Short Video without industry standards can break the situation?
2017, the tuyere has changed: live streaming has dropped, and short videos have been uplink.
recently, Wang Sicong's Banana Sports has completed a round of financing of 30 million yuan. Banana sports started from the PGC sports and entertainment live program "Banana Ball". On the one hand, it does live Reality Show programs according to large-scale events, on the other hand, it also broadcasts its own events.on the same day, according to the official website of the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Culture deployed comprehensive law enforcement agencies for cultural markets in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, Zhejiang and other places to conduct centralized law enforcement inspections on 50 major online performance business units. 30 online performance platforms with illegal content, including Huya TV, YY Live, Dragon Ball Live, Firecat Live, and second beat, were investigated and dealt with in accordance with the law.
earlier, the public relations company Xuanya International, a public relations company with a market capitalization of 7.2 billion yuan, was valued at 7 billion. Volcano Live merged into Volcano Mini Video, and Momo Live's first sister "this girl is not too cold" announced her departure. The live broadcast industry is going through a mixture of ice and fire.
correspondingly, the field of short videos has sprung up. First, Kuaishou successfully raised funds, then Douyin became popular, God bless tens of millions of job-hopping volcanoes, and then Weibo launched the story function. Jinri Toutiao short video business also set up an independent brand, renamed "Watermelon Video".
in 2017, the tuyere changed: live streaming fell back, and short videos went up.
one of the trends that can be seen is that live streaming platforms have turned to short video tuyere to become supporting roles for short videos.
now, the short video track suddenly becomes more crowded, live platform, PGC short video, UGC short video. The problems behind the competition and upgrading are also rapidly exposed, so how can short videos break the game in the second half of the mobile Internet, where user growth is slowing and traffic is becoming more and more expensive?
strong > LVB exit Battlefield transfer / strong >
in 2017, LVB is a very interesting market: show LVB makes a lot of money, and comprehensive LVB is popular. The industry can still make money, there are still anchors scrambling to enter, but there are also star companies selling bodies / shutting down.
this year, there are four obvious changes in LVB:
from peak to trough, it only took one year for the LVB industry. At its peak, the number of live streaming platforms reached 200, with 325 million users, and the number of daily active users of live streaming apps reached 24 million.
during this period, the live streaming platform has also made changes. For example, Yingke has said that it will do a short video since the end of last year, but there have not been many results.
to some extent, users of LVB and short videos overlap, and both want to spend more fragmentation time on consuming video content. Although the content characteristics and thresholds of the two are different, it is certain that short videos are more promising than LVB.
conversely, short video platforms begin to have basic features such as live streaming, and UGC mini video platform is the first to be added. For example, Meipai first made a short video community, and then launched the live broadcast function. Kuaishou also has a live broadcast function, but it is hidden. Momo, Xiaocaxiu and Volcano Mini Video basically have live portals, while watermelon videos and second shots have not joined the live streaming function for the time being.
it is worth mentioning that compared with live streaming, short videos explore a more mature cashing mode, which is precisely what the platform and creators are most concerned about. The short video development report released by Blue Lotus Research Institute shows: "in four years' time, the scale of advertising in China will reach 60 billion yuan, 10 times that of today, and the contribution rate of short videos will climb from the current 13% to 63%, the fastest growth of all channels."
although, like live streaming, in the battle for the new tuyere of short video, fledgling startups keep shutting down, and even Tencent Weishi has announced his downfall, but the competition in the short video battlefield does not mean to end. On the contrary, with the integration of live streaming, short videos, which seem to be the market of the Red Sea, have become more secure at the entrance of traffic.
strong > Competition upgrade market is more segmented / strong >
No one will doubt that short-term video will be the key position to occupy traffic in the future. It has changed from a "variable" in the content field to a "deterministic trend".
the change brought about by this trend is that short video tracks become crowded and lead to competitive upgrades.
BAT joined the bureau one after another, and released a larger subsidy policy to compete for the creators of PGC original short videos. Subsidy is the most direct way, which can not only give direct benefits to the creators and encourage creation, but also stimulate the transfer of users.
but in the past two years, the track of short video has been clear, and the subsidy for PGC short video creators is coming to an end. The field of PGC short video is gradually pursuing refinement and differentiation, especially in the limited traffic pool. Creators in vertical areas such as beauty makeup, food and lifestyle concentrate their efforts, while other vertical categories are also beginning to appear short video content creators.
during this period, excellent PGC creators have come to the fore, and platforms such as Jinri Toutiao and Weibo have emerged. The food category takes the lead in "Daily Cooking" and "solar eclipse", while the beauty category such as "Little Red Lip" and "Beauty Class and make-up" are all ferocious, and this vertical trend is bound to be more intense in the future.
in the second half of the mobile Internet, user growth is slowing down and traffic is becoming more and more expensive, but short video traffic can still grow rapidly. In a sense, it is also related to its civilian temperament. It is a synthesis of "information acquisition + fragmented reading + entertainment + social relationships". Short videos are bound to become products for ordinary users to show off.
as a result, short videos are divided into more segmented markets, and people begin to focus on UGC short videos with a shorter duration than PGC short videos, and the battle for creators begins to shift to UGC short videos.
the volcano mini video incubated by Jinri Toutiao entered the small video market with a subsidy of 1 billion. Earlier, in April, Weibo launched Weibo Story with short video feature, plus UGC, and Momo also announced its entry into UGC "short video social". Tencent shut down Weishi, but turned around to lead the UGC small video boss Kuaishou for $350 million.
strong > how to win the second half of the definition battle? / strong >
behind the competitive upgrade, the problem is also quickly exposed.the first thing to bear the brunt is the serious homogenization of short video content and structural surplus. During the outbreak of short videos in 2016, many content producers did not make adequate preparations and detailed market analysis, leading to a common trend in this field. High-quality content is always in the minority, and it also takes cost to produce good content, so head creators with resources will be better recommended.
what is even more worrying is that so far, there are no accurate definitions and standards for the industry.
therefore, there is a definition dispute between short videos and short videos: the standard given by Kuaishou is 57 seconds, while Jinri Toutiao believes that 4 minutes is the mainstream market, and the second shot shows that the video is undefined in 6 seconds to 4 minutes.
for the platform, there is no doubt that their original intention is to build a moat by seizing the right of definition, but on the other hand, the market differentiation is not enough, which is obviously disadvantageous to the industry. In particular, the distinction between the boundaries, for the creator, the significance is self-evident.
an industry standard is a content production guide. For example, the picture and text industry, just as we understand that a general draft is about 1000 words, the content should be clear about 5w1h, and the structure had better be an inverted pyramid structure; in-depth manuscripts are generally about 3000 words, and the content should have a sharp point of view; features can be more than 6000 words, there should be more details and writing techniques.
as Shizhi founder Ma Changbo said, after jumping into the entrepreneurial wave, content producers are lost in platforms, users, and self-definition. They don't know how short a real short video should be.
We have investigated the situation of short head videos and small video platforms, and seem to be able to spy on some rules:
it can be found that if the duration is less than 1 minute, it is more likely to be UGC short videos, while more than 4 minutes are defined as PGC short videos. The content forms include interviews, talk shows, micro variety shows, dialogues, miniseries, music MV, documentaries and so on. Different programs have different modes of production.
obviously, PGC short videos and UGC short videos are played differently. Compared with UGC, PGC creators are more professional, creative content is more stable, such content can be industrialized, but also more need industry standards.
therefore, for PGC content producers, the key to success depends on who can master more product skills, operational strategies and commercial realization capabilities. "focus on key platforms for different content, a 5-10-minute program is more suitable for video sites and in line with users' habit of watching long videos, while a fitness video is more suitable for Wechat and Weibo, encouraging users to spread it." Liu Fei, founder of Uncle he Xian, once said.
these factors are like a Mobius ring: products want content, content needs operation, operation depends on channel, channel needs user, user wants content.
in this chain, there is no doubt that the content is still the core link. Whoever can continue to produce more high-quality short video content will go further. The preemption of high-quality content has also become the biggest value conversion of these platforms.
on the other hand, the weight that the platform can attract high-quality content is their ability to help the team realize. It can be predicted that in 2017, the short video field will usher in a big reshuffle, and those content teams that do not have the ability to commercialize will be eliminated. Who knows, after O2O, P2P, this year's short video field will also usher in a wave of death?
Edit: mary