Can Tencent Break The "Length" Bottleneck Of Online Platform Short Video Station B?

After a year and a half of hesitation, the video platform began to make efforts in the short video market. The introduction of any video form is inseparable from the creator. For long, medium and long video, the development has entered a cooling off period, short video is undoubtedly the current hot spot.

The dense fishing net in the blue ocean is the real competition pattern of Internet video platform. The fierce competition and the end of the bonus period make it difficult for video production, production and distribution. Change can not be expected in the future, but must be in the present continuous tense.

During China joy last week, sun Zhonghuai, vice president of Tencent and CEO of penguin, said at the company's annual conference that the video industry has entered a new stage of relatively rational development after a period of ignorant learning and rapid development. However, the epidemic situation in the first half of the year led to a period of shutdown of film and television dramas, making it difficult to record programs, resulting in the pressure of scheduling and content production.

It is no surprise that Tencent video will focus on the next stage of one of the focus on the short video. The platform will launch independent Tencent video number, continuously open the commercialization ability and optimize the realization mode. Compared with B station, Tencent video number seems to come a little late. Can the video platform, which has been losing money for years, break the bottleneck of time and content?

Station B, Tencent video and other platforms start to make efforts in the short video market

Create a closed loop

After a year and a half of hesitation, the video platform began to make efforts in the short video market. The introduction of any video form is inseparable from the creator. For the moment, the short-term and long-term video has entered into a long-term development.

Tencent has also begun to test water, Tencent micro vision is an example. Since it was launched in 2013, the daily activity of micro vision once reached 45 million, but the market environment made it stranded. When Tencent plans to revive micro vision in 2018, strong players such as tremolo and fast hand have appeared in the short video track. According to China's online video quality report (2020), by March 2020, the number of online video users (including short videos) in China has reached 850 million, accounting for 94.1% of the total Internet users, an increase of 126 million compared with the end of 2018.

Among them, the new format of short video represented by "Shuo Yin" has sprung up. The number of short video users reaches 773 million, accounting for nearly 91% of online video and 85.5% of all netizens. That is to say, on average, 85 people brush short videos for every 100 people. According to official data, the dau (daily active users) has exceeded 400 million. Tencent's target for micro vision in 2020 is 50 million dau.

In this race, the pressure is obvious. As for Bili Bili, which focuses on medium length video, short video is the first competitor, but it also needs to be included in the development map. Bili Bili has experienced a close combat with short video platforms more than once.

At the beginning of March 2020, a group of up owners, including fisherman alfeng, Laosi ganhai and Yuge brothers, collectively announced the exclusive signing of watermelon video. As early as 2019, after the exclusive agreement between the famous up owner "Ao factory director" and station B ended, he signed a contract with watermelon video to create a number of independent broadcast programs. In response to this, Chen Rui, chairman and CEO of BiliBili, said that what we are competing for now is the comprehensive ability of the platform and its own ecological layout, including whether the creators can achieve long-term and sustainable career goals in this ecology.

At the same time of competition, it is also to solve the dilemma of the industry. It is reported that the light video app launched in December 2018 was officially connected to bilibilibili main station in June this year to start diversion. Although it came a little late, Tencent video provides a complete set of closed-loop.

According to sun Zhonghuai, Tencent video will provide a closed-loop service from content creation to distribution and realization to help users express their ideas, share their lives and build influence. At the same time, the platform will also open up three rights and interests for creators, and support creators in an all-round way by tilting resources, opening up commercialization ability, optimizing the realization mode.

It's still early to realize

The myth of revenue growth has become a thing of the past, and the loss is still the obstacle that the video platform can not overcome. According to public data, iqiyi has suffered losses for 11 consecutive years, of which the total loss in the past five years has exceeded 32 billion yuan. Although Tencent reduced its losses in 2019, the amount also reached 3 billion yuan. With Youku as the core, the loss amount of Alibaba entertainment will also be close to 16 billion yuan in 2019.

If you focus on the Bili of medium length video, you can't escape the loss. From 2015 to 2015, the net loss was RMB 0.165 billion and RMB 0.784 billion respectively. The loss comes from the bottleneck of the industry development. The first problem the platform has to face is the peak of demographic dividend.

According to the data released by Quest mobile, in 2019, the growth rate of the number of mobile end users in China decreased by more than 100% year-on-year, and the growth rate of user duration also decreased from 22.6% in 2018 to 6%. It is an indisputable fact that the traffic pool is saturated. With the incremental space compression of video platform, the cost of obtaining users is also increasing.

In order to seek increment, the only way out for the platform is to increase the cost of content production, and the loss is a predictable outcome. According to public data, iqiyi's content cost will reach 22.2 billion yuan in 2019, accounting for 77% of the total revenue. At the same time, the content cost of Tencent video is more than 3 billion yuan.

Revenue follows the flow. More importantly, in 2019, Internet advertising traffic for the first time showed a year-on-year decline, with total traffic falling by 10.6% in the whole year. The conflict between the rights and interests of platform members and the needs of advertisers also makes the advertising revenue of the platform shrink. According to Tencent's video credit data, the marketing budget of advertisers has dropped from 27% to 19%, and the scalable advertising growth space of long video platform is also limited.

At the same time, a large number of content creators have begun to work on short videos. Hao Zhiwei, a senior Internet industry observer, said in an interview with the 21st century economic reporter that he has been working in the mainstream media platform for 13 years and is also mining in the field of knowledge video. "Because what I do is partial knowledge interpretation video, which is more suitable for today's headlines and station B. This piece of content is also the resource that station B and watermelon video are currently scrambling for. However, for creators, the cost is much higher than that of graphic display. At least, the number of fans must be more than 50000 to obtain profits. If the video playback volume is less than 100000, the revenue can be ignored. Unless you sign a contract with the platform, you can get a fixed income with subsidies. "

Even if it is a loss, the platform still has no spare force in increasing the input of content. After all, the viscosity and residence time of the user are crucial. Sun Zhonghuai believes that the epidemic is only a small pass in the development of the industry, and we should not give up more in-depth thinking just because of the epidemic. "We will dynamically measure the input-output ratio, continue to invest within an affordable range, explore more diversified revenue models, and continuously build a comprehensive video platform with long-term value for users, partners and the industry based on the future."

According to the latest official data of Tencent video, the monthly activity of Tencent video in February reached a new high since 2018, and the growth rate of new members in the first half of the year increased by more than 25% compared with last year. In addition, the number of daily active users of wetv in June increased nearly 12 times compared with the same period last year.

However, for users with higher aesthetic and cognitive abilities, the traditional video platform still needs to be upgraded in terms of thinking. Hao Zhiwei frankly said that he hoped that the platform would not have so many hormones, but would be more serious and arouse many people's interest in serious content. "This kind of interpretation is actually an improvement of ordinary people's cognition, which is beneficial to the choice of life. We can't just have the hormone content. After reading it, we are more empty and tired, and finally we can't get anything