The second WeChat public class in 2023 will return to offline. At the Poly Intercontinental Hotel in Guangzhou, the venue was “crowded so that the door could not be closed” by the participants. This is an annual day when WeChat releases key signals to the outside world. It usually presents the most important thinking of the WeChat team on products in the past year. For creators and ecological participants, it also indicates potential opportunities in the coming year.

The video account is still the most important protagonist. First of all, there has been a major change in the product. In the future, the video account will support the addition of long audio content. It seems that the podcast market that is currently being discussed is about to usher in the entry of video accounts, and the introduction of long audio will undoubtedly attract a wave of existing players. Podcast creators that are incremental to existing creators. When WeChat was born, Zhang Xiaolong hoped to make WeChat a personal ID. Now, they hope that the video account can become a “personal business card”, and opening up the WeChat ecosystem of audio, text, video, and live broadcast will allow individual creations to be displayed in all directions .

Compared with Douyin and WeChat,The video account, which appeared 7 years late, is groping for a business model that belongs to its own product ecology. On the one hand, it quickly complements the functions of commercial monetization such as live streaming, short video advertisements, and short video streaming, and on the other hand, it tries to build more monetization functions for service creators to catalyze the acceleration of the commercialization of video accounts as a whole.

Zhang Xiaochao, the person in charge of the video account, said,The video account will launch a creative sharing plan and paid subscription service next. In the future, original videos can become paid content, and advertisements can also be inserted in comments, all of which are helping creators to further monetize.Compared with pressing the accelerator button of the video number in the last WeChat public class, this time the new function display adds more and more practical entrances to the goal of commercialization.

The video account should be everyone’s personal homepage

For a content ecology, obtaining traffic and obtaining income are two weights that complement each other and motivate creators.

In 2022, the user usage time of the video account will triple year-on-year. Surprisingly, this has exceeded the usage time of the circle of friends. The number of daily active creators and average daily video uploads of the video account also increased by more than 100% year-on-year. These signals all indicate that the supply side of content is positive.

Therefore, at the level of service creators, WeChat announced this time that the video account has ushered in a major upgrade in terms of products. WeChat hopes that the video account can become a personal business card, which can display a user’s video content and live broadcast content, and can also be directly mounted on the window for cash, becoming a display area for users to enrich a variety of “works”.

And this time the most important thing is to increase the function of long audio insertion. Zhang Xiaochao said that when considering whether to include audio content, their first consideration is to see if it can become an atomic component, and at the same time, whether it can be distributed in video streams and live broadcasts. To this they all answered in the affirmative. This means that the current podcasts and other content on platforms such as Himalaya FM, Dragonfly FM, Lizhi, and Xiaoyu will be displayed in the video account, and then distributed through recommended streams and live squares in the WeChat ecosystem.

The video account has been emphasizing the definition of “atomization”. This definition itself hopes that the video account can become a tentacle to open up the various ecology of WeChat, connecting users and content. With the “personal business card”, each user has a private homepage. Here, everything from graphics, videos, to audio, and then to the display window with goods is available, and everything from content to transactions has also been opened up.

The user group of long audio is also highly compatible with the user group with purchasing power of the video account. Statistics from JustPod’s “2022 Chinese Podcast New Observations” show that the average age of the main audience of Chinese podcasts is 30.2 years old, 48.4% are in first-tier cities, the average monthly income is 14,808 yuan, 40% have a master’s degree or above, and 40% are female podcast audiences. than 53.1%. From the perspective of user portraits, 80% of the purchasing power of video accounts comes from female users, and 60% comes from users in first-tier to third-tier cities.

At the beginning of its birth, the video account obtained the special status of opening up the WeChat public account, small programs, and corporate WeChat. Now, the ability to search will also be incorporated into the video account. The idea of ​​WeChat is that in the future, users can “chat and search” in the comment area of ​​the video account, while scrolling and writing comments; in the live broadcast room of the Spring Festival Gala, users can also watch the Spring Festival Gala and do searches at the same time.

02

To make creators more profitable

In Tencent’s recent financial report conference, video account information flow advertisements were also regarded as the “hero” that drove revenue growth, and Ma Huateng also directly called it “the hope of the whole village.” But the video account still needs to prove its ability to monetize.

In helping creators monetize, both Xiaohongshu and video accounts have shown a more “universal” particularity. Xiaohongshu relies on the commercial value of grass-planting notes to allow more bloggers with low fans to obtain the possibility of “realization”; while the video account follows the consistent style and develops commercial products that users with more than 100 fans can realize. .

From today’s various changes, we can intuitively see thatThe video account tries to solve the creator’s income problem by means of products instead of manpower.In the WeChat public class, Zhang Xiaochao mentioned twice that he hopes to use productization methods to standardize the work of heavy operations as soon as possible, and use product capabilities to allow more creators to earn income.This is also the consistent style of WeChat. They believe in“Systems and rules will be much more efficient than operations”。

From “0 fans” to “100 fans”, and then to “10,000 fans” author, there will be corresponding monetization tools at each stage.

future,The video account will also launch two commercial tools.

• Brand New Creator Sharing Program

High-quality content through the original statement will be able to enjoy a series of original rights, including advertising sharing in the comment area, platform protection for original content, priority recommendation for platform distribution, etc. It is different from the original mutual selection advertising system – it has complicated processes and relies on establishing contact and communication offline.The new advertising system will automatically identify the content of the video and place appropriate advertisements in the comment area. Creators will take advantage of this to quickly reap the benefits.

• Paid Subscription Features

As another commercial “small bomb”, the paid subscription system that already existed in the official account system will also be migrated to the video account. This function will support creators to set up a paid content area, and users will become members by paying a monthly fee. For some knowledge content creators, this means that a long-term commercialized fan system will also become a unified capability, covering all creators of video accounts and public accounts. Every creator can quickly establish their own commercial paid subscription system. In recent years, knowledge content has become an important component of various content platforms. Bilibili, Zhihu, Douyin, etc. all have similar functional services.

While providing standardized products, the video account has also been trying to lower the threshold for monetization. The “Video Account Small Task” function, which can be participated in by meeting 100 fans, also underwent a policy upgrade in March. The direct change brought about is that creators who participate in small tasks will increase their income by 40%. From the current point of view, the main advertisers attracted by this form of small tasks are game advertisers, represented by Netease’s “Egg Party” and the WeChat mini-game “Sheep a Sheep”. The highest income of a single video of “Egg Party” reached 36,000 yuan, attracting more than 14,000 creators to participate.

A person in charge of the brand of a large company mentioned before that the video account is a public opinion field for them, and the low-cost, high-exposure method like small tasks is very attractive to them. This can also be seen from the fact that most of the accounts with the highest attention on the video account are media accounts. The new advertising system of the video account may allow more creators to receive the benefits directly brought by the traffic.

At Tencent’s earnings conference call in the fourth quarter of 2022, Liu Chiping, its president, also mentioned, “We are still in the early stages of video account monetization, and we are cultivating additional revenue streams, such as live e-commerce.” In addition, he also said, In order to promote the conversion of advertisers, Tencent has been using innovative advertising formats, merchant-oriented CRM(Customer Advertisement System) tools and user-facing shopping tools to upgrade transaction capabilities.

Behind this, the opportunity they see is that the proportion of WeChat advertising revenue generated by click-to-buy and click-to-message ads continues to increase, accounting for more than 1/3 in this quarter. These are also urging video accounts to more actively help creators gain the ability to monetize. Only when creators realize ecological prosperity can video accounts take advantage of the trend.