Alipay offers subsidies of over 10,000 yuan to recruit talents. Is it “taking advantage of traffic” or “new opportunity”?

Since 2022, the Alipay platform has started to upgrade its Life Account, and has upgraded from the original single text and picture messages to short videos, live broadcasts, text and pictures and other content forms. In addition to functional adjustments, Alipay has also begun to introduce MCN agencies and high-quality talents. Can Alipay bring new opportunities to agencies and talents? Let's take a look.

Every platform now wants to get a piece of the pie in the live short video field?

You can learn about financial management and choose funds through live broadcasts, watch the NBA, buy things, and find a job... You probably can't imagine that all of the above content appears in Alipay.

As early as March 2021, Alipay began to recruit MCN agencies and provide content subsidies. Today, Xinbochang has learned that Alipay is still continuing to introduce MCN agencies and high-quality talents, and will focus on talents with more than one million fans, providing exclusive subsidies, and a single account can get a maximum subsidy of more than 10,000 yuan per month.

Why would a payment software do live streaming and short videos instead of just focusing on payment? For industry practitioners, is Alipay just a channel to "earn subsidies" or is it worth investing in?

1. What is the content of consumption on Alipay?

"Tell me something. You are in Alipay now. What were you doing here just now?"

In the short video comment section of the Alipay Blue V account "免丫租賃", such a comment received 180 likes and attracted many replies from netizens: get energy, feed chickens, return bicycles, check funds, sign in, pay electricity bills... Some people even said: "I forgot."

If you pay a little attention, you will find that there are many comments like this one expressing confusion about how people are immersed in the short video content on Alipay, and these comments will resonate with readers.

At present, in addition to the various tasks and activities mentioned in the above comments that can enter the short video page of Alipay, the "Life" entrance in the center of the TAB bar at the bottom of the Alipay homepage also provides a first-level traffic entrance for Alipay's short videos.

After entering from here, some users can also see the prominent "NBA" Tab label, which aggregates short video content of NBA events and a communication and discussion area on the page.

In addition to being able to browse various videos and the latest reports of NBA games on Alipay, there is also a "Live Broadcast" entrance in the TAB bar at the top of the life page. After clicking to enter, there is a single column of vertical screen live broadcast recommendations.

Among these recommended contents, some show "Click to watch the live broadcast replay" and some show "Click to enter the live broadcast room". The live broadcast content covers: sports events, financial funds, merchants bringing goods, scenic spots, local life services, and corporate recruitment.

In these live broadcast rooms, users can click on the "Blue Car" icon below to complete shopping, purchase funds, submit resumes, and jump to the brand's Alipay mini program.

At the same time, there is a "gift" icon in the live broadcast room. Users can use Alipay points to redeem corresponding gifts to send gifts to the live broadcast room to increase the popularity of the live broadcast room or increase their intimacy with the anchor.

According to Xinbochang’s observation, financial funds are quite popular in the current live broadcasts on Alipay, with multiple live broadcast rooms attracting more than 100,000 or even 200,000 viewers.

In July last year, Alipay Life Account had just completed the upgrade from the original single text and picture messages to short videos, live broadcasts, pictures and texts and other content forms. At the same time, the "Alipay Account Introduction Plan" was circulated in the industry, and the subsidies given became the focus of MCN.

At that time, after experiencing and observing the new broadcast site, it was found that the interactive data of short video content was average. There were only 17 live broadcast accounts displayed on the live broadcast page, and the live broadcast content was also filled with a lot of recorded content.

It is not difficult to see that in just the past six months, the content ecology of Alipay has changed.

In addition to changes in content, the duration of use of Alipay has also changed. According to QuestMobile data, during the Spring Festival this year, the average daily usage time of Alipay users was 7.8 minutes. Previously, this payment tool, which has more than 300 million daily active users, had users staying on it for no more than 5 minutes.

2. Use content to attract 300 million daily active users

In 2016, Alipay launched “Word of Mouth”, the predecessor of Life Account. Its main purpose at the time was to provide merchants with a platform for customer acquisition and publicity.

At the end of 2021, "Kubei" announced its upgrade to Life Account. In July 2022, the person in charge of the platform publicly introduced the newly upgraded Life Account for the first time, and upgraded from the original single text and picture messages to short videos, live broadcasts, pictures and texts and other content forms, and aggregated them in the form of information flow display in the "Life" channel at the center of the Alipay App homepage.

In addition to functional adjustments, Alipay has also begun to introduce MCN agencies and high-quality talents to enrich the platform content.

In March 2021, Alipay began recruiting MCN agencies and influencers in the fields of life and travel, and set up generous traffic support and cash rewards. However, a person from an MCN agency who joined the game complained: "It's very difficult to find an entrance."

In July 2022, the platform launched the "Alipay Account Introduction Plan". The content creation directions of the MCNs recruited by this plan are mainly divided into three categories: smart living, entry-level financial management, and store visits. In addition, there are positive energy content, including public welfare, domestic products, rural life and other sub-categories.

While expanding the recruitment types, the incentive policy also cut traffic support and increased cash subsidies.

As long as an MCN organization introduces influencers with at least 100,000 fans on Douyin or Kuaishou, or at least 10,000 fans on Xiaohongshu, Zhihu, or Bilibili, and publishes at least 13 posts in the first week of their entry, and at least 3 posts per week thereafter, they can receive a weekly activation reward of 300 yuan. Among them, the maximum incentive amount for a single MCN to introduce 100 accounts in a single month is 100,000 yuan.

However, according to the MCN agencies that entered the market at that time, it was not easy to get subsidies.

Recently, Xinbochang discovered that an institution claiming to be an Alipay service provider has once again released a subsidy policy to recruit high-quality MCNs and talents.

However, the policy shows that Alipay currently has four incentive policies, among which the "account incentive policy" has been suspended, and the rewards for active accounts with thousands or tens of thousands of followers, as well as the rewards for increasing followers within Alipay, have been cancelled.

In addition, in the "MCN Active Incentive Policy", threshold requirements have been added, requiring MCN to complete active account assessments, that is, to publish more than 3 pieces of content per week, of which two must be met: UV playback during the week ≥ 100, and average stay time per person ≥ 20s.

In the "Lifestyle Policy", only rewards are retained for accounts with more than 1 million followers. The reward requires the account to first release two videos on the Alipay platform every month, which can be released to other platforms within 24 hours.

From the adjusted policies, we can see that the support provided by Alipay for accounts is being tightened, and is slowly shifting towards supporting high-quality talents and original exclusive content of a certain size.

Xinbochang consulted an industry insider from an MCN agency about the policy, and his reaction was not strong: "Alipay has always been there, but it didn't seem that difficult before, so I didn't pay much attention to it."

He also said that currently all platforms are very cautious about subsidy policies. This is mainly because the subsidy trend has been going on for so many years, and there has been repeated bargaining between platforms and institutions: platforms are afraid of being "fleeced" and losing money, while institutions value whether the money is easy to get and the platform's traffic and development space.

As a national payment tool, Alipay has more than 300 million daily active users. However, its users stay very short. Even after Alipay started to create content, data compiled by relevant statistics show that users stay for no more than 10 minutes.

Therefore, the purpose of Alipay in creating content is very simple: to increase user time and obtain more traffic so as to find more monetization attempts.

As for institutions, since it is not easy to earn subsidies from Alipay, if they enter the market, they have to consider subsequent development.

Based on the situation on the Life Account site observed by Xinbochang, Alipay is already planning the commercialization of short videos and live broadcasts.

3. Explore the commercialization of live short videos

Alipay also recently released a set of data: During the "Collect Five Blessings" event during the 2023 Spring Festival, the total number of live viewers for the life channel reached 1.4 billion, with an average of 360 live broadcasts per day.

Among them, the number of views for a single live broadcast of the job-hunting platform "No. 1 Workplace" exceeded 20 million; another pet life platform called Yunchongbao is also not well-known, but it attracted 52 million views for a single broadcast.

"With such a huge amount of traffic, why can't Alipay sell goods? It's just that no one knows how to sell them." Zhilang, co-founder of the emerging consumer brand Fanzizai, said this in a live broadcast.

Earlier, on November 24, 2016, the platform launched a picture and text community with a reward function, "Circles", laying out the stranger social networking. Within 48 hours of the product's launch, more than 10 million people browsed the pictures and texts in its "Campus Diary" and "White-collar Diary" circles respectively.

According to Zhilang, there is an active gift customization company in Hangzhou, whose main business is customized printing of T-shirts, cups and other gifts. The company's brand, Yinge, is a brand that has emerged purely by relying on Alipay traffic.

They achieved a scale of several hundred million in less than three years through traffic entrances such as membership benefits and membership discounts on Alipay.

It was also because of the Yin Ge case that Fanzizai found a partner with Bangdao, a leading service provider of Alipay. Four months later, the monthly active users of its mini program reached over 800,000, and the monthly repurchase rate of members reached 50%, with almost no investment.

The existence of successful commercialization cases also provides Alipay Life Account with more opportunities. Merchants and institutions can imitate the successful strategies of these cases and make new attempts and efforts.

It is still unknown whether Alipay can bring new opportunities to institutions and talents.

However, when all platforms are evolving towards the direction of "super apps" that have tool functions and take into account content consumption and social life, there is no necessary boundary between content platforms and tool platforms. Just like Douyin does food delivery and online supermarkets, and Meituan, which does group buying and food delivery, also wants to do live broadcasts and short videos.

The layout of more and more platforms will gradually expand the cake of live short videos. Institutional experts may also be able to take a new path outside of traditional platforms.

Author: Aligu

Source: New Broadcasting Station (ID: New_bc)