In the second half of the video war, the biggest difficulty is that there is no intermediate state.

Editor’s note: This article is from the micro-channel public number “poison eye” (ID: youhaoxifilm) , Author: He Runxuan . The original title “YouTube or Quibi, this is a problem | Mengkan column”

Recently, the concept of Chinese video has been very popular, this is because the products of the same track have appeared recently at home and abroad: Quibi in North America, and China at any time, and Chinese video has become a popular concept of streaming media for a while. One.

Quibi drama “Don’t Look Deeper” horizontal and vertical screen conversion effect, Source Wired
What exactly is the video in

? For most people, this word is still a bit strange, but in fact, “medium” is easy to understand. It is a sub-differentiation of the “long” and “short” video concepts that we are used to. It refers to the average playing time of 7-8 Video from minutes to 10 minutes. If you are a B station user, you will be no stranger to this type of video, longer than Douyin and shorter than iQiyi. This is a large part of the attributes of B station video.

The concept appears in people ’s vision because Iqiyi founder Gong Yu mentioned the YouTube model at the Q4 financial analyst meeting. With the maturity of 5G and AI technology, Gong Yu judged that the YouTube model The market potential of the App will grow significantly in the next 2-3 years.

As we all know, the content on YouTube is a lot of PUGC, open the popular, whether it is in “Funniest Clips” or “GoodTaste”, you can see more than 10 minutes of video. Some correlation studies have shown that the average length of videos that appear on the YouTube homepage is 14 minutes and 50 seconds.

Therefore, the YouTube mode can be basically equivalent to the medium video. Although all major domestic video sites currently have videos of similar duration, such as short programs, derivative short programs, CUT, etc., none of them have become a climate. This is one of the reasons why Gong Yu believes that the YouTube model has potential in China..

medium video, refers to videos with an average playback time of 7-8 minutes to 10 minutes

Just two months after the concept was put forward, iQiyi launched its own Chinese video product “Just Now”. The content is mainly divided into two types: the first is professional PUGC produced by MCN institutions, and the second is the main Secondary distribution of the content of the webmaster (that is, the content forms mentioned above).

Iqiyi wants to do this. It ’s not difficult to understand. In the past two years, parents ’videos have been defending against the intrusion of short videos. In the face of the gradual saturation of the main battlefield penetration rate, it is reasonable to open up new battlefields. In addition, to undertake various materials flowing down the platform, use movie drama cut to increase the user’s stickiness, and increase retention is also the goal of long video.

Although Gong Yu predicts that the DAU of this track is only about 100 million, this number is still attractive compared to the member market where the growth of the platform is slowing down. However, from the point of view of the current content, it is more like the simple integration of the iQiyi, and the quality needs to be improved. A person close to iQiyi told Duzi (WeChat ID: youhaoxifilm), “It will take a while for the taste to change.”

Iqiyi launches at any moment

Gong Yu’s previous judgment was that it takes 2-3 years for the market cultivation of China Video. From the establishment of Tudou Youku to the emergence of the first super online drama “Tomb Raider Notes”, it took almost 10 years to cultivate the market for long videos. In theory, the duration of Chinese videos can afford them. But an embarrassing situation is that for the video site that wants to layout the video in the middle of the hill, they found that station B has already stood on their own business extension line.

Although Site B calls its content PUGV, it is still the most recognized YouTube-like product in the industry. The founder of Red Sofa Jin Yechen once summed up YouTubeThree characteristics of the model:

  • Has a lot of “can be searched” video information;
     

  • The content of the platform is sufficiently subdivided and has a long tail;
     

  • There is an excellent UGC creator ecosystem and a hotbed for incubating PGC creative capabilities.

    Obviously, station B is in line. According to financial report data, last month’s Q4 B station monthly live UP main submissions were 2.8 million, with an average monthly interaction number of 2.4 billion.

    The reason why the B station can have today ’s ecology is closely related to its community atmosphere-the common interest from Generation Z has built the background of this community, and it is almost irreplaceable in the Chinese Internet world. This background color is pan-quadratic. Its formation is boosted by various reasons such as population, generation, hardware, technology, etc., and it is in a favorable position at the right time.

    Therefore, if you want to make a class B product, the first problem for video websites to overcome is to build a community. In the past few years, both Youku Planet, iQiyi Bubble and Tencent Doki have shown their social ambitions to enter the game, but unfortunately, there is no obvious cultural convention on the long video user side.

    Interaction between iQiyi Bubble and “Youth Have You 2”

    The most common way for Internet companies to cold start new products is to burn money for subsidies. However, this trick video site certainly does not want to use it: they finally bid farewell to the sky-high IP era, and they ca n’t wait to split every penny Flower, this is clear at a glance as several companies are promoting the contents of the split.

    Therefore, a reasonable speculation is that iQiyi wants to make videos in order to improve the efficiency of the use of content costs: in 2018, YouTube and Netflix distributed content creators almost all of the cost between 12 billion to 13 billion US dollars, But the former covers 2 billion MAU, while the latter has only 139 million paying users in the same period. Iqiyi, who has been holding Chinese Netflix scripts, of course, wants to see if he can acquire users at a higher cost.

    So, Iqiyi or Tencent and Ali, it ’s not so easy to get the script of station B.

    Of course, thinkThere are other ways to play video. When Gong Yu proposed the YouTube model, Quibi was not yet online, but in fact, the dark horse Quibi is closer to their business form: smashing money, focusing on high-quality content, the core is still Netflix-style, so the genes are interlinked. So in theory, domestic video sites can also copy Quibi’s path, using a sufficiently strong PGC capability to open up a new battlefield between the length and the length, bypassing station B and attracting new users.

    But here comes the question of investment and return: Are video sites willing? Will investors be willing?

    Quibi’s “Lighthouse Project” costs up to $ 125,000 per minute, or $ 7.5 million per hour. And Gong Yu mentioned in Q1 last year that the cost of purchasing dramas has dropped from 15 million / episodes to less than 8 million, which means that the normal hourly cost of domestic dramas can be estimated at about 10 million. For the head drama, the price per unit is just over 10 million. Quibi’s money-burning gameplay, at least Iqiyi without blood transfusion, can’t bear it.

    Not long ago, Wolfpack shorted iQiyi. Although its means is amateur and it does not understand the Chinese market, there are also reasons for its weak funds to bully: Although the net loss continues to narrow, but iQiyi ’s full year in 2019 The net loss is still as high as 9.3 billion yuan.

    Chinese video content published on Quibi

    In addition to the financial contraction, another reason why the long video platform does not want to spend money crazy is that they have found that the cycle and frequency of long content explosions have been fixed. Generally speaking, a big explosion in two or three years, and The total number of episodes in that year was not strongly correlated. According to Yunhe data, the number of new dramas in 2019 reached 390, 21 more than the previous year, but last year, there was no explosion of the entire network like “Yanxi Raiders”.

    Another concurrent phenomenon that has not significantly improved quality and efficiency is that users ’willingness to accept platform price increases and ahead of demand is still very low. This puts the long video into a dilemma: in order to attract users, pay for the content and bring continuous losses; hope that users pay the bill but fail to do so, so they continue to lose money. In front of users who will not change their payment habits in a short time, the platform can only hope to achieve maximum efficiency in the use of content costs. As a result, the splitting model appeared.

    This kind of logic is also brought to the moment. But this split is not like his split —