Is the quiet video account making money quietly or is no one making money?

Video accounts, which are known as "Buddhist operations", are limited by the decentralized social attributes, and it is difficult for them to develop e-commerce quickly. Follow the following article to discuss the development direction of video account live e-commerce, which is recommended for Internet friends to read.

In the past 618, compared with the fierce promotion of other platforms, Video Account has a calm attitude of "participation is the most important thing". Taobao, JD.com and Douyin started to launch promotion incentive policies as early as the end of April, but Video Account's promotion was late. Except for the record of 10 million views of Christy Chung's live broadcast on 618, there were no other breakthroughs. The battle report was also quite low-key, only releasing the regular list of goods sold.

2024 is the third year of the commercialization of video accounts. At a time when the growth rate of leading e-commerce companies is slowing down, many people see video accounts as an opportunity to make money. In 2023, the GMV of live streaming sales on video accounts was nearly three times that of last year, significantly higher than the 35.2% growth rate of the live streaming e-commerce market. In the Baidu Index, the search volume for terms such as "video account" and "video account store" has also been rising.

However, despite the enthusiasm of the gold diggers, Video Account has not made rapid progress on the road to commercialization, and is even a bit indifferent.

Although Ma Huateng has also regarded the video account as "the hope of Tencent" for two consecutive years, the numerical results are difficult to describe as "radical". At the third quarter performance meeting of 2023, Tencent Chief Strategy Officer James Mitchell revealed that the advertising load of Tencent Video Account is less than 3%, while Douyin has exceeded 10%.

The outside world also has the impression that Video Account is "operated in a Buddhist way". Compared with other platforms with clear horse racing mechanisms, outstanding super anchors and rapidly changing platform brands, Video Account rarely has phenomenal events and cases.

Born in the WeChat ecosystem with over 1.3 billion monthly active users, Video Account should have had the opportunity to quickly become a rising star. Why did this highly anticipated child not grow explosively? As a brand marketer, how can you find your own opportunities in it?

1. Can the live e-commerce business of Video Account be fast?

Let’s look at a few sets of video account data first:

• On June 18, 2024, Christy Chung’s live broadcast created the first 10 million views for Video Account, but according to multiple third-party data platforms, the total GMV of the live broadcast was less than 10 million.
• Among the top 10 live broadcast rooms in the 2024 Video Account 618 Good Products Festival sales list, 8 are expert live broadcast rooms, and there are new faces.
• In April 2024, "Make Friends" premiered on Video Number (Luo Yonghao did not participate in the live broadcast). According to Xinshi data, the estimated sales of the premiere was about 1.2467 million yuan, while Luo Yonghao's premiere GMV on Douyin and JD.com was 110 million and 150 million respectively.

These data reveal two pieces of information. First, the mature super-top influencers and celebrity effects on other platforms are difficult to copy to Video Accounts; second, the influencer ecosystem within Video Accounts is still fluid.

It is undeniable that inviting super heads and celebrities to video accounts to increase the platform's e-commerce voice and stimulate user consumption is already a big step forward for video account live e-commerce. But it must also be admitted that these actions do not completely work on video accounts.

To understand the reason, we have to go back to the WeChat ecosystem where the video account was born. Two key words are particularly noteworthy - decentralization and social media. The former is its value and the latter is its ecological attribute.

As early as in the WeChat Open Class in 2021, Zhang Xiaolong said: "The slogan of the official account can still be used on the video account. No matter how small the individual is, he or she has his or her own brand."

As one of the atomic content components in the WeChat ecosystem, the role of the video account is a carrier of content delivery. Its most important function lies in the carrying and delivery of content. Just as the official account carries long text content, the video account carries video content.

Although the media forms are different, the goals behind them are similar, which is to give content producers a creator ID that can circulate in the WeChat ecosystem, so that every producer can get a ticket to "be seen" through their content.

In the 2018 WeChat Open Class, Zhang Xiaolong clearly stated that the WeChat ecosystem will follow the development of decentralization. The most well-known application of the decentralization concept on the Internet is blockchain technology, which transfers control and decision-making power from centralized entities to distributed networks, allowing users to interact freely without centralized control.

At the platform level, it can be understood that the platform only provides system rules and technical support, and participants develop freely and equally on the platform based on their own abilities. The main role of the platform is supervision, rather than providing a centralized traffic entrance to dominate the development of the platform ecosystem.

Its direct opposite is centralization. Today, leading e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and Douyin are both examples of centralization, which use centralized algorithms to determine the exposure opportunities of content and products, thereby marketing the traffic and income of merchants and content creators.

The advantage of centralization is that it can concentrate resources to accomplish big things, such as using traffic distribution mechanisms to stimulate merchants to work with the platform to do large node marketing, thereby stimulating consumers to boost the overall sales of the platform.

It is not difficult to find that at the most basic level of product values, the video account born in the decentralized WeChat ecosystem is contrary to the centralized core of traditional e-commerce.

More importantly, as an atomic component of the WeChat ecosystem with decentralization as its value, Video Account relies on WeChat's huge user base and social network. Users are familiar with and recognize social networking among acquaintances, and have extremely high requirements for privacy and trust.

The content circulation form that users are accustomed to is private domain, not public domain. This further limits WeChat's willingness to quickly commercialize. Too high an ad loading rate will make users feel monitored, causing WeChat to lose user trust and cause user loss.

Therefore, although WeChat has many commercial opportunities, it can only choose to restrain itself. For example, it insists on not doing splash screen ads, keeping a low loading rate in Moments ads, and adding a "not interested" option. Orient Securities once predicted that the advertising loading rates of video accounts in Q4 of 2024 and 2025 will be 3.8% and 4.8% respectively, while the current advertising loading rates of Douyin and Kuaishou have reached 11-13% and 7-8%.

WeChat's decentralized values ​​and the balance between user privacy and commercialization under its social attributes will have an impact on the commercialization process and user behavior patterns of Video Accounts. These factors together determine that it is difficult to directly reuse successful methodologies of other platforms in Video Accounts, but there are also rules to follow.

2. Brands entering the video account cannot avoid "experts"

Even though everyone is different, the 99.9% identical DNA sequence in the human genome allows everyone to share the same biochemical mechanisms and have similar cellular operating mechanisms.

The operation of the platform is similar. Even though the "social personality" displayed by the video account is completely different from other e-commerce platforms, the algorithm level follows the same rules.

Relying on WeChat's huge user base and social network, the private domain provides video accounts with the opportunity to internalize highly sticky users into brand assets. However, the growth of private domain traffic will be limited by its closed nature. To expand the traffic level and expand the user portrait, the public domain needs to continuously inject fresh water from the source.

At this time, we face a new problem: How to inject new traffic from the public domain to the private domain?

Although the WeChat ecosystem is not short of traffic, arbitrary traffic push will not only affect the user experience, but also be useless to merchants. This leads to a task that no e-commerce platform can avoid: accumulating user behavior data for label cleaning and improving the accuracy of the recommendation model.

In order to accomplish this task, the platform will first gather content creators, namely experts, to create excellent content to attract users; once the MCN has taken shape, it will accelerate the maturity of the content ecosystem. After sufficient data has been accumulated and the recommendation mechanism has been improved, brands will enter the market as paying players to quickly realize the commercialization of the platform.

The prelude to the rapid development of Douyin e-commerce was completely kicked off by Luo Yonghao's first live broadcast in 2020, but the current video account has not yet welcomed its own iconic influencer. The task of cleaning up the label is still to be completed.

From this point of view, the current opportunities for video accounts still lie with experts.

The duck knows when the river water warms up in spring, and the flow trajectory of the industry is the most direct manifestation. Since WeChat opened the public domain traffic entrance of video accounts last year, many Douyin influencers have begun to switch to video accounts. Guo Yiyi, the "No. 1 video account lady", started on Douyin. This year, influencers accounted for 80% of the TOP10 of the 618 sales list.

At this stage, Runyu, a lecturer and service provider of the video account creation camp, gave two suggestions to merchants who want to enter the video account: First, if the product belongs to a non-standard track, such as luggage, green plants, education and training, or other non-standard categories or white-label products, you can directly enter in the form of brand self-broadcasting;

Second, if you are in the standard product track, such as shoes, clothing, and beauty products, it is recommended to give priority to influencer distribution. First, enter the market through channels to experience the ecological characteristics of video accounts, understand the operating rules of video accounts, and then consider building a team. Tietou Liang, an expert in video account delivery, also mentioned in a live broadcast that the current efficiency of influencer delivery is 4-5 times that of store broadcasts.

It is worth noting that even if you are broadcasting yourself, you still need to broadcast it with the "expert attributes" in the video account.

The user conversion channel in the video account is still based on social trust logic. Conversion is promoted by building a convincing persona at the front end and establishing trust with users. In addition, to give full play to the private domain advantages of WeChat, after-sales service is also needed to enhance word-of-mouth and stickiness, extend the user life cycle, and increase the average order value.

Understanding the development stage and opportunity trends of video accounts affects the decision to enter this platform. However, in order to achieve success on the platform, it is also necessary to focus on the practical level and understand the platform's content preferences and traffic logic.

3. “Products are content, and content is message”

At the end of May, the video account live e-commerce team was incorporated into the WeChat open platform. As a result, the video account live e-commerce has changed from being under the video account to being on the same level as the video account, mini-programs, and public accounts, which is more conducive to the integration of the video account live e-commerce with the overall WeChat ecosystem.

Almost at the same time, according to Yibang Power, an industry insider close to WeChat management said that Zhang Xiaolong recently reiterated the positioning of Video Account and proposed that "the product is the content."

Video account stores, as the atomic component of commodity circulation in the WeChat ecosystem, carry the circulation identity of commodities. Content is the carrier of its circulation, and video account live broadcast, like short videos and public accounts, is one of its forms.

The dissemination and diffusion of these content forms all rely on WeChat’s powerful social ecosystem and must also follow its unique content norms and dissemination preferences.

"Authenticity" is a more stringent requirement for Video Accounts than other platforms.

Due to its strong private domain, social networking among acquaintances, and a user base older than the average online shopping age, Video Accounts provide the possibility of high customer orders and high stickiness, but also provide a breeding ground for fraud and crime. In order to prevent such incidents from happening, Video Accounts are particularly demanding on content quality and authenticity.

The explicit ban on virtual person live broadcasts is an example. Compared with JD.com’s Liu Qiangdong’s virtual person live broadcasts and Douyin’s live broadcasts that can be broadcast after approval, Video Account’s new regulations in June directly listed “using plug-ins, AI and other tools to generate virtual image live broadcasts” as a violation, as well as “video beautification and filters that seriously distort the characters and products”.

In addition to content orientation, video accounts also have their own logic of dissemination. Zero One Digital CEO Jian Feng summarized it as "content is news, and production is content."

Simply put, as a content component of the WeChat ecosystem, if you want to get traffic, you have to make good use of the private domain to leverage the public domain. If the content you create can be forwarded by users to friend chats, WeChat groups, Moments, etc., bringing incremental traffic to the platform, then the platform algorithm will also give you more traffic. "Content is the message" is the content creation structure that triggers this positive cycle.

Based on the types of needs they meet, Jianfeng divides content into four levels: service, information, social, and news. Their spread in WeChat increases step by step.

Take the topic of making soup as an example. If the video content is a tutorial on making soup, it is at the service level, satisfying the user's learning needs, and can only trigger functional viewing and dissemination; but if the video adds care for the dissemination object, such as "drink a bowl of chicken soup when the weather is cold", and then talks about the process of making soup, then the video will have the dual dissemination attributes of "social emotion + practical function" to trigger forwarding and dissemination within the social circle.

However, high dissemination does not mean high monetization. To achieve the purpose of monetization, it is also necessary to embed the value points of the product in the process of content production, which is "the product is the content". Jianfeng further expanded this concept to "production is the content" -

Any part of the production and operation process that allows users to perceive the value of the product and brand can be made into content for dissemination.

In addition to the direct physical presentation of the value of the product, the production process and environment of the product may allow users to perceive the value of the product and brand. Therefore, they can all be used as materials for content production.

Luckin Coffee uses live streaming in stores to allow users to see the working status of store staff and the coffee making process, thereby attracting users to convert and place orders. Adopt a Cow places the live streaming scene in a pasture, factory or milking hall to directly show users the milk production process and dispel users' concerns about food safety.

Although these production processes do not generate revenue during the circulation process, they can help brands build user trust. This is the logic behind the traceability marketing that has been commonly used in recent years.

From this perspective, "commodities are content" is essentially about allowing commodities to circulate in the ecosystem in a more natural and less purposeful way. The relationship between merchants and users is more inclined to trigger transactions with emotional connections rather than prices.

4. Analyst Comments

He who wears the crown must bear its weight. Limited by the decentralized social attributes, it is difficult for Video Account and even the entire WeChat ecosystem to develop e-commerce quickly. But isn’t this experimental and differentiated development path a new attempt?

During the exchange, Jianfeng mentioned an interesting point: "Tik Tok and Video Account are like a confrontation between two extreme product philosophies. One is extreme distribution with strong centralization, and the other is decentralized natural growth , giving everyone equal opportunities but without guaranteeing results."

The previous road has been well-trodden, and some people are happy and some are worried. While the extreme centralized algorithm maximizes benefits, it also traps users in information cocoons, and businesses are shrouded in the Matthew effect and cannot relax for a moment.

The latter path has no end, but there is still hope. Zhang Xiaolong once said in his book "The Product Concept Behind WeChat" that "it is unethical to divide users into high, medium and low-end users". I hope it will come true.

Author: Li Zi

Source: WeChat official account: "Knife Skills Research Institute (ID: DigipontClub)"