What's wrong with me being a rich man?

Chapter 498 Essence
Following its IPO, Alibaba chose to confront Tencent in the short video market. This move, coupled with its reputation as the world's second-largest internet company after Facebook, undoubtedly drew attention to this new frontier in the mobile internet.

On September 26, Alibaba's short video app "Leyin" was launched on major app stores, and the entire Alibaba group welcomed the new app with their respective advertising resources.

With Tencent's Weishi, Alibaba's Leyin, Weibo's Miaopai, Silicon Carbon's Douyin, the independent Kuaishou, and WeChat and Weichao's 15-second short videos in Moments, the concept of "short video" has become extremely popular in the domestic market.

With so many products appearing in such a short period of time, users are both curious and confused.

Ruan Jingman from Lin'an is a recent graduate who just started working. She loved singing when she was in school, and she would often sing karaoke with friends and colleagues remotely on "Let's Sing Together" when she had free time after get off work. So, she downloaded Douyin through a redirect ad on "Let's Sing Together".

Having only played on Douyin for two days, Ruan Jingman downloaded "Leyin" and "Weishi" through advertisements on Taobao and Wechat, unlocking new ways to play with music short videos.

Because she loves singing, she is more interested in the clear content of "Music" and "Micro-videos", so Douyin remains in a corner of her phone.

Lip-syncing, hashtag challenges, and singing duets with celebrities—these short videos, with a maximum length of 15 seconds, offer a refreshing experience compared to traditional text-based platforms.

However, after playing for a week, Ruan Jingman gradually found it a bit boring. The main reason was that her short videos did not receive much feedback, and the trending list on the app was almost entirely filled with celebrity posts. Both Leyin and Weishi had promoted a lot of celebrity resources.

On Friday evening after get off work, Ruan Jingman returned to her rented room, feeling irritable due to the pre-rain heat.

She scrolled through her phone, casually uninstalled the even more boring "Music Music," and browsed through Weishi for a while before getting bored again. Instead, she decided to clean up the apps on her phone.

When Ruan Jingman swiped her finger to Douyin, she remembered seeing lip-syncing and singing together on it before, so she casually uploaded a music video she had recorded but hadn't posted before. Before she could even browse the app much, she received a concerned call from her mother.

Since I was working in another city, the phone call lasted a long time.

When the call ended, the phone screen returned to the TikTok interface, where a red dot notification had appeared.

Curious, Ruan Jingman clicked on it and saw about ten likes and comments.

She replied to each one, and suddenly felt a surge of interest in using Douyin (TikTok).

After watching a few short videos and clearing her throat with water, Ruan Jingman recorded two musical duets.

I didn't cook dinner or go out to eat; I just lazily ate a bowl of instant noodles.

She lay half-reclined on the sofa, looking at the night view of Lin'an through the small balcony. Suddenly feeling emotional, she took out her phone to take pictures of the scenery outside and added her own singing voice.

—A cloudy day, in a room without the lights on.

—As all thoughts gradually settle down.

Ruan Jingman sang a few lines of Karen Mok's "Cloudy Day" a cappella.

The next day, Saturday morning, Ruan Jingman woke up after a good night's sleep. After washing up and eating some bread, she suddenly remembered the Douyin video she had been watching the day before. She casually clicked on it and saw the red dot indicating the status.

She clicked on the status update and was taken aback.

Yesterday I posted a total of 4 short videos, and there were more than 60 posts related to the 3 group songs, but there were nearly 2000 posts about the few lines I sang a cappella.

Ruan Jingman was caught off guard and felt flattered.

I'm neither a singer nor a celebrity, so how come I have so many likes and comments?
She browsed the updates with great interest, feeling a great sense of accomplishment, and then shared the short video of herself singing a cappella with her friends. ...

Alibaba enters the market, and Leyin is launched.

Lingang attaches great importance to this.

Although Leyin is another short video app based on the Mus mode, the move by this giant undoubtedly increases the intensity of competition, and its future evolution towards full-format content cannot be ruled out.

Douyin has been online for three weeks now, and its user base has exceeded one million. The growth rate and daily active user ratio have remained quite good.

Yu Xing did not convene or attend any analysis meetings on carbon silicon data immediately, but instead observed the dynamics of Alibaba, Tencent, and the industry.

Alibaba's ambition to rival Tencent is too strong, and with its abundant funds after going public, it may not take Douyin seriously from a strategic perspective.

On the last day of September, Yu Xing attended the third weekly seminar of Carbon Silicon Data on the short video market.

"Leyin and Weishi have almost the same model and content approach. This kind of competition is like that of Murong Fu, which spread from WeChat and Weichat. Most importantly, their approach to making short videos is still to continue the same way as Weibo."

"Based on our usage and observations, Weishi shows a significant bias in traffic allocation towards celebrity accounts. The initial exposure of a celebrity user is at least 100 times greater than that of an ordinary user. Moreover, the threshold for manually entering the trending list is even lower."

"Including Weibo's Miaopai, Weishi, and Leyin, they are all making short videos according to the video version of Weibo, and the data looks quite good. This has not deviated from the product thinking of Weishi's previous disbandment, which is wrong."

The voices in the conference room offered extremely definitive criticism.

However, none of the attendees refuted the claims. After all, Xing Hongyu, the former head of Weishi, who had flown back from the United States, was probably one of the most qualified people to comment on Weishi.

Weishi has been revived, transforming into a music short video format similar to Mus, but Xing Hongyu believes that the essence of its product development is still the same imitation of Weibo's logic.

Weibo is very successful, Weibo is too successful. Following that logic, the transition from text to short videos was itself an internal discussion at Tencent.

Xing Hongyu now observes the market from the sidelines, and this product logic has not fundamentally changed.

Compared to Weishi, Leyin, and Miaopai, Douyin is different. Carbon Silicon Data uses algorithm technology validated on a software matrix to distribute content through a multi-layer traffic pool model.

Simply put, a video posted by a user will first be pushed to hundreds of users. If the completion rate, interaction index and other indicators reach a certain percentage, the video will continue to be pushed to tens of thousands of users. If the data still meets the standards, the traffic pool will continue to be upgraded.

Weishi is currently leveraging celebrity influence, while Douyin is data-driven; these are the fundamental differences between the two products, or rather, between the two types of products.

Weishi learned from MusVid's product format and then used it to inject traffic and resources. Douyin abandoned MusVid's product format, but internally it still uses Silicon Carbon's attempts and evolution in technical algorithms.

“We are completely different from Weishi and the like, so even if Weishi and Leyin transform into full-content short video platforms in the future, we don’t need to worry too much,” Lü Haiying said, adding, “Of course, we also need my senior brother’s financial assistance.”

The biggest concern for carbon silicon data is being overwhelmed by massive amounts of capital.

Yu Xing took two cell phones out of his pocket and placed them on the conference table: "If you have confidence, then I have confidence. Our friends are indeed desperate for funds."

(End of this chapter)