Let’s talk about the idea of ​​creating content with tool products, starting from making short videos on Alipay

In today's digital age, Alipay, as a widely used mobile payment tool, has begun to enter the short video field, providing users with the function of creating and sharing short videos. In this article, we will explore how to adapt to the trend of the times, combine tools with content, and create fascinating user experience and business opportunities.

Alipay has opened the UGC entrance, and individuals can post short videos. In addition, the subsidy policy has been announced before, and you can make money by posting videos.

It’s time to analyze Alipay and why it wants to make short videos.

1. Why does Alipay want to make short videos?

Without looking at other businesses, and only considering Alipay as a payment tool, there are two core roles: merchants and customers.

If you want to do a good job in payment business, you need to better "connect" merchants and customers. Let them interact more frequently and on a larger scale, and the overall transaction volume can be increased.

Therefore, the indicators for measuring connection are DAU, duration, frequency, etc.

What is the current situation of Alipay? Without internal data, we can speculate:

• The number of merchants is large, but the activity is not high
• Large DAU, low average usage time per person

If this is roughly the case, it means that Alipay is facing a growth bottleneck and is somewhat stuck in a vicious circle.

How to break the deadlock? Merchants and customers, which problem should be solved first?

Alipay is a platform, and the core roles are supply and demand. If you need to choose the best one, it must be the supply side, that is, the merchant.

Because supply can drive demand, and supply is also easier to grasp.

How to solve the problem of large number of merchants but low activity?

As a platform, there are two directions: improving efficiency and acquiring customers.

1. Improving efficiency is essentially about making money from SaaS, which is not discussed in this article.
2. The key to customer acquisition is quantity and quality. Alipay has quantity but lacks quality.

Quality means useful traffic.

For merchants, it is the traffic that can be converted into their own customers and sales. Moreover, they hope it is incremental, not repeat purchases from existing customers.

At this point, the question of "how to do Alipay well" is transformed into "how to provide incremental customers for merchants."

Where are the incremental customers?

From the DAU and duration data, we can see that Alipay has a large user base, but its penetration may not be enough, and it has great potential.

In other words, existing users have not yet been converted into customers of the merchant.

There are many ways to convert.

There is a very important logic, which is: to build a space for merchants and customers within the platform so that they can connect more accurately and efficiently.

Short videos and live broadcasts are the forms of this field.

This conclusion comes from the best practices of short video products such as TikTok, as well as the ability of this content format to penetrate the general public.

Therefore, Alipay can make short videos and live broadcasts.

2. How to make short videos on Alipay

This topic is discussed under these premises:

• Alipay started almost from scratch
• Short videos are embedded in Alipay products as a functional module
• From the user's perspective, Alipay is just a tool

As mentioned above, Alipay is a platform with two roles: merchants and customers. Short videos are also a platform with content producers and consumers.

Therefore, making short videos in Alipay is like putting a small platform inside a big platform.

The roles of these two platforms do not completely overlap and cannot be matched.

For example, the producer of short videos may be an Alipay merchant or not, but both roles can serve the merchant’s customer acquisition.

The roles cannot be matched with each other, so in this topic, the short video platform is the main subject of discussion.

To build a short video platform from scratch, you must first start as a content producer.

The decision logic is the same as above: supply can drive consumption. Moreover, the short video platform was built from scratch and lacks content, but the Alipay platform does not lack traffic.

How do content producers do this? Before doing this, you must first understand this group:

• It is divided into two categories, one is for personal creation and the other is for traffic.
• Extremely profit-oriented, doing whatever makes money, no loyalty.
• Proficient in traffic gameplay and platform rules, and understands them better than the people on the platform.

To be a good content producer, Alipay must do well in: differentiated advantages, traffic mechanism, and monetization model.

To summarize:

1. Differentiated advantages: Learn from video accounts and Xiaohongshu

Currently, in the short video platform sector, Douyin, Kuaishou, Video Account, Xiaohongshu, and Bilibili all have their own advantages and have occupied their territories.

At this time, Alipay comes in and you need to think clearly about how to choose the entry point and how to circle the territory.

For example, Video Account is also a latecomer, but it chose a very good entry point.

Official accounts are resources for video accounts. Their advantages are media professionals and KOLs from various industries. The content of their official accounts are all kinds of analysis and reports.

In order to transform this resource into content creators for the video account, they circled out the "knowledge field" and launched the "8:15" column. They invited people to do live broadcasts and provided them with traffic resources.

This entry point is particularly good, it has its own advantages, and it is also different from Douyin.

Therefore, if you want to make a success of your video account, you need to find your own differentiated advantages. You don’t have to start from the content category, you can do a SWOT analysis.

2. Traffic mechanism: It is meaningless to just do traffic diversion

How traffic operates within the ecosystem needs to be designed.

Simply put, Douyin focuses on the upward and downward trends, and then allocates them to live streaming, e-commerce, life services and other businesses.

Kuaishou is a mixture of single and double columns, but it has more advantages on the follow page, so it has better stickiness.

So, what is the traffic mechanism of Alipay for short videos?

It should be noted that the traffic mechanism here is not to divert traffic from the big pool of Alipay’s homepage to the small pool of short videos.

Simply diverting traffic is meaningless. The operating mechanism within the ecosystem is immature, and any traffic that comes in will be wasted, and there is no ability to receive and retain it.

After all, if traffic diversion works, BAT can do all the business.

3. Monetization model: Platform subsidies, medicine cannot be discontinued

Short video platforms are mature products, so content producers are very professional and profit-oriented. If you want them to play, it must be profitable.

The current incentive policy for short videos on Alipay has a lot of problems:

First of all, the new platform uses subsidies to incentivize content production, which is a typical medicine that cannot be stopped.

It is possible in the short term, but unrealistic in the long term. Without a long-term stable monetization model, once the subsidies stop, the content producers will leave.

I interviewed the founder of a financial MCN, they are working on Alipay, but their purpose is to get subsidies. They move the videos of several accounts here simultaneously, and they earn at least 20,000 yuan a month.

As long as the subsidies are gone, he will definitely stop doing it.

Because they sell courses, or they can transfer to private domains, but the functions of Alipay's live broadcast room are not easy to use.

Secondly, subsidies can attract people who generate traffic, but they cannot attract people who create personalities.

If you search for "Alipay short video" on major platforms, you can see many articles teaching you how to get the best deals.

They have a way to quickly edit a large number of videos and distribute them on the platform to gain traffic. Most of them are patchworks of other materials, and it is impossible to create purely original or custom-made content.

Is this what Alipay wants?

The reason is simple: the kind of content you attract depends on the incentive you use.

The business model of short video platforms is already very clear: advertising, e-commerce, local life, and live broadcast rewards.

I know that Alipay does not need to make money from the short video business, but it needs to design a model around this business model that allows content creators to monetize.

It’s still unclear what it should be, but I know it definitely shouldn’t be a platform subsidy.

Author: Han Xu

Source: WeChat public account @Operation Dog Work Diary