“This feature came too late”
Editor’s note: This article comes from WeChat public account “ Interface news “(ID: wowjiemian), author: Lu Ke Yan Xu Shi-chi
Image source: WeChat
The public account paid reading function that has been dormant for three years is finally waiting for the news.
On January 15th, the WeChat team announced that the WeChat subscription number payment capability is undergoing grayscale testing, and qualified operators can go to the public platform to activate the payment function.
After successful launch, the operator can set a fee for some or all of the original article, and users can read the full article after purchasing the article. WeChat stated that the move is to provide quality content creators with more capabilities and gain more revenue.
On the same day, some original authors have already received invitations for internal testing. Among them, the public account “Three Tables Longmenzhen” issued the first paid reading article “Thousands of Characters Long Text Telling You WeChat Paying to Make Money By Reading”, the price is 1 yuan. Almost 5,000 people paid for the article 18 hours after it was posted.
Several public number practitioners told the interface news that currently the most suitable to try paid reading may be literature, novel serialization, knowledge payment, fan economy, Internet finance and other public numbers and scenes. Such audiences are more sticky and willing to pay. Also higher.
But worries also follow: paid reading is very likely to be used by the title party, or the semi-hidden nature is used to publish illegal content such as pornography, which tests the WeChat platform’s review and supervision capabilities.
“We ca n’t wait to give readers money to show them, and want to pay?” Jiang Chacha, a WeChat content entrepreneur, said that many public accounts now send red envelopes to attract readers to open them, and let them do paid reading. Readers drive away.
Another entertainment public account practitioner also believes that his content is not suitable for payment. In the case of the WeChat public account opening rate is generally lower than 10%, it is most important to be able to retain the traffic, because this is the basis of advertising monetization, and advertising is the main source of revenue.
Public account “Half Buddha Fairy” has 670,000 followers, and mainly publishes miscellaneous articles on the Internet, finance, and society. The average open rate of each article is above 15%.It is already very high.
The founder Xianren believes that he will not consider trying paid features at all. “Anyone can pay for a screenshot. Then send out the long picture, so I don’t think it makes sense to pay.”
In theory, if the content of an article is valuable to be disseminated by screenshots, it will also attract more fans to the author of this content. In a way, the author of the public account has no reason to exclude such behavior.
Tom is also a WeChat content entrepreneur. The public account he created focuses on the lives and ideas of young people. In his view, paid features came too late. In 2016, there were only a few people in the team, and the public account had a considerable opening rate. He has tried to produce electronic magazines and physical books, but this is very costly for a small entrepreneurial team, and he plans to go through several strandings to succeed.
“We sold 200,000 physical books that year, which shows that our fans are willing to pay, but this includes a lot of upfront costs. If there were paid readings at that time, I don’t think we need to work so hard”, Tom Say.
As of now, the monetization model of public accounts is very mature, mainly advertising and selling goods. Only a few public accounts are still trying to pay for knowledge. Tom is concerned that the bonus period of the WeChat public account has expired and that users have access to information in a variety of ways, making it difficult to cultivate the habit of WeChat users to pay for content.
In the early years, WeChat didn’t think about enabling this feature. As early as 2015, the WeChat team publicly expressed the idea of paying for reading. In 2016, there were related plans exposed. In 2017, Ma Huateng commented in the circle of friends and revealed that Tencent is accelerating the development of WeChat public account paid subscription functions .
But paid reading hasn’t really landed until now. There must be WeChat’s measurement between commercialization and user experience. Paying virtually imposes a psychological threshold on users to watch articles, causing the loss of public account fans.
However, several practitioners have told UI News that they will try to pay for reading. The founder of the real estate information public account “Property Market Question Mark”, which has just started in 2019, said that paid reading will not be used as the main monetization method, but rather a fan selection method. In his opinion, the past few years are not the bonus period of the public account, but the bubble period, and the value of high-quality content will become higher and higher in the future.
For the public account practitioners, what is more worthy of attention this year is the “short content” that Zhang Xiaolong emphasized on the WeChat Open Course PRO. The industry speculates that WeChat may internalize a Weibo-like section in the circle of friends, so that the short content pushed by the public account can be more effectively spread within the WeChat ecosystem.
Interface News learned that many public accounts have set up short comics, short videos and other groups to prepare for short content. In a way, this is a test for the public account practitioners, because the public account has encouraged a long text atmosphere for a long time, and it is necessary to maintain high-quality output in the short content era., The manpower and material resources of the content production team is a new test.
In fact, it has become common for WeChat content entrepreneurs to simultaneously contribute to platforms such as Station B, Douyin, and Express. For them, the new form of content means a source of income, and short content is the direction in which they must work.
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