Unidentified B station innovation, UP owners are all complaining about Sina Finance Sina.com

Article | Original Yiming of Sina Technology

A year ago, Station B announced a massive revision to try to change, lead and subvert the industry. It will replace "play minutes" with "play volume".

One year later, the community and product leader of Station B apologized for the revision and announced the cancellation of the project, and Station B was scolded by the hot search

Where does everyone's anger for Station B come from?

　　 "Innovation? Treat the symptoms but not the root cause!"

In June 2023, on the 14th anniversary of Station B, CEO Chen Rui announced that Station B would replace the current "play volume" with "play minutes" (the time spent by users actually watching videos).

Chen Rui's original intention is good. He believes that after the revision, the weight of the "high score but low ability" short content display of the title party, the hot spots and the play stem will be reduced, while the high-quality content can get more positive feedback from the "flow only" mire, and more fully show the market the thinking and communication value of the main content creation of the station B UP.

However, it is puzzling that the function has not been launched for nearly a year. Why?

Fang Fang, the community and product leader of Station B, officially responded to the incident, saying that after seeing these complaints, "I want to dig a hole to hide, and sweat while watching."

In the opinion of Yang Yan (a pseudonym), an insider in the industry, this pessimistic attitude is because the original intention of the revision is to protect the owner of the long video UP, but in fact, the owner of the UP is not really protected.

Specifically, the video popularity of station B is calculated based on the amount of play in the lower right corner of the video, but the video users can watch it quickly for more than ten seconds. Compared with the long video for more than ten minutes, the play amount and completion rate data of short video are easier to "score high". In other words, the contribution of a ten second video and a ten minute video is the same, and the video is equally likely to be recommended, but the cost and effort of the two video productions are quite different. If it is changed to "play duration explicit", the advantages of the long video UP owner with more depth and content can be shown.

In Yang Yan's opinion, this is a measure of "treating the symptoms rather than the root causes", which does not really protect the UP owner. At the same time, A Test, the UP owner who led the discussion, said that if the version was revised, the rules formulated by Station B itself would not be unified with the outside world, and the assessment based on the broadcast duration did not conform to the industry consensus and the public's general understanding, which would also make it more difficult for Party A to quantify the launch of UP owners.

In addition to "A Test is serious", some users said that if you simply push from the dimension of playing time, UP owners are likely to try their best to "water" the story, and the really valuable and dry content will still be sunk. In addition, under such new rules, not only the long video UP owners will not get better incentives, but also the creators of short videos will be lost, and the commercial value of the B station will become lower.

In the final analysis, the revision of the explicit broadcast duration indicator will face such a big controversy because the UP owners and users are dissatisfied with the use experience of Station B. Therefore, if the core contradiction has not been resolved, only changing the broadcast duration indicator of Station B cannot change the situation of UP owners, which is also the source of "anger" of UP owners and users.

What is the core contradiction? In Yang Yan's opinion, from the user's perspective, Station B may not solve the problem of data fraud; At the same time, the streaming information cocoon room is too serious, easy to make users have visual fatigue; There are a large number of videos with seriously inconsistent cover and content; The traffic incentive plan was not recognized by the UP owner.

"A Test serious comparison" also pointed out in the above "complaining" video that today, it is still difficult to accurately retrieve the information you want in the message list of Station B, the UP owner still cannot modify and cancel the function of regular release time, and cannot set the manuscript as a private video. "How difficult is this function?"

　　 Not yet profitable, basic problems should be solved first

Last night, Station B released its unaudited financial report for the first quarter as of March 31, 2024. In the first quarter, the total revenue of Station B reached 5.66 billion yuan, of which the advertising revenue was 1.67 billion yuan, a rapid increase of 31% year on year, but the net loss was 764.6 million yuan. If the U.S. GAAP is not followed, the adjusted net loss is 455.9 million yuan. Still not profitable.

Chen Rui said: "In the first quarter, while ensuring the healthy development of the community ecology, we achieved high-quality revenue growth, opening a new prospect for the company's annual development. In 2024, we will continue to promote the healthy development of the content ecology and community, and bring more rich and diverse high-quality content to users. At the same time, we will focus on the exploration and cultivation of high-quality UP owners to provide more growth opportunities and commercial channels for talented UP owners. We are confident that, with the improvement of commercialization ability and operating efficiency, we will continue to transform high-quality community traffic into high-quality revenue growth and steadily move towards the profit goal. "

It is easy to see that Station B is still willing to continuously output high-quality content and provide business channels for UP owners.

However, according to the existing public opinion, Station B does have a lot of things to improve. If the basic problems cannot be solved, Station B will face greater pressure in the fierce Internet competition environment.