I asked you to save a bankrupt factory and you became the richest man in the world.

Chapter 461: 224-225: Terrifying daily active users! (4000 words)
The general self-media people targeted by Xiaoling APP are the so-called 1.0 self-media people.

Such a group of people can easily master Jianying, a video editor derived from a beauty tool and implanted in the Xiaoling APP, in less than half an hour of learning!

In just half an hour, you can master basic software operations, editing, music, color grading, special effects, text and other basic functions.

It can be said that the requirements for personnel quality cannot be lower.

Compared to those complicated data editors, which often take a month to learn and still not be able to master the essentials, artificially raising the learning threshold and making it impossible for the general public to enter the video editing industry, this is completely turning the table over!

It is safe to say that the era of everyone having their own media has truly arrived, as the threshold for making 15-second short videos is low and easy.

Soon, Gao Ling's move of offering a reward of 100 yuan for the first video released directly caused the number of original videos on the Xiao Ling APP to exceed 100,000 within a few days!
Then in less than seven days, it even reached level 300,000!
Gao Huaijun was initially worried that there were not enough original videos and that there was no content to watch when customers came in.

But he still underestimates the small matter of getting a hundred yuan reward for creating an original video.

Nowadays, many people are not very wealthy, so having a small side job is a really good feeling.

Who doesn’t have a smartphone these days?
Even if this smartphone only costs a few hundred dollars!

It’s easy to get started and use, so it’s suitable as a side job. This seems to be the biggest advantage of short video platforms.

In the following period of time, Hillhouse struck while the iron was hot and, knowing that the time was ripe, sent a short message to all Hillhouse's existing customers, briefly introducing the relevant situation of the Xiaoling APP, and immediately gained the attention of this group of customers.

Hillhouse’s user groups are not ordinary customer groups.

Many people are the backbone of the population.

They are educated, cultured and have a strong understanding of affairs.

When many people saw Hillhouse solemnly informing the information about the Xiaoling APP product for the first time through text messages, they realized the benefits of this product.

They don’t care about the reward of one hundred yuan, but they see the struggle for public opinion and discourse power behind this platform!

This is definitely a blue ocean market that no one has known about before!

Hillhouse's existing user base, accumulated over more than ten years, is estimated to be in the tens of millions.

Many people with a keen sense of smell also feel that Hillhouse’s big move must be hiding something.

Therefore, many of them have begun to settle in and try out this so-called Xiaoling APP.

For a time, the number of active fans on the Xiaoling APP exceeded 10 million in just over a month!
At the same time, the number of videos in it has reached half a million.

Not to mention the popular Weibo, even in some financial reports, many people have focused on this popular software and analyzed why it suddenly became popular.

Indeed, there is an APP with more than 10 million active fans, and this number of active fans is still rising continuously.

This can definitely be called a phenomenon!

Many practitioners who are professionally engaged in Internet research looked down on Hillhouse at the beginning, thinking that it was a mess for them to develop such a software. Now they are all researching why this software became so popular.

They also want to know what the traffic password is!
This group of people are indeed professionals in this field. After carefully studying this software, they discovered that...

Apart from some rather monotonous singing and dancing and camera movements, this software has been continuously diversified to cover celebrities, mother and baby, pets, fashion, beauty, cars, culture and education, etc., for fear of aesthetic fatigue in users.

Under the premise of diversifying content dimensions, Hillhouse has also "organized and planned" to dig out a large number of popular series.

Some popular short videos have been discovered by Hillhouse for their deep meanings, promoted in series, and even elevated to the level of business planning. For example, Hillhouse has launched the "Intangible Cultural Heritage Partner Program" to help inherit intangible cultural heritage, the "Young Pepper Program" to promote short video youth education, and the "Xiaoling Beautiful Check-in Place" cultural and tourism certification brand to help poverty alleviation through cultural and tourism in poor areas, making them business cards.

These contents are themselves very diverse and have strong appeal to some high-end people, but they are also not low-class.

It’s hard to imagine that within a month, Hillhouse’s operations team came up with so many new ideas, with one theme per week!
In the words of Hillhouse Capital’s founder, Gao Huaijun, beauty is value.

Although Hillhouse makes many people waste a lot of time unnecessarily, in Gao Huaijun's view, short does not mean fragmented and meaningless. Whether it is valuable depends on what content the video contains.

UGC cannot get rid of the curse of being mixed with negative content, and the platform will inevitably have to bear more responsibilities. It can be seen that Hillhouse's Xiaoling APP is ambitious and wants to be recognized at the value level.

This situation directly shocked all Internet practitioners!

They know what it means for a software to have 10 million active fans.

This means that this software will become one of the top ten Internet software in China.

Not everyone can become an account holder of Weixin and QQ directly. The number of active fans in the hundreds of millions is really not something that can be achieved by ordinary software.

"Fuck! This is too scary. The number of active fans has directly reached tens of millions, and the number of active videos has reached half a million. Hillhouse's strategy of attracting fans with one hundred yuan is really too effective."

"It's more than effective, it's downright terrifying! Apart from Tingxun, who else dares to say that their number of active fans can surpass Xiao Ling's?"

"The one hundred yuan fan-attracting strategy is just a surface-level thing. The most important thing is not this, but the fan accumulation and brand effect of Hillhouse behind it. Haven't you noticed? Their videos are generally quite interesting when pushed out, and ordinary companies can't do this."

"Yes! Now I remember, it's really interesting! A lot of the videos on this app are stupid, but I just can't stop watching them! Damn it, I just wanted to see what this app has yesterday, but I couldn't stop watching the videos, and an hour went by without me stopping."

“Indeed, Hillhouse has a very clear positioning for this product, which is to kill time! Many interesting videos are actually made by newcomers who have just entered the industry. They look very immature, but they have become popular inexplicably! With such a group of exemplary users, there will definitely be more and more spontaneous creators in the future.”

As more and more people started discussing this, the niche field that this suddenly popular software involved - the 15-second short video platform - also came into people's view.

Other practitioners were pleasantly surprised to find that there was another company in this field, and Toutiao was launching such a related platform.

But what is hard to believe is that Douyin, the short video platform launched by Toutiao, has only about 100,000 daily active fans, and the number of new videos released every day is as small as only a few hundred. Compared with the tens of thousands of short videos on Xiaoling APP, it can be described as a firefly!
"How on earth did they do it? They don't have as many internal customers as Toutiao to convert." Zhang Yiming looked at the relevant report of Xiaoling APP in front of him with concern, and said to Zhang Nan, Chief Content Officer of Toutiao, who was standing next to him.

The current situation makes Zhang Yiming feel like he has missed out on 100 million yuan.

Because Hillhouse's current advantages are much greater than those of Douyin, which has already gained popularity on Toutiao.

Whenever he thought of his previous hesitation in the field of short videos, he wanted to slap himself in the face.

As early as 2015, Zhang Yiming proposed a hypothesis: Is short video a big opportunity?
Many people, including Zhang Nan, think that it is still necessary to do it.

Therefore, they chose the simplest and most direct method, which was to add various videos to the Toutiao APP, which was extremely low-cost and quick to experiment with.

After the launch, we found that the effect was good. After a round of optimization, we found that nearly half of the time among Toutiao users was spent watching videos. This is a key clue.

So the video was separated and made into an independent APP (Toutiao Video), which is Xigua Video.

In 2016, Toutiao tried live streaming, but it entered the market too late and lacked advantages. It also tried the combination of short videos and live streaming, and its retention rate, activity level, and user communication costs were all better, proving that short videos + live streaming may be an effective model. Everyone is discussing short videos again, and they feel that they cannot give up.

Soon, a team was locked in a small dark room for more than a month for closed research and development, and in September 2016, TikTok was launched.

However, although Douyin, which was launched before Hillhouse Capital, has a rapid growth rate, it does not have the explosive customer growth of Hillhouse Capital.

Three months have passed and it is now January 2017.

The number of daily active users of Tik Tok is only a few million, close to 10 million.

It completely lacks the crazy explosive power of Hillhouse Capital, a latecomer.

Just when Zhang Yiming received the report, the daily active users of Xiaoling APP had even exceeded 20 million!
A sharp increase of 20 million in just one month!

The growth rate of DAU is really crazy!

This also makes Xiaoling's product the fastest growing product in China's mobile Internet after Weixin.

Is this a stagnation?

not at all!
According to the monitoring of ByteDance, where Zhang Yiming works, background data shows that this number is still growing and there is no sign of slowing down.

It can be seen that it has entered the TOP5 of mobile applications, squeezing out Baidu, breaking the existing pattern for many years.

This seemed incredible before, but now it is within reach.

"New changes often herald new opportunities. I think their difference lies in what their boss Gao Huaijun said." Zhang Nan does not seem to have the same dilemma as Zhang Yiming.

She comes from a product background, so naturally she doesn't have the same dilemmas that her boss, a science and engineering guy, has.

"Oh? Which sentence?" Zhang Yiming seemed to be interested and asked.

"ALL IN AI!" Zhang Nan directly stated a conclusion.

"ALL IN AI?" Zhang Yiming was stunned for a moment, then his mouth felt a little dry as he said this phrase.

When Gao Huaijun announced Hillhouse's ambitious plan, many Internet people, including himself, actually laughed at Gao Huaijun for overestimating his own capabilities.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, not to mention China, even abroad there is still a long way to go.

The so-called driverless cars are more hype than reality.

For a car to be driverless on the road, not only does the car company need to be ready, but the relevant government departments, infrastructure equipment, including low-latency signal lines, etc. all have a long way to go.

In Zhang Yiming's view, this is just a big gimmick by Hillhouse's boss Gao Huaijun to get funds for a tough battle.

but. . .

Now, this so-called Xiaoling short video APP is related to artificial intelligence?

This is impossible!

Zhang Yiming’s first reaction was disbelief!

“Users are tired of the same old content, but at the same time they crave novelty!”

"So now there is an APP that tells them that they can get new and interesting gadgets in just fifteen seconds, and uses artificial intelligence to judge their preferences. Boss, what do you think this group of customers will think?" Zhang Nan saw Zhang Yiming's disbelief and explained.

She didn't notice Zhang Yiming's expression and continued, "I have been studying this product carefully during this period, and I have also tested it repeatedly. I found that compared with our Douyin, this product does a very good job in big data analysis and push!"

"Look here."

“Did I like these?”

“Short videos related to finance, history, and life philosophy.”

"But you see..."

Zhang Nan then browsed the Xiaoling APP about 40 times and found that this product repeated short videos related to finance, history, and life philosophy, which were indeed much higher than other categories.

If we talk about short videos of other categories.

For example, a dragon sucking water and a beautiful woman dancing only appear once after swiping forty times.

However, this Xiaoling APP only appeared three or four times after being refreshed forty times!
This frequency can no longer be described as coincidence!

This is definitely the result of precise calculations of the underlying logic of the algorithm and the application of the technology of thousands of faces for thousands of people.

As a senior engineer and the creator of Toutiao, how could Zhang Yiming not understand what Zhang Nan was demonstrating?

His pupils shrank slightly, hiding the shock in his heart.

In fact, when Zhang Nan was trying to cover up, he knew in his heart that it was not as simple as giving a recommendation to a customer by simply clicking a like. There were definitely other complex algorithmic logics involved.

This so-called Xiaoling APP is alive!
An ordinary customer has no secrets in its eyes!
Your playback time, number of repetitions, comment strength, malicious clicks, etc. will all be used to judge from the underlying logical level whether customers like the content.

but. . .

The use of this computing power is exaggerated!

Thinking of this, Zhang Yiming almost screamed out!

(End of this chapter)