It’s 2023 now. Does Alipay still have a chance to do live streaming?

In the past few years when the live broadcast industry has attracted much attention, the market has shifted from incremental to stock, and merchants are looking for new traffic growth and exploring new opportunities. Recently, Alipay live broadcast has begun to be discussed. What is the difference between Alipay live broadcast and live broadcast on other platforms? Is there still a chance? Who has seized this opportunity?

The Internet world is full of challenges, but also contains new vitality.

The same is true for the live streaming industry, which has been the focus of attention in recent years. When people discuss that the bonus period of live streaming has passed and the market has shifted from incremental to stock, there are always people who can find new traffic pools and new opportunities.

Recently, many businesses in the live broadcast industry have suddenly been discussing Alipay live broadcasting. The trigger was the event of Alipay upgrading its Life Account in July last year.

Many people are also skeptical about Alipay's move into live streaming. Is there still a chance for it to start working on live streaming so late? How does Alipay live streaming work, and how is it different from other platforms?

First of all, from the perspective of industry space, in recent years, the live broadcast industry has developed rapidly and competition has become increasingly fierce, making it more difficult for businesses to break through on live broadcast platforms. The first comers eat meat, and the latecomers drink soup, which is the current situation of some platforms.

Some merchants confessed to Lianjie Insight that they are now facing the dilemma of rising operating costs and declining profits on multiple platforms, and they are eager for new scenarios and new sources of traffic.

Where there is demand, there is opportunity. Merchants are looking forward to entering a new live broadcast platform to enjoy the dividends, and super apps with huge numbers of users may also have the opportunity to make a name for themselves in the live broadcast industry.

No. 1 Workplace once tried to do recruitment live broadcasts on Alipay at a very low cost, and achieved a maximum of 20 million views for a single live broadcast.

No. 1 Workplace is lucky. As one of the few Alipay platforms in China with over 700 million monthly active users, the commercial value of most of its traffic has not yet been fully developed.

The results of the early pathfinders also pushed Alipay to make a decision to enter the live broadcast market. At the beginning of this year, the number of users watching live broadcasts on Alipay's Wufuzi venue life channel approached 1.4 billion.

However, judging from the current situation, Alipay's live streaming is still in its early exploratory stage. It remains to be seen who can truly seize the early dividends and grab a piece of the pie.

1. In the second half of the live streaming industry, both merchants and platforms are changing

In the past three years, "live streaming" has been the hottest keyword in the Internet industry, without a doubt.

As the live streaming industry develops, merchants and platforms are also changing. The most direct reaction in the live streaming e-commerce field is that merchants have shifted from fighting on a single platform to a global layout to achieve higher-scale business growth. The message behind this is that the war in the live streaming industry has shifted from the first half of the battle for traffic to the second half of the battle for the ecosystem.

The peak of traffic on a single platform has forced businesses to explore new paths. As a result, soft power such as focusing on repeat purchases, customer unit price, and the combination of public and private domains has become the new survival rule for businesses in the second half of the live broadcast industry.

After that, a series of actions were taken by the public, including Kuaishou reopening Taobao external links and Douyin e-commerce strengthening its layout of shelf-type e-commerce.

A senior e-commerce practitioner told Lianjie Insight that in his opinion, traffic-based platforms need to complete the funnel process from traffic to transactions when doing e-commerce. For new brands that are rooted in a single channel or have limited budgets, the input-output ratio is unstable and not cost-effective.

At the same time, it is becoming increasingly difficult to break through on the live streaming platform. Fan Lei, new media director of Autohome, mentioned that there are not many opportunities left for already mature platforms. Even if the products are good and merchants will operate them, the costs will be very high and there will be a lot of involution.

Therefore, operating on multiple platforms has become an inevitable choice. This is not an easy task, but merchants will not give up exploring.

Competition in the live broadcast industry is becoming increasingly fierce and involutionary, but the industry's development prospects are still promising. According to iMedia Research data, the user scale has exceeded 600 million in 2021, and the number of users has continued to rise in the following years, which means that the development of the live broadcast industry continues to increase its attractiveness to users and businesses.

Whether it is the merchants’ desire for new platforms and new traffic, or the prospects of the live broadcast industry, they all point in the same direction - there is still an opportunity to focus on live broadcasting in 2023.

It is not difficult to understand why Alipay wants to join the game.

When Lianxian Insight sorted out the history of Alipay's opening up of live streaming capabilities, it was found that Alipay's live streaming started later than Douyin, Kuaishou, and Video Account, but it was not a flood-like start - first in 2020, Alipay Life Account connected with Taobao Live, and later with the upgrading of the status of Life Account and its own business model, in 2022, Life Account and Alipay Mini Program were connected, and at the same time, its own live streaming capabilities were launched, and merchants can directly sell goods on the "Life Account" live.

Alipay Life Live Channel

Later, Alipay launched a function that supports merchants to configure live broadcast cards on the brand direct link. Users can search for the merchant name on Alipay and see the entrance to the live broadcast room directly in the search results. It helps merchants retain users with more diverse gameplay.

Not long ago, Alipay tested supporting the display of merchant live broadcast information on the homepage, and users can click to enter the merchant live broadcast through the homepage.

It can be said that Alipay has always been active in live streaming. Previously, it was just small steps to explore, but the actions have accelerated in the past two years. This also shows that the live streaming business is becoming more and more important within Alipay.

However, facing strong competitors, it is not easy for Alipay to become the "new pole" of the industry. The next step is to test the commercial services of Alipay Live and the improvement of key infrastructure.

2. Alipay opened its live streaming capability 8 months ago. Who has seized the opportunity?

In recent years, after Alipay opened up many product capabilities under its ecosystem to merchants, some mature brands that dominate the market have used digital transformation to open up growth space, and new and emerging merchants have also seized the opportunity to overtake others.

In the new track of live streaming, merchants are also "co-creating" with Alipay to explore more models and ways of playing.

What is still fresh in the memory of No. 1 Workplace CEO Rong Haixu is that when the number of applicants attracted by live streaming gradually increased, he communicated with Alipay to develop the capability of online interviews, so that job seekers can communicate directly with recruiters without jumping to other terminals, thus reducing the cost of application.

Screenshot of the No.1 Workplace Alipay applet interface

This also made Rong Haixu sigh: "The actual business needs of merchants determine what the platform opens and how to open it. Regardless of the size of the merchant, as long as there is a demand, they can boldly tell the platform to help develop and open relevant capabilities. This is the early opportunity and advantage of the new platform."

At the same time, No. 1 Workplace has also introduced strong trust and security tools such as Sesame Credit during the live broadcast, solving the trust issue between employers and applicants with almost a low threshold.

Like most businesses, No. 1 Workplace also needs an open platform for interconnecting public and private domain traffic to help it accelerate its entry into the deep waters of digitalization.

During this year's Spring Festival, Alipay opened the "Wufu" IP to merchants for the first time. No. 1 Workplace directly uses the Wufu card as a connection point, allowing users to connect to merchants from No. 1 Workplace's live broadcast room to receive the blessing card to increase exposure and interaction. In addition, it has built up its operational foundation on Alipay, such as public domain traffic diversion for mini programs and professional anchor content output. It attracts users from content marketing and event marketing in the front link to "bring goods" in the live broadcast room in the back link, allowing recruiters and job seekers to form a complete closed loop of communication.

In the end, the live broadcast generated 165 private groups of 500 people each, and No. 1 Workplace completed its first counterattack and broke out of the circle in the Alipay live broadcast room.

Image source: No. 1 workplace live broadcast room

In addition to merchant demand, service providers are another positive driving force behind Alipay's live streaming. Service providers are absolutely key players in the live streaming industry, but the days when they could achieve high growth rates based on promotion and access services are a thing of the past. They want to maintain their business growth rate, and they can only provide in-depth services to merchants on mature live streaming platforms, and they are becoming more and more inward-looking. Service providers also hope that new traffic depressions will emerge.

Since last year, Alipay has increasingly signaled its support for the development of the third-party service market, vigorously introducing service providers and co-creating solutions with them. Lianxian Insight learned that as early as March 2021, Alipay began to recruit MCN agencies and provide content subsidies. This year, subsidies for high-quality talents and MCN agencies are still continuing. For service providers, this is a new opportunity to make money.

Overall, with the integration of Alipay's public and private domains and the evolution of its live streaming service capabilities, Alipay's future imagination for merchants and related service providers is becoming increasingly clear.

3. Can Alipay accelerate its performance?

The linkage between public and private domains and global operations are being carried out in full swing in businesses. If a platform's live broadcasting capabilities have both traffic dividends and sufficient public and private domain operation scenarios, what chemical reaction will occur?

Lianxun Insight observed that when doing live broadcasts on the Alipay mini program, if the merchant's life account and other self-operated channels are doing well and have high traffic and conversion rates, then such high-quality merchants' live broadcast rooms will also receive incentives from Alipay. This is different from other platforms that rely purely on content quality and buying volume.

Rong Haixu felt deeply about this.

When he was researching before the company was established, he found that when there was not enough money, manpower, and resources, the only thing that small and medium-sized enterprises could do was to compete on speed. And Alipay's live broadcast market was almost like "a piece of pure land" for "No. 1 Workplace", "very similar to the early Taobao."

Compared with other traffic platforms, Alipay was the first to start the process of linking the public and private domains. It is undeniable that Alipay was born out of Alibaba, so it was the first to be strong in operating public domain traffic. Until now, Alipay's public domain scenarios have been divided very finely. In addition to the interest algorithm, a general recommendation model currently adopted by most platforms, it has also designed many subdivided public domain service scenarios to help merchants accurately obtain the required public domain traffic.

However, since the launch of the mini program in 2018, Alipay has made up for the private domain traffic and started to divert the public domain to the private domain. However, Alipay has always left a strong impression on the outside world as a payment tool, which has led to the outside world ignoring the traffic value of this platform.

Now that Alipay is in the second half of live streaming, if it wants to break through and attract more merchants and consumers, it must do a good job of linking the public and private domains and meet the needs of merchants.

In fact, compared with platforms that explored commercialization earlier, such as TikTok and WeChat, Alipay still has a large amount of commercial traffic that can be released. Therefore, for merchants who use Alipay for live broadcasts, they are closer to money and traffic conversion and have lower costs.

Yunchongbao sold out 50,000 digital collections in the live broadcast room, and No. 1 Workplace became the first merchant lifestyle account on Alipay with over 10 million viewers... Many merchants have benefited from this round of methodology evolution.

Of course, whether the "latecomer" Alipay can accelerate in the second half of the live broadcast also depends on whether merchants will rush into the market.

Rong Haixu's observation is that the number of Alipay live streaming merchants targeting job seekers has expanded from just one at the beginning to seven in just one month.

Risks and opportunities coexist. Alipay's live streaming business faces more challenges in that it needs to evolve itself.

Alipay's live streaming capabilities have only reached the first stage, and it is taking a different path from other traffic platforms. It is very important to find an accurate evolutionary path for itself, such as how to help merchants achieve better results, how to increase the usage time of users in the live streaming room, and how to cultivate original phenomenal top talents.

In addition, before the platform makes money, Alipay may need to let creators, merchants, and live-streaming hosts make money first, so as to ensure the continued stable development of the business.

Alipay live streaming is still in its growth stage, but many businesses have already started to pay attention to it. Fan Lei reminded those businesses who want to try Alipay, "New platforms often have some incremental space. When it appears, you need to study how to obtain user conversion from it, which is very important. You cannot directly copy the operating methods of other platforms. You need to design your product details and service content according to the user characteristics of the new platform to achieve an efficient conversion. "

It can be said that this year is a year of greater "involution" in the live streaming industry, and it is also a year in which merchants are eager to seek new traffic. There is demand and opportunity. It depends on whether Alipay can do this "difficult but right thing" well.

Author: Zhou Yifei; Editor: Midnight

Source public account: Lianxian Insight (ID: lxinsight), a gathering place for innovators in industrial upgrading.