The battle between long and short videos has begun.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “歪道道” (ID: wddtalk ), the author said.
A few days ago, iQiyi released a mixed wish. Financial report.
The financial report shows that iQiyi’s subscription membership in the second quarter of 2019 broke the first time, and Gong Yuxing was so high that “this has become a milestone in the company’s development”.
However, the secondary market is clearly not very face-to-face. iQiyi’s share price fell 9.29% in after-hours trading and was temporarily quoted at $16.4.
In the past 52 weeks, iQiyi’s share price has been up to $32.46 and the lowest is $14.35.
Compared to the highest point, the stock price fell nearly 50% on the day.
The reason is that advertising revenue is not ideal.
In the first quarter of this year, iQiyi’s online advertising business revenue reached 2.1 billion yuan, unchanged from the same period last year;
In the second quarter, revenue from online advertising was shown to be RMB 2.2 billion, down 16% year-on-year.
Going deeper, the ads are not selling well, there may be two reasons:
One is content and the other is users.
The delay in content broadcast is affected by policy regulation, and the decline in user data is more the stagnation of short videos that are brought to online videos. Iqiyi is like this, as is Tencent Video and Youku.
Internet cross-border suppression
After the copyright dispute, when the three major video platforms are struggling to get a higher membership fee, I don’t know if the short video is straightforward, and the fast-handed and the vibrato are taking the break from the user’s time. The side has suppressed the development of the field of long video content.
This phenomenon is not uncommon in Internet commerce today.
The industry barriers that Ctrip built over the past decade have been overcome by the high-frequency low-frequency game of the take-out giants, and Baidu has settled down with the search portal. Today’s headlines use algorithms to change the form of user-acquired content, thus weakening the search. The role.
In the past, entrepreneurs focused on one competitor of the track and killed each other. Now they have to be wary of foreign “invaders”. Obviously, Internet companies have rewritten the rules of competition across the border.
The battle between long and short videos has begun.
As early as the beginning of last year, a formal recruitment JD showed that today’s headlines are being recruited for large-scale production assistants, script editors, etc. In March this year, they invested in artist brokers.Si Tai Yang Chuanhe.
On the contrary, iQiyi and Tencent video have successively provided micro-drama and micro-comprehensive efforts, and provided traffic and financial support for content creators.
However, the integration of long and short videos has exposed their respective anxiety, especially the three major video platforms.
According to CNNIC’s “44th Statistical Report on China’s Internet Development in 2019”, as of June 2019, China’s online video users reached 759 million, of which long video users were 639 million, short video users. The scale is 648 million.
More critical is the user duration.
According to QuestMobile’s China Mobile Internet 2019 Spring Report, the total monthly usage of users in March 2019, the growth of the two segments of short video and comprehensive information contributed half of the overall length increase.
Among them, the short video has an increase of 36.6%, while the online video is only 5.9%.
This trend has been threatening the revenue of the three major video platforms, the most intuitive manifestation is advertising revenue.
iQiyi’s online advertising revenue in the second quarter of this year fell 16% year-on-year. Tencent’s media advertising and social advertising declined in the first quarter. In the second quarter, media advertising experienced negative growth.
When the fast-handed and the vibratos set their advertising revenue targets to the tens of billions, we can see that the advertising revenue of the video platform may not be less than their fraction.
This is why Aiteng concentrates on increasing the rate of payment, but if the time for users to watch the video is heavily dispersed on short videos, as film and television practitioners worry:
Anyone else watching the series?
And the fact that it is even worse is that the film industry’s winter and the pressure of self-made content costs, while acting on the video platform.
Long and short video combinations are just a negative defense
Long video becomes shorter, short video becomes longer, and long video and short video complement each other. It was once considered a major trend in the video content field, but this may not be the case.
Yiqiyi predicted that it will launch nearly 20 high-quality vertical screen works within one year.
To this end, they also gave a more attractive pay-as-you-go model for vertical short videos, and wanted to attract the producers of the video through the platform alone.
But at present, in addition to “Life is for me,” it is difficult to see the vertical screen drama with water splash and iQiyi.
Similarly, Tencent’s vertical screen variety “Speaking with strangers” with a score of 9.2 has changed from the vertical display in the first season to the traditional horizontal video..
The combination of horizontal screen, vertical screen and micro-drama does not only need to bridge the gap between long and short video presentations, but more importantly, the user habits between online video and short video, let the video platform It is difficult to get a lot of user traffic and time from the micro-drama.
According to the research conducted by the Speedway Institute on the behavior of users watching videos online, the proportion of users who watched videos online for less than one hour per day was only 7.9%, and the proportion of users with a viewing time of 1-2 hours was as high as 61.2. %, and 29.3% of users said that they watched videos online for 2-3 hours a day.
Aiyouteng is a pulse-type user growth. Generally speaking, users who log in to video sites mostly have a certain purpose. A good drama can detonate the traffic pool, and a classic movie will often let users watch it repeatedly.
Therefore, the user time of the online video is concentrated and relatively long.
This deep-rooted habit is completely different from the kill time in brushing a short video. In other words, few users will open the video platform for micro-drama and micro-overplay, even if they really want to watch the micro-play, they also More accustomed to fast hands, vibrato, not video sites.
Therefore, to some extent, the long video “shortening” recaptures the user time occupied by short videos, with minimal effect.
Conversely, although the fast and vibrating sounds are simple to release the video, it is not easy to enter the long video production.
In June 2018, the quick acquisition of Station A appeared to be the first shot for the layout of the long video, but today, the content strategy of Station A is still vague, whether it is to continue to deepen the ACG field or to integrate with the fast video. They did not think clearly.
As for the vibrato, it not only gradually opened up the 15-minute video publishing capability, but also accelerated the production of micro-movies or short plays.
This kind of approach can further extend the user’s stay time, which is far from the real film and television production.
What’s more, there are very few users who will give up video sites and watch TV or movies on fast hands and vibrato.
In general, long video is short enough to cope with the user time crisis brought by short video, while short video changes are more and more want to break through the constraints of content production.
Crisis still lies in content
Today, many film and television practitioners are bluntly saying that user psychology is becoming more and more difficult to ponder.
A screenwriter said, “I now find that many young people around me are going to watch the drama at twice the speed. This is actually destroying the quality of the content itself, and the sound and the picture are distorted.”
Another video ad marketer also said that users are viewing content at twice the speed. We used to find it because of him.I didn’t like this content, and later found that it has become a habit to consume content.
This is a dangerous signal.
Users use the double speed to watch the drama, and more are protests against the hydration of the series. Once they are used to watching the game at twice the speed, the best content may not be able to recover the immersive experience of the video platform.
The hydration of the drama and the hard work of the show are actually pushing the user to the short video platform in disguise.
Iqiyi has published a set of data showing that the rate of abandonment of long plays in recent years is getting higher and higher.
For TV episodes of more than 45 episodes, the audience abandonment rate in 2016 was 47%, and in 2017 it was 50%. In the first quarter of 2018, this number has already exceeded half, reaching 56%.
After the user abandons the play, the time spent on the video is easily transferred to the short video before the next target is found.
Therefore, the video platform is dig out as much as possible, but the explosion is hard to find.
From 2017 to the present, iQiyi has successively created a number of explosions such as “Hip-Hop in China”, “Idol Trainee”, “Yanwei Raiders”, and one of the “Yanwei Raiders” has a cumulative volume of 15 billion. .
The three major video sites have experienced this kind of pulsed carnival. As the user’s mental maturity, the audience’s tastes become more critical, and the large-scale failure of the “IP+ Traffic Star” model, the difficulty of the explosion is “going to the next level.” .
At the same time, iQiyi is also suffering from the lack of strength in the N generation.
In creating the explosion, Tencent Video and Youku are not as good as iQiyi.
In the past one or two years of Tencent video, there have been a handful of variety shows and film and television dramas, which can be sent to the public for the last time. For example, “Fujian”, “Rugao”, “Full-time Master”, “Anqing Xiangxi”, etc. Wait.
This is especially true for Youku. After a sudden emergence of “Soul of the Town”, there is only one “Chang’an Twelve Hours” that can be called hot in the near future.
Of course, this is irrelevant to the current external environment.
As of August 19, 16 of the 25 film and television concept stocks disclosed the first half of the year’s performance forecast, and 13 of them saw a year-on-year decline in net profit.
From the box office revenue, the Chinese box office in the first half of 2019 fell for the first time.
And look at the video content launched by this year’s video platform. Among the 40 projects of Tencent’s film conference, there are 15 melody of the times. Aiqiyi follows a series of main melody dramas such as “Patriot” and “Oath”. In the future, there will be “The Titans of the Anti-terrorist Special Forces”. Youku’s tribute sheet is also full of energy.
It’s no wonder that users are addicted to short videos, fun, beautiful, and at least temporarily relieve the anxiety of reality.
However, film companies and video platforms can’t escape this way, and straightforward numbers remind them of what kind of situation they are in.
Aiqiyi, Tencent Video and Youku have their own concerns, but they are consistent in the face of short video threats, but they still have notThere is a way to find an effective response.