Warm tips: long warning, multi – graph kill cat, this articleVery boring and brain-burning
This time we are going to talk about the rules of UGC community construction. To be precise, AFTER observing, using, searching and studying a number of domestic community products, I have summed up five rules about the construction of UGC community. I have given them names that are easy to remember to save everyone’s time, so I will directly post the conclusions first:
1. Law of the Cost Element
The content cost structure of UGC community consists of three parts: physical cost, technical cost, and intellectual cost. These costs also create barriers for users to contribute to the community;
2. Law of cost weight
There is a relationship between the threshold of content cost of UGC community: “intellectual cost > technical cost > physical cost”. Therefore, in an UGC behavior, the behavior with higher proportion of intelligence cost is closer to PGC, or PUGC at least.
3. The Law of stock
It is easier to build UGC content communities for content types with more inventory than for content types with less inventory.
The Law of Poverty
Users who provide content on the UGC community could not or had no hope of making enough money by providing it;
5. The law of ascending passage
Community creators should have a full grasp of the channels they need to help their content users rise. This upward path may include the satisfaction of money and fame and even other social roles.
Now, LET me explain these five rules one by one.
1. Law of the Cost Element
The content cost structure that makes up the UGC community is composed of physical cost, technical cost, and intellectual cost. Then how to understand the three costs respectively?
I have long viewed content production as a process of encoding various information elements according to certain information-flow rules, and the act of “reading” information is decoding backwards. For example, each note is an information element, and composition is to arrange and encode note combinations according to certain rhythm and melody rules, and finally form a complex piece of music that can even express abstract pictures and emotions, which is a kind of information flow.
So the so-called physical cost, technical cost, intellectual cost, are in the process of encoding information elements.
Physical cost: Producing content requires physical labor, from tapping on a keyboard to bouncing around, and it’s hard to find a form of content that doesn’t generate physical labor at all.
Technology cost: Technology cost is the cost of using “tools”. There are two concepts of tools here. One is the more intuitive physical tools used to create content and organize information, such as pens, keyboards, microphones and editing software. The other is at a relatively abstract level, the skills needed to organize information, for example, dancing requires dancing skills, singing requires vocal skills.
It is worth noting that many people think the technical threshold is very high, but according to my observation, the technical cost in most of the time is “hard work can compensate for bad”. As long as the average person takes the time to go down, it is only a matter of time to master the corresponding technology.
Intelligence cost: the cost that has a decisive influence on the coding structure in the process of coding information elements, that is, the creative ability of each person. In the independent external environment of the creator, the creative ability to encode information elements is called original ability.
Intellectual cost is often regarded as the core ability to distinguish the level of content in the process of content creation. It is important to note that many people confuse the cost of intelligence with the cost of technology, but the reality is that individual differences in intelligence are very difficult to bridge with simple effort. This gap is just like cao Zhi can write a poem at seven steps, but I can’t write a pair at seventy steps. While technology can be mastered by practice in most cases, the gap is just that the level of mastery of each person will have some high and low.
A complete content is usually composed of the cost of these three parts. The difference is that the cost of each part is different in the proportion structure of the total content supply cost. This cost structure determines the size of the population that can provide content to the UGC community.
2. Law of cost weight
In the process of content creation, three kinds of costs are used in combination. Among the weight of these three kinds of costs in the total cost of content supply, there is a relationship of “intellectual cost > technical cost > physical cost”.
This relationship has to do with the difficulty behind each person’s mastery of these three abilities.
Why is intelligence the highest?
Let me give you an example. We all learned Chinese when we were young. When we were in grade one, the first thing we did was to learn pinyin, then words, then words. Every word and phrase is an information element, and the teacher gives us the information element in the simplest form of coding, which most of us only need to learn by rote. This is mostly about physical exertion.
Then, in the second half of first grade, teachers began to teach something a little more complicated — sentence formation, which is the encoding of information elements into a flow of information. This is a skill that most people will soon master, but because there are more technical and intellectual costs involved, individual sentence making abilities have made some differences. For example, using the sentence “I, you, think, sleep,” some people create the sentence “I think about you while I sleep.” “I want to sleep with you.” Sentences like this.
And the difference gets bigger and bigger over time. Later, when writing a composition, some people can write freely, and some people are in trouble, writing 1000 words also seems to be their lives in general difficult. Although the average person can eventually rely on hard practice to complete the basic composition and pass the exam.
In the end, the gap between individuals becomes so large that it becomes impossible to bridge. There are people who can write best-selling novels without graduating high school. There are people who can write popular advertising copy. There are people who can barely finish their college thesis.
The difference here is due to differences in intelligence.
So what’s the use of knowing that? You know, as we’ve built the UGC community, we’ve always tried to reduce the cost of creating content for users in order to expand the user base that can provide it. However, objectively speaking, the tools and gameplay we invented are mostly reducing the physical and technical costs of users, and only a few UGC tools that successfully reduce the intellectual costs of users are suddenly popular.
When we use wechat to shoot video, we are shooting video. The video tool of wechat is very convenient, almost anyone can easily shoot a video and publish it, but we don’t know how to shoot a good video, and we don’t know what to shoot.
But if we shoot with VUE instead, it feels completely different, because tools like VUE emphasize making video “big”. Like shooting a video, composition and tone belong to the scope of technical cost. To shoot a video with “style” or even “blockbuster feeling”, all belong to quite heavy technical cost. VUE can quickly help a “cute new photographer” to master these technologies by using simple templates.
A similar example is my favorite image filter, Mix.
This is a great step to take, but the big leap is at the threshold of intellectual cost. With Mix, we have almost achieved that anyone can easily create a very compelling picture, but there seems to be some distance for a cute photographer to shoot “meaningful” and “interesting” pictures.
There was a product that did this with a very simple design.
That’s right, foot notes. Footnotes was born at the beginning of this product has been very unknown, until one day they accidentally designed a function called “big”, suddenly popular all over China.
Footnote’s filters are no more varied than Mix’s or any newer than B612’s. Why did footnote drive everyone crazy at the time?
Added two black photos because they gave up and down, and then add movie lines, plus any filter can do at that time very good picture of the color, this let anyone can make a like scene images, the images and narrative, can express more abstract feelings or a more complicated story.
Suddenly, the simple act of “taking a picture” was elevated to the level of “making a movie”. Even though the user is not actually making a movie, the finished product is very close to the creative experience and emotional feedback.
Remember the movie lines, lines, and the picture of joint, scene narrative which itself need to cost of very high intelligence, through modular and single picture extension imagination, in a way of “plausible” joint together, which is equal to other people’s intellectual grafting on themselves, so everyone remember filter like it very much.
There are many other cases like this. For example, VUE can shoot great short videos, but it cannot solve the problem that the videos I shoot are not interesting enough and lack information connotation. But others have succeeded.
Xiao Kaxiu asks users to attach a video to a sound,
This is tantamount to painting a standard “content copywriting template”
. Created a video content “script”, “line”, “copy” is contains the most intellectual part of the cost, most users can’t create interesting video are dead on this issue, this part then show small cafe templated, anyone can be a very simple to create “interesting” video.
Similar logic applies to tiktok, which recently went red.
Xiaoka-xiu is based on movie lines and videos, while Douyin is based on music and MV.
Compared with the lines of fragments, music has more space for abstract expression, more “paradoxical” and more “ambiguous”, which makes it easier for filmmakers with low intellectual cost to make short video content that can be watched. (By the way, there is a problem of information density. If I have time in the future, I will write a special article on the topic of information density.)
All of these tools have successfully reduced the “intellectual cost” of users, thus opening the door to a huge amount of UGC content.
A product THAT I was recommended by my friend yesterday is Hooked. Every time a word product comes on the market, it’s a great way to lower the cost of intelligence. Just check it out!
Okay, now that we’re talking about this, I guess you’re thinking: I get what you’re saying, it’s
Do UGC tools to reduce the user’s intellectual cost will be popular, right
.
That’s right
This is an idea based on the law of cost weighting.
But there’s another idea
.
In some cases, the reduction of the user’s intellectual cost is not necessarily achieved through the tools of the platform. Another way is that it is feasible for users to directly copy other people’s intellectual achievements through operation. In this way, it also greatly reduces the user’s intellectual cost.
For example, if you search The pure Land of Bliss on website B, you will find that many girls are doing this dance, which is created by GARNiDELiA, a Japanese music group, and there are almost all versions of dance and dance adaptation in China. There are more than 1,000 videos about pure Bliss on B, and their choreographer, Yuan Zhenfu, is actually only one.
A pure land of bliss almost sustains a b-station dance district.
In fact, if you search carefully, you will find that the dance of GARNiDELiA, not only the Pure Land of Bliss, but also the dance of PinkCat, Lamb and Girls, are almost completely destroyed by the dance of STATION B. It is almost impossible to find a house dance on Station B that has not danced in this dance. It may not be too much to say that the dance area of B station is GARNiDELiA, which is the largest dance aggregation area in China (laughter) (I don’t watch much Korean dance, but it is basically the dance of AOA, Sisiter, etc.).
In fact, the similar situation is not only in the dance area of STATION B, but also in the music area of station B. If you go to music communities like NetEase Cloud Music or 5ing, the situation is similar.
The reason is simple: choreography is difficult, composition and lyrics are difficult, and the intellectual cost is very high. Not everyone can make successful works, let alone the majority of ordinary users who have not gone through the training, but also dance and music professionals who have gone through the training for many years, find it difficult.
But almost anyone can “copy” the original choreography or lyrics with a few tweaks or innovations. Going from zero to one is hard, but going from one to 100 is a lot easier.
This kind of “re-creation” hardly invokes the user’s intellectual resources, but more invokes the user’s technical and physical resources, which also greatly expands the number of people who can use UGC content.
Of course, on this basis, there is a more extreme idea, is to let the user pay almost only physical cost on the line. In many UGC communities, there are porters.
I watched the first season of Gordon Ramsay’s Ultimate Cookery course on B with the help of the Porters
This kind of moving is very common at Station B. Some porters are not even involved in the piracy issue (they will contact the original copyright owner directly, get a waiver or handling authorization, there is no copyright risk). Subtitle groups play the role of a large number of moving masters, they not only carry, but also do subtitle processing, and even profit from it (for those of you who have cast subtitle group advertisements, I believe you know what I am talking about).
Yes, if you build an UGC community, a community that provides content at a cost of little physical effort, it can thrive.
Intellectual cost > technical cost > physical cost
What this formula tells us is that there are far more people in the population who can pay the physical cost than there are people who can pay the intellectual cost. So, by building an UGC community, you’re either going to reduce the percentage of intellectual costs, or you’re going to increase the percentage of physical costs, and by letting your users think less, it’s going to be easier for them to produce enough content for you.
So this law can also be interpreted as: it is easier to carry than to dance, easier to sing than to sing, easier to write a 140-character comment than to answer what a black hole is on Zhihu, easier to answer what a black hole is on Zhihu than to write a movie script.
Other behaviors you can try to plug in, something like that.
3. The Law of stock
UGC communities are easier to create with a larger content type than with a smaller content type.
Once we understand the law of cost weighting, the law of stock is not too difficult to understand.
First of all, a large number of content types naturally allow users to transport and imitate them, which is much easier than trying to create a content type from scratch. What’s more, the simple grasp of stock content can now be completed by robots instead of manual. This low-cost way to get content is best shown in today’s headlines or on the far right.
Secondly, if the stock of a content type is large enough, it is also a sign of the potential of the audience market of the content type. Otherwise, if no one consumes the content, how can there be so much stock of content?
One important caveat to this rule is that we’re talking about “easier,” not “better,” or “more successful.” In fact, if someone can pioneer a new type of content form that also provokes users’ desire for UGC, it could be a big deal.
Let’s do another example here, an example of station B.
Yes, I just said that there is a lot of “low intellectual cost” UGC content on site B. Most of this content is based on a large amount of storage. So where are the “new types of content” on site B that have little storage, but users’ desire for UGC is aroused?
Yeah, that’s the barrage from Station B. In fact, the barrage of station B can be understood as a kind of
“An anonymous discussion of a one-second video frame as a topic.”
The UGC form of text is then mixed into the video stream to create a new kind of stream called “video with bullet screen”.
Yes, you remember we discussed above how much easier it is to write 140 characters than to answer zhihu’s question about black holes. That’s it. Although writing a funny bullet screen is also a matter of great intellectual cost, everyone has a flash of intelligence. We may not be able to make a living by being funny like The teacher Guo Degang, but showing a sense of humor occasionally is not an impossible task for most people. High-quality UGC content produced by occasional high intellectual cost can be aggregated into a brand new UGC content form, which is the charm of bullet screen of STATION B.
The same logic also has NetEase cloud music comment area. The same is listening to music, but NetEase cloud music’s comment area can be regarded as a combination of music as a topic UGC content community to play. And those comments don’t come from moving stock of content.
It may also be that the “harder” premise will bring greater rewards.
The Law of Poverty
There was a time when users who provided content on the UGC community could not or had no hope of making enough money by providing it.
This law is very important. Because in the business world, the default understanding is that anyone who knows they can get a high monetary return on their content will not offer it at a low price or with a self-risk mentality.
Users provide content, and the platform bears the cost of that content. I don’t get paid for Posting a picture of myself holding a Coca-Cola on Weibo, but Lu han gets paid for Posting a picture of himself holding a Coca-Cola on Weibo.
So if I were Lu Han, I would know very well what the monetary value of a piece of content I provide is. How do you think you can talk to me about getting me to provide content to a platform at low cost?
People are willing to give away content for free on some of the UGC community platforms because they are just interested in producing content, without ever thinking about how much money they can actually make by producing it.
This hopelessness and “poverty” perception of not being able to make money will be of great help to the platform building of UGC community. To put it more crudely, it is possible to purchase “high quality, high potential value” content cheaply.
Moreover, in this psychological state, UGC community platform operators can also use non-monetary material feedback to motivate content contributors. The simplest and most conventional way is to give content contributors “fans”.
Of course, with the spread of concepts like the “influencer economy” on the Internet, more and more people have come to realize that any contribution they make to content is valuable, but many have no hope of realizing that value. This is also a challenge and opportunity for the UCG platform.
The challenge comes from the increasing pressure on potential content delivery costs, and the opportunity comes from the fact that perhaps more of the future value of the platform will be determined by how many potentially high-value content creators it can produce. In fact, similar logic can be seen in the early tudou network and now Kuaishou body.
5. The law of ascending passage
If you build an UGC community and give the people who provide content on your platform a mental high for a long time, it’s not going to be sustainable and it’s not going to support a strong enough ecosystem.
A good ecosphere is one in which people not only have connections, but also generate connections of interest. It’s one of the strongest relationships in modern society.
Therefore, to build an UGC community, platform operators themselves should have access to resources that help users rise.
For example, if an independent singer provides music content on a platform, the relationship between the singer and the platform will be more stable and long-term if the platform can help the singer gain a large number of fans and successfully transform into a releasing singer, or even finally successful commercialization. This would be easier if the platform itself had the resources of China’s largest record label.
This law is not hard to understand. However, one thing should be noted here. In any case, ascending channel resources themselves are scarce. In other words, human society itself is a pyramid structure, and the space after ascending is naturally small. As a result, no one person can provide all users with ascending channels.
So how do you provide as few upchannels as possible, but ensure that the majority of users are happy to provide content?
My answer is to use the uncertainty lever.
Uncertainty leverage is when we are willing to pay some costs for a huge, uncertain success, and take the risk that those costs will all go to waste.
The classic uncertainty lever is the lottery, where you can spend $5 to win $5 million, and many people are willing to take that risk. However, lottery operators always control a stable cash rate, which is generally 50% in China. That is to say, if they receive 100 million yuan, they will only give 50 million yuan as prize money. So the lottery operators are guaranteed to make $50 million, simple as that. (That’s why lotteries are franchises.)
And similar uncertain leverage is also used in the Internet is very much, such as NetEase play very 6 yuan raiders activity.
The classic uncertain leverage in the content industry is the online market in the Internet film and television industry. Of course, this market is not UGC anymore, it’s basically high PGC, or at least high PUGC.
But using the uncertain lever, haven’t the ability to do the movie before, can only make advertising, film and television group, could also take out 50-1 million investment into “film market,” the great released on the Internet in China’s film and television production capacity, output a lot of shocking low quality content, fill in a lot of approximate b-movie content consumption demand of the market.
I don’t know if anyone’s seen Mojo.The trend of this year s Internet market is to reduce the total supply, expand the number of consecutive dramas, and increase the input of individual dramas to create a super continuous Internet market.
Of course, in this process, I watched one film and television team from 10 to earn 5, to 10 to earn 3, it is said that this year has reached 10 to earn 1 difficult.
However, there are still a large number of film and television practitioners into the “big business”, as long as film and television investors believe in the uncertain leverage, they are like lottery buyers, they will not stop.
The same is true in the UGC market, where last year Papi Jiang went viral with a short stand-up video that went viral all over the world. There are many people who want to be popular, as long as they take some time to shoot a video, they will have the opportunity to be popular. After the popularity, there will be tens of millions of investment and hundreds of millions of advertisements. Many people will be willing to try such a good thing.
The operation of the excellent UGC community is almost always devoted to this, encouraging content providers in the community to continuously contribute low-priced content to increase the number of users and daily activity of the platform.
The above is probably a summary of a rule of UGC community that I made in the past. It is rather rough and not very detailed, and there is room for detailed research and discussion on many specific rules.
If you’re asking me if I can use these rules to accurately identify the next popular community, I have to answer that these five rules are necessary but not sufficient. In terms of specific “pop culture elements” and “cultural context”, these five laws are useless. However, if we take the pop culture trends and these five laws into consideration when we do matrix analysis, they can often yield miraculous results.