"Short video/live broadcast is becoming the favorite content form of middle-aged and elderly people. In the process of competing for the last incremental market of China Internet-400 million middle-aged and elderly users, Tik Tok and Aauto Quicker need to sink further to shake the dominance of WeChat.
For middle-aged and old-aged vertical apps such as jelly beans, beautiful articles, color TV, and small rice cakes, which have "entered the market" since the last round of Internet entrepreneurship boom, are faced with the challenge of struggling to seek "out of the circle" or sticking to the core users to make "small and beautiful" products? "
-age club research team
Competition for short video platforms has become fierce, and Tik Tok and Aauto Quicker have rushed to attack the last incremental market of the Internet.
Wechat’s penetration into middle-aged and elderly people has basically been completed, and the proportion of middle-aged and elderly users in Tik Tok and Kuaishou is still at a low level. Compared with the saturated young users, middle-aged and elderly people are the last users in Tik Tok and Aauto Quicker.
According to the data revealed by the 2020 WeChat Open Course PRO, as of September 2019, the number of monthly active accounts of WeChat reached 1.151 billion. If the population under 12 years old (parents are not allowed to use WeChat because they are too young) and over 70 years old (too old to learn WeChat) are deducted, WeChat is basically popularized in every China person, including middle-aged and elderly people aged 50-70.
In the short video platforms represented by Tik Tok and Aauto Quicker, the number of young users has not increased, while the proportion of middle-aged and elderly users is still low, and there is still much room for growth in the future.
According to the latest data of QuestMobile, among the newly installed users of vibrato short video in March 2020, 14.5% were over 46 years old, compared with 13.0% in the same period last year, indicating that middle-aged and elderly users are rapidly migrating to Tik Tok.
In fact, middle-aged and elderly users have become important fans of many head accounts in Tik Tok and Aauto Quicker. For example, in the national official media accounts such as People’s Daily, CCTV News and Xinhua News Agency, the proportion of fans over 41 years old has reached 10%-20%.
In some emotional head accounts, fans of middle-aged and elderly users account for a higher proportion. For example, Tik Tok’s "Tu Lei" has 24% fans over 41 years old, while the fast-moving "Sichuan Coke" has 34% fans over 41 years old.
In fact, the trend of middle-aged and elderly people on the two platforms of Tik Tok and Aauto Quicker goes far beyond this. In the second half of last year, AgeClub made an in-depth analysis of online celebrity, an elderly person in Tik Tok (see Depth: How to Build online celebrity for Middle-aged and Elderly People? Explosions the development model, current situation and opportunities of Tik Tok elderly online celebrity ");
At that time, online celebrity, an elderly person in Tik Tok, mainly attracted young people and people under the age of 35. Health, emotion, culture and other contents that are really suitable for middle-aged and elderly people and mature in WeChat ecology are very scarce in Tik Tok.
1. The vibrato has changed: there are not only old online celebrity, but also Quyi, calligraphy and painting, and mother’s clothes …
Compared with last year, Tik Tok has changed significantly.
First, some elderly online celebrity, who rose rapidly last year, are now facing the dilemma of losing their powder, exhausted their creativity and failing to realize their goals properly, especially some amateur online celebrity. However, some elderly online celebrity, who have strong creative ability, solid personnel and mature operational ideas, remain hot, and their fans have increased significantly compared with last year.
For example, Uncle Na, who specializes in showing the exquisite life of elderly men, had 9.86 million fans in early August last year, and now the number of fans is 14.32 million. Another "Cai Yunen" who specializes in filming the interesting life of a 98-year-old grandmother has 6.31 million fans, nearly 4 million more than a year ago.
Recently, an elderly online celebrity "Grandma Wang who only wears high heels" has gained 10 million yuan in three months. She is 79 years old this year and has more than 15 million fans. In May, she participated in the live broadcast organized by Tik Tok and brought goods, with a single sales of 5.3 million.
It is understood that the operator behind it is a team with Tik Tok’s funny head account "Play Seven Stages" (currently 14 million fans). After several years of exploration, the operating thinking of Tik Tok online celebrity is very mature.
Another change that deserves more attention is that vertical content categories that are deeply loved by middle-aged and elderly people have begun to appear in Tik Tok, and these categories have not yet appeared head accounts, so there are great opportunities in the future.
For example, the accounts of Shaanxi Opera, Huangmei Opera and Henan Opera in Quyi category have a low number of fans, ranging from 200,000 to 400,000, but middle-aged and elderly users over 41 years old are the main fans, accounting for 50%-80%, indicating that local and long-tailed content categories have great potential in middle-aged and elderly groups.
In the category of calligraphy, the proportion of middle-aged and elderly people is also very high. There are 1.242 million fans of "Junhai Calligraphy", accounting for 43% of users over 41 years old, 1.31 million fans of "Lv Yingru Calligraphy" and 36% of users over 41 years old.
Tik Tok has also begun to appear accounts specializing in selling middle-aged and elderly women’s clothing, and the number of fans is currently 100,000-400,000.
2. Aauto Quicker Run: 50 million middle-aged and elderly people support rich content ecology.
Aauto Quicker, a short video giant, shows a different situation from Tik Tok.
Online celebrity, a funny and attractive old man who is common in Tik Tok, is rare in Aauto Quicker. The most representative one is Uncle Ben Liang, an ordinary farmer in Shandong with nearly 18 million fans. With his unrestrained "wild singing" in the fields, he became popular in Aauto Quicker, and the average number of people in the live broadcast room exceeded 10,000.
Similarly, unlike Tik Tok, the long tail content which is popular among middle-aged and elderly users is more abundant in categories and accounts in Aauto Quicker.
For example, in the Quyi category, which is very popular among middle-aged and elderly people, there are many accounts of millions or even tens of millions of fans. In terms of duet, "Actor-Xuejing Yan" has more than 12 million fans, accounting for 26% over 41 years old; "Artist-Wei San" has 10.19 million fans, accounting for 23% over 41.
In addition, in Henan and other popular Henan operas, there are 1.515 million fans of "Li Yuan Chun Lei Zhu" and 1.139 million fans of "Happy Henan Opera Brother Positive Energy", accounting for about 50% of those over 41.
In terms of health and wellness, there are nearly 3 million fans of the million-level account "Shaolin Positive Energy", accounting for 38.74% over 41 years old.
In terms of calligraphy, there are 1.11 million fans of "Feeling Hard Pen Calligraphy", accounting for 24% over 41 years old.
In addition to these, accounts in folk musical instruments (suona, erhu), square dance, fishing and other categories have gathered a large number of middle-aged and elderly users. These accounts have a small number of fans ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, but they have frequent interactions and close relationships with fans, and the possibility of commercial realization is more abundant than that of advertisements and live broadcasts in Tik Tok.
In-depth interviews with a large number of middle-aged and elderly users in various cities across the country by NewAgingPro, a consulting brand of AgeClub, it is found that they have a wide range of hobbies, such as gardening, tea art, photography, chess and Go, etc., and high-quality learning content and communication scenes are what they lack most now. Short video/live broadcast can just make up for this gap.
According to AgeClub, there are 40 million to 50 million daily users in Aauto Quicker, and such a large number of users is enough to support many finely classified head accounts and rich business models.
Where is the middle-aged and elderly vertical APP that survived the big waves?
In the past two years, middle-aged and elderly users entered Tik Tok and Aauto Quicker, which was more a spontaneous process of users, and important changes will take place next. As time goes by, these giants will inevitably have more layouts for middle-aged and elderly users in the future.
Behind Aauto Quicker and other giants stepping up the layout of middle-aged and elderly people, the online behavior of 400 million middle-aged and elderly people is rapidly evolving in breadth and depth. Like young people, they will move online in the future, such as shopping, buying classes, ordering takeout and investing in wealth management. Content and social networking are still the best user portals.
Compared with pictures and texts, short video/live broadcast has unique advantages: it is easier to receive information, the content is more lively and intuitive, and most elderly people have different eye problems. Watching videos is more eye-friendly than reading words.
Even WeChat, which started with graphic content, is stepping up its transformation to video, and launched live broadcast and video numbers in the past year. According to the follow-up observation of AgeClub, after several middle-aged and elderly entertainment platforms broadcast live on WeChat, the number of simultaneous viewers will soon reach thousands or even tens of thousands, indicating that middle-aged and elderly people have a very high acceptance of live video.
In the process of competing for quickly online middle-aged and elderly users, the giants relied on the platform ecology to get dividends in the early stage, but they have not paid full attention to the development of middle-aged and elderly users from the platform strategy level. As for the APP/ applet that entered the middle-aged and old-aged market in the last round of Internet entrepreneurship boom around 2014, they have gone through many detours and also precipitated a unique model in terms of users, products and realization.
Combing the APP/ applet with candied beans, beautiful articles, color TV, small rice cakes, etc., middle-aged and elderly users account for the main proportion, and they all "survived" through big waves. Their development experience and process are very worthy of attention.
Rise: We must seize the traffic/content bonus of middle-aged and elderly users.
These apps and applets with middle-aged and old people as the main users have consciously or unconsciously seized the dividends of middle-aged and old people migrating to smart phones and WeChat in the early rapid growth.
For example, the small rice cake focusing on audio albums and short videos is a typical example of grasping the social fission dividend of WeChat and rising. The small rice cake was first launched in 2014, and it has been tepid. In January, 2017, the WeChat applet appeared. At the end of May of that year, the Xiaomi Cake launched the applet, and it was bound with WeChat official account, which opened up the seamless diversion between WeChat official account and the applet, thus rapidly expanding the user group of Xiaomi Cake.
At that time, within a month, the number of users of small rice cakes rose from 10 million to 20 million.
The start of the beautiful article also benefited from the rapid popularization of smart phones among middle-aged and elderly people, which resulted in a strong demand for editing and sharing long pictures and texts.
Founder Tang Qi once revealed that he was still working at Huawei at that time. At first, he made a simple demo and promoted it within Huawei, and then the number of users continued to rise. After the APP was officially launched, it only found relatives and friends to help forward the online articles on the first day, and then it was not promoted. Its early 10 million households were brought by users themselves.
Another path of user traffic bonus is the application of market buying. Fan Zhaoyin, the founder of Love Square Dance, once reviewed the pioneering course in the field of square dance at the forum on innovation and entrepreneurship for the elderly held by AgeClub. In 2015-2017, an APP was launched in the application market, and the average customer acquisition cost per download was only 1.5-2.0 yuan. Later, companies with a valuation of tens of millions of dollars appeared in the square dance industry. These companies are typical of financing and buying traffic.
Another middle-aged and elderly video APP entrepreneur also told AgeClub that when it was launched in the Android market, the user retention of Huawei mobile phones was higher than that of oppo and vivo, which may be the reason why people who buy and use Huawei mobile phones are older.
In addition to the bonus of middle-aged and elderly users migrating to WeChat, the bonus of content theme also plays an important role. Many middle-aged and elderly entrepreneurs have mentioned in unison that in the years of 2015-2018, there are still few contents on WeChat that meet the reading interests of middle-aged and elderly people. As long as explosive content is produced by combining the characteristics of the post-50 s and post-60 s, it is easy to quickly break out among users and gain a large number of new users.
Midcourt: Find the core requirements, polish the function/realize —— Candy beans hold fast to the leader of the square dance, American articles strengthen long graphic editing, color TV focuses on video editing, and small rice cakes focus on information flow recommendation.
After grasping the user/traffic/content bonus, it is also very important to polish the product. Whether the middle-aged and elderly user experience can be continuously optimized and improved is the key to determining whether the middle-aged and elderly APP can really retain users.
APP/ applets such as candied beans, beautiful articles, color TV, and small rice cakes are unique in their products, which reflects the deep understanding of core users, and the subsequent commercial realization can be realized smoothly.
Candy beans are aimed at the square dance group from the beginning, and they are the leader of the square dance group, so they are all around this group in terms of APP function, teaching system and operation activities.
In terms of common video playback functions, Sugar Bean has designed functions that ordinary short video apps don’t have, such as slow playback, mirror, screen projection to TV, AB loop, etc. Video can be projected to a big-screen TV, and the picture can be flipped on the mirror to facilitate comparative learning, taking care of the needs of square dance groups to learn and practice dance at home.
Many square dance leaders need to shoot their own teaching demonstration videos, and Candy Bean has added the functions of adding titles, flipping and splitting screens in shooting and editing. In order to take care of women’s love of beauty, they can also whiten and slim the characters in the video; In addition, in order to enrich the playability of the video, it is also supported to dig out the portrait from the green screen and put it in a new background, or copy a character into three or five people.
In order to enable middle-aged and elderly users to master the skills of video production, Sugar Bean recorded a series of video courses, such as "Have you used the new function of green screen keying?", "Tutorial of changing colors for clothes", "Changing the sky for real video" and "Making special effects for opening video transitions".
In operational activities, theme shooting and evaluation activities were launched according to social hotspots and time nodes, such as "Online Free Clinic Against Pneumonia" during the epidemic and "Mother’s Day Gesture Dance Selection" before and after Mother’s Day.
The live broadcast section of candied beans also has distinctive square dance characteristics. The content of the live broadcast is mainly that professional teachers are promoting paid courses such as square dance, aerobics and modeling, and a small number of anchors are carrying square dance costumes or teaching mobile video production.
Color TV is an APP that started with video editing, and later developed functions such as community and live broadcast, but the functions of video editing are unique. For example, you can freely add titles, splice multiple video materials, adjust the video order, add soundtracks and subtitles.
In order to help middle-aged and elderly users learn video production, special teaching sections "Color TV College" and "Color TV School" are launched, which mainly focus on video editing and production, as well as poetry creation and folding fan production.
In the process of making editing videos, many middle-aged and elderly users need more and newer materials and more powerful editing functions, resulting in a clear willingness of members to pay.
And members have brought a lot of income to color TV. According to Age Club’s understanding from the industry, the current membership income of Color TV is in the order of tens of millions.
At the beginning, the beautiful article mainly used mobile phone to edit long pictures and texts, which just seized the opportunity window that WeChat can only edit and publish long pictures and texts on the PC side, and it is too expensive for many middle-aged and elderly people to learn and use.
Therefore, it can be seen that the function of American articles in graphic editing is the most powerful in all apps. You can adjust the text size, color and boldness, add serial numbers to paragraphs, and adjust the alignment of paragraphs; In addition, audio and video can be added to the article, and pictures can be added in the form of single sheets or puzzles.
In terms of realization, the main income of American articles-members and prints-is extended from long graphic editing. In the membership service of 19 yuan/month and 198 yuan/year, the main functions are related to graphic editing, such as high-definition original pictures, high-definition videos, high-definition titles, massive pictures, advanced typesetting, template customization, exclusive music and exclusive templates.
Small rice cake is a rare "technical flow" in the application of middle-aged and elderly people. The technical characteristics are not reflected in the powerful and perfect editing and production of the main function "Audio Album". In fact, this functional little rice cake adheres to the principle of minimalism, and can only add words, pictures and videos without further freedom.
Small rice cakes pay more attention to the sharing and communication of middle-aged and elderly users after editing, the use time brought by browsing short videos on small programs, and the advertising click income brought by it, so they emphasize the recommendation algorithm behind short video information flow.
There are several small programs of the same kind launched by Xiao Niangao, such as blessing circle, small bench group photo album, etc., all of which are based on minimalist graphic editing+extremely fast sharing and communication+information flow recommendation, showing the same technical characteristics and traffic thinking.
Ru Haibo, the founder of Xiao Niangao, is one of the few middle-aged and elderly entrepreneurs who rushed in with the emphasis on mobile Internet opportunities. He has previously started several projects and worked as an investor in Jingwei Venture Capital.
In contrast, Jiang Yimin of Color TV was born in the chip industry, and the founder of the American article was from Huawei. The founder of Candy Bean was a technical background in video before, and they were not particularly good at business models.
Giant sinking VS small and beautiful vertical APP: Who is the future of middle-aged and elderly Internet?
The candied beans, beautiful articles, color TV, and small rice cakes that survived this round of entrepreneurial tide in 2014 have all gone out of their own unique models in terms of users, products, and realization, and there are many companies with incomes of tens of millions to hundreds of millions of yuan.
The essence of its success is to capture the group of middle-aged and elderly users who are the first to set foot on the wave of mobile Internet, are the most socially active and have relatively strong purchasing power. For example, Candy Bean captures the captain of the square dance who has a strong demand for learning new dances, and Color TV and Beauty Articles capture the vitality of middle-aged and elderly people who like traveling parties and taking photos and videos.
Vertical APP has done a perfect job in a certain segment demand for middle-aged and elderly users, successfully attracted small and heavy users, and cultivated their payment habits to achieve a small and beautiful development state.
However, the other side of the matter is that if the vertical APP wants to "go out of the circle" and expand its target users from small groups to billion-level users with more dispersed needs and greater differences, it needs to expand heterogeneous categories in content, design a more sticky social structure in users’ social relationships, and make trade-offs in improving and simplifying functions. In the past, it was no longer applicable based on the needs understanding, product experience and liquidation methods of small users.
In fact, these apps have indeed done or are doing "out of the circle" attempts. However, some restrict the expansion of content categories because of the graphic form, some are too heavy to change users’ mental cognition because of their vertical attributes, and some are hesitant in the strategic direction because of the company’s genes …
There is no doubt that giant platforms such as Tik Tok and Aauto Quicker have a deeper understanding of the needs of billion-dollar users, and the rich and complete platform ecology and closed-loop business of giants will also bring more possibilities for the middle-aged and elderly Internet.
1. Tik Tok/Aauto Quicker: Fully tap the long tail content, and middle-aged and elderly people are willing to pay for interesting and dreamy "knowledge".
After several years of rapid development, Tik Tok and Aauto Quicker have become enough content/social platforms to threaten WeChat, and the rich entrepreneurial opportunities for middle-aged and elderly people that once appeared on WeChat are likely to be repeated in Tik Tok and Kuaishou, which will be richer and more different.
As previously analyzed, although middle-aged and elderly users in Tik Tok are growing rapidly, and some accounts attract a large number of middle-aged and elderly fans, compared with the content ecology of the whole platform and the rich hobbies of middle-aged and elderly people themselves, there are still many content needs that have not been met.
Moreover, compared with the explosive topics such as emotion, health and pension displayed in the form of pictures and texts on WeChat, the form of short video/live broadcast is naturally suitable for many long-tail contents, such as gardening, tea art, photography, chess and chess, wenwan collection, etc., which are popular among middle-aged and elderly people. The video mode is more impactful and can stimulate the interest in learning and paying.
There are already cases in which high income is obtained by selling classes for middle-aged and elderly fans.
"Chen Libao Suona", a fast-paced suona anchor, is also a young wind player of the Central National Orchestra. He once participated in "I am a singer" with singer TanJing, and is a well-known post-85 s performing artist. At present, there are 450,000 fans, accounting for 27% of those over 41.
The short videos on its homepage are mainly videos of its own performances and rehearsals, as well as songs co-operated with TanJing and Sitar tan. During the live broadcast, it explains suona knowledge and answers various questions of fans, with an average of 400-500 people online.
Chen Libao’s suona courses include "zero-based speed learning series" and advanced course series, which are quite popular after its launch. The hottest course has 7,600 buyers, and the number of buyers of other courses is mostly between 1,000 and 3,000.
In addition to selling classes, Chen Libao also sells suona and other musical instruments in the live broadcast room. The price is around 1000 yuan, and nearly 10 instruments can be sold every day.
In the media interview, Chen Libao once revealed that there are college students, music teachers, business owners, bus drivers and farmers among the students, and the oldest student is over 70 years old.
In fact, middle-aged and elderly users not only buy suona courses on Aauto Quicker, but also have singing education programs for middle-aged and elderly people with millions of paying users on WeChat ecology. The logic behind it is actually the same. Middle-aged and elderly people are willing to pay for their "dreams".
2. "Wechat business" on the fast hand: Why do you choose wig products with middle-aged and elderly people as the main users?
Tik Tok and Aauto Quicker started from the Internet, and the e-commerce business that undertakes the heavy responsibility of making profits is the common focus of the two companies. As mentioned above, there have been accounts for clothing and accessories for middle-aged and elderly people. Tik Tok and Aauto Quicker undoubtedly have greater opportunities when similar businesses on WeChat are saturated.
The two platforms also pay more and more attention to online and offline communication, and both launch the same city plate to encourage local businesses to settle in, which brings new opportunities to many local service businesses.
Especially in Aauto Quicker, which is decentralized and community-oriented, traffic distribution tends to tilt to the waist and tail accounts, which has more room for local services targeting middle-aged and elderly people.
Taking the tourism category as an example, there are more than a dozen matrix accounts of "Zhangjiajie Tourism Reception", many of which have 1 million or even 2 million fans, and middle-aged and elderly users account for an important proportion, generally between 10-30%.
Similar to the recruitment and joining agent model in WeChat Ecology, there are already teams operating on Aauto Quicker, and the selected products happen to be wigs with middle-aged and elderly customers as the main target.
There are many wig accounts in Aauto Quicker, most of which are opened in wig stores to drain their offline stores.
Aauto Quicker’s account matrix "Salongwei" adopts the mature Wechat business model, creating new concepts of "wearing hairstyle" and "scene clipping" to relieve ordinary consumers’ resistance to wigs, and recruiting wig partners throughout the network through short video/live broadcast, promising to provide a perfect course training system;
For example, there is a CEO interactive system in management, an online sales system, a terminal marketing course and a product manager in marketing, and China scene tailoring in wig technology.
Another Aauto Quicker account matrix named "Elephant Replacement" provides nationwide door-to-door replacement service for C-end users, and offline training and wig raw material supply for B-end users who start businesses and open stores.
The offline training costs 2,980 yuan for 3 days, and the main contents are replacement technology, self-media promotion and physical store sales skills.
Why are wigs favored by Wechat business team? First, because of the high gross profit, according to AgeClub, the purchase price of wigs from Wechat business to stores is only 300-500 yuan, which costs 2,000-3,000 yuan.
Second, wigs require high marketing ability, because wigs are not a category with high public acceptance at present, which requires a lot of publicity and education for users and a lot of marketing training for the team, which is precisely Wechat business’s specialty.
tag
All the above data and cases have fully explained the vitality and potential of middle-aged and elderly people in the Internet world. But we believe that this is only the beginning for 400 million middle-aged and elderly people to fully embrace the Internet life.
Looking back at the content/social development path of middle-aged and elderly people, we will find that it is halfway compared with young people, and there will be many possibilities in the future:
In the form of information, from text to voice, pictures to video;
In social relations, from acquaintances (family, colleagues, classmates, comrades-in-arms) to semi-acquaintances (community owners, square dancers, etc.) to strangers (network friends, senior college students, etc.);
On the theme, from family parent-child, health, emotion to various long tail subdivision hobbies;
In terms of demand experience, from simple operation to rich content to information property security (from online behaviors such as shopping, payment, investment and wealth management).
