Is Alipay Life Account the next short video trend?

When Alipay Life Account fully opens the UGC entrance, does this provide new opportunities and space for individual users ? With the support of the profit-sharing plan, will it attract more mid- and low-end creators who cannot "roll" on mature platforms or new creators who lack the ability to invest heavily? Let's read the article together and see the author's interpretation!

Not long ago, the "Alipay Open Platform" official account posted a tweet showing that Alipay Life Account has fully opened the UGC entrance, supporting individual users to edit and publish short video content in the APP. This is the first time that Life Account has opened UGC since the upgrade was announced in July last year, which means that Alipay's content ecosystem has officially opened its doors to individual users.

It is worth noting that last year, Alipay Life Account upgraded from the original single text and picture information to short videos, live broadcasts, pictures and texts and other content forms; and gradually opened up the Alipay homepage and multiple Alipay end users' high-frequency access scenarios, and laid out the global content layout; starting from May this year, it has successively released a number of cash incentive policies for creators and MCNs, using "real money" to attract high-quality content creators to settle in...

In the year since Alipay announced its transformation into Life Account, it has been making frequent moves in product and ecosystem construction. Some creators have noticed Alipay's "fierce investment" in content and have chosen to join in. Many early entrants have already reaped the first wave of dividends. On social platforms, experience sharing such as "earning 300 for 10,000 views" and "earning 100,000 per month with a few thousand fans" has constantly stimulated the nerves of practitioners.

How far has Alipay come on its content journey? Who will have new opportunities in this new content arena?

1. After one year in the market, how far has Alipay come on the content road?

Kas conducted a "field investigation" and tried to browse and publish new videos on Alipay Life Account, and found that the entire content production and publishing path is now very smooth.

Specifically, the most important entrance to the Life Account is located in the center of the Tab bar at the bottom of the Alipay APP. Clicking into the "Life" channel will first enter a single-column feed of short videos, giving you a similar sense of immersion as when you watch Douyin. In addition, users can also enter the double-column image and text recommendation format through the "Featured" navigation bar above according to their personal preferences.

Screenshot of the "Featured", "Discover" and "Live" pages of Life Account

The content publishing process is not complicated. Click the "+" sign at the bottom of the screen to enter the creation process. You can also simply edit the video before publishing. Generally speaking, Alipay Life Account has basically covered all the functions of mainstream short video platforms . On this basis, as a super APP relying on 1 billion traffic, Alipay Life Account has its own unique characteristics and advantages.

According to Kas, at present, Life Account has been connected with various scenarios on the Alipay side, which can better realize global content operation . For example, the "Life·Discovery" portal has been launched on the Alipay homepage, and users can jump directly to the Life Channel after clicking it. Ant Manor has also launched the "Watch Videos and Get Feed" activity to attract more users to browse the Life Channel.

The connection between Life Account and Ant Farm

"I spent the whole morning watching short videos to feed a chicken" and "I'll go plant trees after watching this one." From the comments section of Life Account, it is not difficult for us to feel the magical power of the connection of all scenes, and it has only been 15 months since the upgrade of Life Account.

In July last year, Alipay officially announced the upgrade of Life Account, adding short videos and live broadcast formats, and moving the "Life" channel to the center of the homepage.

In order to build a better content ecosystem and attract more high-quality creators, Alipay has launched a series of incentive policies for creators and MCNs since May this year, using cash rewards to stimulate the production of good content.

Take the profit-sharing plan, one of the incentive policies, as an example. Its core is to give cash rewards to creators who join the plan according to the effective playback volume . According to Kas, joining the plan requires meeting four conditions: the number of fans, the number of videos, the playback volume, and the platform style requirements. However, the official numerical requirements for these four indicators are not high, which is undoubtedly good news for amateur creators or mid- and low-end creators. It is worth mentioning that, considering the platform's digital life positioning, the official currently focuses on supporting pan-financial content including business, financial management, finance, real estate, etc., as well as pan-life content such as food, store visits, and home life.

Alipay Creation Sharing Plan

In addition to efforts on the creator side, Alipay also expanded the voice of Life Account by cooperating with highly watched international sports events. At the beginning of this year, Life Account launched the NBA content channel, and in October, it launched the Passionate Asia section during the Asian Games. Data shows that during the Asian Games, 200 million people used Life Account to learn about the event information and watch the exciting moments of the stadium, and more than 62 million people went to the "Asian Games Cheering Station" to cheer for the athletes.

While solving the traffic problems on the supply and demand sides, Alipay Life has also launched components such as "Product Selection Plaza", "Creator Center" and "Hot List" in succession, continuously meeting the needs of creators from the perspective of product function construction.

2. They reaped the first wave of dividends

After a series of product capability infrastructure construction and support actions, Alipay's content ecosystem has taken shape.

After watching thousands of videos on Alipay Life, Kas found that the content on the platform currently covers a variety of categories, including finance, business, real estate, mother and baby, film and television, entertainment, food, cars, store visits, home life, life vlogs, etc. Although the data performance of different videos under different categories is uneven, it is not uncommon to see videos with more than 10,000 likes.

Among them, supported by Alipay's own financial attributes and the continuous launch of incentive policies, many commercial financial accounts have begun to gradually emerge, gaining traffic while also obtaining real cash income.

At the end of April this year, the financial account @小A学财经 entered Alipay and began to continuously publish financial knowledge. The contrast between the sweet image of the girl next door and the financial content immediately caught the attention of users, and the easy-to-understand expression and interesting content that follows hot topics also further attracted the attention and support of users. So far, @小A学财经 has accumulated 274,000 fans on Alipay.

@小A学财经Alipay Life Account screenshot

In June, @败家财经 also chose to join the Alipay platform after seeing the natural fit between financial content and the platform's tone. So far, the account has updated more than 100 works, one of which analyzed whether Zibo barbecue was overdue from a financial perspective, with over 700,000 views and 36,000 likes. In one month, due to the popularity of the video, @败家财经 received more than 10,000 yuan in incentives through the Alipay creative sharing plan.

@败家财经Alipay Life Account screenshot

In the general life track, in July this year, home blogger @海边二狗哥, who has accumulated more than 200,000 fans on mature platforms, was invited to join Alipay.

The videos it releases always start with warm family scenes, and then use a humorous way to show users home content including life tips, household items, storage techniques, and old item transformation. They are not only extremely practical but also full of fun.

In more than three months, @海边二狗哥 has accumulated 17,000 followers on Alipay, among which a video of handmade DIY creative transformation has received 19,000 likes.

@海二狗哥 Alipay Life Account Screenshot

It is worth noting that although his fan base seems somewhat "insignificant" when compared to other content platforms, if you look at his income, you can really feel the content dividend of Alipay at this stage - by joining the profit-sharing plan of the Alipay platform, @海边二狗哥's monthly income has reached nearly 100,000 yuan.

@Simon and Anna, an account that records the daily life of a Chinese-Russian couple, began distributing content on Alipay Life Account as early as July last year. With their high-contrast personalities, real-life scenes and humorous narrative style, the two quickly became popular with many users. At the same time, the Alipay profit-sharing plan also helped them earn nearly 70,000 yuan in cash in 3 weeks.

@Simon and Anna Alipay Life Account Screenshot

Official news shows that after the launch of the Alipay Creation Revenue Sharing Plan, 60% of active authors have already benefited from the plan . It is obvious that with the strong support of Alipay Life Account, many creators have already reaped the first wave of dividends and gained tangible traffic and income.

From the user's perspective, although many users initially did not understand the content produced by Alipay, based on the huge user base, highly sticky user usage habits, and a traffic distribution mechanism based on "high-quality content", the attitudes of many users have changed invisibly, and they have gradually developed the habit of watching content on Alipay.

At the same time, users on social media have reported that Life Accounts may be testing the ability to get red envelopes by watching videos. Based on Alipay's expertise in consumer vouchers and red envelopes, it is believed that there will be more imagination in C-end traffic.

3. Whose opportunity is it when Alipay creates content?

Although Alipay is still a novice in the content field and the scale of its content is far from comparable to that of mature content platforms, as a platform that relies on 1 billion traffic, whose content can be connected with high-frequency access scenarios of multiple users within the terminal, and has popular C-end activities such as Wu Fu, Alipay Life Account also has its own imagination based on the value of the platform.

In Kas's view, for Alipay itself, the new exploration in the field of content means that the platform still has a lot of homework to do and many shortcomings to improve, but for creators, in the environment where mainstream short video platforms are becoming more and more "popular", the new content position undoubtedly means new opportunities and chances.

As we all know, in the past one or two years, as the short video industry has entered its mature stage, the decline in traffic in the content industry, the increasing degree of internal competition and increasingly fierce competition have become indisputable facts. Especially on mature content platforms, various content types have become saturated, and the time for users to keep a certain type of content fresh is constantly shortened. Coupled with the influence of the "Matthew effect", it is becoming increasingly difficult for amateurs to start from scratch to obtain traffic and become a creator. Many mid- and low-level creators are also overwhelmed in the "competitive" creative environment.

At this time, the Alipay Life account, which is aggressively publishing content, provides a new outlet for the "miserable" creators.

Currently, Alipay Life Accounts are still in the early stages of development, and the platform's traffic distribution is more fair. Coupled with the continuous introduction of substantial incentives, the chances of creators gaining both fans and revenue are greatly increased.

All of this is beneficial to the mid- and low-end creators who have long been unable to get on the mature platforms, as well as the new creators who are not yet able to invest heavily. Of course, vertical creators that match the tone of Alipay, such as financial management, investment and other pan-financial content, undoubtedly have more unique development advantages.

The content construction has taken shape. The next step for Alipay is to solve the problem of commercialization. Although it has not yet gained a clear advantage in the competition for user time, relying on its unique financial management, business and travel mentality, as well as the natural user trust, the commercialization of Alipay Life Account is full of room for imagination, which will inevitably mean greater development space for creators.

Author: Kas Data

WeChat public account: caasdata (ID: caasdata6)