Almost last spring, Douyin began to become a little hot. Many friends around asked, “How long do you think this product will continue to be active?” I think it’s hard for most of us, myself included, to imagine how tiktok’s pixel-level UI, which pays homage to Musical.ly in every direction, plays so much like its predecessor, Xiao Ka Xiu

And he has an even more formidable opponent, Speedy.

Therefore, I plan to write an article to talk about Douyin and Kuaishou.

The trembling sound of the attack, the quick hand of the ring

It has to be admitted that Tiktok has maintained its buoyant momentum, even after the Spring Festival gala was temporarily pulled from local screens and the prize-answering mode was stopped

According to the latest data from third-party statistics agency QuestMobile, Douyin grew nearly 30 million DA this Spring Festival, and surpassed watermelon and Volcano,

This on the one hand benefits from Zhang Yiming

Spending money to buy growth is not for everyone, such as the HQ mode before, in addition to headlines million heroes for embedded gameplay, other separate App seems to be a little cool. There are huge differences in products, and the capacity at the end of the funnel is completely different.

You can’t expect a feature that is primarily a growth model to be platformable by itself. Of course, there are also interventions caused by policy risks, but the compound product strategy also avoids such policy risks well. It is also driven by fancy growth mode, and the headline spending on Douyin is always more effective.

Compared to the short-lived growth products, The long-term growth figures of Douyin are really impressive, especially when Douyin enters 30 million days and still maintains a high growth capacity.

On December 23, 2017, Douyin released a new version, and since then, it has remained in the top three on the App Store

Moreover, according to the unconfirmed rumors about douyin’s launch budget, the CPA price of Douyin is likely to fluctuate between 4 and 7 yuan.

If Tiktok were a separate spin-off, what would be the valuation, $5 billion? Or higher.

And that’s not even taking into account that Tiktok has been booming in South Korea and Japan as well.

It is easy to create an illusion that Kuaishou is not defeated by Douyin. People who have this illusion are probably ignorant of power, and in fact the growth of kuaishou can be said to be very, very exaggerated.

According to QuestMobile, Kuaishou grew more than 70 million DAUs from 2017 to Spring Festival 2018, and that’s on top of 40 million DAUs.

Fast hand is equivalent to the nitrogen acceleration on the high-speed track, the track all opponents set a lap. There is no single item in the entire Headline Corps that can compete with Quickhand, and only legion warfare can barely keep the crazy Quickhand down. In the market, only Douyin went from 0 to 60 million DAILY active users, barely comparable to Kuaishou, a monster with 70 million daily active users.

So it’s no wonder kuaishou’s valuation has skyrocketed from $5 billion to $18 billion.

I wrote about Video Wars last May and used this image:

There was another picture that wasn’t posted:

I judged at that time, toutiao through FaceU+ volcano + Douyin group into a blocking matrix, blocking kuaishou. After nine months, I realized that I had misjudged one thing and that the headline was actually through watermelon

The frantic growth of Douyin has become a sharp knife behind the equally frantic growth of Kuaishou.

According to QuestMobile, the headlines are a lockdown

Headlines have established an offensive line that “dismember” and “close in” fast players. Huohu is poaching some of Kuaishou’s utilitarian bottom users, watermelon is fighting for Kuaishou’s boring and time-consuming jokes, and Douyin is fighting for Kuaishou’s future — social media users, and the youngest users.

It starts with connection, relationship chain and Social Media

When the news of Kuaishou’s listing was spread online, I once made a statement on my wechat moments, to the effect that SOME secondary market participants strongly opposed kuaishou’s adoption of Benchmark Momo to make down side valuation model with live broadcast business as its core business.

There are many versions of momo’s male-female ratio of active users

However, if the main income of Kuaishou now comes from live broadcasting business, it would be ridiculous to value Kuaishou as live broadcasting.

In my opinion, Kuaishou is a strong contender for the title of “Instagram of China”.

Then my friend Pan Xun asked me a question:

What is Instagram? Is social media? Social network? It’s not live.

This question is very interesting. In fact, FOR a long time in the past, I have been studying social network and media as two completely separate categories.

Until I came across the product Kuaishou.

At the beginning, I also treated Kuaishou as a “short video platform”. I was not surprised that some people would like to watch such information, but I very much doubt that anyone would be able to watch such a low-information information gathering platform for a long time.

However, Kuaishou’s growth is very healthy. In 2017, Kuaishou added 60 million DAUs in just one year, which is almost an incredible level of growth. So I must have overlooked something important.

Then one day a friend reminded me that kuaishou differed from other video platforms in that the comments were very active. This phenomenon is also found in B station. At that time, I did not study B station simply as a video website, but as a large community.

This incident opened up a new possibility for me: social and media are not two parallel lines, but actually “two sides of the same coin”, two poles based on some variable.

This variable is the strength of the chain.

In fact,

What is the nature of connectivity?

Humans have evolved two key abilities over the long term in order to survive:

  1. Ability of social organization to cooperate
  2. The ability to obtain information about the external environment

For humans, from 10,000 years ago to today, most of our working day has been devoted to collaborating with society, or collecting and processing information from the external environment.

So,

Then, as we exchange information and collaborate with each other, a chain of relationships is born. When we connect primarily to create chains of dependency, the behavior tends to be more social, whereas we connect more to information.

And SocialMedia, which is based on social networks

Social Media is translated as Social Media or Social Media, and its biggest feature is

According to the information theory of C.E. shannon, the path of an information transmission unit is as shown in the figure above, while social media can be regarded as a network of countless such transmission units, in which each person often plays the role of transmitter and receiver at the same time

Most Internet products are a mix of social and media, with different “ingredients”.

Snapchat in its early stage is the most complete Social communication product, while FB is a Social network, while Instagram, Quora and Twitter are more Social Media

Here’s a picture I shared while doing social research:

The business flow of social behavior begins with discovery. What did you find? Find the information others are presenting. Content with the purpose of “showing yourself” will naturally appear on Social Media.

However, there is a characteristic of “show yourself” information that is relatively small. As a result, the form of content that carries information becomes lighter, such as “a short piece of text,” “a photo,” “a short video in 15 seconds.”

Now we have some conditions:

  1. People have a need to constantly connect with others;
  2. The person initiates the connection by discovering the information displayed by others;
  3. In the process of human connection, the exchange of information produces a chain of relationships;
  4. The volume of information for self-presentation purposes is small.

We find a logic:

  1. People need to constantly connect with each other, and that connection is an end in itself.
  2. In order to connect with other people, we would need a lot of information to find people worth connecting with. In order to be connected to others, we produce a lot of display information that causes others to connect.
  3. When someone discovers the information displayed, connects and interacts with it, a chain is established. The strength or weakness of a relation chain is related to the density of connection interactions, and a weak relation chain is also a relation chain.
  4. Information about ourselves is small and light, so it takes less time to consume it at a time, but we need to see a lot of it at a time.
  5. If you can continuously flood people with this kind of information for a short time, it can take a long time for a person to be online.

This logic, if true, would lead to something like this:

It can occupy users’ online time for a very long time, and the content production cost is very low. It can establish weak relationship chain through connection and interaction, and has certain network effect and scale effect. It can use social network to distribute content and acquire new users, threatening social entry level platforms at any time.

In fact, this logic underlies the rise of many products, such as Dubsmash, Xiaokasu, Musical.ly, and Meitai. But they all ended up with more or less some problems.

By now, you can see that we’re missing two key things:

To be able to provide this information in large quantities on a sustained basis, two final key conditions need to be added:

  1. Establish an efficient UGC content ecosystem;
  2. Users can find interesting information efficiently (e.g. there is an efficient push algorithm).

This is a huge difference between Kuaishou and other Social Media in terms of products.

But if it’s just that, douyin and Kuaishou aren’t fundamentally different, and douyin’s threat to Kuaishou isn’t big enough.

Douyin VS Kuaishou: Who will be the winner of China’s Instagram

I have seen many different analyses of the battle between Douyin and Kuaishou, including one that attributed the success of Douyin to strong operations. To be sure, Tiktok is doing well. As mentioned in the previous section, Douyin has done a lot of work from product to operation in order to solve the efficient UGC content ecosystem. It has designed unpredictable gameplay like the ga dance machine, provided a lot of amazing special effects, and you can see short technology streaming videos on Douyin that you can hardly see on Kuaishou.

Douyin is working very hard on UGC, kuaishou doesn’t seem to be doing anything.

Yes, Kuaishou does almost nothing operationally because kuaishou doesn’t need it.

Tiktok designs content challenges and develops various gameplay and engagement challenges to reduce the intellectual cost of UGC for users

Kuaishou is so lucky, others need to pay great efforts, kuaishou because of the right place at the right time and people, naturally get it. This is just like other people in the desperately ploughing weeding fertilization, but Kuaishou only buried the seeds in a natural fertile soil.

Kuaishou’s basic users are third-tier cities, rural areas, and second-tier cities. These people lack channels of expression, are repressed opportunities to express themselves, have no sense of identity in life, and have a much narrower social circle than the “Internet and investment banking elite” of the first and second tier. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have UGC content capabilities.

As with station B, one of the features of community is empathy. If you can’t get recognition anywhere else, you can here. This is home.

So on Kuaishou, UGC motivation is never scarce, and all interactions get positive feedback. Social

Media will naturally take shape. On the basis of such cultural barriers, when Kuaishou gets the bonus of mobile Hooli network construction in third-tier and fourth-tier cities, the opportunity of camera and graphics processing technology maturity, and the maturity of intelligent recommendation algorithm, the three auxiliary conditions, “everything is right” Kuaishou will not stop.

You see, what kuaishou said, “Everyone deserves to be recorded”. This is the most ordinary users can be stabbed in the heart of a word.

Tiktok is a different story.

Tiktok’s UI starts to tell you that this is cool

Douyin clearly sets a standard of “good”. And maintained this tonality with restraint. So everything on Douyin is “embellished”

I asked a friend of Douyin a long time ago, I said that I saw a lot of quick touch content on Douyin recently. I heard that you have been trying to generalize the content, so are these contents the result of your efforts?

In fact, none of this was intentional. As a matter of fact, Tiktok is a content generalization, from the early stage of gesture dance to the present diversified content forms, but the inclusion of kuaishou content in the middle is not officially promoted at all. In fact, Douyin is very nervous about this kind of content, because some of it may impact the original community tone of Douyin, and users will lose the standard of “good”.

For me, I don’t know which one will have the last laugh, show or life. All I know is,

Some things, may be doomed from the beginning.

Write the last words

In January 2018, I posted a message on Wechat

That was the first time DAU and MAU were roughly even for both short video businesses. Spring Festival can be seen as the first stage of the decisive battle between the two families. At present, Kuaishou is still far ahead in the absolute total number of single products, but the performance of Douyin does threaten Kuaishou to a great extent.

This is not just in the numbers. It is reflected in other unexpected ways. For example, this song called ‘Superstar’ is a douyin song, and Kuaikuai has some of that song on his hand. If you go to Kugou Music and search for the song, you’ll find users of Douyin and Kuaishou are locked in the comments section of Kugou

The battle is already raging between user groups on both sides. The last time I saw a war like this, I remember the era when the emperor went to war. Maybe this war will go on for a long, long time. That may not be a bad thing.