The "Creator Profit Plan" of Video Account has been officially launched. Is this the opportunity for creators?

Introduction: As a rising star in the short video era, how does WeChat Video Account innovate its relationship with creators? The author will give the answer by introducing the creator profit sharing plan. How will video creators deal with the dual choices of "opportunities" and "challenges"? This article will introduce it to you.

Recently, the internal beta test of the "Creator Profit Plan" of Video Account was launched.

Creators can set their original videos as paid content and insert advertisements in the comment section. These advertisements are similar to the patch ads in public account articles and will not affect the user's normal viewing experience.

Since the launch of Video Account, we have been exploring ways for creators to monetize . Now the threshold for monetization has been further lowered, bringing new dividends to creators.

With the continuous improvement and growth of video accounts in commercialization, for enterprises or individual creators, video accounts have gradually changed from an "optional option" to a "must-have option".

01 How to join the "Creative Profit-sharing Plan"?

The creative profit-sharing plan was proposed at the 2023 WeChat Open Class PRO·WeChat Appointment on March 28, but I didn’t expect it to be launched so quickly.

The creative sharing plan is still in the internal testing stage. The platform will invite creators who meet the conditions in batches. The conditions are as follows:

• The number of effective followers (number of fans) is 100 or above;
• Comply with content standards;
• High-quality original author.

Specific application steps: "Video Account Creator Center" - "Creator Services" - "Creator Profit Plan" - "Apply to Join"

When a creator publishes a video and turns on the original declaration, there will be an opportunity to display ads to users below the comment section of the video without the creator having to take any additional action.

Regarding advertising revenue, Video Account has not yet published detailed regulations. It only states that it is related to many factors such as video quality, video playback, number of submissions, and advertising industry selection.

In terms of settlement method, the income for the first half of the month will be settled on the 1st of the following month, and the income for the second half of the month will be settled on the 15th of the following month. The income can be directly withdrawn to the personal WeChat wallet.

The launch of the creative profit-sharing plan also means that in addition to video content platforms such as Zhihu and Xigua Video, the vast majority of content creators now have another stable monetization channel.

02 Encourage more creators to join the video account

In the past two years, the short video content market has been severely "involuted", the competition for traffic has intensified, and the threshold for monetization has been raised, making it difficult for small and medium-sized content creators to survive.

The purpose of the continuous introduction of monetization policies by Video Account is to attract more creators to join. In the WeChat Open Class, the official also mentioned that the next goal of Video Account is to allow creators to have long-term, healthy and stable income.

The current monetization system for video account creators has been initially formed, not only for new creators. Video accounts provide corresponding monetization tools and channels for creators at different stages.

For example:

• For new creators, the official website provides three commercial capabilities, including product showcase, live streaming, and live streaming rewards.
• In the 100-fans stage, two new monetization channels were added: video monetization tasks and the newly released creative profit-sharing plan;
• In the 1,000-fan stage, a new feature for sharing video products was added;
• At the 10,000-fan stage, authors can join the mutual selection platform;
• …

It can be seen that Video Account is using a tiered operation approach to launch monetization models that are more suitable and beneficial to creators at different stages in order to increase their actual revenue.

Especially at this moment, Video Account, as Tencent’s “hope of the whole village”, is destined to receive more resources and traffic.

As the ecological system continues to improve and develop, creators will no longer have to worry about having no way to monetize. As long as they create high-quality content, monetization opportunities will continue to emerge.

03 It is both an opportunity and a challenge for creators

The direct reason why Video Accounts can continuously introduce favorable policies for creators is that brands are increasing their budget investment in Video Accounts and user and content data are continuously improving.

According to the latest data, in the three years since the launch of Video Account, the number of active authors has doubled, the total consumption time has increased three times, exceeding WeChat Moments, and the number of authors with more than 10,000 fans has increased fourfold.

The number of daily active creators and the average daily video upload volume of Video Account in 2022 increased by more than 100% year-on-year. The number of videos with more than 100,000 likes doubled that of the same period last year, and more and more creators are also reaping their own good results on Video Account.

Not only that, relying on the traffic recommendation mechanism built on WeChat social relationships, after the video account introduced the recommendation algorithm, the official team disclosed data that the algorithm-based recommended playback volume increased by 400%.

The improvement in platform traffic shows creators the development space for video accounts.

In addition, the creator profit-sharing plan currently available is only open to personal accounts, not corporate accounts or media accounts, and the fan requirement is only 100, which is an excellent opportunity for small and medium-sized creators.

On the other hand, we should not be too optimistic. Judging from the current market response to the incentive policy for short video content, the income of small fan authors is relatively low.

In addition, the monetization ability of video accounts still needs to be strengthened, which also puts tremendous pressure on advertisers . As the advertising effect of video accounts may be further discounted, advertisers may begin to re-evaluate the effect of their advertising on video accounts, which is a very serious problem for video accounts.

Compared with other platforms that have already launched original profit-sharing plans, Video Account still has a long way to go in terms of monetization for creators.

Final Thoughts

As a rising star in the short video platform, Video Account is quietly changing the landscape of the short video industry. As WeChat continues to increase its investment in Video Account, there are more and more competitors, and the cost of "mining" this traffic depression will become higher and higher.

The launch of the "Creation Profit Plan" still provides low-cost monetization benefits for small and medium-sized creators. We will have to wait and see how it will develop in the future.

Author: Yan Tao

Source: WeChat public account "Yan Tao San Shou"