This article is from WeChat public account: IT broke the news sinks (ID: baoliaohui) , author: ants, title figure from: vision China
Iqiyi couldn’t sit still after the loss of the third quarterly report expanded. Yang Xianghua, iQiyi member and president of overseas business group, revealed in the interview: We want to increase the membership fee.
As early as last October at iQIY iJoy, the membership price of Gong Yu was too low: we set this price in 2011 for pirated DVDs. At that time, pirated DVDs cost $ 5 a piece, and most people watch four a month, so we sell them for 20 a month. The DVD has gone up for so many years, and each person has watched more than 4 dramas per month, so we haven’t gone up yet.
Iqiyi ’s price hikes have been blowing for more than a year. It does n’t rain when it ’s thundery.
But iQiyi’s membership price has no advantage. If you only look at the membership fee for one month, Youku is 15 yuan, Tencent Video and iQiyi are 20 yuan, and the price is basically consistent with the scale of each platform. If iQiyi does not join forces with the industry to raise prices but takes the lead in “running away”, it will be very unfavourable to compete on the long video track in the world. This is equivalent to the subject of user growth. Youteng is still answering questions, and iQiyi throws his pen: “I want to testRevenue growth. “
But after the price increase speech came out, iQiyi was slow to move again. Perhaps the official wish was to rely on the price increase of the new members to get on board and carry another quarterly report for the company.
1, Member ceiling
Behind iQiyi’s eagerness to “push the pig into the circle” is the traffic ceiling of the long video industry.
IQiyi’s subscription growth rate has dropped from 20% in Q3 2018 to 5% in Q3 2019. Membership revenue growth rate has slipped to 0% once this year, and the growth is showing signs of stagnation. From an industry perspective, starting from the third quarter of this year, data on head video sites ’activity and total media duration have all shown negative growth.
18 years is a year of overall cold wave in the film and television industry. On the one hand, the tax policy of the film and television industry has become stricter, and countless film and television companies have been dragged into the tax recovery storm by Fan Bingbing, and the industry has entered a speed bump. In the second quarter of 1919 alone, the filing of domestic film and television drama series fell by 42% year-on-year.
There is less supply, there are fewer head works that can stand up, and there are fewer platforms to master the new members’ masterpieces.
On the other hand, those who have achieved market success in the past, with examples such as “Gu Jian Qi Tan” and “Thirty Miles of Peach Blossom” have faced comprehensive challenges.Those such as “Broken Sky” encountered the original party spit, and the latter, such as “Sweet Critical Strike”, encountered Waterloo. This year’s “Shanghai Fortress” has become a textbook example of this model.
A significant industry change is that Everyone started to develop original variety shows, hoping to suck powder and sticky powder through this method which is easier to operate than film and television. Even the same phenomenon appeared in each content, Youku launched “This! After “Hip-hop” became popular, iQiyi soon released “Hot Blood Hip-hop Dance Company”. Even variety shows may retake the old path of film and television content: After the exclusivity of content disappears, platform competition once again shifts to the exclusivity of fresh meat.
In front of the traffic ceiling, rising membership fees is a double-edged sword: it is an opportunity to redeem a wave of members, save the stock price in crisis, and is an overdraft of future increases.
2, “Iqiyi Fund”
Iqiyi ’s revenue is like a fund. The fund manager has been dreaming of a “decentralized allocation dream”. It has two areas of expertise: advertising and membership, in addition to publishing, IP licensing, games, and e-commerce. Plates are also involved, but with limited success.
This year’s advertising segment encountered a cyclical cold wave, which is evident in its net profit attributes. According to the three quarterly report this year, iQiyi’s advertising service revenue continued to decline and dragged down the company’s net profit.
Iqiyi’s dream is to match two great funds in the field of target video, one is called “Feifei Film and Television Content Selection” and the other is “Disney Entertainment Industry Mix”.
Netflix’s investment idea is very simple: maintain long-term sustainable high-quality content production capacity and use this as a basis to attract a large number of paying users. Because of its relatively stable position in the North American market for a long time, Netflix has been able to devote all its attention to content and use member income as a magic weapon for revenue. Backed by a large English audience, it has laid the foundation for the number of users for Netflix.
The biggest difference between Netflix and the domestic video giants is that stickiness is already on the platform, not the content. In the past, the three giants all had a heart to sprint on NetFly. Everyone backed up against the giants to start a content war. As a result, they could not win or lose for a few years, but the traffic-oriented content market made the practitioners endless.
Disney follows a “multi-point flowering” strategy. Theme parks, movies, TVs, and consumer goods are all part of Disney’s business landscape. Among them, “core IP drives authorized revenue” is the success of Disney: Disney’s animation image clothing, food, toys and other peripheral energy sources continue to provide Disney with income.
IP development is Disney’s core competency. Taking Frozen as an example, the film production cost was less than US $ 200 million, the box office was as high as US $ 1.274 billion, and the revenue six years after its release was US $ 11.3 billion, of which US $ 9.575 billion came from Derivatives sales.
This is exactly what iQiyi wants.
Yang Xianghua once mentioned that iQiyi is closer to Disney’s business model: the media accounts for one third, the park accounts for one third, and the derived income accounts for another one third. From the perspective of business distribution, iQiyi has included hot businesses in recent years such as e-commerce and entertainment live broadcast, but the voice is not loud, and has been in a hidden state for a long time in relevant reports and financial statements.
In addition, iQiyi lacks the second innovation culture on the site. For a long time, the UGC second-generation content and discussions of long videos have flowed to Weibo, Douban, Zhihu and other platforms. The ecology of iQiyi cannot be separated from the core long video content. When the derivative discussion left the platform itself, It also affects the revenue effects of e-commerce and games. This is also the pain point of all long video websites: user stickiness exists due to exclusive copyright, and it disappears as exclusive copyright content is digested.
Yang Xianghua predicts that Aiqi will welcome a wave of incremental users in the 5G era.
Sinking market growth may be one of the few traffic dividends in the long video industry. Before meeting incremental users, iQiyi needs to configure the relationship between various revenues and operate the payment culture of other services on the site. Once these new users have adapted to the long video website culture of “go and watch”, it will be more difficult to reverse it.
3. Net content war
Right now, the long video is at a critical point.
You can think of the long video as a lone warrior wielding a sword and walking on the hot weapon battlefield: the short videos are fragmenting the time, but the long videos are well versed in the idea of protracted warfare. The videos focus on personal preferences, and the long videos focus on family watching; the short videos are the heavenly pride of the algorithm recommendation, and the long videos are the final glory of the editor recommendation.
This is by no means a peer-to-peer war. One is an old aristocracy in the television era, and the other has experienced the baptism of the ultra-high elimination rate of Internet content algorithms. The focus of engagement between the two parties lies in the “information / length ratio” of the content. A term in the list of food ingredients is the “net content” of the content. Numerous fans resent the adaptation of Jin Yong’s drama to join the long shot of the male and female protagonists, because it dilutes the highly condensed “net content” of the original.
In short videos, it can give users an excitement point every 5-10 seconds on average. To get a dopamine secretion of the same size in a long video,It often takes more than a minute. In the variety show, I have to wait for the footage of the auditorium to end, and in the film and television drama, I have to wait for the end of the environmental introduction of the distant scene, not to mention a few minutes of advertising to fill the content. Watching long videos requires users to have the courage to sacrifice time, but short videos are not. The lowering of the threshold provides a competitive advantage for short videos.
For long video platforms, how to increase the net content of homemade content in order to compete with short videos on the stimulation frequency will become the top priority. At the same time, long videos should also give play to their own advantages: depth, integrity, and system, so as to beat short videos in heavy weight. Netflix’s successful experience proves that in the face of an absolutely solid heavy content moat, users’ willingness to pay is by no means a problem.
The domestic and US long video markets are different: all three are backed by giants, and they cannot eat each other, and they cannot rush into “dragging” in-depth content on the premise of uncertain market share. The three companies had to learn from short videos for entertainment and dissemination to avoid being eliminated in the traffic war.
Wang Linhai once criticized the domestic film and television content as focusing on IP traffic and not focusing on humanistic care. This is worth warning of all long video content: When long video insists on competing with short video in entertainment attributes, its own thickness advantage disappears. Under the psychological preset of entertainment attributes, the net content of short videos comes higher, faster and more rude. Even if Tencent Video and Youku Video can take advantage of inter-business collaboration and iQiyi can use the price increase message to “catch the pig into the circle”, it cannot resist the trend of fragmented time being divided.
Don’t be blinded by traffic wars. … p
This article is from WeChat public account: IT claimed sink (ID: baoliaohui) , author: ants