The article is from WeChat public account: Haike Finance (ID: haikecaijing) , OF: He Xu, from FIG title: Oriental IC

The big move has been released.

In early March, a small news circulated in the WeChat “video number” comment area: watch more videos and like more, you will be officially invited to open a video number.

This kind of news is all over the place for a while, making it hard to tell the truth.

As many communities started to promote, this phenomenon has successfully aroused user curiosity. It was just that the curiosity quickly dissipated-someone had already recorded a short video on the video number to refute the rumor.

Popularity seems to be declining. At present, the industry is updating content with various official accounts of Tencent. “Tencent Cloud” and “Tencent” are mainly responsible for telling small jokes of employees’ home office. “Tencent News” and “Tencent Movie” update the content according to their respective fields, together for the traffic family The new platform sipped.

This is a story about Tencent re-starting short video in early March 2020.

Tencent has been on the short video track for 7 years since it started to make a product called “Weishi” in 2013. There are no less than 14 short video products announced by Tencent. As for the leading starring micro-vision, after its resurrection, it is increasing resources to spend money to this day.

Short videos have become the most cherished dreams of this social empire.

Short Video Shortlist

Vine developed by Microsoft has not grown and expanded on a large scale like its predecessors, Facebook and Twitter. This symbolic short video app was acquired by Twitter just six months after birth, in October 2012. I wonder if this inspiredOr, purely by coincidence, an entrepreneurial team that has been doing quick GIF animation in Beijing Tiantongyuan began to adjust their direction and transition from tool applications to short video communities.

After a toss, Vine ’s user data stopped at 40 million. Four years later, Twitter announced that Vine was shutting down. Unlike foreign social platforms, which often use short videos as a tool, the flames of independent short video applications have become more and more popular in China.

Tencent noticed this opportunity earlier. When it was launched in the second half of 2013, ByteDance was still busy running for the headlines of just one year after birth, looking for people, building teams, and thinking about how “information and finding people” should be realized. The second shot that appeared during the same period is also worth noting, it has been tied to Weibo.

WeiTV also emphasizes the similarity with Weibo. The most intuitive point is that the team is the Tencent Weibo’s man and also said in the promotion that the operation is mainly based on Tencent Weibo. In a publicity document at the time, you can also find the sentence: You will find this is a mobile app that looks like Weibo.

In the history of micro-vision promotion, so far people have talked about it, and Ma Huateng, who has always been low-key, has posted 4 small videos on it-although it is also shooting the slide of Tencent’s building.

It seems that the way of “video version of Weibo” has been spotted, and the previous direction of Weishi is also to introduce stars and follow the fan economy. An 8-second short video that the host Xie Na once sent was impressive. In the picture, she didn’t say a word for 3 seconds, then suddenly moved and introduced the audience with exaggerated language. This is a new application. Pictures Can be moved.

A large amount of marketing expenses achieved initial results: During the Spring Festival of 2014, the download volume of Weishi ranked among the top five in the Apple Store’s free list, and the number of users increased to 45 million. This is the first moment of highlighting in micro-life. In 2014, it began to bear the double pressure from the second shot and the beautiful shot. The beauty shot born from Meitu software has a stronger ability to make the list, and soon it was released to the top of the free list.

Another “rival” is very dramatic-it’s microletter. The new version of WeChat was released in September 2014, and for the first time supports users to send small videos in the circle of friends and chat boxes.

No longer burning money, declining data, the rise of rivals, and the strength of internal support of the group is unknown, which is considered to be the main cause of Weishi’s death in 2015. Microvision died naturally. Sohu Technology mentioned in a report that the number of users of Weishi has always hovered below 50 million, and its last update was in April 2015.

A month later, another partner, Xiaocaixiu, went online, and also has a strong ability to charge the list. Two months later, he rushed to the top of the Apple Store free list. In addition, the number of Meipai users broke 100 million early. At the time, there were publicity claims that its speed of breaking 100 million exceeded Weibo and WeChat.

Two other things cannot be ignored. It was also this year that the number of fast-handed users exceeded 100 million and had not been noticed by the media; Byte Beat will set up a short video team for the first time in 8 months.

The short video stream application, the first time, there is no direct benchmarking abroad.

The next year of 2016 is known as the first year of short video, and the entrepreneurial team of Fengqiyunyun undoubtedly continues to stir the heartstrings that Tencent wants to join. In the post-micro-vision era, Tencent responded by making a variety of short video applications.

Perhaps due to the cautious engineer culture of the Goose Factory, we don’t know much about many products released during this period. Most of the news about them was that they released version 1.0 and version 3.0. In their descriptions, they rarely saw the various types of “subversion”, “star product managers”, “changing the world” and so on that manufacturers keenly mentioned at the time. word.

But in an app copy launched in January 2016, called “Flash Cafe”, we can still see Tencent’s anxiety at this moment. At the time, it was introduced like this: This application “almost accommodates the product features of small coffee shows, second shots, and beautiful shots that attract users.”

After that, Tencent has continued to launch various short video products, so no need to repeat them here. Many people may not have heard their names: QIM, MOKA Mocha, DOV, MO Sound, Yoo …

Finally, I decided to revive Microvision. But before it was officially resurrected, it had a very strange movement. I don’t know if it has something to do with investing in fast hands during that time. In March 2017, WeChat, which had not been updated for a long time, suddenly announced that it would close the service.

This news has caused many people’s confusion, mainly because of the next few actions: they explicitly stated that they would shut down the service, but updated the software on the Apple Store three times in May, June, and August.

Taking a closer look at what happened during that time, it is not difficult to understand Tencent’s anxiety. People are spending more and more time on short videos, and they are running out of time.

Dynamic bus stop sign marketing during the Spring Festival 2020

Before talking about the resurrection of microvision, let’s first understand how some anxiety disorders before Tencent were cured.

Anxiety Resolve

Looking back, it is not difficult to see that Tencent’s anxiety is treated in two main ways: one is to disappear the source of anxiety, and actively or passively abandon the business and recover on its own; .

If you have used Renren.com, you may still remember that there was a “Friends Network” with a clover on the website.

In 2008 and a few years later, Tencent formally tested QQ alumni in 2008. Two and a half years later, it has a new name, “Tencent Friends”, and has a good momentum of development. The target is exactly the popular Renren. Everyone was listed in the United States in May 2011, with a market value of more than $ 5.5 billion. In July of the same year, Tencent Friends changed its name to Friends.com.

After the mobile Internet tide struck, Tencent changed its weapons, and Renren’s network traffic fell, day by day. The social enemy alert is lifted. In the year that Renren’s market value shrank by 92%, that is, in July 2017, Tencent issued a notice saying that Friends Network ceased service.

Another well-known thing is that Tencent once made great efforts in e-commerce and failed to invest in JD.com. While Tencent does search, the paths are similar.

2006 Tencent releases search (soso