"if you miss the official account in 2012 and Douyin in 2018, you can't miss the video account in 2020. "

Today last year, the group of people who made the most money on the whole network collectively heard the wind. After thousands of calls for "Wechat short message", she came out shyly, and the entrance to the "video account" quietly appeared in the golden position at the bottom of the "moments" on Wechat's discovery page.

Never before has a content platform received so much attention from the first day it was born. After the video account internal test was opened, official account creators, online celebrity bloggers, KOL and even MCN organizations ran in groups, and for a while, the judgment that "video account is the biggest vent in 2020" became popular.

The video account has been growing at a terrible rate for a whole year-in June last year, Wechat officially announced that the number of daily active users had exceeded 200 million. In September, founder Securities estimated that the daily active users of the video number peaked at 350 million, with an estimated benchmark level of 300 million. Long-term space estimates 600 million.

Douyin announced 320 million daily active users in July 2019, a result that Douyin took three years to achieve since its predecessor, A.me, was launched in the autumn of 2016. Kuaishou Technology had 302 million daily active users in the first quarter of 2020, nine years after Kuaishou Technology went online.

The video number has just turned one year old, and it's still early.

Whose chance is it?

Although the video number wants to stimulate the willingness of every ordinary person to create, so that every individual can be seen, this does not prevent people with lofty ideals from becoming a "big fish" in this "flood".

Fan Weifeng, founder of Gao Camphor Capital, who is a heavy user of the video account, hopes to turn his personal video account into "the largest account to talk about the Water margin" and is happy to borrow the examples in "Water margin". Discuss hot topics such as how Ren Zhengfei's daughter should start out and Twitter bosses should read Water margin. Based in part on his personal experience in the video account, Fan Weifeng is confident about the future of the video account: "I used to work on content, and I first used it myself to get strong positive feedback. So I think it can also give good positive feedback to others. "

From the point of view of the content creator, Fan Weifeng is the basic video number of 0. The so-called "0 foundation" means that there is no large-scale accumulation in Wechat ecology before the video account, such as official account fan base and private domain traffic base; at the same time, it is not migrated by experts on Douyin, Kuaishou Technology, Bilibili Inc. and other platforms.

Like him, the "original" creators include "break dancing Kaikai" in construction site dancing, "Fish too idle" in animation healing style, "Xiaojiang Food Research Institute" in the food category of life, "eating women's meals at home", emotional "Korean emotion sharing", "Changchun Singularity" and so on.

But the video number Big V that people are more familiar with is mostly the "vested interests" of Wechat ecology-creators who have accumulated private domain traffic pools are rapidly pouring in at the beginning of the birth of video accounts, and some of them have grown into the head power of today's video account ecology. For example, one Zen monk (account of MCN organization Dayu Network), night listener Liu Yun (founder of "Night listening"), Li Xiaoyi (founder of "woman with fragrance in Soul"), Lin Shao and 1000 books (founder of "Ten o'clock Reading"), private domain Xiao factory director (founder of Star Education), they have a common feature, that is, they have established a certain IP attribute before entering the video account.

Especially the authors of official account, they have experienced a golden era of picture and text creation, but as the rise of Douyin drives content consumption habits to tilt from picture and text to video, the dividend of picture and text traffic disappears, they have to open up a new battlefield for video. Video number is such a traffic depression that picture and text creators have been waiting for for a long time. According to the new list, 261 of the top 500 official accounts have opened video accounts, accounting for 52%.

The creators of this kind of "bring your own traffic" are the main force of video number content supply, and their own private domain traffic makes it easier for them to complete the cold start. The reason for this may be that the video account is still in its very early stage, and its public domain traffic pool has yet to be expanded. At present, a large proportion of the 200 million to 300 million daily active users of the video account are entered through private domain entrances such as moments and social groups, which are strongly bound to the social relationship chain of Wechat.

"Night listening to Liu Xing" once mentioned in an interview, "it is very important to have the basis of an official account to be a video account. In November last year, its video account had 700000 followers, about half of which came from official accounts.

But there are others who do not agree with this view. Fan Weifeng mentioned that it is a common misunderstanding that people in the market think that video accounts do well today with official accounts and IP backgrounds, just because these people had more potential and received more multimedia attention. "inside the video number, there are precisely some popular style numbers, which have not been accumulated before. "

At the same time, he also denied the lack of video number public domain traffic. "if you just click in from your moments and leave as soon as you watch it, then you will stay for less than a minute. It (video number) must stay much longer than this. "

There is no doubt that every time a new platform is born for Weibo Corp, official account, Bilibili Inc., Xiao Hongshu, Kuaishou Technology, and Douyin, it will cause a shift of attention and create a group of new opinion leaders and online celebrities and talents, bringing them huge traffic and considerable wealth. "after Douyin, where can I find a platform that is still in its infancy and has 200 to 300 million daily active users? "

What kind of video number can make money?

But the question is, with platform-level opportunities visible to the naked eye, what kind of content can get a piece of this huge new dividend pool?

In terms of high-quality content, more grassroots and more positive energy content is indeed more popular on video accounts. At the end of November 2020, the new list combed the video content of 100000 + likes in the past 15 days, and the popular styles were classified as emotional chicken soup, old song sharing, family filial piety and other social positive energy, teaching content.

The content shared by Tang Lei from our video of the Beijing News on the Wechat Open course PRO a few days ago also confirms this. He said: "things that warm the heart and positive energy on the video number are more popular, and each item can basically get a higher quantity." "

However, what users like to watch is not equal to those with high commercial value. At present, the commercial prospect of video number is still in a completely uncertain stage. An advertising agent told "Deep ring": "at present, customers still inquire more and execute less, probably because they do not understand how to calculate ROI." "

Like advertisers, there are also investors who are watching. Fan Weifeng, founder of Gao Camphor Capital, one of the institutions most concerned about video accounts in the venture capital market, told Shensheng that they scanned nearly 10,000 video accounts, but not many people could make bets. The current breakthrough is more in the supply side, in the ecological chain of service providers.

According to the information obtained by Shen Xiang, at present, some funds have been in contact with "fish too idle", but none of the big funds on the market (such as Sequoia, IDG, etc.) have taken any action against pure video content producers.

Advertisers do not like, investors do not hurt, that is to say, video number to make money, we have to rely on self-reliance.

Fortunately, the official video number has given a lot of functional help:

In September, Wechat internally tested the promotion function of video number.

The live broadcast function of the video number will be launched in October, and the small store on Wechat will be opened.

The video number launched live in December with functions such as beauty, filter, joint broadcasting, mirroring, reward, lucky draw and so on. In addition, the home page of the video number seems to get through the merchants' own Mini Program.

The launch of live streaming function is an important step for creators to realize the commercialization of video number, which makes the commercial scene of "live broadcast with goods" landing in the ecology of video number.

In addition, compared with various types of live streaming platforms, one of the advantages of video number is its linkage with Wechat social field and trading field. At present, the private operating environment provided by Wechat for merchants is relatively mature. After the video number is connected with the backend of other Wechat products, users can easily enter the small store, Mini Program and merchant enterprise account from the video number to consult. Then directly in the Wechat ecology for transactions, payment, the whole link is very smooth, and can satisfy users to make decisions longer.

In November 2020, "Night listening to Liu Jing" contributed the first popular style of live video with goods, and the number of online users in the studio reached a peak of 22000 that night. When the product was killed in seconds, the Wechat store collapsed for about five minutes, even affecting several live studios next door. A source told Deep Sound that the live broadcast had more than 10 million GMV, setting a record.

For brand merchants and WeChat merchants, the video number is first of all such a "tool" that can improve the conversion efficiency.

"Private Domain Director Xiao" is currently one of the head accounts of the video number's workplace content. Xiao Yiqun is mainly a post-90s entrepreneur, whose star education covers vocational training, language learning, interest learning and so on. He released the first short video introducing Feynman's Learning method in June 2020, which quickly broke the circle three days later and garnered 7000 likes seven days later.

Xiao Yiqun, director of the private Xiao factory, told Shensheng that the video number provides more help in the cash-out process, while the live video number is a better way to cash out the stock of fans, and can even increase the value of fans by 10 times.

"our original private domain traffic is the more accurate audience accumulated by our course products, through the video number to do sales transformation, we can further tap the value of the original traffic. "

A front-line fund investor who is watching the video number ecology told Shensheng that the video number content style and audience are very suitable for the promotion of educational products, and many related start-up projects are under way. There are entrepreneurial projects to do workplace education through "WeCom" + "video number", which can include learning how to give a speech, how to improve writing skills, how to do PPT, and so on.

Of course, in addition to cashing out goods, selling lessons and rewards for the C side, the video number has also given birth to some B-side opportunities, such as agent operators, SaaS service providers, data analysis institutions, and so on. All the business models that have been successfully practiced on Douyin also have certain opportunities in the video number scene.

The video number is actually quite unfortunate. It is rare for a product to enjoy such high light at birth, attracting a lot of attention, but it is also frightening step by step.

Above the water, the video account was once misunderstood as Tencent's last blow to the byte-beating short video attack, so it was burdened with too much speculation, banter and lack of understanding; below the water, based on the high ecological starting point of Wechat, as soon as the video account was opened, it attracted a group of people who are the most good at making money in the network, and it is particularly difficult to build a native content ecosystem for those who want to harvest, transport and scrape the edges.

If you only use the "video content platform" to interpret the video number, it will underestimate Tencent's ambition. Wechat defines video number as a platform that everyone can record and create, as well as a window to learn about others and the world. In the Wechat open class this week, Zhang Xiaolong revealed that his plan for the video account is to become "the official website of every organization", to become a platform for undifferentiated videos, and to become a channel for everyone to express. Not just online celebrities and Big V performances.

Such a top-level design is too great and unique for those trying to dig gold on the video account, and it is difficult to find a way out in this special dense forest if you want to simply apply the money-making tricks of Douyin Kuaishou Technology and Bilibili Inc..

There are still many questions to be answered about the video number, such as whether it is time for everyone to create. What if the psychological threshold of shooting video on hand is lowered? If the ideal consumption ratio for followers, friend recommendations and machine recommendations is 1:2:10, does this mean that the content of nipple music is big again? How can the video account be further connected with other aspects of Wechat ecology?

But what is certain is that this will be a fertile ground full of opportunities, and if you wait until the opportunities are confirmed, it will be too late to enter.