"Kuaishou has become the world's largest live broadcast platform", with live broadcast revenue of about 20 billion last year. If Kuaishou is a unicorn in the domestic live broadcast field, then Bigo Live, created by the original team of YY, is the leader in overseas live broadcast products.
Bigo Live's parent company BIGO TECHNOLOGY PTE.LTD. (Bigo for short), is headquartered in Singapore. Bigo Live is its main product.
Bigo Live with a strong Chinese gene is not smooth sailing.
Like other Chinese Internet companies, Bigo Live is also promoted by regions and countries. The first wave focuses on Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand, Indonesia , and Vietnam; the second wave enters Middle East ; the third wave targets CIS countries ; then the United States, India, etc. The strategies are different in each area and at each stage, but they have achieved good results.
But in recent days, Bigo Live daily active users' daily active users also showed a downward trend: daily active users fell by about 10% compared with the highest peak. The reason is, on the one hand, due to strategic adjustments, many of Bigo's product lines are being promoted; on the other hand, the development shackles that YY has in China still exist overseas: the cost of acquiring customers is getting higher and higher, but the breakthrough point is not in your own hands.
estuary: Thailand
Bigo Live is the first live broadcast application among Chinese Internet companies to go overseas. At that time, there were no similar products overseas to benchmark, so it was also very blind at the beginning. For example, the first country I entered, Thailand took many detours and paid a huge price.
At the beginning, I wanted to take the campus route. When the team first went out, many people still couldn't speak English well, so they took the translator to go to campus one by one. However, the campus management in Thailand is very strict. Whether it is offline cooperation, sponsorship or advertising, they need to obtain written approval from the management office. The Bigo team had never accumulated local resources before. It is said that they had gone to 18 companies, but they were directly rejected by 16 companies, and the other two companies did not directly reply.
So, the idea of entering campus was abandoned and he began to take the route of beauty. The new route is very suitable. First, Thailand's entertainment industry is developed, with many beauties and model companies, and it also provides good media resources; second, the technology from YY is very powerful, with no lag, good beauty effects, and good video stream optimization; second, users have never seen such a product, and it is very fresh.
At that time, the cost of buying volume was also very low. The average cost per user to acquire customers was less than US$0.1 (now US$0.8-2). Several factors were superimposed, and the download volume and daily active users both increased.
was the first two or three months of operation in Thailand when Bigo Live Beauty Live was the best: the anchors’ quality was very high and the content was also very high. At that time, Bigo Live could be retained at 50-60%, while the average level in the general industry was 20-30%.
But later, Bigo Live made some mistakes, which caused its reputation in Thailand to decline, and it is still difficult to recover.
first, low-end content gameplay. Although Bigo Live does not subjectively condone the dissemination of vulgar content, it does not strictly manage it. For a while, the recommended content on the homepage at night was very vulgar (now these videos can be found on Youtube). Although Thai culture is relatively open, users are very repulsive to low-end content. For example, Tinder, a dating software that is very popular in many countries, has received average response in Thailand. The vulgar content of
has a serious blow to the brand image. Bad money drives out good money, and some anchors who provide high-quality content have lost a lot; many advertising channels are unwilling to cooperate with Bigo Live anymore.
Second, de-unionization (live trade union refers to media companies that sign contracts with live streaming platforms). When daily active users and retention were strong, Bigo Live did not want to copy the union's gameplay abroad, and hoped to directly connect with the anchor. But at that time, Bigo's localization strategy still needs to be improved, and it is difficult to get rid of the union gameplay in specific actions. This move also caused large-scale anchors to stop broadcasting.
Generally speaking, Thailand is more like a touchstone as the first country to be entered by Bigo Live. After Thailand, Bigo Live entered Indonesia and Vietnam. Because of Thailand's painful lessons, Bigo Live attaches great importance to content and localization when entering other countries.
has learned from the past, Bigo Live has avoided many detours in Indonesia and Vietnam.At the beginning, Bigo Live focused on offline "amateurs", such as offline shopping guides, etiquette ladies, car models, etc., both men and women, and first ensure sustainable content production. After
has content, Bigo Live began to promote social routes. Its online sport (the first of its kind in YY refers to two people not in the same place but can combine their voices to sing together), and multi-person interaction (can be able to chat with 9 people). These two services account for a large part of the retention and daily active users.
Indonesia has been very successful so far and has been growing continuously, becoming one of Bigo's two major sources of income (the other is the Middle East, which will be discussed below).
But I have also encountered a crisis in Indonesia. In December 2016, Indonesian IT departments closed the Bigo-connected domain name server because of indecent content. It was Li Xueling who went to Indonesia to meet with the IT department in person and negotiated to establish a legal department in Indonesia and hired Indonesian employees to manage it, so that the crisis could be smoothly overcome. Later, I have always had a better relationship with the government.
The most profitable: Saudi
The Middle East is the second area that Bigo Live has entered after Southeast Asia. This place is a huge gold mine. We checked the charging rankings of several popular countries in Bigo Live, ranking best in Saudi Arabia, and ranked first in the best-selling list on Google Play (about 10 in India, about 20 in Indonesia, and about 70 in the United States).
Popular countries
Saudi paid rankings
The Middle East and Southeast Asia play differently. The Middle East is mainly UGCh (user production content), and Southeast Asia is mainly PGC (specialized production content).
The characteristics of the Middle East region are very obvious, with strong payment ability and relatively conservative. For example, Saudi Arabia is an extremely conservative country. Women need to wear black robes and masks when going out. There are few opportunities for contact between men and women, so social demand is very high. If you look closely at the paid list in the Middle East, you will find that stranger social interaction is very popular, such as Azar from South Korea.
Bigo Live is real-time and can chat as long as you like online, so it solves the big gap in social interaction. Moreover, the Middle East and North African Arabic is basically universal and can be spread over a large regional range. The anchors mainly come from Lebanon , Egypt , Morocco , and paying users mainly come from GCC Gulf countries.
The supply of anchors in other conservative countries is limited, and PGC is not easy to invite, so UGC's strategy is adopted to mobilize the enthusiasm of users and produce content by themselves. For example, I have done some activities and PK between countries.
Following the Middle East, Bigo Live has been launched in CIS countries and the United States, but the results are not good.
It was launched in India relatively late. Based on India's huge population base, Bigo Live currently performs well in India, and its payment list has also soared and achieved high daily active users. However, India has always been a "black hole", and users' willingness to pay is generally low.
ceiling?
Bigo Live is still the most popular and profitable live broadcast application now, but its ranking and daily active users have declined in most markets. We believe there are several reasons:
1, strategy adjustment. At the beginning, we bought large-scale volume in all markets. In the early days, we paid great attention to user volume and daily active users. After crushing a number of competitors, we transitioned to accurate volume and controlled ROI (return on investment). Later, there were more products and more product ends, and the purchase volume of individual products shrank.
2. Overseas, the overall monetization efficiency is not as high as that in China. The domestic language, culture and group characteristics are highly unified, and the cost of acquiring customers can be reduced, while overseas regions vary greatly, so much more investment is required. Now Bigo Live has achieved profitability in basic balance of revenue and expenditure, but customers in each region have already been involved, so it is still difficult to get to the next level.
Bigo Live was famous on the list of the most profitable non-game applications in 2018
video live broadcast is a strong monetization business. This model has high requirements for the customer group. First, the network must be good, second, customers must have the willingness to pay, and third, they must form stickiness. Therefore, compared with other products, the churn rate is also relatively high.
3. Competitor.Competitors also formed a division, causing the loss of paid users, such as Kitty Live, Nonolive, etc.
4. Regulatory pressure. The Indian market, which is now focusing on the promotion, has attracted the attention of the media and the government, and the Indian government may soon take measures. Bigo Live is actually a lot of manpower to do content review, but now there are one-to-one video chats, which makes management more difficult. The previous section of
missing?
A complete product ecosystem should be traffic + monetization. Bigo is still the front part of the lack of ecosystem: attracting traffic.
Based on this, Bigo Live product may have passed its most glorious moment. It’s very simple. If a country’s customer base is enclosed, then the customer base will become smaller and smaller. Because some people only try once, some people will keep trying, but after all, they are still a minority in severe addiction, so it is difficult for them to continue to grow their income.
is on the traffic end, Bigo Live is also trying social products. In 2017, the domestic situation was as follows: Momo Fengguang, which changed from social to live broadcast, was launched, and , which focused on live broadcast, was eager to sell itself. All signs indicate that live broadcast is not as good as social to tell stories. Therefore, YY has always wanted to rely on social interaction.
If it is Momo's social networking to live broadcast, you only need to add a monetization entrance to the product book; but it is difficult to transfer live broadcasting to social networking, such as Huajiao and Yingke, have tried it, but none of them succeeded.
Moreover, switching to social networking will also have a certain negative impact on the live broadcast function. For example, in general, the homepage of a live broadcast application will recommend the best quality content, but in order to serve social interaction, the homepage of Bigo Live is "people nearby", which actually reduces the spread of high-quality content.
Just like the parent company YY, Bigo also takes the product route. When one product is updated, it will quickly launch another one. Currently there are three important product series: Bigo Live video platform, short video social platform Like, and voice social platform Hello. The next product Bigo focuses on is perhaps Hello.
Bigo Live also has its own significance for other brother products, which is that it encircles a specific group of people: young people, mainly male, have the habit of online consumption. After circling these people, they can cash in through other channels.
Three Mountains
In an interview in 2018, the person in charge of Bigo Live mentioned the "Three Mountains" theory: Chinese Internet companies will face "Three Mountains" when going overseas. One is Apple's AppStore, and the other is Google's Google Play. Both companies charge about 30% of the commission. Third, Facebook and Instagram, 60% of the mainstream traffic comes from these two platforms.
Li Xueling also said in an internal letter to acquire Bigo, "BIGO helped YY confirm one thing: the revenue model of live streaming overseas is established. We can be different from other American Internet companies - a model that mainly relies on advertising revenue. We have more opportunities to create a business model that directly pays for users, so that we can avoid the competitive advantages of American Internet companies and complete our own unique survival model." How to avoid the competition of American Internet and how to effectively attract traffic? This is not only YY, but also a question that all Chinese Internet companies need to think about.
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