B station is an ACG community, with users greater than products, and videos and comics are all content carriers. Watermelon is video recommendation, and technology business is the priority, and they are all practicing the business closed loop of "user content consumption - platfo

In September 2016, Toutiao held the second Toutiao creator conference. The platform's video data was disclosed for the first time at the conference: Toutiao has 2 billion content consumption per day, of which 1 billion is video consumption, and video consumption has exceeded the total number of clicks on the Toutiao; , Toutiao has only introduced video content in May 2015, and the growth rate in 16 months is very rapid, and the supply of video has not kept up. The quality of many content with high playback volume is still very rough; among the 1 billion video playbacks on the platform every day, 93% are videos within 10 minutes, and 74% are within 5 minutes.

Zhang Yiming 's judgment shared at the conference was that the production, distribution and interaction of video content have been subverted by smartphones, and everyone has the ability to produce videos. The recommendation system makes the matching of information and people more efficient. Video consumption has been fragmented and can be consumed and interacted anytime and anywhere.

According to this, Zhang Yiming called for: Short videos are in the storm of a big explosion. Toutiao will Allin short videos, and will spend 1 billion to subsidize short video creators on the platform in the next 12 months, hoping to affect the direction of the entire industry. Compared with the 1 billion subsidy, the impact of Toutiao has been even more profound. In 2016, Toutiao began to split/launch its short video independent products, benchmarking domestic Kuaishou and overseas Musical.ly and YouTube, Volcano Video, A.me and Toutiao Video. Among them, Volcano and A.me are independent products to explore vertical screen short videos under the urban and rural binary structure, and are responsible for female Zhang Nan .

headline video is independent from the main end of the headline, which is the persistence of the man Zhang Nan. He believes that the United States has YouTube, and China now has such an opportunity. It can be done very well after independence, and it can be used to prove its judgment. Then there is the Watermelon Video.

In June 2017, Toutiao Video's brand was officially upgraded to Xigua Video. In November 2017, it was announced that in the Toutiao APP, the consumption time of videos from Xigua Video has accounted for 61.4% of the total consumption time, and the proportion is still rising. Xigua Video's average daily viewing volume is 3 billion, and the average usage time is 70 minutes. Each user watches 28 short videos every day. According to Questmobile data, Xigua Video's daily active users increased from 5.17 million to 32.7 million in 2017, an increase of nearly 5 times.

On January 3, 2018, Xigua Video launched the live Q&A section "Million Heroes". Toutiao opened up all resources, including the advertising space originally planned to be sold to the outside world, leaving it to millions of heroes. The trend of live Q&A in one and a half months has boosted the rapid growth of Toutiao products including Xigua, and Xigua Video's daily active users have increased by more than 10 million.

After the Spring Festival in 2018, Xigua Video, which lasted for one and a half years, began to enter a product breakthrough period. On the one hand, live Q&A poured into a large number of users with low retention. On the other hand, it was necessary to deal with the rectification storm. In April, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television and the Cyberspace Administration of China interviewed Kuaishou and Toutiao short video platforms. Toutiao products started rectification from April 5, and the Inner Jokes were removed. Xigua Video closed the functions of mobile video upload, live broadcast, barrage, etc., removed 500,000 suspected videos, and handled 40,000 problem accounts.

In the past year, Xigua Video has worked hard to break through products in creator ecology, vertical content supply, variety shows, live broadcast, etc., and Bilibili successfully completed its listing during the same period, and has also made many explorations and achievements in the generalization of content categories, live broadcasts, and variety shows. From the core capability dimension, we examine the similarities and differences between these two products on YouTube.

3. Core capabilities: creator ecology, business closed loop, growth and recommendation

1. creator ecology + business closed loop

In terms of content form, according to the professional level of the producer and content, it can be divided into UGC, PGU, OGC, etc. YouTube's path is to initially base itself on UGC, improve PUGC through content division, and become the absolute overlord of UGC and PGC. In 2015, it began to explore long video OGC through YouTube Red/Premuim, but it was not very successful.

B and Xigua Video. B station occupies a very strong position in UGC, and has embarked on a difficult and down-to-earth road in the cracks of the giant's long video war. It initially relies on games and drama categories to establish the AGC cultural tone and attract creators to influx. The subsequent generalization of content was also very successful. The vertical versions such as life, music, and technology have opened the ceiling, making it the first choice for users in first- and second-tier cities to watch diverse content in an environment full of long video giants.

Currently, B station is based on UGC and strives to make up for the PGC ecosystem. It launched the creator incentive plan in January 2018 and shared the share to UP owners. It currently covers 160,000 out of 730,000 UP owners.

Xigua Video's initial focus was PGC, and content subsidies have been started within the Toutiao account system. The initial content is rough. The creators became scissors hands or porters under the incentives of subsidies. In the future, under the construction of the platform, the games, entertainment, rural areas and other categories have successively made breakthroughs, and the quality of short videos has been improved by setting up golden seconds awards. At present, it has formed a good content ecosystem in vertical categories such as games, agriculture, rural areas, Vlog, fashion, music, and sports.

Inspired by the content sharing, Xigua Video is basically based on PGC. The platform disclosed 300,000 PGC creators. Currently, UGC is stimulated by building Vlogs and other methods. There are now more than 7,000 Vlog authors.

In terms of content style and user perception, B station focuses more on cultural core and core users. The top content categories are games, life, entertainment, film and television, dramas, technology, and music; Xigua Video focuses more on content diversity and mass users. The top content categories include games, rural areas, Vlog, food, fashion, music, and sports. The two are similar in content categories, but there is already a certain gap in content supply: B station provides 70,000 videos per day, watermelons are about 300,000 watermelons, and YouTube is about 3.6 million.

YouTube With the development of the platform, PGC has gradually become the mainstream of the platform, and UGC has been more occupied by Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and other products. Currently, 0.64% of the content on the YouTube platform accounts for 81.6% of the playback.

From this path, it is very important to run the closed loop of " user content consumption - platform advertising monetization - creator content sharing" . Only when PGC creators have profits can they continue to have the motivation to creators. Users can see the content they need on the platform, and commercial income feeds back to the authors.

• , relying on Toutiao's commercial monetization system, Xigua Video is obviously better in the commercial closed loop. The creator's income comes from advertising share. Currently, the platform relies on feed streams and back-insert advertising monetization; the problem of
• B website has always been that the commercial closed loop has not yet been completed, the game revenue exceeds 60%, and the advertising revenue accounts for 8.2% or even slightly less than the live broadcast revenue. Which revenue is given to creators and how to give creators better incentives has always been a question mark.

At the Golden Second Award in January this year, Xigua disclosed that creators with annual income of over 500,000 exceeded 600. A few days ago, on June 29, the top , Ao, the game area of ​​Bilibili, took the opening screen of Xigua, and placed the latest video series "The Factory Director is Coming" exclusively on Xigua.

It is difficult to sustain electricity generation with love, and the grandma master also needs to make a living.

2. Recommendation system and user growth

YouTube's recommendation system is the absolute first echelon in the world, and is quite rough on the user growth side: Google relies on its monopoly position in the Android operating system and requires mobile phone manufacturers to pre-install a variety of applications including Google Play, YouTube, Gmail, etc.; at the same time, Google's search engine strongly diverts traffic in search, and all video search results will be directed to YouTube.

Although YouTube's search proportion has always been very high, from the platform's product actions, the recommendation system can help massive content match users more efficiently, allowing users not only to find content with purpose, but also to consume content without purpose. Strong user growth has made the content consumption and commercial monetization and circulation of the entire platform faster and the network effect is stronger.

From these two perspectives, Watermelon, which reused its Toutiao recommendation capabilities, is the first echelon in China, and Watermelon's head Zhang Nan was once in charge of Toutiao's growth team, and his ability to grasp various growth methods is praised. The most typical battle is the live-assistance of answering questions in 2018. Xigua Video is one of the earliest players to be deployed, helping products such as Xigua and Douyin to obtain more than 10 million DAU growth within one month. The current distribution idea of ​​

B website is still mainly channel + follow + search. The recommendations on the homepage from actual user feedback are not accurate enough. Users rely more on popular videos and rankings to expand new content. The difficulty of cold start of UP owners is higher than recommendations.

On the user growth side, B station has long relied on the community cultural atmosphere and user self-dissemination to drive growth. It is often because a heavy user in the QQ group can bring a group of users by constantly recommending them. These users who come from the cultural atmosphere will be very sensitive to the platform's "original intention", which is part of the reason why B station is very cautious in commercialization.

In addition to the growth of user self-propagation, B station has relatively scarce user growth tools. In the current situation where users are mainly used in first- and second-tier cities, how to expand the downward users and generalize the age structure is a challenge.

comprehensively looks at

, Xigua is more in line with YouTube in terms of core capabilities, and B station has also taken a good position due to community culture. However, can community culture solve the weakness of products in business closed loop, recommendation and user growth? This question needs to be truly questioned.

3. Other comparisons

In addition to core capabilities, Xigua and B station also have their own differences and similarities with YouTube.

In order to solve the copyright issues on the platform, YouTube invested huge amounts of money in 2007 to establish a Content ID copyright system to help copyright owners identify infringements on the platform and help copyright owners monetize on the platform. Toutiao launched the spirit stone system in 2017, using the same solution as the copyright mechanism of Content ID.

YouTube's live broadcast, subscription membership, and self-made long content explorations are not successful outside the main product, and gradually shrink and retreat. Xigua and B station are trying to expand more dimensions in content form.

Watermelon Live was launched in January 2018. In October last year, on Watermelon Play, it announced that the top anchors' single online game reached 5.1 million. Live streaming has now become a core strategy of Toutiao. According to 36Kr, Toutiao established a live broadcasting platform in March this year to support all its live broadcast businesses. Live B station is a highlight of its new business expansion, and its revenue share is even higher than advertising revenue.

and all three are currently trying to make long content. YouTube launched YouTube Original series in 2016, which is an exclusive service for subscription member Youtube Red. It finds top YouTubers to star in reality shows and buy movies, TV series and other series at low cost. The platform investment is insufficient, and the content quality is not high. At the same time, the advertising-free function of Red members is not attractive enough, and users do not pay.

B website uses exclusive copyright animations and documentaries to drive major members, while "Story King" with Up as the core drives users to actively fill in the platform content.The large members driven by copyright content have grown quite well, and they also bring content costs that account for 50% of the revenue. The results of the self-made variety shows "Story King" and " Time Travel " need to be further observed.

Xigua announced in August last year that it had entered the field of self-made variety shows, investing 4 billion yuan to create native mobile variety shows, pulling platform data through short-term, long-term and short-term feeding, and making more radical play. It spent a lot of money to invite celebrities to do professional content. At present, there is no obvious manifestation of reputation and effect.

Conclusion

B is an ACG community, with users greater than products, and video comics are all content carriers; YouTube is video search + recommendation; watermelon is video recommendation, technology and business priority, and they are all practicing the business closed loop of "user content consumption - platform advertising monetization - creator content sharing".

B website has a strong community attribute, a distinct ACG culture, emphasizing personality, and a strong sense of brand. At a certain level, it is similar to the "attitude news" mainly used by NetEase , and it is doing the business of a generation of young people. Toutiao has always said that it is "information without attitude", and it is relatively necessary to strengthen the attributes of tools to weaken the unique brands, because Xigua Video needs to give the right content to the right people regardless of age and region.

"The users of Xigua are loyal to Xigua, and the users of Bilibili are loyal to the UP master."

Author: Pan Luan, official account: Luan Books (ID: luanbooks)

This article was originally published by @Pan Luan. Everyone is a product manager. Reproduction of

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