video industry, Kuaishou made the transformation at the right time. This short-term user loss was later seen as a small challenge that Kuaishou faced in its pursuit of long-termism.

But Weibo was not so lucky. Within three years, Miaopai lost momentum and fell behind, and its new product Xiaokaxiu was only a flash in the pan. Weibo gradually fell from the "altar" of short videos.

From investment to self-development, catching up late

Kuaishou has over 10 million daily active users. An article that went viral, "The Cruel Story of the Lower Class: A Video App for Rural China," has made Kuaishou begin to attract the attention of a wider audience. The intelligent algorithms and immersive vertical short videos that Douyin learned from Toutiao have made users unable to stop watching one video after another, and "scrolling Douyin" has become popular.

Caught between Kuaishou and Douyin, Miaopai has basically lost its market competitiveness since 2017. After realizing this, Weibo has also tried to find breakthroughs at various levels. It no longer pins its hopes on third-party products or investment companies, and starts to roll up its sleeves and do it itself.

In April 2017, Weibo imitated Instagram's "story" function and launched "Weibo Stories". This function initially only supported the posting of short videos of less than 15 seconds, similar to the self-destructing function of Snapchat. The short videos posted on "Weibo Stories" were only available for viewing within 24 hours.

At the same time, in the first quarter of 2018, Weibo acquired Yizhibo’s live broadcast business and integrated Weibo and Yizhibo products. Miaopai, Xiaokaxiu and KuRan Video, all owned by Yixia Technology, are still highly integrated with Weibo.

After several updates, "Weibo Stories" has gradually become a tool that can be displayed on the Weibo homepage. From being a tool that could only be shared at the beginning, it has become a tool that can be edited, modified, and used for shooting and production. In March 2018, the function of creative music shooting was added, making it more and more like a smaller version of TikTok.

MCN agencies will even use data such as playback, forwarding, and comments generated by "Weibo Stories" short videos to measure the stickiness between fans and bloggers. "Weibo Stories" are inherently instantaneous. Within the effective time period, the better the data, the higher the stickiness.

At this point, a key change occurred.

As the social media with the largest number of users in China, Weibo is a rich traffic pool. It is generally believed that the cold start of Douyin originated from Weibo. At that time, Yue Yunpeng, a crosstalk artist who had tens of millions of fans, uploaded a short video with the Douyin watermark on Weibo. This popular Weibo post instantly made the public know about the new species "Douyin".

At first, not only could short videos on Miaopai and Xiaokaxiu be shared and forwarded within their ecosystems, but short video content on Weishi, Kuaishou, and Douyin could also be directly spread on Weibo. But when Weibo saw that not only Yue Yunpeng, but more and more users started uploading short videos on Douyin, it could no longer sit still.

In March 2018, Weibo’s ban on TikTok caused a sensation. Weibo no longer allows users to share Tik Tok short videos directly to Weibo, requiring a second upload. Weishi is facing a similar situation.

Mao Taotao, Weibo's public relations director at the time, responded that as an open platform, Weibo has always been open to all kinds of cooperation, but the prerequisite is to follow the rules. In the field of short videos, Weibo maintains cooperation with its competitors Kuaishou and Meipai.

Less than two months later, Weibo launched its own independent product, an independent APP "Aidong Short Video" based on "Weibo Stories". The media interpreted it as a defensive product against TikTok.

However, even with Weibo Stories, an information flow product, as its main platform for video content, "Aidong Short Videos" did not generate much attention.

Another short video product launched by Weibo, "Hetun Short Video", suffered the same fate as "Aidu Short Video". In the second round of short video charge, Weibo failed to regain the core voice in the short video market, and was unable to prevent the "wild growth" of Douyin and Kuaishou.

Even though Weibo MCN agencies and celebrities are also spreading to Douyin and Kuaishou, most people will not give up on producing content on Weibo. Although these arrangements have failed to contain the development of its competitors, Weibo can be said to have maintained the content ecology of short videos through its continuous attempts.

Playing new games on Oasis and Video Account

As Weibo enters its tenth year, it is facing the pressure of revenue growth hitting a bottleneck and net profit continuing to decline; externally, it is facing competition from short video products such as Douyin and Kuaishou for user time. Weibo urgently needs new products, more innovations and changes to tell a good story for the next decade.

On the one hand, as an old social product, Weibo needs to consolidate its own social moat based on the accumulation of social relationships. On the other hand, how to find a more efficient monetization model and open up commercialization channels is also a top priority for Weibo's current tasks.

Last September, just after its 10th birthday, Weibo quietly launched a new social APP "Oasis", focusing on content and video sharing. For a time, a large number of users flocked to it, even causing the server to crash.

Weibo also tried its best to divert traffic. For a period of time, Weibo’s opening screen ads were all posters of celebrities moving into Oasis. It even set up special display cards for Oasis on Weibo to divert traffic to it. Pictures and short videos from Oasis would turn green, and if one wanted to view the updates, one had to download Oasis.

To some extent, this strategy did not bring about the effect of "hard work produces miracles". After all, in the App Store rankings, Oasis has long been ranked outside the top 20 among social products.

Weibo's independent short video app "Planet Video" was officially launched in May this year. It is more like an independent APP that integrates the short video content within Weibo, and it can be regarded as an independent application entrance for Weibo video.

We have previously reported that "Planet Video" is a UGC video community that focuses on horizontal short videos. Video content is presented to users in the form of a feed stream. This product will be one of Weibo's S-level projects this year.

It was also learned that Weimeng Chuangke Network Technology (China) Co., Ltd., where Sina Chairman Cao Guowei works, registered the trademark "Planet Video" in December last year, and also registered trademarks such as "Langhua Video", "Wild Island Video" and "White Whale Video". These products have not yet been launched.

But it is obvious that Weibo will never give up on making short videos. It now seems that Weibo’s new round of bets are placed on Video Account.

On July 10, Weibo officially launched the "Weibo Video Account Plan" for high-quality video creators across the industry, and Weibo video creators were fully upgraded to Weibo Video Accounts. In addition to providing 1 billion precise advertising resources and 30 billion top exposure resources, Weibo also announced that it would distribute 500 million in cash to video accounts to build a video advertising profit-sharing model.

Simply put, it is an advertising-sharing model similar to Youtube, sharing part of the revenue with content producers, thereby stimulating more creators to produce content on Weibo; at the same time, Weibo did not split the video account into an independent one, but continued the previous video menu bar and presented content in this independent column.

Weibo Video Account places more emphasis on commercial advertising and monetization, which is also the current situation that Weibo has to face.

Weibo CEO Wang Gaofei admitted that Weibo's advantage in the video market lies in hot topics and celebrity videos. Weibo not only needs to activate video creation in other fields, but also needs to increase users' consumption of video content on Weibo in order to match the commercialization capabilities of professional short video platforms.

During Weibo's 2019 third quarter earnings call, Wang Gaofei explained the sluggish growth in the advertising business by saying that the core pressure of the advertising business mainly came from the decline in advertising unit prices. He mentioned that if priced based on CPE (cost per click), Weibo would have some weaknesses in first-click rate compared to the current short video platforms that are centered on the click model. Weibo needs to put more effort into sales, agency and service in this model.

As Weibo fan traffic becomes less and less valuable, the unit price of Weibo advertising cannot really increase. Weibo does need to combine the platform's own advantages to provide differentiated services to video authors and find new growth points through short video business. More importantly, Weibo, which mainly makes money from advertising, continues to use differentiated advertising products and the growing influence of internet celebrities to tap into customers' performance advertising budgets.

Weibo's various actions in the past year have been seen as a signal that it is once again focusing on short videos, and it is also constantly responding to other social products and making new countermeasures.

In particular, as Bilibili and Xigua Video are competing in the long video field, Douyin and Kuaishou are constantly expanding their business and content ecosystems, and Tencent has launched its video account and opened a first-level entrance, Weibo, which has already failed in two short video battles, must step out of its comfort zone and launch another charge in the short video business.

After all, no one can predict what form the next explosion point of the short video business will take and who will be the lucky one.

Author: Li Xiaolei

Source: Tech Planet ( tech618 )