"when I started creating the video, I wrote a goal in the memo-100000 fans for half a year."

When she joined Kuaishou Technology in early 2017, Li Wwa secretly set no small goals for herself.

Like most content creators, she didn't have a clear account direction at first, but just shared the food, drink and fun of daily life, and her viewing was not fixed. Few comments, except for her high school classmates, are her own trumpet.

Although not achieved within half a year, but the goal of "100000 fans", Li doll finally achieved.

In 2020, she released a short video recording climbing Mount Tai overnight, which received more than 10 million views and gained more than 100,000 fans overnight. Li doll found the content direction-to do real and powerful documentary content, and started the entrepreneurial journey of the short video.

From the "Human fireworks at four o'clock in the Morning" series to "experience a hundred kinds of Life" to "see the World" and "see yourself" series, Li Wwa gained more than 3.23 million fans in the following year and became a well-known "content expert" of the platform.

Her success is not only on the Kuaishou Technology platform, but also to "copy": her Douyin platform has more than 1.8 million fans and Bilibili Inc. fans have exceeded 80, 000.

There are more and more creators like Li, who are no longer obsessed with being the head of a single content platform. Once they have figured out the "popular path", they will apply this methodology to other platforms to precipitate more traffic.

When the content creator and the short video live broadcast platform break through the exclusive and unique relationship, the good content creator will naturally become a scarce resource and a "hot cake".

What chips do platforms such as Kuaishou Technology and Douyin have in this "war of robbing people"? Who can retain the creator for a long time?

1

From "Star" to "Creator"

The competition for creators between the two platforms begins with the star Big V.

When it comes to Kuaishou Technology stars, the first thing that comes to mind for most people is the top Chinese music scene-Jay Chou.

The cooperation began in May 2020, when Jay Chou settled in Kuaishou Technology with the ID of "classmate Zhou" and wrote "Jay Chou's first Chinese social media" on his official account. The only one in the whole network is Kuaishou Technology. " In order to demonstrate the exclusivity of its cooperation with Kuaishou Technology

According to Tech, Jay Chou, as a top star, has always been the subject of competition between Kuaishou Technology and Douyin; in order to invite Jay Chou to stay, Kuaishou Technology and the Jay Chou team went through dozens of rounds of difficult communication, not counting the contract fee.

Around the expiration of the two-year contract between Kuaishou Technology and Jay Chou this year, speculation about whether he will change the platform has arisen one after another, and a new round of secret warfare on the platform has been staged again.

In June, Bilibili Inc. announced that "ouch, not bad" came to Bilibili Inc., and Javier Music, the music company behind Jay Chou, was invited. Mi Goo video also announced that the release of Jay Chou's new songs would be broadcast live on July 6. There are also people wondering whether Jay Chou will go to the Douyin platform with a larger traffic pool.

However, the final result came out, Jay Chou still stayed in Kuaishou Technology, which is undoubtedly a great benefit to Kuaishou Technology.

According to Cai Yiling, head of star operations of Kuaishou Technology, the arrival of stars on the platform can cause more fans to post and create content. At present, entertainment category (including stars, film and television ensembles, etc.) is already Kuaishou Technology's first major category, with daily production of VV (Video View, broadcast volume) reaching 10 billion.

However, the environment for stars to survive is always the entertainment industry, what they need to present is film and television works, and the social platform is only one of the channels to increase their exposure. This determines that stars will not appear at high frequency on short video platforms, and even short videos and live content will not have high frequency output. This can be seen from the situation of Jay Chou in the past.

Classmate Zhou, who has been stationed in Kuaishou Technology for two years, has only 102 works and 5 live broadcasts in Kuaishou Technology as of July 19 this year. It almost maintains the frequency of updating content only once a week.

From the perspective of the platform, stars can bring topics and discussion, but in order to maintain the long-term sustainable development of ecology, the importance of medium-and long-tail content creators can not be ignored, or even better.

At the recent Kuaishou Technology photosynthesis conference, Wang Jianwei, senior vice president of Kuaishou Technology and head of the main station business, stressed the importance of content creators: "in Kuaishou Technology, not only the user is our old friend, but also the creator."

The same is true for Douyin, the creator is one of the basics of Douyin's e-commerce ecology, together with platforms and brands to build Douyin's e-commerce ecology. Kang Zeyu, president of Douyin e-commerce, pointed out last year that the emergence of excellent content creators is one of the three major reasons for the formation of interest in e-commerce.

Obviously, Kuaishou Technology and Douyin have shifted from the grabbing of stars to the "street warfare" of medium-and long-tailed creators. The reason why it is called "street warfare" means that the war is more brutal, more lethal and more dangerous.

However, the two companies also showed great differences in this competition. Cai Yiling told all-weather Technology that the biggest difference in the development of Kuaishou Technology star content in the past and in the future is from B-side thinking to C-end thinking. that is, to create content based on the needs of Kuaishou Technology platform users, rather than producing content with the "stereotype" of the entertainment industry. This also reflects from the side, Kuaishou Technology begins to return to the original mind in the development of the creator, thinking about what users really need.

In comparison, Douyin put forward the connotation of "high-quality author spirit" at the ecological conference in May this year: "hot career, successful people, authentic, professional and interesting, efficient implementation, win-win and far away, abide by the rules and regulations, and help the society." It is not difficult to find that this 32-word spirit focuses more on the content e-commerce management theory, which is essentially a guide to the creator's business direction and shows the business thinking of the relationship between consumers and creators, which is different from Kuaishou Technology.

2

Why does the platform fight for "plain people"?

Knowing that the "street fighting" is fierce, why does the platform have to catch up?

In the final analysis, it is determined by the attributes of the content platform. The content platform does not produce goods, but only generates value through the creator's content. Content is traffic, content is growth, with good content can promote the commercial development of the platform.

For Kuaishou Technology and Douyin, content creators are undoubtedly the core resources of the platform.

According to Kuaishou Technology's quarterly report for 2022, 25 per cent of its nearly 600m monthly active users are creators, while medium-and long-tail creators contribute more than 80 per cent of their content. In the second quarter of 2022, the number of works published by Kuaishou Technology platform increased by 40.5% compared with the same period last year; as of June, the number of Kuaishou Technology fan creators exceeded 2 million, and the total number of creator fans was 263.9 billion.

The increasingly prosperous ecology has given more creators the opportunity to accelerate their growth and realization, which in turn directly pushed up the commercial value of Kuaishou Technology.

Official data show that so far, more than 6 million creators have received hundreds of billions of traffic support on Kuaishou Technology, with a cumulative fan gain of more than 15 billion. Kuaishou Technology has been online for 25000 hot topic activities, created more than 2.4 billion excellent works and played more than 26 trillion times. Kuaishou Technology has helped 20 million creators earn income every year for three consecutive years, and Kuaishou Technology's total income has increased by 25.3% in the past six months compared with the same period last year.

Kuaishou Technology platform also reached 323 million DAU (average daily active users) in the fourth quarter of last year; MAU (average monthly active users) increased by 21.5% year-on-year to 578 million, an annual growth rate of more than 100 million yuan; annual total revenue reached 81.1 billion yuan, annual e-commerce transaction volume (GMV) increased by 78.4% year-on-year to 680 billion yuan.

On the other hand, Douyin, inspired by its content, has made great progress in the ecology of live short videos.

Douyin ecommerce released a set of figures at the second ecological conference: in the past year, 1.8 million merchants newly joined Douyin ecommerce, starting their own growth; there are 3.86 million mobile e-commerce talent, realizing their own hot career; there are also more than 20, 000 ecological partners of institutions and service providers; compared with April last year, the cumulative number of trailer short videos increased by 31%, and the number of studio orders increased by 112%.

"the GMV of Douyin e-commerce in the past year is 3.2 times that of the same period, which should be a fast-growing e-commerce platform in the same period." Said Wei Wenwen, president of Douyin e-commerce.

If newspapers, radio and television were the core media of advertising marketing 20 years ago, then 20 years later, with the high popularity of the Internet, live and short videos throughout people's lives have become new channels for commodity marketing and transaction.

When live and short video platforms begin to seek commercial development, their realization paths are advertising and live e-commerce. To enrich content products and improve content quality, another way of thinking is that the platform is attracting traffic and enhancing business transformation.

3

Retain people with "flow" and "cash"

As the development direction and operational strategies of each platform tend to be homogeneous, creator activity and content productivity are no longer limited to algorithms, but to see who can better hit the demand pain point.

When asked what the creator's core focus is, an operator of Yuxin Culture of Shanghai MCN told round-the-clock technology: first, how to make money on the platform; second, whether it can continue to make money.

In daily communication and observation, the platform also found the challenges faced by creators. At the photosynthesis conference, Wang Jianwei, senior vice president of Kuaishou Technology and head of the main station business, pointed out: "flow and cash are the two core issues faced by creators, and their essence is how creators change from 'creation' to 'continuous creation'. And how to change from 'support' to 'sustainable management'."

If the platform is regarded as an oasis, then "flow" to creators, like "sunlight, air and water", is the basic condition to maintain their survival, while "commercialization" is to creators. More like "chemical fertilizer", it is a factor that helps them grow faster and better.

In order to help creators solve the flow and cash problems, Kuaishou Technology said that he would upgrade the photosynthetic plan, providing one billion cash and hundreds of billions of flow subsidies to creators throughout the year; in addition, he would launch the Kuaishou Technology Star special program to provide 10 billion flow support and 1 billion + network-wide resources exposure.

In terms of commercialization, in addition to the past business orders, live reward and other models, Kuaishou Technology will also work with creators to explore short video marketing, live e-commerce and other ways. According to Kuaishou Technology's plan, it will make use of the company's people and goods matching SaaS tools for fast distribution to achieve the stage goal of "building 10 1 billion brands, 100 million merchants, 1 million promoters breaking 0, and 100 million GMVs in a single market".

The development logic of Douyin, which focuses on "interest e-commerce", fundamentally depends on short videos, live broadcasts and other content to convey information to users and arouse consumer interest. For content creators to continue to cash in, traffic exposure is also essential.

In March this year, Douyin e-commerce released the "Spring Rain Plan", which plans to use 20 billion of its traffic to encourage the creation of high-quality e-commerce content. It is reported that two months after the launch of the program, the platform has given more than 8.9 billion traffic reward support to more than 200000 pieces of high-quality content.

In the way of cash, in addition to the well-known video advertising, live streaming with goods, Douyin e-commerce is also looking for new breakthroughs. It is worth mentioning that Douyin has upgraded "interest e-commerce" to "global interest e-commerce", and users can transform their existing shopping intentions through shopping malls and search functions.

Live short video in the second half, the platform competition has been completely reduced to the "talent" competition. The competition for this kind of talent is not limited to top stars, variety celebrities and knowledge giants, but also tens of thousands of ordinary "creators" who can innovate and have ideas. Who can let more capable creators enter the platform and stay on the platform, who can get tickets to the final.

According to Wang Jianwei, among the creators of Kuaishou Technology's published works in 2016, more than 70% and 80% of the 10, 000 and 100, 000 fan creators are still actively publishing their works, respectively, and 94% of the million fan creators are creatively active.

Kuaishou Technology previously accumulated a number of highly sticky users and creators by virtue of the old iron culture, but in the competition with Douyin in the future, how to make creators continue to realize may become the key to determine their fate.