What are the trends and opportunities for video accounts in 2023?

At the 2023 WeChat Open Class, the Video Account team stated that the "Polaris Project" has been fully upgraded. High-quality creators who meet the requirements can receive up to one million traffic support, and special incentive plans have been launched for key vertical categories such as music, comedy, games, and drama. The author of the following article explains the trends and opportunities of Video Account in 2023.

This Spring Festival, China Media Group and Video Account cooperated for the second time to "watch the Spring Festival Gala in vertical screen". More than 190 million users watched the CCTV Spring Festival Gala in the Video Account live broadcast room , and the influence of Video Account has become increasingly prominent.

The past year was also a year of explosive growth for the video account. Ma Huateng even called the video account "the hope of the entire company."

Not only did it update dozens of features in a year and complete rapid iterations, it also created many phenomenal live broadcast events such as the Spring Festival Gala, the Winter Olympics, and concerts, becoming a rising star in the short video platform.

At the WeChat Open Class at the beginning of the year, the achievements of Video Account in the past year were given:

• In 2022, the number of original content views on video accounts increased by 350% year-on-year, and the scale of live broadcast viewing increased by 300%;
• In 2022, live streaming sales increased by more than 8 times year-on-year;
• In 2022, the total user usage time has exceeded 80% of the total user usage time of WeChat Moments;
• …

Next, based on the content of the open course, let’s talk about the trends and opportunities of video accounts in 2023.

1. Increase support for creators

In 2022, Video Account will begin to provide full life cycle service capabilities for creators within the ecosystem, with upgrades to traffic incentives and honor incentives , including upgrades to the Polaris Plan and the MCN recruitment plan.

In the past year, Video Account has provided billions of traffic through the "Polaris Project" to support and incubate tens of thousands of outstanding creators.

At the 2023 WeChat Open Class, the Video Account team stated that the "Polaris Project" has been fully upgraded. High-quality creators who meet the requirements can receive up to one million traffic support , and special incentive plans have been launched for key vertical categories such as music, comedy, games, and drama.

In the future, the service capabilities for video account authors throughout their life cycle will be further upgraded, mainly reflected in the comprehensive upgrade of author service tools, including exclusive growth tasks, heating tools, violation query tools, Gold Star Awards, etc.

2. Brand Merchant Incentive Plan will be released

In 2022, more and more merchants and enterprises have chosen to settle in Video Accounts and achieved growth in users and performance.

In particular, the launch of video store has provided merchants with more convenient and efficient business tools. The video store team said that the current sales from video store account for more than 90% . Among them, the top three consumption categories are clothing, food and beauty.

At this year's WeChat Open Class, the Video Account team stated that in order to better support the operations of brand merchants, Video Account will launch a brand merchant incentive plan in the near future.

For brand merchants that settle in video account stores, various rights and interests including cold start of traffic, brand logos, exclusive services, etc. are provided to help brand merchants operate.

3. Live streaming will invest 5 billion in traffic incentives

After a year of continuous breakthroughs, video account live broadcasts have been integrated into all aspects of users' social life. In 2022, the scale of video account broadcasts increased by 300%, the viewing time increased by 156%, the high-quality broadcasts increased by 614%, and the broadcast time increased by 83%.

In 2022, Video Account invested 4 billion operating traffic in live streaming, the number of income-generating anchors increased by 101%, and the total income of anchors increased by 447%.

It is expected that 5 billion traffic will be invested in 2023 to continuously help new anchors to start broadcasting and get traffic; focus on supporting anchors who can keep users watching, improve the anchor growth system, launch operational support plans in different fields , so that anchors can grow; improve monetization tools and incentive policies so that anchors can have income.

4. Live broadcast conversion focuses on the linkage between public and private domains

In 2022, the overall scale of video live streaming sales continued to maintain rapid growth, with sales increasing more than 8 times year-on-year compared to 2021. The platform's public domain purchase conversion rate increased by more than 100%, and the average customer price exceeded 200 yuan.

In the past two years, Video Account has been continuously opening up various channel entrances within the WeChat ecosystem, encouraging businesses to operate their own private traffic pools.

This year's WeChat Open Class once again emphasized the improvement of public domain purchasing power. It can be seen that the linkage between public and private domains and the sedimentation and conversion of private domains will be one of the main themes of video accounts in the future, which can effectively help businesses to maintain stable income operations.

In the future, Video Account will continue to improve live broadcast related functions, launch live broadcast streaming, heating and other tools, and provide merchants with more public domain traffic.

5. Further lower the threshold for monetization and increase monetization channels

In 2022, the Video Account team has created a more comprehensive, more mature monetization method for authors with different numbers of fans, covering more authors:

• 0-100 fans, open to live broadcast rewards and live broadcast sales rights;
• 100-1000 followers can enable short video task permissions;
• 1,000-10,000 fans can enable product sharing permissions;
• 10,000+ fans can enable mutual advertising permissions.

Creators can also realize monetization through content payment, live streaming, official tasks, seeding monetization, etc. In the future, these monetization channels will become more and more abundant and complete.

6. Final Thoughts

Today, Video Account has surpassed Douyin in terms of monthly active users. It is expected that in the next few years, Video Account will continue to improve the infrastructure and ecology of live broadcasting, which will greatly change the current industry landscape of live broadcasting e-commerce.

Author: Yan Tao Sanshou

Source: WeChat public account "Yan Tao Sanshou (ID: yantao-219)"