Can the Tik Tok mini program only rely on short dramas?

This article deeply analyzes the latest developments of the Douyin Mini Program in terms of content diversity and traffic growth, explores its application potential in the field of mobile video and its competitive relationship with the WeChat Mini Program, and guides readers to understand the latest trends in this field. I hope it will be helpful to you.

Douyin Mini Program is quietly expanding. According to 36kr, Douyin Mini Program is expanding the diversity of platform content through open source. Douyin has invited some content apps, hoping that they can distribute content and guide monetization on Douyin Mini Program and Douyin videos.

Douyin Mini Programs do not have a high presence in the Douyin ecosystem. But in fact, according to Questmobile data in May 2023, Douyin Mini Programs have become the mini program platform with the fastest traffic growth.

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The popularity of the short drama has further boosted the traffic growth of the Douyin mini program.

An industry insider told Byte List that in September 2022, Douyin opened a path to jump to WeChat mini-programs, which led to the explosion of mini-program short dramas. The original model of mini-program short dramas was to place them on Douyin and then direct traffic to WeChat to complete transaction payment.

According to a research report by Orient Securities, Douyin accounts for about 80% of the total consumption in terms of the distribution of traffic channels, while 90% of the landing pages are on WeChat Mini Programs. However, as the Douyin Mini Programs have been improved, a portion of the traffic has been intercepted by Douyin itself within its own system, and the Douyin Mini Programs have taken over this part of the transactions.

Questmobile data shows that during the Spring Festival this year, among the top camps of Douyin mini programs, short drama mini programs have risen strongly, occupying six of the top 10, and the overall traffic has increased. This type of content-based mini program is exactly the advantage category of Douyin. Compared with WeChat mini programs that carry many important life service functions of WeChat Jiugong grid, the main usage scenario of Douyin mini programs is mobile video, rather than the main scenario of WeChat, Alipay, and Baidu Smart - life services.

Data from Orient Securities research report in November last year showed that the monthly active users of WeChat, Alipay and Baidu smart life services were 322 million, 312 million and 98 million respectively. In comparison, the monthly active users of Douyin mini program life service category were only 20 million.

In the battle of mini programs, Douyin mini program is on the other side of WeChat mini program. Judging from the recent move of Douyin mini program to introduce content APP content, it will continue to follow this route.

However, life service mini programs are closer to transactions, have higher commercial value, and have higher user stickiness and retention. Just as the number of video accounts is based on WeChat, which has 1 billion monthly active users, the monthly active users of Douyin mini programs are also based on Douyin's huge user base. This means that although the Douyin mini program has a high usage rate, it has not formed a user mindset, and its presence is much weaker than that of WeChat mini programs.

Zhang Xiaolong once said in the 2019 WeChat Open Class Pro: "Search should always be a major source of traffic for mini programs." The reason why users go to "search" for mini programs is that WeChat has cultivated the habit of using mini programs, but Douyin mini programs have not yet developed such awareness.

However, Douyin, which has already penetrated into every aspect of people's lives, obviously also needs to use mini programs to supplement the platform's content and services. Can Douyin mini programs become the "Nine-square grid" of Douyin?

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A major trend that is visible to the naked eye is that there is almost no soil for the growth of new independent apps, and Internet traffic is being concentrated in mini-programs, especially in mini-programs of super apps.

According to Questmobile data, as of November 2023, the average monthly number of mini programs used by users across the entire network increased by 5.0% year-on-year, while the number of APPs decreased by 0.2% year-on-year.

For super apps, betting on mini programs is one way to gather traffic. At the same time, because mini programs can carry more internal and external services and content, mini programs have also become an option for super apps to expand their capacity. This is exactly the case with Douyin's introduction of content from third-party content platforms through mini programs.

According to 36kr, mini programs will carry complete content consistent with content-based apps; the Douyin video account will serve as a content carrier to divert traffic to the mini program by publishing clips through official and user accounts.

In fact, this model has already been implemented in the Douyin mini program. The short dramas are directed to the mini program through short videos on Douyin, which is similar, except that the content this time is replaced by pictures and texts.

Earlier, a batch of short videos have appeared on Douyin in 2022. The video scenes are generally cooking or parkour, and the audio is AI voice reading novels. These videos are the same as short plays, and they all end abruptly at the climax or turning point. The blogger will not tell the name of the novel, but guide to search for keywords on a certain APP.

This model is CPS novel distribution. Previously, WeChat’s mini-program infrastructure was relatively complete, and the main battlefield for CPS novel distribution was WeChat. Now, with the evolution of Douyin’s mini-program and the huge traffic of Douyin, Douyin can completely gather this part of the traffic.

At the same time, Douyin's advantage lies in videos, and it has been making up for the past few years with pictures and texts. Recently, according to an exclusive report by Tech Planet, Douyin has restarted the grass-growing community APP "Croissant" that had been removed from the shelves for nearly two years. Compared with the version before it was removed, the new version of Croissant is more like a Douyin version of Xiaohongshu in terms of experience.

Novels and other graphic content can help Douyin fill its gap in the graphic field. Douyin already has a lot of similar content.

Previously, Douyin Mini Program had established a promotion plan, that is, the Mini Program operator released the promotion plan, and after the influencer accepted the order, he published a short video and attached the relevant Mini Program, and he could get a commission. In September last year, the Mini Program promotion plan updated its functions, and the platform officially added support for graphic and text content, and supported the publication of graphic and text content to promote the Mini Program.

At present, short drama mini programs are the most popular mini program category in the promotion plan square. In the copyright content platform category, we can see that novels, long videos, comics, digital reading and other content are also being promoted in Douyin mini programs.

This is exactly why more users use the mobile video category in the Tik Tok mini program.

Currently, the monthly active users of Douyin mini program are much less than those of WeChat mini program, but in fact, ByteDance mini program was launched not too late.

In the early days, mini programs were used as the infrastructure for Douyin e-commerce. In 2019, Xiaomi Youpin was one of the first to participate in the Douyin e-commerce mini program test. Users can jump directly to the Xiaomi Youpin product purchase details page from the short video page, and the mini program also supports functions such as store page display and in-store search.

However, with the development of Douyin live e-commerce, the development of Douyin's mini-program e-commerce has not been fast. Unlike brand merchants who directly open mini-programs in WeChat, brand merchants who enter Douyin directly open stores instead of building mini-programs.

For super apps, the important function of mini programs is to provide more transaction scenarios and expand their usage scenarios and commercial value ceiling. Douyin mini program has also gone through this path.

In August 2022, Douyin and Ele.me reached a cooperation, and users can place orders through Ele.me’s Douyin mini program.

A month later, at the Open Platform Developer Conference, Douyin officially launched the Open Platform and announced the business carrier of the Open Platform - Douyin Mini Program, calling it the "main container" of the Open Platform, that is, using the Mini Program to accommodate more services from external companies. In the same year, Douyin opened up the platform service providers for transportation services, and T3 Taxi was the first to enter.

However, since then, the progress of Douyin mini program in the life service category has not been fast, and it has also failed to cultivate user minds.

On the one hand, this is related to the recognition and traffic scale of the Douyin Mini Program itself. Compared with the 900 million monthly active users of WeChat Mini Program, the 300 million monthly active users of Douyin Mini Program is much lower. Orient Securities mentioned that the health code has cultivated the mentality of users to use WeChat and Alipay Mini Programs, but Douyin has not assumed this infrastructure function, so users are more unfamiliar with the Douyin Mini Program itself.

This is related to the weak tool attribute of Douyin. As the largest entrance to the mobile Internet, WeChat has already played the role of a life assistant. In scenarios such as taking a taxi or ordering takeout, users will choose WeChat's mini-programs more often than Douyin, which has stronger entertainment attributes.

This is also related to the traffic distribution mechanism of Douyin. As Zhang Xiaolong said, the main source of traffic for mini programs is search, but users often rely on algorithm recommendations when using Douyin. For example, if they want to book a hotel, users will directly walk into a live broadcast room instead of searching for a mini program on a certain platform.

These factors together have prompted the Douyin mini program to take a different path from the mini programs on other platforms.

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Of course, there are some overlaps between Douyin mini programs and WeChat mini programs, namely short dramas and small games.

QuestMobile data shows that in February 2024, the mini-game market grew rapidly. For example, the number of active users of WeChat mini-program games reached 750 million, accounting for 80.3% of the overall traffic. WeChat once gave relevant data that in 2023, WeChat mini-game advertising consumption increased by 30%, and the commercial scale increased by more than 50%. Xundao Daqian, a subsidiary of Sanqi Interactive Entertainment, has more than 160 million active users.

Although game mini-programs are the second largest category in terms of monthly active users among all categories of Douyin mini-programs, there is still a considerable gap between Douyin mini-games and WeChat in horizontal comparison. Currently, the monthly active users of leading products are in the millions. However, the war has already begun. In April this year, Douyin issued a new rule: for Douyin mini-games that meet the conditions, developers can receive 90% of the total Android consumption and advertising incentives equivalent to 5% of the total Android consumption, that is, a "90% to 10%" profit-sharing mechanism. In contrast, WeChat mini-games are "60% to 40%". The extra 30% offered by Douyin is a great temptation for developers.

Obviously, Douyin is trying to snatch developers from WeChat and attract more developers to develop Douyin mini-games.

Earlier in January, Douyin announced that it would invest more than 5 billion yuan in resources to provide support such as talent subsidies, operating subsidies, project support, advertising grants, etc., to promote the development of Douyin mini-games from three aspects: improving capabilities, completing delivery, and policy incentives.

Although TikTok is a mobile Internet giant on par with WeChat, its mini-programs still need to make more efforts to catch up.

At present, the entrances to mini programs include mini programs that have been used in the past, video mounts, comment areas, live broadcast rooms, Douyin search, account homepages, etc. Among them, the entrances to mini programs that have been used in the past and account homepages are not conspicuous.

The Tik Tok mini program has not yet been able to play the role of WeChat’s nine-square grid.

Judging from Douyin’s current attitude, mini programs have not been mentioned at a strategic level. This is related to Douyin’s strategic deployment and platform attributes. Most of the popular life service mini programs on WeChat are platform-level mini programs, which is related to the decentralized model of WeChat and mini programs, but such a model is not suitable for Douyin.

Mini programs are shelf-style, and users need to walk into and open the door of a mini program and select products by themselves, which is inconsistent with the mainstream interest-based e-commerce on Douyin.

For example, Douyin has already personally laid out the important categories of life services in mini programs. Unless a strategic cooperation or annual advertising framework is signed, Douyin will not recommend the account of a platform-level company in the information flow.

Even though Ele.me has previously reached a strategic cooperation with Douyin, which has huge traffic support, due to the platform model and tone, the cooperation with Douyin has not greatly alleviated Ele.me's traffic anxiety.

For small brands, opening a store or livestreaming directly is more profitable than developing a mini-app. This is the main reason why mini-apps for life services do not have a strong presence on Douyin.

However, mini programs have become an important growth point for mobile Internet traffic. At the same time, introducing more external mini programs and enriching platform services and content can also drive the growth of platform payment scale. Right now, Douyin is vigorously developing its own payment business.

It is conceivable that Douyin, which is advancing into various fields, will also focus on mini programs. According to Orient Securities, movie ticketing and medical health mini programs have performed well in Douyin mini programs since the beginning of this year. Obviously, Douyin mini programs with growth potential will compete head-on with WeChat in the future.

Author: Tan Xiaohan; Source public account: Zimubang (ID: 686668)