The winner has been decided. Is there still a need to start the short video war between Douyin and Weishi?

In the two months since Weishi was relaunched, despite a huge subsidy of 3 billion yuan, Douyin is still Douyin. It not only made one person famous, but even the city of Xi'an became popular.

The ability to create stars is a direct reflection of the capabilities of short video platforms, not only because of traffic, but also because of influence. The formation of influence is not due to content, but originates from social interaction.

Is exclusive content in short videos really important?

Although it is very close to Douyin in appearance, Weishi still seems to have not recovered from the restart process. If Weishi continues to stay close to Douyin in the future instead of finding a killer weapon to surpass it, then this pre-publicized and high-profile short video war may come to an end, and the basis for a war of equal strength no longer exists.

Ma Huateng once said that Tencent's gaming industry profits are declining year by year, and Tencent will increase the proportion of revenue from social and performance advertising in the future. He also explicitly mentioned that he would explore the combination of short videos and social networks.

However, this important instruction was not understood by Weishi. Weishi, which scored twice, believed that content was the most important, so it spent 3 billion yuan on exclusive content subsidies. However, it turned out that Ma Huateng's instructions were very correct, especially when looking at the relationship between short videos and social networks. However, perhaps because Tencent relied on content to gain a lead in long videos, it turned to use the long video model on short videos, but the effect showed a two-tier differentiation trend. The principle that oranges grown in Huainan are oranges has always been valid. What Weishi needs to do now is to ask itself, is Douyin really attractive because of its exclusive content?

Weishi’s logic believes that exclusive high-quality content will bring more traffic and attract more users. However, it ignores the fact that long video content and short video content have completely different meanings for both producers and viewers. Long videos are for personal viewing, while short videos are more about grouping people together and forming personal interest tags on social networks through dissemination and sharing.

For short videos, the content is based on wide-area dissemination. Users find groups with similar interests and hobbies through reposting and sharing, forming a short video social network.

Tencent is good at social networking, but when it comes to short videos, it has been trying to find a way in. Its approach is also contrary to social networking. In order to gain an advantage over Douyin, it has monopolized high-quality content. In fact, in the short video ecosystem, the existence of various porters is like gastrointestinal lactic acid bacteria. You think it is a bacterium, but without it, you will feel very uncomfortable.

Let's look back at how Douyin competes with its rivals such as Kuaishou. With the same content, Douyin provides a more sophisticated way of playing. Compared with the purely self-entertainment shooting mode of Kuaishou, Douyin adopts the "shooting + music" form that is more popular with the masses. In addition, with the outer layer of music, compared with Kuaishou's blind spoof, its image is more high-end, so that there is a saying that "Kuaishou is Douyin in the countryside, and Douyin is Kuaishou in the city."

Everyone aspires to be high-end, but they just don’t have the means to achieve it. Tik Tok provides this means, and this is its ultimate skill - it makes you look high-end even though you are lost in the crowd.

In fact, if you want to make short videos popular, pursuing exclusive and exquisite content is a counterproductive move, because short videos that are monopolized and cannot be widely disseminated are worthless.

Moreover, short videos are mainly used on mobile devices. Their advantage is that they are fast and convenient. You can shoot and post them at will. Is there any threshold for such exclusive content? How competitive can the so-called exclusive content encouraged with 3 billion yuan be?

Restarting does not mean rebirth

Tencent's layout in the short video field was much earlier than Toutiao. In September 2013, Tencent Weishi was officially launched. Its initial route was to drive traffic through celebrities and invite celebrities to join Weishi.

With the huge influence of celebrities and this novel form of interactive video with idols, this approach has begun to bear fruit. By the Spring Festival of 2014, the download volume of Weishi APP ranked among the top five, and the number of daily users reached 45 million.

However, as the craze faded, the traffic driven by celebrities showed signs of decline. When the influence of celebrities was saturated, a large number of users left Weishi in 2015, and Weishi was merged into Tencent Video. Then, in early April, Weishi officially announced the closure of the app.

This was the first phase of Weishi's expansion into the short video field. The result was obvious: failure. If we were to summarize Weishi's route and layout in this first phase, it would be in one word: attacking celebrities. Tencent's logic and idea was simple: they wanted to make Weishi a video version of Weibo.

However, Tencent overlooked one point: the purpose of online short videos is not to obtain information about idol stars. If users really come to watch stars, then the fastest and most convenient way to obtain star information must be Weibo. Compared with these forms, short videos have no advantages in any aspect.

Short videos are not a channel for obtaining information. In the field of short videos, viewing behavior is not the main thing, but social interaction is. Therefore, the relevant management departments are very clear about this. When regulating Douyin, they did not shut it down, but asked it to close the comments. When the comments were reopened, many big V anchors lamented that when there were no comments, they didn't even want to record videos. This shows that social interaction is the soul of short videos, and content is just a skin.

In the first stage of Weishi, it mistakenly limited the production of short videos to celebrities, which greatly limited the activity of other groups and classes. Moreover, the business logic of Weibo is that celebrities drive traffic, and people pay attention because they like them.

But the logic of short videos is that traffic creates stars. For many current short video celebrities, they became "stars" because of the huge traffic generated by a large number of disseminations.

Short videos and the herd effect

Whether it was the celebrities or the content, Tencent's two mistakes were to make a short video platform a PGC platform controlled by professional content. But the reality is that the nature of short videos determines that the platform suitable for them is UGC where users generate content. The core of short videos is the users who spread and share short videos, not the video producers.

In the book "Amusing Ourselves to Death", Postman once said: As the channels for obtaining information become more and more abundant, people's thoughts are increasingly influenced by each other. Under the influence of the trend of the times and popular culture, it is difficult for individuals not to be influenced by the public's thoughts. This is also true. The reason why there are big Vs on social networks is nothing more than because they have the ability to think, and most people habitually accept the results of thinking, and follow the crowd to form a herd effect. In the end, volume and emotions win, not facts and truth.

Nowadays, the more individuals are influenced and restricted by public opinion, the more they want to make their own voices, even if they are absurd and tone-deaf, in order to show the meaning of individual existence under the influence of big Vs.

In short, the key to winning the short video war is to recognize the psychological needs of users and give them the same space and conditions to voice out their opinions and spread their ideas. Everyone has the urge to show their presence, and what short videos need to do is to amplify this urge.

Opportunities will not always be there, and the battle for short videos may have ended.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.