Alipay has decided to "TikTok-ize", is it feasible?

Is Alipay heading for "cosmic expansion"? As a payment tool APP, Alipay continues to make efforts in local life, social networking, short videos, live broadcasts, etc. Why? Can this inject new vitality into Alipay? This article analyzes Alipay's expansion into different businesses, hoping to inspire you.

Following WeChat, another national app is moving towards cosmic expansion.

In the past year, Alipay has been active in the content field, especially in its bet on life accounts. Since July last year, Alipay has recruited various types of content such as finance, livelihood, and leisure through MCN to develop short video live broadcasts. At the beginning of this year, it announced a partnership with the NBA and launched an NBA column on the life channel, where users can directly watch NBA-related short videos and event information.

At the end of March, Alipay added a "Take a Look" column on the homepage. After clicking, users will be redirected to the Life Account to watch short videos or live broadcasts. At the same time, the Life Account is particularly prominent in the Alipay website, located in the middle of the bottom tab bar. In the search bar, the "Life Account" channel is also ranked in the middle, second only to the mini program in the subcategories.

Alipay screenshot

Alipay, as a financial tool app in the eyes of the public, plays an important functional role in payment, just as its name suggests. But in 2020, Alipay announced its upgrade to a digital life platform, which laid the tone for its transformation. However, not all users want apps to develop towards the cosmic level of "infinite expansion", and more and more comprehensive content often means more and more complicated and lengthy app functions.

But for Alipay, although the minimalist style is lightweight, it does not have an advantage in terms of user retention time. How should Alipay solve this balancing problem?

1. Why does Alipay need to create content?

No app is willing to give up social networking. Even WeChat, which is used by almost everyone, will retain space in Tencent's financial reports every period, using data such as the growth of users or usage time to prove that it is still young and has potential. As a financial tool, it is difficult to implant social genes in Alipay, but Jack Ma has not given up the desire to compete with Pony Ma on the social front, and even repeatedly personally stepped out to stand up for his own social products, but almost all of them came back empty-handed.

Until the end of 2016, a piece of negative news temporarily put Jack Ma out of the social battlefield. On November 27, 2016, Alipay grayscale tested the circle function, launching circles such as campus diary, white-collar diary, overseas purchasing, Maimai Financial Media, and sent different circle invitations to corresponding users. Although it is a social tool, the "circle" has certain restrictions and is "invited to enter the life circle" based on the characteristics of different groups of people. For example, in the "campus diary circle", only female college students can post dynamics, and other users cannot post dynamics, but can like and reward.

Image source: Internet

However, in the "campus diary" and "white-collar diary" circles, some users posted a large number of explicit and pornographic photos in order to stimulate rewards and likes. Wang Sicong also ridiculed Alipay as a "payment pimp" on Weibo. As the incident continued to ferment, some users questioned whether this incident was "Alipay's vulgar marketing." Alipay, which was deeply involved in the "pornographic photo scandal", closed the entrances to various diary sections in the early morning of the 28th and issued an official statement saying that the life circle function was still in the grayscale testing stage and was only relatively open.

The social war at that time is similar to the content war today, both of which are apps' desire for users.

According to Analysys data from the second quarter of 2016, Alibaba's Alipay and Tencent's Tenpay ranked first and second with market shares of 55.40% and 32.10% respectively. According to iResearch's statistics two years ago, Alipay's market share in mobile payments reached 80%. The 2016 "Internet Trend Report" shows that Chinese users use WeChat Pay more than 50 times a month, almost five times that of Alipay.

As a tool-type app that is used and left, Alipay is also trying to retain users with marketing IP and increase their stay time. For example, the IP of Jiwufu, which became popular with Jingyefu, once kicked off the Internet red envelope war. According to official data from Alipay, the scale of Jiwufu users' participation in 2023 reached an all-time high, and the participation enthusiasm increased by nearly 30% compared with last year.

Even so, Alipay does not have an advantage in terms of user time compared to other content-oriented or social apps. According to QuestMobile data, during this year's Spring Festival, Alipay ranked last among all apps with more than 50 million daily active users, with an average daily usage time of only 7.8 minutes.

Image source: QuestMobile

The reason why Alipay users spend so little time on it is related to the fact that mobile payment has been deeply rooted in the minds of users.

Yiyuguancha has interviewed many Alipay users around them and found that most of them use Alipay as a payment app for daily consumption, or a livelihood app for paying water and electricity bills and checking medical insurance matters, as well as a game app for grabbing energy to feed chickens in Ant Forest, etc. However, they have no obvious perception of content consumption, which also means that Alipay is facing a tough nut to crack.

2. After betting on "short videos + live broadcasts", is Alipay also going to "roll" into local life?

Although the road is long and difficult, Alipay still has to rush into battle. After all, even Pony Ma called the video account "the hope of the entire factory", and the content battlefield represented by short video live streaming has become a territory that strategists have to fight for.

Judging from Alipay's current actions, in terms of short video content, it mainly aggregates content within the site through the form of life accounts, and gives full play to the financial characteristics of the App, with financial management content as the development focus. In the Alipay life account channel interface, the content is mainly divided into multiple types such as finance, workplace, and people's livelihood. In the financial type, most of the financial management content is about how to choose funds and how to judge investment opportunities.

Alipay screenshot

Compared with other short video platforms such as Douyin, Alipay's inherent financial genes have become an advantage in the development of financial content on the site. It is also beneficial for financial bloggers to guide users to purchase financial products directly on Alipay, avoiding traffic restrictions on other platforms.

At the same time, the homepage of the Alipay financial blogger not only displays common content from various platforms such as dynamics and live broadcasts, but also includes real-time information, making the blogger's actual fund holdings on Alipay public, which improves user trust. For most ordinary users, financial content may have a threshold and is not very popular. Life-related content that users are more likely to accept also occupies a large proportion on Alipay.

In July last year, Alipay launched the MCN content incentive plan, requiring MCNs to introduce more blogger creators of three types: finance, people's livelihood, and leisure. At the same time, for MCNs that introduce more than 30 bloggers, Alipay also requires that the number of accounts of these three types of blogger creators should not be less than 40% of the total.

Although Alipay is actively recruiting, according to relevant media reports, most of the lifestyle accounts on Alipay choose to publish content through agency operations, and the focus is still on platforms with stronger content attributes such as Douyin, Kuaishou, and Xiaohongshu. At the same time, Alipay sometimes automatically grabs content according to the agreement, and even does not require MCN to manually distribute it.

Alipay Lifestyle is not only eager for short video content, but also has made efforts in live broadcasting. During the May Day holiday, Yiyuguancha noticed that there were many Alipay live broadcast rooms selling tickets for popular city attractions. Clicking the blue car in the lower right corner can directly jump to the corresponding merchant's mini program.

This "life account + mini program" approach gives merchants the opportunity to establish a business operation platform similar to Tmall, while also providing merchants with greater freedom and more official stores. By encouraging brand merchants to broadcast themselves, Alipay bets on local life content and reaches more online users. As an important payment tool for merchants, Alipay's advantage is that it can use offline payment scenarios to link online marketing activities.

According to official data, during the National Day last year, Pop Mart planned a marketing campaign in conjunction with Alipay's promotion, connecting online mini-programs and offline stores. Ultimately, at a cost of 10,000 yuan, it achieved a transaction volume of nearly 50 million in 15 days and brought in 100,000 new brand users. For brand merchants, participating in the marketing activities officially launched by Alipay is an effective traffic amplifier, and the fans attracted are relatively more accurate.

Pop Mart x Alipay Marketing Activities

However, as short video platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou, and even the grass-planting community Xiaohongshu, have successively entered the battlefield of local life, it has become more difficult for Alipay to gain a foothold in the market.

On the one hand, Alipay's content ecosystem started late and has not yet built a stable content traffic pool. On the other hand, platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou have already launched exclusive payment tools and are not completely dependent on Alipay, so they have a more stable moat.

3. Alipay can’t have everything

After all, the content problem of Alipay is actually the problem of Taobao and even the entire Alibaba system. As the two major money-making machines of Alibaba, Alipay and Taobao have similar content planning. For example, they put their respective content channels "Life" and "Shopping" in the middle of the tab bar, and both expect to monetize the most direct content types.

A Taobao merchant told Yiyuguancha that the official requirement for the type of short videos posted by merchants on Guanguang is that they can promote their own products. For drama-themed and vlog-themed videos that are popular on other platforms, they are rarely given traffic exposure support. "Taobao clerks feel that these contents are far from monetization and it is difficult to have a direct conversion. But from our merchant's point of view, it is actually difficult to devote energy to creating content that is specifically suitable for Taobao conversion." This is also reflected on Alipay.

Taobao screenshot

For merchants and even consumers, Alipay has a long way to go in re-cultivating the user mindset and allowing users to form new consumption habits. These are difficult to fully achieve only by enriching the content on the site through Alipay . The key lies in how to let merchants and consumers understand the business opportunities of Alipay so as to encourage them to increase their investment.

However, from the perspective of Alipay’s product planning, “wanting everything” may turn into “not being able to do anything well”, which is also a problem that every app will encounter in the process of expanding its boundaries and becoming a super app. For example, when some young users find that the app functions are becoming more and more complex, they will switch to adult mode to avoid the serial bombardment of information.

In the Internet product end where verticalization and segmentation are becoming extreme, users do not necessarily want to accept all push information from apps. If these two contradictory points cannot be resolved, Alipay’s dream of becoming a super app may be reversed halfway.

Author: Thick Code

Source: WeChat public account "Yiyu Observation"