Beauty shoots enter the stage of emergence "buy while watching" to welcome the second half of competition for Short Video

Meipai announced the launch of a "buy while watching" function to help celebrities monetize, as well as a "Meipai M Plan" that connects brand parties and celebrity advertising cooperation.

Original title: Meitu's traffic monetization is moving cautiously Short Video In the second half, the smoke of smoke resurfaces

. After three years of making Short Video, Meitu's Short Video community has officially sounded the clarion call. However, this plan has little to do with Meitu's overall performance in the short term.

On May 31, Meipai announced the launch of the "Buy while Watching" function to help celebrities monetize, as well as the "Meipai M Plan" to connect brand parties and celebrity advertising cooperation. According to Chen Bai, vice president of Meipai Products, after the "Buy while Watching" function is launched, relevant product display links in Short Video will be displayed under the video, and product labels will be displayed in the video. Users see the products they like, click on the shopping cart tab to purchase without jumping out of Meipai playback.

This also means that Meipai has become the first Short Video platform in the industry to support this function. As soon as this function was announced, it received extremely warm cheers and applause from nearly a hundred talents in the audience. "This function is amazing." A beauty photographer told the 21st Century Economic Report reporter.

The "Meipai M Plan" can integrate the brand's promotion needs, customize marketing plans, and match relevant talents. At the same time, the "Meipai M Plan" also cooperates in depth with the social media advertising platform "Weibaoyi" to join forces in customer introduction, media services, data sharing and other aspects. "In short, the plan is a 'matchmaker' between brand merchants and beauty photographers." Chen Bai said.

Although Meipai has launched two monetization methods, it will hardly be helpful to Meitu's performance in the short term. "Among the two monetization methods, the services provided by Meipai will be free in the short term, and all the shares will be distributed to middlemen and talents." Wu Xinhong, CEO of Meitu Company, said,"The current realization of the beauty auction is still in the early stage of support. It is more based on the ecological perspective of the beauty auction, taking the ecosystem as the first consideration factor. In order to better promote the business, there is no more interest consideration for the time being, and we will consider sharing after entering the positive income stage in the future."

Short Video competition entered the second half

of 2005. Video websites represented by YouTube rose one after another. Videos taken by users around the world were spread on the Internet, and the video UGC concept began to spread around the world. In 2013, many Short Video platforms around the world were launched, and the UGC era of Short Video officially began.

Nowadays, the competition in the Short Video industry has become fierce, and the number of popular Short Video is not small, including Douyin, Xiaoying, Xiaocai Show, Meipai, Second-Shot, etc. Short Video are also attractive to capital. Since last year, Toutiao, Sina Weibo, and Tencent have allocated 1 billion yuan, US$100 million and 1 billion respectively to subsidize Short Video content creators. Alibaba has even directly transformed its Tudou. com into a Short Video platform, and plans to invest 2 billion yuan to create a "Big Fish Project."

"The future belongs to Short Video." Li Guangping, senior investment manager of Today Capital, said,"The living standards of first-tier and second-tier cities in China are growing rapidly, but the cultural level is still much behind Japan and the United States. Multicultural video presentations can be seen on Youtube, but the domestic Short Video industry is in its early stages. Therefore, the Short Video industry is still a blue ocean at present, and a large number of high-quality content and institutions will still be produced in the next three to five years."

Although the investment community has high hopes for the future content quality of the Short Video industry, the content of the Short Video application platform is basically similar at present, whether it is seconds, fast hands or chatter. The "2016 China Short Video Industry Development Research Report" released by iResearch pointed out that there is a problem of homogenization of the content of the Short Video platform, which makes it difficult to form a clear product positioning, resulting in users having no clear choices when using mobile Short Video application tools and low user stickiness.

However, in Wu Xinhong's view, the beauty shoot has formed its own differential positioning. "Meipai is different from other Short Video platforms. Our content layout is more inclined to serve female users, giving priority to the content needs of female users." Wu Xinhong said,"We will carry out more vertical ecological construction around advantageous categories such as food and dance to distinguish the content from other platforms."

According to Bei Gou, senior vice president of Meitu Products, more than half of the users of Meitu are located in first-tier and second-tier cities, and female users account for 76% of the total users. They are mainly white-collar workers, fashionistas, and hot moms, with strong spending power. The advertising value of the creators of beautiful photography is also several times that of other video applications.

What

can be clearly felt in the early stages of monetization is that in 2017, Meitu's attempts to monetize traffic have accelerated significantly.

Cai Wensheng, chairman of Meitu, has repeatedly emphasized that Meitu will focus on the three major strategies of internationalization, platform and commercialization in the future to form revenue growth points in four parts: intelligent hardware, advertising, value-added services and e-commerce. The growth of the latter three is expected to be faster than that of hardware.

Meitu has also begun to continue to deploy around this idea this year. On the afternoon of March 29, Meitu released its first e-commerce product "Meipu", which focuses on a fashionable social shopping platform. It also unveiled the fashion customized product "Meitu Customization", officially taking the first step in Meitu's e-commerce strategy.

From the data point of view, it seems that it is the season when it can be "harvested" for beauty auctions. According to information provided by Meitu, as of the end of 2016, Meitu users had uploaded more than 510 million videos. In 2016, the average time spent by each user on beauty photos was 28 to 36 minutes, compared with 15 to 27 minutes in 2015. In January 2017, the number of monthly active users of Meiquan reached approximately 160 million.

However, what is surprising is that Meitu announced that Meitu's monetization service will be free in the short term. Wu Xinhong said frankly that in terms of income, the beauty auction is not radical, but more as a consideration for overall ecological construction.

"Recently, there has also been news that some celebrities from other Short Video platforms have been poached by today's headlines. This actually reflects the importance of ecological integrity from another perspective." Beigou said,"An ecologically complete Short Video platform is not afraid of talent being poached. Under a healthy ecology, new talent will continue to be created."

The so-called healthy ecology includes people who can produce high-quality content, fans attracted by high-quality content, and influential brands. Each party takes what it needs, forming a virtuous cycle. In fact, in order to help talents shape their influence, Wu Xinhong emphasized that Meipai will not sign exclusive agreements with talents."Meipai hopes to help talented talents become popular on the entire network, which means they are also very popular on other platforms, but it was originally supported by Meipai. We want to be truly open-minded."

In fact, the realization of the beauty auction envisioned by Wu Xinhong is still in its early stages. "The first stage is for people to link to their own Taobao stores and microstores on the video page to open up the video viewing, product purchase, and payment processes; the second stage is to cooperate with brands to incorporate strictly screened products into the supply chain system, allowing people to seamlessly connect with the supply chain to ensure product quality and purchasing experience." Wu Xinhong said,"The third stage is Mito customization. In the future, we hope that Meitu Customization can provide products with guaranteed quality and take into account the style of talents according to the wishes of talents."

Editor: jessica