Zhihu novels are conquering Douyin, who will be the next Xiaoshuai and Xiaomei?

Anyone who frequently uses Douyin must have seen the story of Xiaoshuai and Xiaomei. This type of AI dubbing or real-person dubbing, combined with movie clips, was once very popular on Douyin. People either watched a movie through this "5-minute viewing of XXXX" method, or watched a thrilling story through a script they wrote themselves. This article explains another trend for us. Let's take a look.

Short stories are going crazy on Tik Tok.

"I traveled through time and space and became a fake rich girl in a novel. I could only return to my original world if I was killed by someone else, so I started to commit suicide like crazy..."

"The whole world knows that he married me to make Bai Yueguang jealous..."

"I used all my efforts to get pregnant with the general's child, but I found out that the general's wife, who was not favored by the general, was my lifesaver..."

Not surprisingly, you must have seen this type of video on TikTok: a short video that does not consider the integration of sound and picture at all, with relaxing scenes such as cutting soap, making cakes, and washing carpets as the base, and is stiffly accompanied by clichéd online text subtitles read aloud by an AI mechanical voice, which constitutes all the elements of this type of short video.

I thought these crudely made videos were just inconspicuous works among many short videos, but I didn’t expect that more and more popular ones would appear, bringing in millions of traffic and popularity, as well as countless users in the comment section who couldn’t stop asking for follow-up.

In just two years since its rise, "Zhihu tweet editor" has become a hot new sideline. With the help of the craze for Tik Tok tweet editing, Zhihu's short story track has been packaged and divided separately, supporting Zhihu's branch transformation from a question-and-answer community to a story platform. Under the tweet craze, Tik Tok also began to join the game and launched the "Tik Tok Story" function.

Big companies are taking action, and platforms such as Fanqie, Qimao, and Shuqi have also flocked to this broad road full of possibilities.

1. Zhihu takes over Douyin and replaces Xiaomei and Xiaoshuai?

When you look at these tweets seriously, you will find that the novels on Zhihu are simply born to become popular on Tik Tok.

On average, each video is 3 to 5 minutes long, and the plot is highly condensed, seemingly showing only the most critical nodes in a long online novel, with reversals filling the short story.

This is also a common feature of most Zhihu short stories. For example, the earliest Zhihu novel to go viral was the 2019 portrait of women in the harem, "Palace Wall Willow", which originally came from an answer to the question "Why do concubines in the harem have to compete for favor?"

Compared with typical online novels such as "The Legend of Zhen Huan", it is short and concise, plain language, fast plot development, and many twists and turns, which can quickly capture the user's attention in the information flow question and answer. At the same time, since it is often necessary to mix in the question and answer to write a proposition, most Zhihu novels use the first person, which is more immersive than traditional online articles.

This narrative structure, which combines the characteristics of being short, simple, and fast, makes Zhihu stories unexpectedly interlinked with short videos. Especially at a time when short dramas are popular, everything has been accelerated. Users are increasingly unable to restrain their patience for long stories, and they prefer to watch dramas that are loud and clear. Short stories with concise outlines have also become the preference of many people.

As a result, Zhihu short stories took advantage of Douyin and began to take root outside the public's view. Zhihu officials made good use of the opportunity and launched the Yanxuan story section within Zhihu, where short story creators finally had their own base. Externally, Zhihu officials launched the "Retweet Project" and began to consciously guide short video creators to recommend Zhihu's Yanxuan novels on Douyin, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu, and video accounts, attracting users to watch the ending on the Zhihu platform.

The chain reaction brought about in practice is that Zhihu's paid members have further increased. The Q2 financial report shows that Zhihu's average monthly subscription members have reached 14 million, a year-on-year increase of 65.3% - it should be noted that in 2019, Zhihu's paid members were only 570,000, and the payment rate was only 1.2%. So far, the #知乎推推# and #推推知乎# topics on Douyin have been played 2.35 billion and 2.37 billion times respectively.

Correspondingly, the financial report mentioned that Zhihu's revenue costs in the second quarter increased by 10.5% compared with the same period last year. In order to enhance the attractiveness of content, content and operating costs increased accordingly.

All this means that Zhihu, which once focused on popularizing knowledge, is disappearing, and the platform, which mixes various stories, is becoming a brand new Zhihu.

In this era full of luck and chance, any growth brought by extremes is worth exploring. In particular, it brings not only the prosperity of Zhihu short stories, but also a new logic of dreaming and making money.

2. Short stories, secret explosive business?

Searching for tweet editing on TikTok, the most popular videos are all editing tutorials. In the comment section, people discuss how to obtain copyright, how to make videos, and the endless possibilities it contains.

Among them, the information of "free authorization", "working at home" and "monthly income of over 10,000 yuan" was repeatedly emphasized. The appeal to the public is obvious. It means there is no age limit, no educational limit, and even no work location limit. You can start and end at any time.

A beautiful dream is so easily presented before your eyes. You don’t need to think about the copywriting or shoot the video yourself. You just need to select the appropriate material, copy the content of the novel you want to promote into the AI ​​dubbing software, and generate dubbing one by one. If you add some relaxing videos such as making cakes, handicrafts, and cutting soap, it is simply the perfect choice.

A blogger who edited Zhihu tweets revealed, "As long as a user searches for the keywords you left on Zhihu and recharges their membership, whether they are new or old users, the first month's membership fee is 9 yuan, and the blogger gets a commission of 6 yuan. If the user's membership expires and they search for your keywords and recharge their membership, the commission is still 6 yuan."

Furthermore, the tweet editing business not only makes tweet editors an increasingly widely noticed profession, but is also driving changes in the landscape of the online literature industry.

The breath of great change of the times is blowing, and no one wants to fly on the vent of the wind. As a result, more and more online literature platforms, such as Fanqie, Qimao, Shuqi, and Quark, have chosen to enter the market. In the past, these platforms used tricky advertisements to attract traffic, but now their shift has become more logical. Obviously, the people swimming in this sea are still the same group of people.

Even Douyin itself is eyeing this new track full of possibilities. In April this year, Douyin officially tested the "Douyin Story" function, which is to attach the original link of the novel/comic in the online article promotion video, and short video users can click one button to jump to the reading interface to watch.

From the beginning to the end, online literature is a piece of cake that big companies cannot let go of. The "2022 China Online Literature Development Research Report" shows that the scale of the online literature market has reached 38.93 billion yuan in 2022, and Zhihu's story further tells the public that as long as the right track is chosen, its scale is still likely to grow rapidly.

And a new pyramid of "tweet clips" is gradually being constructed.

At present, Zhihu is still at the top of the short story videoization. With the continuous increase in tweets, Zhihu's reader users are growing unprecedentedly. According to third-party data, the number of Zhihu short story submissions in 2022 surged by more than 400% compared with 2021, and paid membership revenue increased by 84% year-on-year. In Q2 of this year, Zhihu's paid membership revenue was RMB 449.1 million, an increase of 65.6% from RMB 271.2 million in the same period of 2022.

In the past, reading platforms represented by Fanqie and Qimao used to shout the slogan of free, plus cash reading incentives, competing with paid reading and occupying half of the online literature. Today, they still "use money to open the way", and it seems more logical to attract users to the platform, which is also an advantage that Zhihu does not have.

In December last year, Tomato Novel launched the "Short Story" function in the Tomato Novel APP and launched a cash incentive activity for the creation of story categories. According to the official activity introduction, creators can get a guaranteed contract of up to 15,000 yuan and a one-time cash reward of up to 10,000 yuan for a single short story. Tomato has made full preparations for this new track.

In April this year, Douyin officially began internal testing of the "Douyin Story" function. On the one hand, it was to strengthen support for Tomato Novels, and on the other hand, it was to further improve the construction of the upstream platform to a large extent.

Over the past few years, Douyin has never given up on building its own upstream platform. It has continued to acquire online literature platforms, launch new novel products, and build comics business, in order to integrate the three major contents of text, pictures, and videos to form a synergy. This has almost become Douyin's obsession.

In the best case scenario, if "tweet editing" can be sustained stably enough like live broadcast slicing, it will surely be a powerful tool that the online literature industry will be reluctant to give up.

But the difference is that in the ambition of Douyin's super-head anchor Crazy Xiao Yangge, a platform dedicated to live streaming slicing "Zhong Xiaoer" was born, and a larger and crazier slicing army was gradually brewing. Under the leadership of more regular troops, people still have expectations for its future. However, the power of this whirlwind of tweets blown by Zhihu is getting smaller and smaller.

3. Crisis Under the Water

Any industry has no other choice but to "tap potential" and "stabilize" when entering the fully competitive stage. From today's perspective, the best time for tweet editing has gradually passed.

A typical phenomenon is that everyone feels that the current tweet circle is becoming more and more complicated. "In the beginning, tweets only needed pictures with text, then videos with dubbing, and now texts need to attract attention. In order to prevent duplication of materials, many players have also used AI animations." A related practitioner complained on the social platform.

To some extent, the reason for the decline of its influence is the same as the reason for its dominance. In just a few minutes, a sufficiently ups-and-downs story outline and an irrelevant decompression video are enough. This easy-to-copy model also means that it is highly replaceable. "You don't need to go to the platform to buy articles. You can almost put together a story by browsing Xiaohongshu, Weibo, and Douyin." Someone once summarized a set of "free secrets" belonging to tweets in this way.

Therefore, in addition to the conventional AI voice reading novels, more "fancy" things have appeared, such as various foreign language dubbing versions in English, French, Japanese and Korean, shouting tweets, rap interpretation versions, etc. Every time this happens, the blogger Meng Xizhou, who first played the meme tweet, will be pulled out for "judgment", "Meng Xizhou, this prosperous age is just as you wish."

Even so, the homogeneity of tweets has often turned it into a matter of luck : whoever’s video is first seen by users can make money. This is one of the main reasons why many practitioners chose to “expand the volume” in the early days of tweets. “Doing TikTok is essentially about probability. When your quality is certain, the more you post, the greater the probability of hitting a hit, and only in this way can you gain an absolute advantage.”

More and more people have chosen to leave. Players from a certain online literary licensing studio that once provided exclusive services here are gradually withdrawing from the competition. "We mainly make money by selling courses and resources."

In April this year, in addition to the internal testing of the "Douyin Story" function, Douyin officials also took another major action to raise the release threshold. The most critical point is that only those with more than 1,000 fans can post it.

In the past, when these tweet accounts brought enough daily activity to the platform, the platform’s attitude might have been ambiguous. But as Zhihu’s reach becomes longer and longer, Douyin will certainly not be willing to give up such a huge amount of traffic.

Now, Douyin launched the Douyin Story function, firstly to shorten the user conversion path, reduce the number of users searching outside the site, and keep the traffic within the platform; secondly, perhaps Douyin also wants to enrich the platform ecology through online literature, increase user stickiness and usage time.

On the other hand, as the platform becomes increasingly eager for original content, it certainly does not want this model, which has no technical content, is full of hidden dangers, but can be quickly replicated, to reduce the quality of short videos.

The rules of the game are ultimately in the hands of upstream players. But the key point is that even TikTok itself does not have a decisive advantage in terms of tweets.

The online literature market has long formed a fixed pattern, and the tweet business has long been divided up by various online literature platforms. In addition to its traffic advantage, Douyin also has the ecological capabilities within the platform, which does not require users to jump multiple times or rely on various cryptic keywords to find online literature, and there will be no traffic limit problem.

For this reason, many practitioners have expressed their interest, as there are few entrants and there are still dividends to be gained. But on the other hand, the threshold of 1,000 followers also discourages many people. After all, compared with the operating costs of Douyin, it only takes a corresponding amount of time to attract traffic to Zhihu, QQ Reading, Quark and other platforms on Douyin.

If Douyin wants to get a share of this fertile soil, it needs to offer higher commissions or provide traffic support within the platform. However, after the action in April this year, Douyin has once again become silent in the field of online literature, and it remains unknown what the future will be like.

The future of new entrants is uncertain, but Zhihu, the former leader, is consciously getting rid of its dependence on short videos. In May, Zhihu launched a new brand "Yanyan Story", positioning itself as a native short story platform, aiming to provide users with a more professional and immersive reading experience. Short stories are still the mainstream signature of Yanyan Story, and more than 90% of the content can be read within 10 to 20 minutes, but the overall operation has gradually developed towards a more formal online literature platform.

This means that in the future, Zhihu’s dependence on TikTok may become less and less.

Douyin, which was borrowed by the internet, watched with its own eyes those who had come at an accelerated speed leave at an even faster speed. At this moment, where will the wind blow from this piece of land? Perhaps only time will tell.

Author: Pomegranate, Editor: Yuejian

Source public account: Xinentropy (ID: baoliaohui), insight into business variables and exploration of the essence of business.