Is 2023 finally the real "Year of Video Account"?

In recent days, the popularity of WeChat video accounts has remained high. Can the C-position video accounts release new vitality in 2023? As the new year of video accounts is coming, what actions should operators take? In this article, the author analyzes the content ecology, social strategies, user preferences, etc. of WeChat video accounts, and makes a detailed explanation of the development of video accounts in the new year. It is recommended for all operators to read.

If the past three years of the Internet world have ushered in the "Big Year of Bilibili" and "Big Year of Xiaohongshu", then 2023 may be the year of the real "Big Year of Video Account". The confidence of such a prediction undoubtedly comes from the determination of Ma Huateng and Tencent. Whether it is the financial report of each quarter in 2022 or Ma Huateng's internal speech at the end of the year, Video Account was directly established as the "hope of the whole factory", and the slogan of increasing investment and accelerating commercialization has made the market's expectations for it infinitely full.

However, when the outside world was full of curiosity about how the video account would make "drastic changes" next, the 2023 WeChat Open Class was quietly held.

WeChat Open Class 2023

The reason for the low profile is that the data is not amazing. "The total time spent by video account users has exceeded 80% of the total time spent by WeChat Moments users" was revealed long ago; "The number of original content broadcasts increased by 350% year-on-year, and the sales of live streaming products increased by more than 8 times year-on-year" These figures seem explosive, but they do not give absolute numbers. In the world of the Internet, which established application did not grow like this in the first few years?

QuestMobile data shows that in June last year, the monthly active users of Video Account had reached 813 million, far exceeding the 680 million of Douyin, making it the short video platform with the most users. In the second quarter of last year, the total user time of Video Account also exceeded 80% of that of WeChat Moments.

There is no doubt that the video account product has now been established. In terms of its commercialization, the anxious Tencent has actually started working on both advertising and e-commerce.

Since the video account was connected to information flow advertising in July last year, Tencent's overall advertising revenue has been significantly boosted, and the year-on-year decline has been greatly narrowed from 18% in the second quarter to 5%. In the fourth quarter of last year, the video account's information flow advertising access reached 1.05 billion yuan in revenue in just two quarters, far exceeding the five quarters of Moments.

Tencent Financial Report

Last month, Ma Huateng also guided the direction of the integration of Video Account and e-commerce: "For e-commerce transactions, Tencent still has to play the role of assistant and connector. How to complete the e-commerce closed loop without getting involved in e-commerce, and hope to be closer to transactions." Before Boss Ma issued the mobilization order, in fact, small and medium-sized businesses had been struggling in Video Account for a long time, and were tortured by the slow operation and traffic investment metaphysics of Video Account.

But the elegant Zhang Xiaolong seems unwilling to follow the footsteps of TikTok. He may still be holding back some big moves, after all, the "Costco + Disney" strategy has been fully verified by Pinduoduo in the WeChat system.

01 People call for video e-commerce

After the e-commerce industry experienced the coldest 618 and Double 11 last year, no one is not looking forward to new channels. The video account with the most monthly active users is the most popular, after all, live streaming is still hot during Double 11.

However, Zhang Xiaolong, who has been obsessed with concerts for the past year, still has not created a benchmark for bringing goods like Dongfangzhenxuan, and fans continue to fall into a cycle of habitual disappointment with video accounts. Video accounts are getting better and better, but with a "light operation and heavy product" approach, it will adopt a small-step-fast-moving model, and will not take off instantly as everyone expects.

"2022 WeChat Video Account Ecological Development Research Report"

In terms of e-commerce, Ma Huateng still said that he would “not leave the game”, which means that if Video Account already has information flow and capital flow support, it is highly unlikely to do logistics. Even so, Video Account’s after-sales and advertising capabilities still need to make up for shortcomings.

Compared with content production, e-commerce naturally faces greater after-sales pressure. In the past, WeChat would hand over the labor-intensive dirty and tiring work to service providers such as Youzan. The launch of the video store reflects Ma Huateng's determination to create a "closed loop of e-commerce". In this way, the video store has become a unified outlet for merchants to operate their own businesses, the Preferred Alliance has become the only distribution channel, and third-party channels have been removed from the shelves.

This means that Video Account will at least unify the various functions of the e-commerce platform at the product level, and will no longer let service providers fight on their own. Of course, due to the current poor macro and industry environment, it is difficult for Tencent to open the door to personnel expansion against the market. Then, Video Account is also likely to outsource many labor-intensive tasks. The problem of insufficient staff is also affecting Video Account in terms of content.

Image source: WeChat Open Community

Douyin’s operations team responds quickly to reported topics, while Video Account’s efficiency is much lower and it is easy to miss hot topics. It should be noted that Douyin, which advocates “great effort to achieve miracles”, has 20,000 employees, while Video Account, which prefers “small and beautiful”, has only a few hundred employees. As a platform with more than 1 billion users, WeChat has a low tolerance for content risks within its ecosystem and is unwilling to authorize a large operations team.

Compared with Douyin, the video account operation team has limited authority and is also restricted by the review team. In addition to the lack of after-sales manpower, the video account traffic is also a mystery. In Douyin, although the detailed algorithm rules are unknown, the return rate of traffic is very stable. However, MCN still cannot figure out the rules of video account traffic, and everything is left to fate, which also makes them dare not invest heavily.

As a result, the people who benefited from the video account last year were basically micro-businesses with developed private domains. The current video account traffic support strategy is to reward the corresponding public domain traffic based on the private domain traffic of the live broadcast room. This is equivalent to the official video account only doing half of the traffic investment tool. If a closed loop is to be formed in the end, private domain capabilities should not be regarded as an entry ticket.

WeChat Open Class 2023

The considerations here are all from the perspective of the gap between Video Account and the top short video platforms. After all, Kuaishou has made significant progress after making up for its shortcomings, while Tencent lacks e-commerce experience. In terms of supply, Video Account may have some advantages. Tencent can consider forming an alliance with its old friends JD.com and Pinduoduo, and these two e-commerce giants have not achieved good results in live streaming and are also lacking a video outlet.

02 Will social networking follow the path taken by Pinduoduo?

The reason why Video Account was able to rise despite being unpopular is that it fully utilized its own social advantages, instead of following in the footsteps of Douyin like Weishi.

Channel research data shows that in the fourth quarter of last year, 7% of the traffic of Video Account came from "following", 53% from "likes from friends", and 40% from "machine recommendations". The high proportion of social traffic means that users still regard Video Account as an opportunity to interact with friends, and have not formed the habit of "swiping" Video Account. The latest data from Quest Mobile shows that the average daily usage time of a single user of Video Account is only 35 minutes, which is less than 118 minutes for Douyin and 119 minutes for Kuaishou.

Video account screenshot

However, this is exactly what Zhang Xiaolong wants, as he hopes that users can "use it and leave". In fact, Video Account has fully utilized the social network advantages of WeChat from 0 to 1, and has differentiated itself from the machine recommendations of Douyin and Kuaishou. Zhang Xiaolong said at the time: "The content liked by friends is better than the content recommended by the machine, and I almost gave up the machine recommendation."

However, thanks to the ultra-high cold start efficiency of WeChat social relationships, video accounts can quickly gain popularity, but it is difficult for users to become addicted . Video accounts can be said to be "social". Because of WeChat, Pinduoduo was able to break into the e-commerce red ocean where Alibaba and JD.com were locked in a stalemate; because of WeChat, video accounts can also cut a piece of the pie in the plate of Douyin and Kuaishou.

Users who don’t like overly entertaining content are the “outside the fifth ring” users in the short video world. Of course, there are many middle-aged and elderly players among them. But some people actually have high spending power and are also Douyin and Kuaishou players. However, due to the personalities in their circle of friends, they will not like entertainment content that exposes human nature crazily, but will share general knowledge content such as news and finance in a pretentious manner.

Video accounts later introduced the "Private Like" feature, which alleviated this problem to a certain extent. However, due to the lack of sharing fun in "Private Like", the experience is still somewhat different from that of Douyin. Looking back, the sharing of general knowledge content is actually valuable, at least it allows Video accounts to further distinguish users who consume high-end brands.

If Video Account wants to achieve a surprising success in the next step, social networking is a dimension that Zhang Xiaolong needs to focus on. In addition, Pinduoduo has already given a good demonstration of the combination of social networking and e-commerce. In addition, the WeChat platform also has the creative strength in "small games", and the "Sheep and Sheep" that went viral a while ago is the best evidence.

“Sheep, Sheep” was created by an external team, and WeChat itself has also made popular products such as “Jump Jump”. Creating a high-end version of “Kan Yi Dao” for video e-commerce may be the next task of the WeChat team.

03 Where are the hot content? Where are the native influencers?

Whether it is the e-commerce ecosystem or social communication, they can only be auxiliary. If the video account wants to create a hit, it still needs to have solid content of its own.

In terms of content, the online concerts that have been popular on Video Accounts in the past year, such as Westlife, Cui Jian and Jay Chou, all have impressive data. This kind of operation that relies on its own strong content territory should appear frequently on Video Accounts in the future.

Tencent can bring live broadcasts of sports events, commentary of TV dramas, and other forms to video accounts. Similarly, at the beginning of last year, video accounts launched paid live broadcast rooms. The first paid live broadcast was the Jazz vs. Warriors NBA regular season on "Tencent NBA", which cost 90 WeChat beans worth 9 yuan.

Video account screenshot

However, it is not easy for Video Account to use its own high-quality content, which depends on the progress of Tencent's "wall removal". In the past, Tencent's "departmental walls" brought considerable resistance, but this time Ma Huateng took advantage of the residual power of anti-corruption to let those departments that could not survive or did not survive well give up the opportunity for business cooperation, so there will not be too many obstacles.

Apart from this kind of "keeping the money within the family", Video Account is not willing to spend money on content investment, but instead asks WeChat service providers to find UP hosts on platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou to develop Video Account on multiple platforms. Video Account is only responsible for official traffic support such as the "North Star Project", and even small red envelopes are paid by service providers.

Zhang Xiaolong believes that the creative energy of ordinary people is not necessarily worse than that of stars who want signing fees. With the painful lesson of Weishi in the past, Ma Huateng can't say much. But in the past year, Zhang Xiaolong has begun to change his original intention of universal traffic and gain popularity through concerts. Next, his focus on content may be on native big Vs. To allow high-quality creators to unleash their creativity, video accounts must give them expectations - once the content is good enough, I can get enough traffic.

WeChat Open Class 2023

To achieve this, on the one hand, we need to further increase the proportion of machine algorithms in traffic distribution. Zhang Xiaolong originally designed that the ratio of attention, friends, and machines is 1:2:10, and now the proportion of machine recommendations is far from enough. On the other hand, the operation of video accounts needs to select some key directions and do additional push traffic, such as secondary creation of film and television dramas, music, sports and other content.

Indeed, the lack of high-quality original content has reduced Video Account to a headline account in the short video field, and its advertising value has been seriously damaged. Due to the lack of high-quality content, the viewing time is insufficient, and Video Account is difficult to accumulate sufficient user behavior data, and the recommendation algorithm is not accurate enough. As a result, the fan conversion cost of Video Account creators is much higher than that of Douyin.

In fact, the content of Video Account has made considerable progress since its launch, but Zhang Xiaolong has always focused on products rather than content. The most important thing is the live broadcast function, which has gradually become popular for live broadcasts of concerts, news, games, and knowledge. When a large amount of high-quality content accumulated by Tencent is presented on Video Account in the form of live broadcasts or short videos, the growth of one will be offset by the decline of the other, which should be able to greatly weaken the content advantage of Douyin.

In any case, Video Account is certain to release revenue this year, but it will not pile up resources to compete head-on with Douyin, and small businesses that expect timely help may be disappointed. However, even if Video Account miraculously makes great progress in content, social networking and e-commerce, businesses will have to learn to operate private domains. After all, turning a blind eye to WeChat groups, corporate WeChat, public accounts and mini-programs is also a great waste of the complete capabilities of Video Account.

In 2023, the market also needs a real "Video Account Year". After all, the entire Internet still needs more "traffic effects" to continue telling the industry story.

Author: James Taishi

Source: Yiyuguancha (ID: yiyuguancha), the telescope and sonar of the pan-entertainment industry.