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Text/Earling
Source/Ginkgo Technology (ID: yinxingcj)
WeChat, known for its “restraint”, has been adjusting its “sense of presence” at a speed visible to the naked eye in the past two years.
In the first half of 2022, several concerts that have blasted social media have attracted a lot of attention to the video account. Some people are keenly aware that WeChat, which once emphasized that it should exist like air, now seems to be turning into another “species”.
WeChat in the past was only born for communication. If you look at the list of offline functions of WeChat, you will find that if a new function is not an auxiliary tool for communication, it will also be disturbed to a certain extent. Then it will inevitably be marginalized or even offline.
However, the continuous revision of the video account has allowed people to see the constantly swaying WeChat: from a tool quietly waiting to be dispatched, to a platform that actively guides users’ attention; in order to avoid the constraints of real identity, it even guides users within the account. Establish a new ID system.
The video account seems to be like a gap in the sprawling empire, giving some insight into WeChat’s “self-opposition.”
From “a product, how many functions must be added to become a junk product” to “a product, how many functions must be added in order not to become a junk product”.
In the past ten years, Zhang Xiaolong’s personal concept has changed, indicating that WeChat is completing an “elephant turn”.
But in this difficult “turning around”, it was not entirely a superb plan, and some occasional little absurdities drastically changed the direction of the story.
“Unintentional Willow” of the Traffic Strait
The Strait of Malacca connects three major countries. Every year, 50,000 merchant ships arrive in Singapore, and oil tankers account for nearly half of the world. Relying on its port advantages and the “Singapore Model” created by Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore has grown from a barren island to a developed country in Asia.
Huang Zheng is a loyal fan of Lee Kuan Yew, and his understanding of Singapore is also more unique. In 2015, he began actively punting boats in the digital world to find the “Strait of Malacca”, and set up camp at the location closest to the traffic empire.
In the eyes of many users, the rapid rise of Pinduoduo is due to the fact that cheap groupings have leveraged the sinking market in WeChat. But Huang Zheng, who has a vicious vision, is aiming at the deeper fetters in WeChat traffic.
When WeChat’s daily active users exceed 1 billion, it is no exaggeration to describe it as a “virtual kingdom”. Behind the huge throughput, WeChat has become an important hub in the digital world.
For users, WeChat is a hub for expressing and sharing emotions; for merchants in the secondary list, WeChat is a hub for finance and trade; based on the communication between different users, this tool has become a social transportation hub.
Several sturdy hubs build an intertwined “relationship chain”. This not only achieved Pinduoduo, but also helped Tencent to complete a beautiful “sneak attack”, which made WeChat Pay leap.
In this virtual world’s largest traffic strait. Whether it is large or small businesses, content creators, or enemy troops lingering outside the door, they are all trying to dig a bonanza here.
Gradually, as WeChat’s population growth reached a critical value, the relationship chain also experienced stagflation.
The product manager of WeChat mini-games once introduced in the Open Course Pro that WeChat mini-games users over the age of 30 accounted for 66%. Just as aging is becoming a problem in China, WeChat is entering a mid-life crisis.
“If it weren’t for the fact that there were a lot of people using WeChat, I wouldn’t use it.” On the Internet, such remarks are frequently seen. On Zhihu, a Tucao WeChat answer can get up to 53,000 likes, more than 6,600 comments, and more than 10 million reads.
The boss late at night @, the lover asks for a second reply, and the Versailles can’t be seen in the circle of friends… It’s not only the defeated enemy army who “has been suffering from WeChat for a long time”, but also many young people who are “hijacked” by life. And this group of people precisely determines the future of WeChat.
Zhang Xiaolong once said that he hopes WeChat will be a product that users can use and leave. In his concept, people should not play with their mobile phones 24 hours a day. After all, WeChat cannot occupy all the user’s time.
People are the sum of all social relations, and the expansion and complexity of social relations is the most difficult problem facing WeChat. If information and emotions overwhelm people, it will hurt the overall value of WeChat.
WeChat has been strengthening its privacy settings over the years. However, WeChat is too big. When the “circle of friends” carries too many relationships beyond simple friendship, taking care of the universality of users becomes the main theme.
It is difficult for a product to take care of everyone. Old people, young people, men and women are all different individuals. In front of the product, everything is covered, which means that everything is not available. This is more evident in the overseas version.
Compared with the jubilant atmosphere of the domestic version of WeChat, the overseas version of WeChat has not made any splash. Over the past few years, WeChat’s overseas user growth has almost stagnated. From time to time, I will see foreigners complaining that the overseas version “is derailed from the international trend and does not consider the habits of foreigners”.
It is a new proposition that WeChat cannot please everyone externally, and instead improves the use efficiency of ecological traffic inwards.
As a result, WeChat has successively created CallKit voice calls, moment videos, drifting bottles, WeChat circles, WeChat mini-games, etc. in recent years.
Regrettably, most of these functions end with shutdowns, and the 16-year lifespan of “Moments Red Packet Photos” is as short as two hours. Even some of the functions that are still in use today are difficult to say successful no matter which dimension is evaluated.
Tencent has also paid countless times of true love in the video field, and they are all scarred.
From Weishi, Penguin Look, Flash Coffee, QIM, DOV, MOKA to Cat Cake, MO Sound, Tencent Cloud Small Video, After Dinner, to Quick View, Time, Yoo, Soy Sauce, Sound Rabbit…
Tencent has launched more than ten short video products, but all of them cannot escape the fate of thunder and rain. But the sudden rise of the video account made everyone feel it was an accident.
Last year, the two concerts of “Xicheng Boys” and “Mayday” were inexplicably popular on the video account. The number of viewers for the Xicheng Boys concert was 28 million, and the Mayday New Year’s Eve concert was 16 million.
Even people inside WeChat can’t understand why it is so popular. But for WeChat, the video account is more like an extension of the “traffic hub”.
As a newly added hub in this virtual country, the video account can be seamlessly embedded in almost all scenarios of WeChat. Public domain traffic can also enter the video account through search, Kankan, and official accounts.
The WeChat team’s hope for the video account is to further strengthen the relationship chain, so it iterated at an unprecedented speed in WeChat history.
Between the coming and going of traffic, the daily activity of the video account has also gone all the way to 500 million, chasing Douyin.
Intentionally planting flowers will not bloom, inadvertently planting willows and willows. The rise of video accounts has forced everyone to re-examine its position on the poker table.
“Special Zone” is difficult to treat
After combing through the functions that WeChat has launched over the years, an interesting phenomenon will be found. Whether it is inward or outward, if a function requires strong operational capabilities, WeChat generally cannot do it well.
A typical example is the built-in version of Xiaohongshu “WeChat Circle”.
But if a product only needs to rely on social traffic and light operations, it has a greater chance of surviving on WeChat. WeChat Pay, Moments, Official Accounts, and WeChat Reading are all such products.
WeChat does not emphasize “strong operation” because Zhang Xiaolong believes that the efficiency and output ratio brought by “system” and “rules” are better than operation. So “the video account didn’t spend a penny to buy content, and I don’t want to do it in the future.”
However, whether it is the first Kuaishou or the later Douyin, they are telling the world that the short video tells the story of algorithms and operations.
Under the indifferent operation concept, the early video accounts were quickly captured by the content that favored the middle-aged and the elderly, such as health preservation, chicken soup, and positive energy.
Although this has also opened up many user groups that Douyin cannot reach, it is obviously not possible to rely on this group alone to stimulate the vitality of the content ecology.
For professional creators who have been entrenched in major video websites for a long time, the video account does not yet have the allure of becoming the “first choice”.
On the one hand, the traffic temptation provided by the video account is not big enough for them to move, and on the other hand, the traffic distribution mechanism of the video account is not yet mature. Although the algorithmic recommendation mechanism for video accounts has been developed, the recommended content that everyone sees is still very different.
Unsure of the algorithm recommendation logic for video numbers means that the ecology and tonality cannot be determined, and the content becomes uncontrollable during the dissemination process.
In addition, video accounts are highly private, and the hot search mechanism is not yet developed, and there is a lack of clear “topic squares” to guide them. This means that most of the traffic will not come from the first-level portal, but from the sharing of WeChat users.
The video account is attached to WeChat, and the daily life does take a lot of advantage. But just looking at the number of plays and the duration of use, the data people have observed so far are not ideal.
So for most creators, Douyin, Kuaishou, Station B, Weibo, Xiaohongshu and even Taobao Live are still their first positions.
That’s why we saw that from the end of 2021, the video account will launch several content in a row through the purchase of large projects, especially in the concert category.
This year, after the surprise of the two concerts “Western Region Boys” and “Mayday”, the video account began to use the mature and popular IP to build momentum for itself.
In order to continue to encourage the development of creators, the video account has also launched the “Creator Incentive Program” to provide traffic tilt to original content.
The topical explosions and creative incentives did effectively popularize the video account to more users in a short period of time. But for WeChat, which has always emphasized light operations, it is undoubtedly equivalent to setting up a “special zone” internally.
In the past relationship chain system, WeChat has always been considered a private site, and the platform’s will should not be too obvious, otherwise it will cause the feeling of private space being occupied.
The emergence of the video account has pushed WeChat from a tool that seeks to provide efficiency to a platform that actively exchanges value. This is inconsistent with the product logic that WeChat has always adhered to.
Unless the new system is no longer projected into the user’s real identity relationship and will not interfere with each other, this means that social relationship resources that have not been fully cultivated in the past will be difficult to tap.
More importantly, WeChat is not an independent product, and changes in the video account also need to take into account the interests and strategies of Tencent Group.
In Tencent’s 2021 financial report, the video number was mentioned 13 times. On the conference call on the evening of May 18, Tencent executives once again emphasized the importance of video accounts.
Tencent hopes that “the video account will provide significant commercialization opportunities”.
As a result, the video account has been in full swing to launch regular functions such as live broadcast delivery and live broadcast rewards. After several concerts, the commercialization of live concerts on video accounts has gradually matured.
The video account escapes the ID system corresponding to the real identity, and can be developed freely in commercialization. But to put the two systems together in the same product as WeChat, and to be related to each other, from the perspective of product logic, it is difficult not to cause contradictions.
On the one hand, WeChat hopes that people will have more connections with each other, so that the ecology has a stronger self-evolution ability, but on the other hand, it is also afraid that too extensive connections will cause social pressure to users.
The establishment of the “special zone” of a video account is an attempt by WeChat to “inadvertently intervene”. The early positioning is more like a supplementary function to make up for the dilemma of the low open rate of the official account.
Perhaps this is why WeChat chose to start a video account after the rise of Douyin and Kuaishou for a few years.
Naturally, there is also the vigilance and longer-term thinking of WeChat executives on the algorithm – when the population is the most dense and the liquidity is weakened, the traffic brought by the relationship chain can be as balanced as possible.
This is like closing the door to distribute bread, it must be more evenly distributed than when the door is open and people come in and out.
But relationship chains are not a panacea. When Tencent did Tencent Weibo and Friends.com, it imported the social relationship chain from QQ. The ending wasn’t ideal.
All the upgrades of WeChat are to strengthen the resilience of the relationship chain, but for other content or social products, high-density links have instead gathered the pressure of acquaintances that some users have deliberately avoided.
The strong reminder of the video number is the most front-end problem.
Many users have expressed that they are afraid to like the content they really like, but only dare to like some content that can show their taste and positive energy.
Although this can guide the content to a certain extent, it greatly affects the richness of the content ecology.
Epilogue
WeChat has grown from a simple tool to a behemoth, and now has 1.2 billion monthly active users, and the vines have penetrated deeply into a country with a large population.
There is no doubt that WeChat is already a traffic kingdom in the virtual world, and Zhang Xiaolong, as the creator of this new world, has deeply imprinted his product philosophy in WeChat’s product logic.
WeChat has used the blue planet opening screen for many years, which is like a metaphor, revealing the opposition and unity behind the product. We want to make products that exist naturally like water and air, but it is difficult to hide the traces of value orientation.
The conflict between product design and self-perception may be precisely the charm of WeChat. Just like the ebb and flow of everything in this world, it is also like the internal contradiction of WeChat. Balance may be the eternal theme.
After growing into a behemoth, how will WeChat reconcile the crowd? After weighing the pros and cons, the algorithm failed to achieve the effect of 1+1>2.
As a “special zone”, the video account is difficult to treat. This is because the privileges enjoyed by the SAR cannot override the sovereign branch of the country. How to find a balance point still has to go back to the general development program.
In his masterpiece “Lee Kuan Yew’s View of the World”, Lee Kuan Yew proposed four “measures of the sky” to predict the future of the country – population, language, tradition, and trade.
Among the four indicators, Lee Kuan Yew believes that the population is the most important factor, and the vitality of the population can give the country a steady stream of development momentum.
If you compare running a super app with running a country, population is naturally the foundation of your life. But language, tradition and trade are often more determinants of a nation’s solidity.
The reason why WeChat can remain stable in the continuous expansion is precisely based on the creation of a new social culture. But the emergence of the video account is breaking this balance, making the semi-closed WeChat, so it has become public.
Today, under the pessimistic outlook of the overall advertising market and the lack of competitive growth, the video account has been pushed to the forefront of creating new business value for Tencent.
Another spring has passed, but WeChat is no longer the WeChat of the past. How far can the “circle” drawn by the video account go?
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