Douyin official announcement: Is the character-based IP going to be terminated?

Douyin released the "Douyin Announcement on the Governance of Fake Personalities" late at night, which means that Douyin has begun to focus on rectifying personal IP accounts. The knowledge payment industry, which is strongly related to personal IP, will also face a huge test. What are the reasons behind it and what is the future direction? Friends who want to know are welcome to read this article. I hope it will be helpful to everyone.

On July 22, Douyin released the "Douyin Announcement on the Governance of Fake Personalities" (hereinafter referred to as the "New Regulations") late at night. After reading the details, many industry insiders took a deep breath:

The introduction of the new regulations means that Douyin has begun to focus on rectifying personal IP accounts. All kinds of unverifiable labels will be comprehensively regulated, and the knowledge payment industry that is strongly related to personal IP will also face huge challenges.

Screenshot from TikTok official

1. Douyin aims at paid knowledge

According to the new regulations, Douyin not only rejects endorsements with false labels, but even teachers with decades of teaching experience are not allowed to post relevant teaching content on Douyin if they cannot provide valid proof.

On the same day, Douyin issued two related announcements, also targeting knowledge payment:

Screenshot from TikTok official

According to the announcement, on the one hand, Douyin strictly controls the content of general knowledge categories and strengthens the review of role qualifications.

On the other hand, the promotion capabilities of existing educational mini-program experts can be recovered.

The fact that Douyin released three announcements on the same day is enough to show its determination to regulate the knowledge payment industry.

This is not the first time that Douyin has targeted the knowledge payment industry.

In March this year, Douyin issued the "Douyin's Announcement on Carrying out Special Governance of "Black Studies" and "Pseudo Success Studies"" (hereinafter referred to as the "Old Announcement"), which specifically addressed the problem of "self-media" hyping up social anxiety and attracting fans and traffic for profit without any bottom line.

Screenshot from "TikTok Blackboard"

Combined with the old announcement, this new regulation is a continuation of Douyin's response to some special actions of relevant departments, and it continues to clean up the platform environment.

Compared with the old announcement, the new regulations show that Douyin has increased its efforts to regulate personal IPs. It will fundamentally ban false personal IP labels and reject endorsements of false information. The extension of the review period will also reject false personalities and false qualifications, raising the threshold for personal IPs.

The measure of recycling the promotional capabilities of education experts will not only pour cold water on the current so-called IP craze, but may also further squeeze the living space of knowledge payment.

2. False personalities need to be rectified

Some time ago, the closure of Douyin, Tencent Classroom, and Taobao University caused a lot of controversy on the Internet. Many people in the industry felt very sorry about it. At that time, people believed that the era of paying for knowledge was about to end.

A considerable part of the reason for this phenomenon is that the original classification rules of teaching content have been broken up by the current abundant personal paid teaching. In the era of super-segmented industries, it is difficult for platforms to accurately classify and deliver relevant content for knowledge payment.

At the same time, due to the complexity of the market, it is difficult for platforms to conduct reasonable and effective supervision of knowledge payment under the above-mentioned classification dilemma, so chaos frequently occurs in the knowledge payment industry.

This not only affects the user experience of the platform, but also increases the platform's regulatory costs and affects the platform's reputation. Moreover, because the teaching content lacks practical application scenarios, knowledge payment has gradually become a one-time deal.

According to the content mentioned in the new regulations, the platform has increased the intensity of governance and punishment on individuals’ false personal labels.

For example, not long ago, the account of "Lao Tao Tells the Truth", an internet celebrity with millions of fans, was blocked and became a hot topic. Since then, this account, which was criticized for false staged photos, has been banned indefinitely by the platform.

Screenshot from TikTok

In fact, in daily life, personal IPs are very common on Douyin, such as identity labels such as "attending physician of a certain hospital", "person in charge of XX in a certain department", "XX lecturer in a certain industry", or performance labels such as "leading 100+ mothers to become rich", "helping 300+ companies achieve performance growth", or titles of this expert and that master, which are dazzling and difficult to distinguish between true and false.

Not only may users be misled by false information when searching for relevant information or seeking help on the Internet, causing financial, health, and mental losses, but it also increases the difficulty for officials in the corresponding industries to share real information from the complex information flow.

It is foreseeable that after the implementation of the new platform regulations, such fake personal accounts will be severely cracked down and the user experience will be improved. Not only the knowledge payment industry, but other better and more authentic information will also be able to appear to users faster and more accurately.

However, some people believe that this move may promote the activation of a wave of gray certificate-issuing industries.

3. It seems more difficult to attract private domain traffic

We noticed that the new regulations emphasized that such illegal accounts often monetize by diverting traffic to third-party platforms, implicitly indicating the behavior of diverting traffic to private domains.

This new regulation was discussed in the industry exchange group of Jianshi. It was believed that merchants, through the form of knowledge payment, directed users to third parties for transactions, training camps, private board meetings, etc., and Douyin could not profit from it. The loss of users and traffic has become a pain point for Douyin.

Therefore, Douyin’s new regulations are ostensibly aimed at rectifying accounts, but in fact they are also simultaneously rectifying the behavior of diverting traffic to private domains.

Combined with the recent follow-up of Jianshi that Douyin's traffic self-closed loop is accelerating, it can also be seen that Douyin is determined to prevent the diversion of traffic to private domains.

In fact, not only Douyin, but also Taobao, JD.com, Tmall and other public domain platforms are using various methods to cut off merchants' behavior of diverting traffic to private domains.

Most people have two opinions on this.

From the perspective of merchants, the platform has tightened the entrance to private domain traffic because the market has continued to tighten recently. Discussions on topics such as user ownership and user data assets have also gradually begun to be put on the agenda. The platform hopes that users will be converted within the platform so that they can keep users, and therefore profits, in their own hands.

From the user's perspective, they hope that the links within the platform can be improved so that users can make payment conversions more smoothly within the platform without the trouble of frequent jumps between different platforms.

Interestingly, in the past, providing users with product knowledge was a common way for brands to reach and attract users on Douyin. In the case of the platform's crackdown on package cards and AI outbound calls, if even personal IPs are hit, it may be more difficult for merchants to operate and attract users on public domain platforms.

What do you think about this? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section.

Author: Gao Xiangrong

Source: WeChat public account "Jianshi"