The short video went to sea and has arrived in the remote rural areas of the South Asian subcontinent.
Editor’s note: This article is from “志象网” (ID: passagegroup), the author Luo Ruiqi.
From the New Delhi Railway Station, take the express train all the way to the south, five hours to Jhansi, the small town of Uttar Pradesh, then transfer to the car, and bump on the bumpy road for an hour before you can reach the small town of Madhya Pradesh. Just (Orchha).
Ocha is a contradictory metaphor. Located at the junction of two populous states in North India, it has a typical Indian rural landscape. However, poverty did not cover up the “starlight” in this sinking space – more than a dozen “net red” on VMate, stationed in Ocha.
While driving between the towns of Ocha, the houses are all low-rise houses, and the roadside leaves are covered with thick dust. From time to time, there is a high-class hotel specially designed for foreign tourists.
The usual banners on the roadside are green. Some are the propaganda materials of local politicians. Some are dozens of fans who wish to wish their favorite Bollywood stars a happy birthday. There is also a special one. Ten “net red” are wishing everyone Diwala and Tossehra. )happy.
The “Net Red” banner at Orchha Village / Photograph by Luo Ruizhen
Like China’s “Taobao Village” and “New Media Village”, in the small Orchha, thousands of people have appeared on the VMate platform. VMate is responsible for the user’s operation. The morning tells The Passage. After the selection, VMate has hundreds of people in this area. People mainly take their daily life, some perform juggling, and some people shoot themselves. Farm work.
Behind this, as one of the hottest destinations for the Internet, India has attracted more than a dozen large and smallThe short video gamers sprinted into the top of the 2018 Google Store India download list, and TikTok, LIKE, Helo and togetU four short video platforms squeezed into the top ten.
Ocha is like a mirror, a short video to the sea, has arrived in the remote countryside of the South Asian subcontinent.
See yourself
In the eyes of many Indian short video entrepreneurs, VMate has always been a “Buddha” compared to other high-profile rivals. However, the VMate of the “Buddha” has also recently begun to accelerate.
On October 24, VMate announced that monthly active users reached nearly 50 million. When it received a billion-dollar investment in Ali in May, its monthly activity was only 30 million.
This shift is also reflected in the shift in VMate’s internal focus. Cheng Daofang, head of the VMate business unit of Ali Innovative Business Group, said that in the past two years, VMate has focused on the construction of content ecology, and will mainly focus on community satisfaction.
On October 20th, Gao Chen and the team operated by VMate users went to Orchha to participate in the offline meeting of local talents. Manoj Kumar is the agent of VMate in Orchha. He started preparing a week earlier and spent more than 10,000 rupees (about 1,000 RMB) to borrow tables, chairs, stereos, and a green carpet to make a small outing in the park. Block area. These devices are generally only used when the rich people in the village do something red and white.
When Gao Chen and his colleagues arrived, thirty or forty people came in line to wait at the gate of the park. Some people dressed in costumes dressed up for the party. Manoj said that he only invited 40 people, but there are still many users who have heard the news and have come spontaneously. A man who used a marbled ball on the VMate, with the marbles beside the sound of the VMate.
“Do you understand? Who else doesn’t understand?” Deepika works in the VMate user operations team. She uses a microphone to introduce VMate’s incentives for people, what kind of video to shoot, how much to update, how to Get more attention and come together. 40 people sat on the carpet, mostly at the age of twenty, rushing to answer questions.
Even if the rules are designed to be simpler, some people are unclear. Most of these people have just “touched the net” and face-to-face is the most effective way to communicate.
Rahul Dwivedi and his brothers are performing a fire-breathing
At the end of the introduction, the people started to take turns. Rahul Dwivedi is only 21 years old. He painted the Indian flag on his upper body with oil paint and performed acrobatics such as fire-breathing and smashing bricks with his brother. He told The Passage that he studied the fire-breathing two or three years ago and dreamed of performing on stage at the Indian Talent Show. His dream is being realized on VMate, so it sucks 170,000.
After the performance, everyone started to set up a mobile phone. Gao Chen and his colleagues became the object of everyone’s photo. The Chinese did not understand Hindi and greeted the “Hi Vmate friends” dedicated to VMate again and again. Smiling at the camera.
Roshini Malavia is 17 years old. She performs a match on VMate and sings popular Bollywood songs. The 15-year-old brother often shows up with her. Seven or eight months ago, the family bought the first smartphone and used it together. After the brother introduced the VMate, he started to post the video of Roshini singing. Now there are 880,000 fans.
A month ago, Roshini cashed in the fans’ rewards on VMate, and bought a vivo thousand yuan smart machine. Its camera is better. Roshini and his brother also opened another account. Before using Vmate, Roshini, like most Indian girls, loves to sing love. With VMate, she received a lot of praise from fans. Someone told her that “you must be the star of tomorrow” and she is encouraged.
The 18-year-old Ocha farmer girl Kajul, because VMate’s video of cooking, cleaning, and farming is “fired”, her brother is taking care of her account, taking her on a motorcycle and driving a tractor. Kajul is not good at words, facing the camera, she is silent for a long time, saying that she never thought she could have hundreds of thousands of fans.
Roshini and her usual tractor
On the VMate platform, there are tens of millions of users like Roshini and Kajul. “Our users are ordinary people, neither fancy nor good-looking, but showing the ordinary people in India.” Enosh David is the first local employee recruited by VMate. In his opinion, VMate users not only put It is used as entertainment and as a way to show real life.
Enosh just joined VMate, the content of the platform is more extensive, mainly there are several major categories of funny, music, diet, dance, etc. As the content operation gradually deepens, these categories are subdivided, such as funny Classes are classified into mischief, imitation, language, and so on. In addition, the long tail content of localization such as fitness and labor has been developed. Now, the content of VMate has been subdivided into 18 types.
“Fitness is not only in the gym, but also in the countryside. It also receives a lot of people’s love,” Enoch said, and the content of doing farm work and other work has become one of the most popular content.
“When many people look at these videos, they think ‘this is me.’ Many users will turn from content consumers to producers of content,” he told The Passage.
Thousands of Roshini are “seeing themselves” on VMate.
Be seen by others
VMate also allowed the magician Ganesh Tripathi to walk from behind the scenes to the stage.
The 46-year-old Ganesh was born in the countryside of Rajasthan. Before that, he worked as a cashier in Calcutta. In 2015, he suffered from oral cancer and was unable to continue working. He returned to his hometown. At this time, the librarian in the village found him.
The librarian is also a part-time magician. When Ganesh was a child, he used to play with the magician. After he fell ill, he picked up this hobby. He became a teacher and developed it into his own. Career.
Master has an account on YouTube, “Guru Chela”, and sends some videos of his own magic show. There are already a million fans. Ganesh has been giving assistants to Master before, and the masters are all present. Last year, when Master died of illness, YouTube’s account number slowly stagnated.
Because of illness, Ganesh made a patchwork of 500,000 rupees, which was spent on healing. Fortunately, his condition has healed after treatment and his body is slowly recovering. Four months ago, he started using VMate. He started spending more time on it, working with Master’s son and taking some short videos of performing magic.
This time, he went to the stage and accumulated 40,000 fans with his magic skills. Not only that, he also made money from the platform, spending monthly for his wife and three children.
Ganesh Tripathi is performing magic to children in shelters
On October 18th, Ganesh followed the VMate team and went to a children’s shelter set up by an NGO in Delhi. He performed magic for the children and changed a chocolate from his hat. The children were happy. Eat it.
“Magic is a very mysterious and romantic thing.” Ganesh told The Passage that he is happy to bring happiness to people.
Let ordinary people become the protagonists on the platform, which is the gene that VMate was born with.
“Our mission is to enable Indians to record and express equally.” Cheng Daofang told The Passage that this vision has not changed since the first day of VMate’s birth.
At the end of 2017, VMate was established within UC, when the short video track in India was just getting started, and the vibrato and fast hand had entered India. The short-lived video of the entrepreneurial fever is also beginning to see signs.
Cheng Dao said, “Copy from China” is the big logic of UC before going to sea, and the birth of VMate is also in the same line. “We pick some of the proven tracks in the country and consider whether India has the same core appeal. We think India is likely to succeed,” he said.
Under the great influence of Bollywood, most Indians are born to be able to sing and dance, and have a strong desire to express; but at the same time, a large number of ordinary people have very limited ways of entertainment, no platform to show themselves, VMate United Dai Jiawen, the founder and head of operations, called it “the talent has no place to put it.” This is the big background of the birth of VMate.
Selecting a route that is close to ordinary people is also in line with the culture of UC. “We hope that users can participate, and I don’t want it to be a platform for performance.” Cheng Daofang said.
Aocha’s Daren and the VMate team take a photo
The positioning of ordinary people determines that VMate has natural advantages and disadvantages from birth.
Advantages needless to say. In the towns and villages outside India’s first- and second-tier cities, there are 890 million people’s base. They are the “next billion users” that international giants such as Google are keeping an eye on. Most people are just beginning to get in touch with smartphones and the Internet. VMate has a chance like once QQ and IndiaLike WhatsApp, it becomes the entrance for users to know the Internet.
But these emerging Internet users don’t know what short video is, let alone show themselves in front of the camera. “A lot of people just started to take a selfie, it’s a big face, nothing.” Cheng Daofang said, “But the performance platform is destined to be a niche and cannot benefit the public. We picked the road that was difficult to walk, but I believe It is more valuable.”
VMate built its own content system from scratch.
Based on UC’s deep ploughing in India for nearly a decade, Vmate had some agency relationships with the media. At first, they tried to start. But soon found that this road is nowhere. The existing mature institutions are Bollywood-style song and dance content, and the cost is also high, which does not conform to the positioning of VMate content.
Cheng Dao said, the team slowly screened a group of people out through various channels. These people may have a good video shooting ability, but they are very smart. They use them as seed users and then cultivate them according to geographical follow-up. They use the tentacles to find more people. After a year of “land reclamation”, VMate has now established its own talent discovery system. There are thirty or forty agents, and thousands of people have been discovered. Now more than 2,000 people are active on the platform.
One of Orza’s Manoj is one of the resources of the previous UC period. Cheng Daofang called them “star stalkers”. They are the first step in uncovering the talents for VMate. They must not only push people offline, but also teach users to start video from zero to one.
In the future, Cheng Dao hopes that the small offline party activities will also be completed by the agent, and VMate’s operation team is only responsible for relatively large user activities, such as quarterly or annual gatherings.
“Going to the sea” and “Going to the countryside”
Since this spring, India’s short video track has undergone a round of intense reshuffle. The Passage has previously reported that (short video goes out to sea, “small days”, small platforms are struggling, giants are overweight). India’s short video product Clip, which has been in the limelight, has sold the local language platform ShareChat, togetU announced retreat, and two or three Small and medium-sized platforms are also struggling to find a transformation.
Even Indian entrepreneurs commented that Chinese investors have already realized that it makes no sense to compete with TikTok. According to The Passage, major players including TikTok have begun to slow down their overall investment this year.
VMate is taking a road that is thick and thin. Cheng Daofang said that VMate’s investment was less than one-tenth of the competition last year, but this year, when each family began to reduce their investment, VMate invested more than last year.
“My judgment last year was that they could not continue to save money,” said Cheng Daofang, UC has a market for India.More in-depth perception, it is very clear that “Do not want to make money within three years”, the choice is to use patience to cultivate the community, while other platforms will choose to slowly slow down when they can’t get the effect.
“The rapid competition of competing products, no problem, let us educate this market together.” He said that after users are educated, while other platforms begin to slow down their investment, VMate can use relatively low cost. Some of the content producers and users in the competing production system are attracted. “If people accept it, I will go to it.”
Bhavna Srivastav teaches children to paint in shelters
Bhavna Srivastav is one of the people who have been “squatted” by VMate. She is a teacher at a public school on the outskirts of Delhi. Because she is good at painting, she often sends some DIY works on the Internet, using the letters to draw the god Ganesha, and the two figures to draw the ducks.
“VMate gives me a feeling of being cared for.” Bhavna told The Passage that on other platforms, there were often many counterfeit accounts, and she complained many times, but did not receive a response. When she started using VMate, she got 25,000 fans in more than a month, and when there was a counterfeit account, the operations team would quickly ban her.
Bhavna also participated in the public welfare activities at the Children’s Shelter on October 18. When Gao Chen saw her, the two men chatted eagerly. Not only her, but in the different Daren gatherings, Gao Chen can almost call out the name of each person.
This kind of friend-like familiarity is based on the close interaction between the VMate user operations team and the people. Gao Chen told The Passage that the larger user survey VMate will be held once a month, and each time more than ten people will be invited to VMate’s office; after that, quarterly and annual visitors will be held regularly. get together.
In addition to the research, the user operations team will also maintain close contact with the people, using online and offline channels to help them understand what type of video is more popular, suggesting improvements to the video, let them attend It was better to shoot.
The VMate team is communicating with users
and small user research is everywhere. Every month, colleagues from products and technology fly from China to India to visit the local team to learn about the short video usage habits of Indian users.
“Chinese colleagues come to India and really observe the users all the time. They will take the security guard to talk for a long time, see what mobile phone he uses, what apps are in the mobile phone.” Nisha in VMate responsible for brand marketing Pokhriyal told The Passage.
Gao Chen also said that every time a product and R&D colleague comes to India to buy dozens of mobile phones to go back, in order to solve the various adaptation problems that may occur when the video is shot and uploaded.
On October 20th, VMate held its first large-scale offline party in Noida. Unsurprisingly, the party became a large netizen of hundreds of people to meet. Many people dressed up and greeted each other with enthusiasm. When they met a familiar face, they began to take pictures together.
“You see a lot of people coming over with their mouths and then introducing each other. We hope to have this kind of atmosphere.” Cheng Daofang said, “We have patience and planning is at least three to five years.”
VMate’s “midfield battle”
In order to make it easier for ordinary users to use, VMate has also created a lot of holiday-related stickers, various sunglasses elements stickers that are popular in India, and even VR attractions stickers. When this year’s Bollywood blockbuster “Housefull 4” was released, VMate also cooperated with its announcement to do related activities.
These localization operations are mainly from VMate’s local operations team. A local team that cooperates with Chinese colleagues is also an incomparable advantage between Cheng Dao and his competing products.
“He doesn’t know how to do localization, but no one.” Cheng Daofang said that UC entered the Indian market in 2009 and accumulated a lot of experience in local team building and management. It can be supplemented. The Chinese employees who are stationed in India are also scarce than expected. “People are the biggest bottleneck.”
Standing on the shoulders of UC, VMate’s core founding team came from UC, with a framework to complement other people. Nisha was previously responsible for branding at UC and has been working at UC for four and a half years.
As an old employee of UC, Nisha has adapted to the rhythm of VMate from the beginning. When she first came to VMate, she did the work of content operation.Just go to the brand. Nisha said she has learned to “embrace change.”
It took her a year to get used to it. She said that when she first entered UC, she often felt that it was difficult to keep the pace of thinking with the Chinese colleagues, and there would be disputes on many things. Chinese colleagues often emphasize the rules that have been verified in China, and she is more convinced that the Indian users have a solid understanding of the field. But in the end, both parties will let go of the dispute, mainly based on the needs of users, and finally everything will be verified by data.
Chinese team of VMate
In VMate, the entire project is divided into special items, and then split into sub-special items. The front-line project of the user side will be authorized to the appropriate local staff to be responsible. “Let him go to the army to fight,” Dai Jiawen said. After giving appropriate incentives and freedoms, the ability of Indian local teams to grow and achieve a sense of accomplishment will also rise.
Now, VMate’s local team has already had several “experts” with decision-making power in content, brand, and user.
This super-strong local team also gave VMate a good transcript. According to Cheng Daofang, this year VMate completed the KPI for the whole year and did not exceed the budget. In his opinion, VMate’s money is “very efficient.”
In April of this year, VMate began to try to reward in short videos. When users post, (by) comments, (being) liked, etc., they can get VCoin. This kind of virtual gold can be used to play. Reward your favorite videos, and if you accumulate enough, you can withdraw them.
Gao Chen told The Passage that it seems that the willingness of users to enjoy the gold coins is still very high. This way not only increases the activity of the community, but also makes the head of the person Encourage them to create better videos with extra income. At present, the head of the person can earn more than 1,000 yuan per week.
The bonus coins won by the user on the display VMate
“The cost of this part is much smaller than the cost of buying.”We spent about a tenth of the money on the competition, and we were able to reach the level they had spent on it. Cheng Daofang said, “This is a very healthy growth, so we are actually very confident.”
He also said that VMate is currently only considering the efficiency of spending money, not considering making money in the short term, and looking to break even in five years, and he is more optimistic about the prospect of realizing.
In the three major categories of advertising, rewards and e-commerce/games, the experience of UC tells Cheng Dao that the volume of online advertising in India is still small and can’t get up in a short time. The game and the e-commerce have not yet got up. Inverse, VMate chose to play the game.
In his view, doing community gambling is the economic development of India. “The rewards are all small money. The Indians are so poor, 10 rupees are available.” Cheng Daofang believes that the vast majority of users have limited entertainment, and the satisfaction of spending small sums is very attractive.
“As long as our community is sticky and take that position, I believe that as long as India has money, our community is sticky, I think it is easier to make money than I think,” he said.
Occa’s offline party made Deepika’s face appear in dozens of Vmate Daren videos. She said to the camera over and over again, “Hello VMate friends”, with a smile on her face.
“Every time I get in touch with people, I see and feel the positive changes VMate brings to their lives, giving them the opportunity to realize themselves and seeing them become more confident.” Deepika said “This makes me feel like I am in a great career.”
(ManojKumar and GaneshTripathi are pseudonyms)
(pictures are from VMate except noted)