Will this be the white knight who saves Weibo again?
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Guotai Junan Securities Research” (ID: gtjaresearch) , author Guotai Junan Media team.
September 2, during the off-duty time, Weibo on-line Oasis APP beta.
No matter whether Weibo is willing to admit it, all users who open the Oasis APP with curiosity will inevitably have a feeling of deja vu.
Entering the initial page of the Oasis, the dynamics of the “Following People” are arranged in the same order as the Instagram page.
Data Source: Oasis APP, Instagram
The one hidden in the search page is based on the image information flow that is recommended to be aggregated and displayed in 11 categories. This is also the place where many netizens directly call the small red book.
Data Source: Oasis APP, Little Red Book
However, we still found some new ways to look forward to, such as the “water drop” in the upper right corner of the homepage
< /p>
It can be seen that Oasis will launch a high-quality content recommendation channel based on voting and rewards, and will also open members, malls, official repo and “succulent” scenes that may resemble ant forests.
Besides the app, it’s more than just that.
According to Weibo’s unaudited second-quarter earnings report released last month, net revenue growth slowed to 1%, while the net profit for the quarter fell by 26.9% year-on-year.
This is the seventh quarter of Weibo’s net revenue growth slowdown. More and more investors are beginning to link it to the rise of new social platforms such as Vibrato and Xiaohongshu.
Strictly speaking, based on page interaction design, it is unfair to assert that oasis and other platforms are not fair, and the microblogging depth report released by Guotai Junan Media team last week also defines Weibo’s life at the moment. Somewhere else.
However, in any case, Weibo is on the line in the oasis at this time, the intention is very obvious, that is, to slowly become a platform for KOL one-way speech, to rejuvenate the brilliance of social.
Just, more like an oasis of hodgepodge, can you really become a white knight on Weibo?
01, Weibo does not want to be “thin”
In the summer of 2009, the word “micro” belongs to Sina and his Weibo.
At the beginning of the line, Weibo added @, private message, comment, and forwarding functions, which laid the role of Weibo as a social tool in an open environment.
At that time, Sina Weibo invited invited stars and celebrities to settle in, and carried out real-name certification, which was driven by the celebrity effect to achieve the growth of early users.
It may be interesting to have a soul. The early Weibo showed a one-way interaction between ordinary users and celebrities. It is very similar to today’s traffic concentration, but the magnitude is completely different.
In order to enhance the relationship between ordinary users, in September 2012, Sina Weibo PC side appeared “close friends” group, officially announced that Weibo entered the private social field.
At the same time, the information stream is fully embedded with the “Like” button, which enriches the interaction between users in addition to sharing, commenting, and collecting.
In April 2013, Sina officially announced that Sina Weibo and Alibaba signed a strategic cooperation agreement. The story of the realization of Weibo traffic, the prologue begins.
A year later, Weibo officially landed on the NASDAQ Stock Exchange. However, the listing was not on the shore, Weibo was greatly threatened by WeChat at that time. The user growth rate continued to decline for a long time after the listing, and the stock price also fell.
The second spring of Weibo comes from a strategic self-revolution.
Since 2015, Weibo has channel down as its main task, and the sinking measures include three aspects:
-
Sinking in the content world: Social media platforms sink to vertical segments;
-
The sinking of the overall user structure: first- and second-tier cities sink to the third, fourth, third, and fourth lines;
-
Heading of the head user: Celebrity V sinks to small and medium V and self media.
ThisThe play style until the sudden emergence of the short video platform, today’s headline with vibrato, volcano, watermelon video, etc., only slowly began to fail.
It can be said that the ten-year history of Weibo is a period of continuous optimization of functional structure and response to competition from different track products.
And its strong user habits and long-lasting use time also prove that his vitality is still strong.
The total monthly usage of Weibo in 2019 is the fourth largest year-on-year growth. Source: QuestMobile, Guotai Junan Securities Research
This vitality comes from the unchanging core of Weibo’s butterfly–a platform based on user relationship information sharing, dissemination and acquisition.
Based on this kernel, Weibo has gradually grown into a social application with a square media attribute centered on fan and interest aggregation.
Through an open relationship chain and decentralized social relationships, Weibo builds a connection between the public and the field to achieve a process of disintegration information dissemination.
This unique content barrier has become a competitive advantage for Weibo.
Just, and the platform such as Xiaohongshu is born to be different for e-commerce, how to realize the content of Weibo is always a question that the company is thinking hard.
02, dig the land for gold
Costco, which is popular among Shanghai residents, proves that in today’s materially rich, selling the right goods to the right people is the most efficient business model.
It is placed on the microblog that aggregates the flow of the whole field. Deep ploughing of the vertical field is the only way to accelerate its realization.
Since 2004, Weibo has been spreading from the natural media to the vertical field, from hot-spot to interest-oriented, the increasingly perfect vertical domain ecology and the leading position in social communication, pushing Weibo to sink. Attracting more low-line urban user groups, Weibo has also established a core barrier to attract and retain content authors, strengthening the network effect of Weibo.
In 2018, the vertical field covered by Weibo was further expanded to 60, of which 32 fields read more than 10 billion in a single month. In the nine fields of travel, maternal and child, and automobiles, the field of pan-entertainment is still strong. In-depth operation of TV dramas, variety shows, movies, etc., the field of pan-life has grown rapidly and continued to expand.
The expansion of the vertical field is not far from the rapid growth of large V users at the beginning.
In 2018, the number of Weibo V users exceeded 47,000, a year-on-year increase of 60%. Large V users produce an average of 6.5 million original content per month, with an average monthly reading of nearly 1.6 trillion, accounting for 54% of the total readings on Weibo.
And in June 2019, Weibo Da V released 7.9 million original Weibo, producing 2.05 million videos, and the degree of videoization continued to increase with the original ability.
At the same time, Weibo V also pays more attention to social fan operations. The large V user group has an average of 4.7 billion new fans per month, a substantial increase of 147% year-on-year, accounting for 55% of Weibo’s total station fans.
Hobbies or heads KOL drive the relationship between the same group of people, greatly enhancing the stickiness of Weibo users.
03, Big business in a small circle
With Big V, with fans, private domain traffic is never a strange word on Weibo.
With the improvement of the voice of the network red big V, the combination of star, KOL and brand marketing is an important way of microblog marketing.
The data published by Weibo’s white paper shows that 23.1% of users are most likely to be attracted by the online advertisement KOL recommendation, and 22.4% of users are most likely to be attracted by celebrity recommendation.
Weibo with huge wide-area traffic is undoubtedly the best carrier for the Red Man economy. The network red-man shop that has grown up on the Weibo platform has considerable revenue and has a huge fan presence.
The KOL with a transaction volume greater than 1 million in 2018 reached 2,800, an increase of 52% over the same period of last year; the revenue of net red shop owners and content shopping guides reached 25.4 billion, a year-on-year increase of 36%.
Even in the newly completed segment, maternal and child, food, animation and other fields have also achieved large-scale growth. The KOL scale of the transaction volume of more than 1 million yuan on Weibo has increased by 50% year-on-year.
Double 11 Shopping Festival Weibo Red Shows amazing ability to bring goods,Source: Weibo White Paper
In 2019, Weibo will upgrade the window display products to provide more data support for the Reds, and focus on expanding the industry coverage of e-commerce, and strive to cultivate users’ habits of making purchasing decisions around the Reds in more fields.
The advertising business generated around Weibo Reds has naturally become the main source of Weibo’s profit. In terms of segmentation, the advertising business mainly comes from three aspects.KA (brand customer), SME (small micro customer) and Alibaba.
Source: Corporate earnings, Guotai Junan Securities Research
After 2013~2015, Alibaba’s advertising business accounted for an important part of Weibo’s advertising revenue, with a proportion of 40%. Since the first quarter of 2016, the share of Alibaba’s advertising business has begun to decrease, mainly due to Weibo’s firm commercial positioning.
Continuously increase the advertising investment of brand customers (KA) and small and micro enterprises (SME) customers, which makes Weibo customers more diversified and promotes the steady increase of Weibo revenue and profits.
In 2018, Weibo’s advertising revenue was $1,399 million, a year-on-year increase of 50%. Among them, the revenue from brand users (KA) was 45%, up 77% year-on-year. The main growth driver was the growth of the number of head users and the help of Weibo marketing investment policy.
The increased stickiness of Weibo users, as well as marketing models and product innovations, brought small and micro enterprise (SME) advertising revenue to 47% of total revenue.
KA&SME becomes the main force of advertising revenue (in millions of dollars). Source: Corporate earnings, Guotai Junan Securities Research
In addition, on the advertising track, compared to WeChat’s carefulness in the circle of friends, Weibo’s natural media attributes make it as good as it is. Adload is more comprehensive than social platforms such as WeChat and Vibrato.
Data Source: Corporate Financial Report, Guotai Junan Securities Research
Media information flow is similar to the public domain, each useThe user’s Feeds stream is inherently larger than the more intimate social media.
For example, Weibo users pay an average of 300 to 500 accounts, which is much higher than the average number of friends on WeChat. Weibo is based on semi-professional content producers such as PCG+UCG, and its content quality is much higher than that of media based on real social relationships such as friends.
The data published by Weibo White Paper shows that 62.5% of e-commerce marketing methods of different platforms are more willing to accept Weibo information flow advertisements, of which 14.5% of users will be attracted by advertisements and directly purchase, and the remaining users Even if you don’t place an order directly, you will be deeply immersed in the information flow advertisement.
It can be seen that in many platforms, Weibo advertisements cover more consumers and have a better secondary “harvesting” effect on the exposed population.
However, the 25% ad loading rate of Weibo is already much higher than that of similar public media Facebook and Twitter, approaching the ceiling level.
I am afraid that Weibo is not someone else, it is myself.
04, Red Sea Oasis
As early as Weibo stepped into the Nasdaq, some people asserted that Weibo would pay a lot of tuition fees in the misunderstanding of the Chinese media environment by overseas investors.
However, in the past ten years, Weibo chose to quickly realize its real-time business based on wide-area traffic, and did a good job. It not only hit many people’s faces, but also quickly became a ten-fold stock.
However, the popularity is waning, and excessive commercialization also makes users miserable about the advertising and promotion that is mixed in the information flow. Traffic fraud is the height of public opinion. The previous battles between Cai Xukun and Jay Chou have also become a thought-provoking chapter in the history of the Internet and Chinese business.
The Oasis APP launched this time will be worthy of our continued attention to the operation of high-quality content and head customers.
If we compare Instagram with Xiaohongshu, the two operations on UGC can be described as two extremes in the Chinese and Western Internet culture: Ins chooses to help head users transform their business accounts, providing the usual channels for traffic monetization, but The operation of the content stays in the more original advertisement exposure; while the small red book is deeply bundled with the head user in the form of contract signing, and the operation means are more flexible and diverse.
Where the oasis will be in the future, or tell a different story, will be the key to the continuation of this product.
Oasis grows into a long time, will it be engulfed by the sand sea as a relic, or will it eventually be colorful?
Weibo and us are waiting for the next butterfly change.