Zhang Chaoyang: Sohu Video will take over the PGC banner

"There are always big things about to happen in the video website industry." The most significant event recently was Alibaba's $4.5 billion purchase of Youku. The industry has been speculating that the existing landscape of video websites is about to be rewritten.

In this regard, Sohu Video CEO Zhang Chaoyang expressed his own views, "I personally don't believe in mergers and acquisitions. I believe in the power of Internet-native mathematics. This acquisition is a big and good deal, and Victor Koo himself has received a very good return. I hope Youku will continue to innovate after the acquisition. China's innovation, especially in the video field, has taken place in the PGC field. Sohu Video will now take over the banner of PGC and self-media using Internet-generated content."

For the video industry, 2015 was a year of rapid rise of PGC (Professional Generated Content) and the advent of the PGC era has ushered in a new round of competition among major video websites. Facing Youku, the former leader in PGC business, why did Sohu Video have the courage to take up the challenge of "PGC"?

Propose the concept of knowledge visualization and create the most influential PGC platform

At present, video websites have turned to PGC, gradually shifting their focus from the crude model of burning money to compete for copyrights to professional third-party production teams. While the PGC model has gained unprecedented attention and traffic, it has also gradually exposed the problem of homogeneity. For example, the popularity of WIFI and 4G has made PGC short videos overwhelming, and the content is mostly in the form of comedy, jokes, talk shows, etc. Once a program is successful, similar programs will immediately follow, which will cause aesthetic fatigue to users and reduce their favorability.

The emergence of this situation reflects the problems of PGC content providers blindly following the crowd and lacking professional platform guidance. In response to this, Sohu Video proposed a knowledge-based video strategy. In addition to entertainment, Sohu Video content is not limited to traditional funny forms. Zhang Chaoyang said that in the era of knowledge imaging, video programs cover a wide range of fields, from complex advanced mathematics to cooking and astrology. Sohu Video self-media strives to lead the new trend of PGC content. In fact, Sohu Video has also become the industry's first online video platform to strategically promote the development of PGC content. Sohu Video is currently linked with 56.com's dual platforms, and mobilizes Sohu's matrix resources to provide all-round support to producers, strengthen the discourse power of video self-media, and establish the brand image of PGC producers.

According to reports, Sohu Video will provide better first-screen recommendation positions for high-quality PGC content. In addition to ranking by traffic, it will also manually intervene in high-quality content to recommend high-quality online content to users. In order to prevent content homogeneity, it has set up 20 program categories on its self-media channel. "We hope to tell everyone that in addition to talk shows, animation, entertainment, and comedy, you can also cook, travel, learn English, learn mathematics, physics, chemistry, dance, etc. Knowledge visualization will cover more and more, and our classification will continue to evolve."

Sohu 56 currently has 1,800 PGC producers, has created nearly 10,000 columns, and has 350,000 videos. At the same time, the platform has 600 million monthly viewers and 1.8 billion monthly views.

Let the leading PGC producers receive one million from Sohu Video every month

In order to attract excellent PGC producers, various video websites have pushed PGC to a strategic level in 2015. For example, Tencent Video's "Qingzhe Plan" plans to sign and support 100 high-quality PGC projects this year; iQiyi has proposed a "sharing the same taste" plan for PGC business; Youku has also expressed that it will increase investment in PGC business and explore new business models...

Compared with traditional copyright purchases, PGC adopts a business model of sharing revenue with producers and distributors, which reduces the cost of purchasing copyrights for video websites. Compared with the previous model of purchasing copyrights first and then selling advertisements, this can help video websites get rid of the "burning money" dilemma to a certain extent.

As for PGC producers, they are more concerned about how to cooperate with videos to share profits, or simply put, "how to obtain higher profits" so that they can concentrate on developing video self-media business.

In response to the producers' "difficulties", Zhang Chaoyang said: "We hope to build such a platform so that you can not only make a full-time living on the Sohu Video platform. I just asked some producers how much money they get every month? They said tens of thousands. My dream is to let the leading PGC producers get one million a month from Sohu Video."

So what is Sohu Video's idea of ​​helping PGC producers make money? It is understood that in terms of profit sharing subsidy policy, Sohu has achieved high profit sharing and fast settlement, with a profit sharing ratio of up to 40%. Producers who broadcast their videos exclusively can get up to 60% of the profit sharing, which will be settled the next day and can be used as needed. In addition to profit sharing, Sohu also provides various subsidies and traffic support, and provides different levels of subsidy rewards and traffic support for new, growing, and high-traffic producers.

Currently, the monthly share of producers on Sohu 56 platform is nearly 10 million. In addition, Sohu has launched a dual-platform share for PGC producers on PC and mobile platforms, which greatly increases the source of income for programs uploaded by PGC producers, allowing PGC to accelerate the realization of content traffic, promote the faster development of PGC producers, and enhance the content ecology. It is foreseeable that the traffic realization ability of high-quality PGC content will undoubtedly become stronger and stronger.

Whether Sohu Video can take over the PGC banner in the future remains to be verified, but in the past two years, the vigorous promotion and support of video websites for both self-made dramas and PGC have reflected a problem from the side: video websites are actively exploring new profit models besides copyright purchase and advertising sales to get rid of the criticized "money-burning model". In this exploration process, the enthusiasm of video websites for content production has been stimulated, and a large number of professional video content teams have been helped to grow, enriching netizens' entertainment needs for video content.

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.