Some thoughts on Douyin and Kuaishou

Nowadays, the development of short videos has entered a mature stage, and its market position has gradually stabilized. In the past, Kuaishou had accumulated many years of experience, and Douyin has made great efforts in recent years, and has emerged like a sudden force. The two giants occupy half of the country, and later there are Tencent Weishi is ready to make a move. As the general trend of the situation is gradually taking shape, I would like to study the respective characteristics of the two giants to see why they have achieved their current success and what enlightenment they have for subsequent entrants.

According to the 45th "Statistical Report on China's Internet Development Status" released by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), as of March 2020, the number of Internet users in my country was 904 million. The average person spends 30.9 hours online per week, and short videos account for 11% of the time online. That is, the average person spends 3.39 hours per week on short videos. Calculated, short videos occupy an astonishing amount of time every week.

According to data from iResearch's "2020 China Social Entertainment Video Research Report", the user scale of each mainstream APP is as follows:

Among them, Douyin and Kuaishou are undoubtedly They are the two giants in short videos.

When it comes to Kuaishou, most people think LOW, while Douyin is a bright and trendy representative. But what reflects behind this is indeed different user groups, their life styles and daily concerns.

Most of Kuaishou’s users come from second-tier cities and below, and a large proportion come from fourth-tier and below cities; the life styles from first-tier cities to fifth- and sixth-tier cities, from fields to squares, are Many of the "small town youth" who love sharing, lively and youthful people are young and middle-aged people at the bottom of society.

Kuaishou’s opening slogan is “In Kuaishou, you can see every kind of life.” From Kuaishou’s “Seeing”, we can clearly feel that Kuaishou hopes to reach out to ordinary people and is targeting the grassroots masses. What the majority of the public likes is the ordinary and real world. Therefore, the core group targeted by Kuaishou is ordinary people.

Douyin’s user groups are mainly young users in first- and second-tier cities. The ratio of men to women is relatively balanced, with women slightly larger than men. The user group has begun to gradually penetrate into third- and fourth-tier cities; users are urban youth, Fashionable young people, students, talented young people, handsome men and beautiful women; most of the user tags are like music, food and travel; social style tends to be fashionable, literary and fresh, and campus style.

The slogan of Douyin is "recording a good life", and the focus is on beauty. What Douyin shows to people is exquisite, beautiful, petty bourgeoisie life, foreign beauty that is difficult to reach, and elusive beauty. The beauty of the world is a dream that people yearn for in their hearts but that is difficult for ordinary people to reach. Therefore, the core group targeted by Douyin is the petty bourgeoisie who have some spare time to enrich their spiritual life.

Most people still watch short videos for entertainment and relaxation. According to the category of video content, there are mainly the following categories:

Funny, food, travel, beauty Makeup, Internet celebrities, emotions, culture, singing and dancing, pets, fitness, sports, cars, parenting, etc.

The needs of users when browsing videos can be simply divided into the following categories:

For users who watch these contents, the video content needs to be relaxing, funny or exciting to satisfy their decompression demand, which is also the content with the largest demand among short videos.

This has higher requirements for the content quality of the video. The video quality needs to have small and exquisite creative points, deeply rooted and down-to-earth life clips, high technical level or well-produced scripts and pictures. Cost investment, but small videos are limited by the length of the video, and they only bring short-term and instant stimulation to people. This requires many beautifully produced videos to continuously provide people with content output. This type of UGC content requires the participation of many creators and sufficient production volume to screen out videos of high enough quality for consumption by audiences across all platforms.

The purpose of people with such needs is to quickly understand the cause, process, results, and impact of the incident in a short period of time. The length of the short video can promote the media to improve the efficiency of users in obtaining information.

Learning on short videos is mainly divided into two categories, one is knowledge-based and the other is skill-based.

Knowledge-based learning is mainly about learning a scientific category, but fragmented learning is not conducive to building an overall knowledge system. Therefore, the knowledge-based videos in short videos are mostly popular science and expand knowledge. But they can't explain it in depth. However, this type of video can be used as an entry point to popularize knowledge, arouse interest, and then jump to professional education categories for systematic learning.

However, skill-based learning videos have strong purpose, low learning threshold, and high efficiency in acquiring knowledge, so they are very suitable for playing on short video and other platforms.

Shopping on short videos is mainly divided into two categories. One is that users actively search for relevant information in order to seek product evaluation information, and the other is that sellers use short videos to promote product sales. Advertising is placed on the platform and consumers are passively exposed to the advertisements.

Generally speaking, the user positioning of the two major products is different. Douyin focuses on sophisticated urban youth, while Kuaishou focuses on social small-town youth, although the two platforms overlap in content. However, the difference in user positioning will affect the focus and product value proposition of the product, so the functions reflected in the detailed product design are also affected by product positioning and customer groups.

The biggest difference between the two is that when watching, Douyin uses immersive interaction, sliding up and down to switch video content, allowing users to focus on the video content itself, ensuring that user viewing is the highest priority. Users do not need to think about what content to watch at all, they can just enjoy it. The brain is in a short-term and high-frequency flow of experience.

Kuaishou has a double-row navigation layout. The user needs to return to the navigation page when switching videos. The user needs to return to the navigation page and then click on the next video. The user status is browsing works and When selecting works to switch between, when browsing, the brain still needs to think about whether to watch this video based on the cover.

In contrast, Douyin’s mode is easier to immerse. The brain does not need to spend too much thinking to enjoy short-term and high-frequency content several times, which invisibly reduces the quality of the content. Thinking and selecting, just subconsciously adapt to the content. Kuaishou's cover page requires a high level of generalization or appeal in order to attract more attention and popularity.

From the interaction and functional layout of a product, we can see the concept and value proposition behind the product.

When entering Kuaishou, the default navigation is the discovery page, and the number of likes is displayed in the lower right corner of each video. Moving to the left is the attention page, and the date is displayed in the lower right corner of each video. The discovery page mainly recommends high-quality videos with a lot of likes, while the follow page focuses on social interaction. The people you follow seem to be your friends, so they are sorted according to the time of the works. Although Kuaishou has also set up a large-screen mode as a new attempt, the default option is to retain the dual-screen mode. Perhaps when the mode and data accumulation are mature, Kuaishou will have data support to see which mode is more suitable for their users.

Douyin enters the recommendation page by default. In full-screen mode, you can directly see the number of likes and comments. It is worth noting that when you browse Douyin normally, you cannot see the release date and time. You can only click on the author. The release time of the video will only be displayed when viewing the list page or searching. Douyin pays more attention to where the video content itself was shot and what the content is, but the release time of the video is not the focus of the product.

Function page

In Douyin, "I" is displayed as an independent menu bar. In addition to the basic number of followers and fans, it mainly displays the user's own works. Share your works and favorite works. The function items are in the upper right corner and need to be clicked to see. The deeper design reflects the product design concept that these things are relatively low-frequency functions when users browse information, so the reach path is deeper.

Kuaishou, on the other hand, is mainly based on the function bar, giving priority to displaying current news, private message dynamics and other highly interactive information prompts. The rest show popular, games, live broadcast and other functions, while the user's own data needs to be clicked on the avatar to see more deeply.

In addition, Douyin, as a short video APP with music as its main feature, displays the corresponding background music more conspicuously under each video, and encourages users to tune in with the music. This is also Douyin's This is one of the reasons why pop songs often become popular.

At present, the main monetization models for short videos include the following categories:

1. Advertising forms, such as branded ads produced by video owners, product placement ads, pre-roll ads, and Embed soft ads in your videos.

2. Rely on e-commerce, such as live streaming, which is currently popular.

3. Some Internet celebrities with stable traffic also rely on fans’ rewards to monetize their traffic.

Among them, Douyin’s business model is mainly based on APP opening screen advertising, short video advertising push, and live broadcast e-commerce cooperation.

Kuaishou’s business model is mainly based on KOL live broadcasts and fans’ rewards. This difference is also determined by the focus of the two.

Although the differences between the two have been analyzed, the two giants have developed a lot to learn from each other and integrate with each other.

On the premise of optimizing the existing recommendation model algorithm, Douyin will increase its investment in the training of KOLs and live broadcasts, and strive to build a fan ecosystem of Internet celebrities to help KOLs cultivate loyal fans. Kuaishou has also launched a large-screen mode to allow users to experience immersive browsing and optimize the recommendation algorithm while maintaining its own characteristics.

When short videos experienced explosive growth, they gradually converged and each formed a typical representative in the industry. How to highlight the characteristics of their products while continuing to expand the market, deepening from a single product into an ecosystem, and creating Building a moat and ecological alliance for their own products and consolidating existing results will be the next focus of the major giants.

One of the development directions of Douyin is to expand the overseas market horizontally. Although there are greater risks due to changes in the international political situation, risks and opportunities coexist. How to mediate between the blue ocean market and the influence of the political situation has become the current TikTok’s biggest challenge. In addition, it is necessary to deepen social interaction vertically. The current algorithm highlights the importance of high-quality videos, but also ignores the social relationship chain, which is not conducive to cultivating a stable fan circle. Gradually deepening the depth of different video types, the length of short videos is also gradually lengthening. From short videos to gradually touching different market segments, accounts in various fields such as knowledge and information, culture and art, and variety videos are also gradually growing. .

Kuaishou is to Douyin what Pinduoduo is to Taobao. Although it is not high-style, it is indeed effective. Moreover, through the efforts of Kuaishou in recent years, it has gradually eliminated the original public impression of "local". The next development direction should be to introduce some high-end celebrities to create a new traffic ecosystem while stabilizing the existing anchor fan ecosystem. Bring new vitality to platform traffic, enrich the platform's impression tags, and establish new traffic grabbers.

In fact, I sometimes reflect on myself, why I dismissed Douyin Kuaishou when it was new and missed the experience of the first batch of trials. When studying their evolution and development, I missed it. A lot of intuitive first-hand information. Thinking about it, I have been trapped in the existing information circle, feeling satisfied and losing the motivation to explore new things. For new things, we see more of the already familiar logic in new things, but we ignore the unknown new things that are the most valuable. After a person reaches the age of 25, he does not just repeat the past. Always maintaining curiosity and exploring new and unknown things is the meaning of living.

Reference materials:

"Short Video: User Portrait Analysis of Each Platform" /p/d42bcf186fa0

"Short Video Platform User Research Report 36kr" /p/ 1723825668097

"TalkingData: Kuaishou User Crowd Insight Report" /archives/798021.html?weixin_user_id=27o6ETQjrgyc8vQ8yhc5IGWe7ak0DE

iResearch "2020 China Social Entertainment Video Research Report" /archives/ 1073124.html

"In-depth analysis of Douyin" /evaluating/1010523.html

"The rise of Douyin, the abdication of Kuaishou" /it/4091389.html