Video accounts begin to "invade" the circle of friends?

Recently, some users have discovered that video account content has appeared in Moments. The appearance of such products in a certain private social space will dilute the user experience, but what is the core intention of the video account? In this article, we will try to analyze it.

In a large company, being promoted to a "village hope" business almost means a green light all the way. After all, hope is green.

This is confirmed by a recent product test of Video Account. A WeChat user recently discovered that her Moments had been filled with Video Account content that her friends had liked. This change puzzled her. Moments have always been considered a social space with a certain degree of privacy. If Video Account is given the green light, will the product attributes and user experience be diluted? And what is the core intention of Video Account's tentative "invasion" of Moments?

Although Tencent has not made a clear response to this, we can still see some clues from Tencent’s specific expectations for the video account.

▲ User screenshots

From the screenshots of the user on July 10, after opening the Moments, the recommended video will appear above the content that the user last viewed. The upper left corner of the video will display "**(friend's avatar + name)♡'s video", and above the video is a dividing line, followed by a line of small words reminding - "The above is the content updated this time, go and see", that is, the content above is the newly added Moments content. The user recalled that the likers of the recommended video were all friends who often chat and interact on WeChat. With this strong social relationship endorsement, she would be more interested in understanding the specific content of the recommended video. And just click on the video to directly enter the city of the video account.

Judging from the results, WeChat probably hopes that Moments can become a new entrance for video accounts and a traffic channel based on social relationships.

Currently, not all WeChat users can see such videos, which shows that the feature is still in the testing phase and the recommendation mechanism is unclear. According to public information, last July, a netizen’s Moments suddenly showed a video that his friend liked. This means that the WeChat team has been gray-scale testing for at least a year.

The WeChat team has always been cautious and restrained in product updates. One small detail is that the official account has been online for 12 years, but it was not until recently that the title modification function with limited conditions was launched.

▲ On July 9, WeChat official accounts quietly launched the title modification function

In comparison, Video Account is an outlier. A business WeChat service provider told NoNoise that "from the perspective of rhythm, Video Account is a special case of WeChat ecosystem products."

Although Zhang Xiaolong's early signals to the outside world were that Video Account was just a backup for Weishi and a basic content component of the WeChat ecosystem, judging from the actual traffic resources obtained by Video Account, the facts are not that simple.

It can be said that since its launch in January 2020, Video Account has started various buff stacking paths——

In November 2020, WeChat launched a new feature that allows video account creators to share the link to their Moments during live broadcasts, and the live broadcast will be pinned to the top of their friends' Moments. Once the other party opens their Moments, they can see the pinned live broadcast entrance. This is the first time that WeChat has used Moments to direct traffic to video accounts.

2021 is the year when the video account will be fully connected with the basic components of WeChat to obtain multi-level traffic entrances: first, the connection between the official account and the video account was established in March. After the video account was bound to the official account, the video account homepage and the official account homepage achieved two-way display and could jump with one click; in May, the connection between the official account and the video account live broadcast was further established. When the video account is broadcasting live, fans will be reminded on the official account page that his/her subscription account is "currently broadcasting live"; in July, WeChat applet can directly jump to the video account live broadcast room; in September, "Search" was connected with the video account live broadcast.

▲ Source: Tencent 2023 Q2 Financial Report

In July 2022, under the guidance of WeChat's multi-level traffic entrance, Video Account launched the native information flow advertising function and began to accelerate commercialization. According to Tencent's Q2 2023 financial report, Video Account's advertising revenue in that quarter was 3 billion yuan. In Q1 2024, Video Account's advertising revenue increased by more than 100% year-on-year. The growth was so rapid that Tencent executives asserted that with Meta's success, Video Account's monetization potential will eventually exceed traditional social information flows such as Moments.

In the eyes of investors, Video Account is more than just a "new bud on an old tree" as Ma Huateng said, it is simply a thriving cash cow. An investment institution estimates that Video Account's advertising revenue may reach 38 billion yuan in 2025.

However, the brilliant vision cannot quench the thirst of the moment. Despite the good growth at the beginning of this year, Tencent management also admitted that the growth rate of advertising business in the next few quarters may not be as fast as that in the first quarter.

The pressure will naturally fall on Video Account. To shoulder the heavy responsibility of Tencent Advertising's growth, Video Account can only accelerate commercialization. Considering that DAU, user time, information flow loading rate, and CPM (cost per thousand impressions) jointly determine the volume of advertising, the accelerated growth of daily active users and average user time on the platform is the source of accelerated commercialization.

▲ Image source: Tencent official account

Although the user time of Video Account increased by 80% year-on-year in Q1 this year and is twice that of Moments, there is still a lot of gap compared with 125 minutes of Douyin and 133 minutes of Kuaishou in 2022. Some industry insiders have inferred that the average user time of Video Account is nearly 60 minutes. In theory, if the entrance to Moments is completely opened, Video Account can not only obtain new private domain traffic, but also achieve the goal of user stay time faster. According to the WeChat team's 2021 data, 780 million users enter Moments every day, and 120 million users post Moments. For some Moments users who rarely browse Video Accounts, entering the Video Account information flow through the recommended "Friends Like" video seems to be a smooth operation.

Zhang Xiaolong has said before that he has always believed that obtaining information through social recommendations is the most human way. Along this line of thought, it is only a matter of time before video accounts invade the circle of friends and blur the boundaries between public and private domains.

It’s just that in this closed loop, the user’s intention is vague.

If you are an iRen user, just thinking about the fact that the videos you liked will appear in other people's Moments is embarrassing enough. Sharing what to share in Moments and establishing a personality are already exhausting enough. If you take a break to watch a video account and like it, it will be pushed to the social level. Moreover, you cannot control which friends the system pushes it to. Will you be able to watch videos and like it easily in the future?

From the perspective of users who are being pushed, passively receiving various WeChat Moments ads is already enough to test people's patience. Will they be passively attracted to watch short videos next?

If video accounts invade the circle of friends in this way, is it possible to create a new social pressure? It is still unknown. The changes in the circle of friends can be used as a reference. In 2021, more than 200 million users chose to make their circle of friends visible for only 3 days, and 660 million users watched but did not post every day. Some people may say that there is also a "Friends ♡" list listed with "Recommendations" above the video account. You will most likely see the videos that your friends have liked, and vice versa. I'm sorry, the nature is different. The video account is not a social space. For "Friends ♡", I can choose to watch or not watch it, and my own likes may also have multiple meanings, but no matter what, users always have the initiative.

If WeChat recommends a video I liked to my friend’s Moments page, the user has no choice in the process unless he or she chooses not to like it.

Some media have previously reported that Zhang Xiaolong has repeatedly emphasized internally that when doing anything, one should never consider how to commercialize the product first, but should first consider the user's needs and scenarios.

When it comes to connecting Video Account with Moments, what are the users’ needs and scenarios?

Author: Sun Jing

Source: NoNoise (ID: forjingyijing), there is too much noise, let's add something valuable