Table of contents:

• 1.0 Tik Tok VS Bilibili
• 2.0 Xigua Video VS Bilibili

1.0 Tik Tok VS Bilibili

According to iResearch data, about 67% of people watch short videos for the purpose of relaxation and entertainment, that is, to satisfy their entertainment needs.

Data source: "2020 China Social Entertainment Video Research Report" issued by iResearch Consulting

As excellent domestic UGC platforms, Bilibili and Douyin have a large number of short videos in different fields, and both can meet the entertainment needs of users. But the difference is that the Douyin platform mainly has videos of 0-3 minutes, while most videos on Bilibili are around 5 minutes long. At the same time, half of the videos with the best playback volume in the gaming, technology and digital areas of Bilibili are more than 8 minutes long.

Data source: Bliss Lab

(Bliss Lab recorded the top 100 videos in each region from January to April 2020, and drew this chart by counting their median duration)

However, in this increasingly impetuous era, people seem to prefer shorter videos. iResearch research shows that about 70% of users prefer short videos of less than 3 minutes, while only 17% of users prefer short videos of more than 5 minutes.

This duration preference can, to a certain extent, explain the difference in the number of users between Tik Tok and Bilibili. As of the first quarter of 2020, Douyin had 400 million daily active users and 510 million monthly active users, while Bilibili had only 51 million daily active users and 190 million monthly active users.

The length of the videos seems to have become an obstacle for Bilibili to quickly increase its user base. But even though Bilibili’s user base is smaller than that of Douyin, it still has very high user stickiness. Bilibili’s one-year new user retention rate is around 80%, and its 10-year user retention rate is 60%. This means that Bilibili’s users are very satisfied with Bilibili.

Morgan Brown tells us in Growth Hacker that the utility of a product and the friction when using the product will jointly determine whether a person can be converted and become your customer.

Utility refers to the satisfaction of a person's desires and the degree of satisfaction.

Friction refers to all the resistance encountered in the user's usage process that may cause the user to give up using the product.

The greater the utility and the smaller the friction, the better the user experience will be, and the more likely they will be converted and enter the next round of the user funnel.

Therefore, the author will conduct a comparative analysis of Douyin and Bilibili from the two aspects of product "utility" and " usage friction" , so as to discuss what has affected the rapid expansion of Bilibili and what makes Bilibili have such a high user conversion rate.

For content creators:

For content viewers:

Whether for creators or viewers, Douyin has a low threshold for use and little resistance to use. This is an important reason why Douyin has a large number of users. After all, the product's usage threshold will determine the size of the market that can be developed.

However, due to the limitations of short videos themselves, the ceiling of Douyin's utility is relatively low (it can only mainly meet entertainment needs). However, the short board of Douyin short videos is exactly the long board of B station long videos.

Next, we will apply two viewpoints of Mr. Yu Jun to discuss the product utility :

Viewpoint 1: Don’t treat users as natural persons, but as a collection of needs

Mr. Yu Jun said in "Product Methodology" that user needs can be infinitely superimposed, and they can use your product for different purposes. As long as he thinks of your product instead of your competitor's when he has a need in a certain scenario, he can be considered your user.

According to iResearch data, the top three motivations for users to use short videos are: browsing interesting content (entertainment), sharing the excitement of life (social), and learning knowledge and skills (learning). Therefore, we can regard these three motivations as three needs of users.

Entertainment needs:

Both Bilibili and Douyin have UGC videos on various topics, so both can satisfy various entertainment preferences.

Social needs:

The social aspect is divided into two dimensions: the connection between video creators and viewers, and the connection between viewers.

In the first dimension, the connection between publishers and viewers on the Douyin platform is not close, and users are more concerned about the content itself rather than who produced the content.

As the top traffic on their respective platforms, Douyin's "Poisonous Tongue Movie" and "Zheng Lifen" (Douyin accounts with over 100 million likes) have a fan-to-like ratio of only around 3%-6% (fan-to-like ratio = followers/total number of likes). However, on Bilibili, the fan-to-like ratio of top traffic "Lao Fanqie" and "Zhang Ao" are both around 20%. As creators in the fashion field, the fan-to-like ratio of Douyin's "Youdada Diary" is only 10%, while the fan-to-like ratio of "Magical Girl Uta" on Bilibili has reached 56%. This means that compared to Tik Tok short videos, Bilibili's up-masters are more trusted and recognized by fans. The IP value content is higher.

In the second dimension, although Douyin users can participate in forwarding and commenting, only highly liked comments are placed at the top of the comment area, and most comments rarely have the chance to be seen by other users. However, the barrage of comments on Bilibili can allow the audience to have real-time emotional resonance, which can be funny, touching, or heartwarming. To a certain extent, it makes the audience feel a sense of belonging and emotional identification.

Learning requirements:

Due to time limitations, short Tik Tok videos cannot fully develop arguments and can only simply pile up opinions and useful information. Not very convincing. The videos on Bilibili are not limited in length and can clearly provide arguments and case analyses, so that the useful information and opinions conveyed are more likely to be accepted by the audience. At the same time, unlike paid online education software, many of Bilibili’s videos are produced by PUGC. Not only are they free, but they can also provide different interpretations of the same topic from various angles and directions.

Taking fresh graduates seeking jobs as an example, the user's demand path should be:

Find recruitment websites and pay attention to recruitment information - Write a resume - Prepare for the written test - Prepare for the group interview - Prepare for the business interview - Prepare for the final interview - How to choose an offer

For each stage here, Bilibili has a large number of corresponding videos for sharing experiences, which can meet the needs of users at different stages. The video quality of Bilibili is also much higher than that of other video platforms, which is verified by the high conversion rate of Bilibili.

Some new up-hosts in the learning area of ​​Bilibili (who have been up-hosts for less than half a year and have published less than 10 videos) have basically the same number of fans and likes. "Hogwarts Pig" received 15,000 likes and a total of 14,000 fans, with a conversion rate of 93%. The new up master "Occasionally I will laugh" also achieved a fan conversion rate of about 84% with 3 videos, while the number of fans of "Runaway Senior" even exceeded the total number of likes, which means that his fan conversion rate is almost 100%. This is basically rare on other platforms.

Viewpoint 2: Utility is proportional to happiness. When the utility is higher, the user's sense of happiness will be stronger.

Utility refers to the degree to which a product satisfies a user's desires. According to the above analysis, Bilibili’s entertainment, social and learning functions all perform well. Even though the usage process of Bilibili is slightly more complicated than that of TikTok, the benefits it brings far outweigh the resistance caused by its friction, thus enhancing the user's sense of happiness and contributing to a higher user conversion rate.

Summarize

The usage friction of Douyin is less than that of Bilibili, but the product utility of Bilibili is greater than that of Douyin.

Due to the different characteristics of short videos and medium and long videos, Douyin and Bilibili have different performances in usage friction and product utility. Douyin has won a huge user base with its low usage threshold and rich entertainment experience. Relying on the high-quality product utility, Bilibili has gained a large number of users while also cultivating extremely high user stickiness. Bilibili’s 10-year retention rate reached 60%, which is enough to show how much Bilibili’s users love Bilibili.

Although Bilibili and Douyin both belong to the video industry, since one is short video and the other is medium and long video, the product usage scenarios and user groups are also different. In terms of commercial value, Douyin has a large user base, which means more traffic, so advertising here can be seen by more users. Although Bilibili has a smaller user base, its users are more closely connected with KOLs and have more trust in KOLs, which may lead to a higher product conversion rate (= number of buyers/number of video viewers).

Therefore, it is difficult to say which one is the better product. Both have their own advantages and disadvantages

2.0 Xigua Video VS Bilibili

The content in Douyin consists of a large number of short videos produced by UGC.

The content of iQiyi, Youku and Tencent Video consists of film and television resources acquired through copyright purchase + long videos (self-produced dramas and variety shows) produced by PGC.

As for the content on Xigua Video and Bilibili, apart from the copyrighted film and television resources, most of the content is medium and long videos produced by PUGC.

Since the content produced by iQiyi, Youku and Tencent Video is not similar to that of Bilibili, this article mainly selects Xigua Video as a competitor for comparative analysis with Bilibili.

ByteDance has an excellent product matrix. As one of ByteDance's products, Xigua Video enjoys the huge capital and traffic dividends brought by the company. It should also be noted that even if Xigua Video can attract more content creation by allocating capital and traffic, it will be difficult to establish its own community atmosphere in the short term. This is precisely the core value of Bilibili, that is, the core competitiveness of Bilibili.

A community is a group of people who share common interests or benefits. Community culture refers to the values ​​and behavioral norms that are generally recognized and followed within the group. So what is the community culture of Bilibili?

The author believes that it can be divided into three points: a tolerant and friendly social atmosphere, a strong ability of secondary creation, and a barrage culture.

（1）Friendly atmosphere

Bilibili was originally an ACG website and a platform where niche groups gathered. Precisely because of its niche nature, people in the circle are more likely to understand and tolerate each other, which has laid the foundation for the ethos of Bilibili from the very beginning - tolerance. At the same time, most of Bilibili's users are young people from first- and second-tier cities. Most of them have received a good education and have relatively high quality. Therefore, the atmosphere on Bilibili is more friendly and harmonious than other social platforms.

For example, when the B station up master "Fisherman A Feng" announced that he would quit B station and join Xigua Video, everyone was cheering and blessing him in the barrage, and the highly praised comments in the comment section were all about understanding and tolerance, with little anger and abuse. This is relatively rare in the cold world of the Internet.

(2) Ability to create secondary works

At the same time, the secondary creation ability of Bilibili users is a powerful endogenous force of Bilibili. The secondary creations on Bilibili can even make content on other platforms popular. For example, "Origai" originated from Kuaishou, but it really became popular because Bilibili used it as ghost animal material and carried out a lot of secondary creation. The 1993 movie "Green Snake" became popular again because of the secondary creation of the video "Dawei Tianlong" by B station.

Neither Xigua Video nor iQiyi has the ability to create secondary works, so the joy of creating secondary works can only be experienced on Bilibili.

At the same time, ghost animals are the feature of Bilibili. Even if secondary creations such as ghost animals are released on other platforms, it is difficult to achieve the same entertainment effect as on Bilibili because the audience has changed.

(3) Barrage Culture

Although all video platforms now have the function of posting barrages, the barrages on Bilibili are quite different. This is because after a long period of accumulation, the various gameplays derived from the barrage of B station have become a common understanding among B station users. This is the unique culture of Bilibili. For example, empty ear, popular science bacteria, counting bacteria, emphasis barrage, communication barrage, substitution barrage, subtitle barrage, symbol barrage, etc. These different types of barrage can be used in different scenarios to enhance the user's viewing experience.

At the same time, since users of Bilibili are good at creating and playing with memes, they often use barrage to ridicule a certain phenomenon in the video. For example, the "death chicken" that often appears in the videos of the Huanong Brothers and the "getting rich warning" that often appears in the videos of the fisherman A Feng have also become memes well known to internal members.

In this case, the emotional experience brought by the barrage on Bilibili far exceeds that of other platforms.

It is these three elements that together constitute the community culture of Bilibili, making Bilibili a fun and interesting Bilibili. However, as Bilibili broke out of its circle, the original community atmosphere was inevitably affected. In the process of commercialization, Bilibili has continuously lowered the user creation threshold and the difficulty of membership examinations in an attempt to expand its user base.

But with more people, community management will naturally become difficult, and it will inevitably affect the user experience of the original community members (after all, the values ​​​​and barrage etiquette that have been formed by Bilibili over a long period of time are not so well understood by newcomers coming from other social platforms). That’s why there are comments like "the little broken site has changed" on Bilibili.

Summarize

Bilibili and Xigua Video each have their own advantages but also face challenges.

Bilibili's community culture and strong self-generating power ensure the quality of its videos and bring various high-quality benefits (entertainment, social interaction, and learning) to users, but it also faces the problems of monetization and loss of UP hosts. At the same time, how to balance commercialization and community atmosphere in the process of breaking the circle is also one of the challenges facing Bilibili.

Xigua Video, with its capital and traffic dividends, can encourage more people to create on Xigua, and can quickly increase the amount of content in the short term. At the same time, it can also spend a lot of money to poach high-quality creators from other platforms to improve the content quality of the platform. But it is undeniable that Xigua Video was established only a short time ago and has a complex user structure, so it is impossible to form its own platform culture in the short term. The connection between users and creators is not as close as that between up-masters and fans on Bilibili. Moreover, the endogenous power of Xigua Video is not strong. ByteDance has used a similar strategy before, spending a lot of money to poach big Vs from Zhihu to join Wukong Q&A, but Wukong Q&A's operation ultimately failed. Not only was Wukong Q&A incorporated into Weitao's business, but its employees were also transferred to other positions.

Therefore, capital and traffic dividends are not a magic weapon for success. The key is to formulate corresponding operating strategies based on user groups and product characteristics. This will be a difficult problem that Xigua Video and Bilibili will have to face.

Author: FreshMilk

Source: FreshMilk