Diversification leads to sustainable growth.
Text丨Heike Finance Fan Dongcheng.
Now the "ear economy" is back in the spotlight.
The so-called ear economy refers to the economic phenomenon caused by people using their ears to consume information. Recently, the data released by the 2023 International Audio Industry Summit shows that the market size of the audio industry remains above 380 billion yuan, driven by intelligent audio terminals, intelligent cockpits and other products.
This shows the resilience of the audio industry.
It is precisely because of the combination of technology and new business formats such as knowledge payment, audiobooks, podcasts, and live broadcasts that the ear economy has rapidly surpassed the traditional radio era and gone faster and further. When it comes to audio alone, the steady growth of the market is obvious to all. According to the research institute iResearch's "2023 China Network Audio Industry Research Report", the market size of the network audio platform will reach 115 in 2022800 million yuan, and it can reach 138 in 2023100 million yuan, which will reach 162 in 2024900 million yuan, with a compound annual growth rate of 197%。
Among them, the trend of the head player Himalaya is also hot.
On December 20, Himalaya held the 2023 Audio Night and Peak Explosion Awards Ceremony, showing the development status and trend direction of the audio industry with awards such as the Top 100 Podcast Award, the Best Technology Partner of the Year Award, the Live Anchor Honor Award, and the 123 Commercial Value Anchor Award. Fu Haibo, senior vice president of Himalaya, said at the meeting that it is necessary to let users feel understood, creators feel the power of the platform, and partners feel the industry's leadership.
A new moment has been ushered in in the audio track.
As the largest audio platform in China, Ximalaya has achieved sustained profitability. In the fourth quarter of 2022, the platform achieved a single-quarter profit of 10 million yuan for the first time, and from the fourth quarter of 2022 to the third quarter of 2023, it has been profitable for 4 consecutive quarters, and the number of monthly active users (MAUs) in all scenarios has also increased from 28.4 billion rose to 3. in the third quarter of 20234.5 billion.
The content industry is under pressure due to short-term **, and long-term ** is still struggling to find a profit point, while the growth and prosperity of long audio is quite eye-catching. For Himalaya, its own growth path is also a reference to the exploration of industry boundaries
The user scale and stickiness of the content platform first come from the content itself.
Looking back, it can be seen that the content of the Himalayan layout started earlier. Since its establishment in 2012, Himalaya has used UGC (user-generated content), PUGC (professional user-generated content), and PGC (professionally produced content) to quickly cover different levels of content domains. According to the prospectus, as of December 31, 2021, the overall number of audio produced by Himalaya was 33.9 billion.
The unique content accumulation has brought a lot of traffic to Himalaya. The platform has cooperated with Deyun Club since 2014, and the related content is still the top stream in the station, and the cumulative number of "Guo Degang's 21-year cross talk selection" has reached 33400 million.
Audiobooks illustrate this issue as well. Himalaya aims at authoritative literary lists such as the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Hugo Award, and the Mao Dun Literature Award to create a Himalayan audio book list. For example, the classic work "Ordinary World" of the Mao Dun Literature Award is 4300 million, the ** volume of "The World" is 1200 million. According to the Himalayan 2024 content IP plan, the winning works of the 2023 Mao Dun Literature Award "Echo", "Snow Mountain Land", and "A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains" have also been included in the platform.
In addition to classic literature, the content of Himalaya also covers popular literature, online literature, and a variety of original film and television works, so it is often "dreamily linked" with other works of different categories - take the movie "Wading Through the Angry Sea" released in November 2023 as an example, its Douban score is 75 points, and the original ** in the Himalayas has also received more than 140 million** and countless praises, and some users said that they felt "unfinished" after listening to it.
This huge content ecosystem has even changed users' Xi of chasing dramas.
Compared with reading or **, immersive listening can fully mobilize the user's imagination and make the experience unique and deep. As a result, Himalaya cooperates with platforms such as iQiyi and Tencent**, and film and television content is associated with one click. Film and television IPs such as "Sauvignon Blanc" and "Lotus Building" have been linked to audio publicity, and users are naturally fully engaged. For example, the number of "Lotus Building" in the Himalayas reached 26.72 million, and "Sauvignon Blanc" reached 1100 million. In 2023, the number of Himalayan dramas will exceed 8.3 billion.
Some of the content of the platform allows users to listen first. At present, more than 50 million users have listened to the original works of film and television dramas to be released in 2024 through Himalaya, including "Da Feng Da Changren", "Fox Demon Little Red Lady", "Dajiang Dahe", "The Protagonist" and other works. According to the observation of Heike Finance and Economics, the number of "Da Feng Beat the Changeler" on the platform is 62600 million, and some users said that they "chased almost 500 episodes" in one go, "it's so cool".
Himalaya does not simply carry and sound these contents, but polishes products based on user needs. In order to conform to the user's sense of hearing, Ximalaya created the "Celebrating More Than Years" audio live casting competition, and through the live audition, users voted for their favorite 8 protagonists to enter the audio drama crew. For the audio drama "The Legend of Zhen Huan" that will be launched in March 2023, the platform has also found the original voice actors of the film and television drama to ensure that the audio content is original.
This combination of live broadcast and audio is known as "amphibious anchor" within Himalaya, which mainly serves the growth of audio anchors and promotes a stronger interaction between audio anchors and users.
In addition to major IPs, Himalaya has also boosted the boom of podcasts, and its trend of continuing to expand content categories has also attracted widespread attention from the market.
Podcast is podcast, is Apple's launch of the portable digital *** iPod combined with broadcast (radio) to come, overseas development for a long time, domestic is gradually from the niche to the public. As of May 2023, the number of Himalayan podcasts** exceeds 260,000, and the number of weekly active podcasters exceeds 250,000, the number of Chinese podcast users on the platform exceeds 1600 million. In June, Himalaya reached a partnership with Apple's Apple Podcasts, which is its only certified podcast hosting platform in Chinese mainland.
Based on Himalaya's user and content base, the popularity of podcasts is a matter of course. The business talk podcast "Startup Insider" within the platform has a volume of 6200 million, the popular science program "So that's it?!".>> Volume 3300 million, and the talk show podcast "Ritan Park" also reached 200 million. According to the latest release of the "2023 National Listening Trends***", 70% of users believe that podcasts have companionship value, and 25% of users use podcasts to learn Xi improve or acquire new knowledgeMore than 50% of listeners within the Himalaya platform are willing to pay for podcast content.
Data is a testament to the impact of Himalayan content.
Himalaya's all-scenario MAU in the third quarter of 2023 is 34.5 billion, a year-on-year increase of 215%；Among them, the all-scenario DAU increased by 12% year-on-year2%, and mobile MAU increased by 21% year-on-year2%。
Judging from the content released by the Himalayan Audio Night, users associate listening to audio with "atmosphere shopping" and "spiritual comfort zone", and Himalaya has gradually become an "electronic bird's nest" for young people: on the one hand, in scenarios such as driving, walking, and housework, users have the rigid need to meet their hearing;On the other hand, in the context of the era of visual overdrive, many people turn to audio as a way to recuperate, as a way to get rid of short-** addiction or mobile phone dependence.
Cars are one of the typical scenarios. According to the "2022-2023 In-Vehicle Space User Listening Behavior Insights and Trends Report" released by iResearch, more than 60% of users mainly focus on the quality and content of audio when choosing in-vehicle audio, 805% of users experience a sense of calm and relaxation after listening to in-car audio.
This means that platforms with high content richness work better. Consumers can get the improvement of sound, handling, comfort and other experiences through the software provided by the vehicle, which can be called "car digital soft decoration".
Himalaya has reached cooperation with more than 80 car brands, serving more than 90 million car owners. Taking the cooperation with Tesla as an example, the platform supports account opening, the mobile phone and the car terminal can be seamlessly switched, and the listening history can also be synchronized. Updated in September 2023 202326.After version 9 of the system, Tesla has improved its Chinese voice recognition capabilities, and users can use voice commands to ** Himalayan audio content. Himalaya has also optimized the in-vehicle side accordingly.
According to the "2023 Car Audio Industry Insight Report" released by the research agency Aurora Big Data, in the field of car audio platforms, the coverage rate of Himalaya among the top car companies is 935% and a platform penetration rate of 178% and 81 percent of user loyalty7%, both ranked first.
In opening up the closed loop from content to commerce, Himalaya tried a variety of possibilities. In 2023, "Double 11", Himalaya once again launched the "Sound and Movement Good Things · waaaa!Treasure" event. The event attracted more than 2.13 million listeners, and the cumulative number of interactions reached 5.6 million, a year-on-year increase of 7 times. During the event, 5,500 podcasts participated in the "planting grass" of good things, and the related voices were 170,000, a year-on-year increase of 4896%。
There is also the Himalayan original "123 Carnival". A research report released by Capital ** in December 2023 pointed out that the "123 Carnival" is the first festival in the field of content consumption in China, and has become a vane for IP publicity in the audio fieldOn December 1, 2023, more than 1 million users have participated in the event check-in task, and 120,000 people have reserved for half-price annual passes.
This is where Himalaya's diversified revenue system comes from.
According to the prospectus, Himalaya's revenue** mainly includes the subscription business, advertising business, live broadcast business and other innovative products and services of membership subscription and paid on-demand listening services. 2021 subscription business revenue 299.1 billion yuan, accounting for 511%；Advertising business revenue148.7 billion yuan, accounting for 254%；Live broadcast business revenue100.1 billion yuan, accounting for 171%；Other innovative products and services revenue37.6 billion yuan, accounting for 64%。
According to the data of the Himalaya platform, with the obvious increase in user awareness of payment, by the end of 2022, the number of audio users paying ** increased by 24% year-on-year, and more than 1,000 people purchased each one**.
The status of subscriptions, ads, live broadcasts, and even other models can show that Himalaya has the ability to convert content and traffic into monetization. What's more, this capability benefits different circles of content production.
In November 2022, Himalaya launched a new creativity rating system to comprehensively evaluate creators' ratings through different dimensions and provide personalized content diagnosis for them. In the three months of operation of the new system, more than 60,000 creators have achieved a leap in rank through support and creative traction. In 2023, the number of creators who have achieved revenue breakthroughs on the Himalayan platform will reach 370,000.
The achievements of the Himalayas are visible to the naked eye. According to the data of the "2023 China Online Audiovisual Development Research Report", Himalaya ranks with 73The market share of 5% ranks first in the domestic network audio platform.
But the market is more concerned about what kind of future Himalaya will bring to the long audio industry.
Today, the answer given by Himalaya is technology, such as AIGC (generative artificial intelligence), ASR (automatic speech recognition) technology, TTS (text-to-speech) technology, etc. In 2023, two of Himalaya's speech technology achievements will be included in the world's top "2022 IEEE International Conference on Audio, Speech and Signal Processing". Previously, Himalaya also applied the AI synthesized sound of the late storytelling master Shan Tianfang to the production of audiobooks through TTS technology, and used a single storytelling tone to interpret works such as "Twelve Money Darts", "The Legend of Shushan Swordsmen" and "Those Things in the Ming Dynasty".
In the Himalayas, "Shan Tianfang's voice reproduction" has been launched more than 100 times**, with a total ** of more than 100 million. According to Heike Financial Observation, "Twelve Money Darts", "The Legend of Jigong", "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and many other *** have exceeded 5 million, and many users left messages in the comment area saying "I thought the work was recorded by Shan Tianfang himself".
Audio dramas combined with AI are also a key point. In 2020, Himalaya launched the first audio drama label "White Night Theater", and the number of fans of "White Night Theater" has exceeded 3 million in the past 3 years, with a cumulative ** volume of more than 1 billion. In October 2023, the theater will launch the multi-person audio drama "The Godfather Trilogy" produced by AI timbre, which restores the classic timbre in the movie with AI timbre reproduction technology, with more than 640,000 **.
The production of audiobooks and audio dramas through AIGC can not only reduce the cost of the platform, but also create more possibilities in the content field. The Himalayan Everest Lab team has created 370,000 audiobooks**, and more than 2.5 million hours of AIGC works on the platform are produced daily.
This change is not only happening in PGC, but also in UGC and PUGC. For example, the "multi-angle audio AIGC technology" can automatically identify characters, assign timbres, and carry out speech synthesis and emotional transformation of a variety of emotional styles according to the subject matter provided by the creator. This greatly lowers the threshold for audio creation, which can not only expand the user base involved in creation, but also improve the efficiency of creation and broaden the boundaries of content.
There is also a product of "Parents Tell Stories, AI Black Technology". Users can submit 5 audio clips of about 1 minute for AI training and customize their own voices. After the training is completed, users can use their own voices on the "Parents Tell Stories" page or in **中中 that supports AI transliteration. In other words, parents can accompany their children with AI voices when they are busy, so that children can enjoy unique parent-child time.
At the Himalayan Sound Night, Huaisha, a science fiction interpreter and producer of youth products, said that he often records in the recording studio for 6 hours in a row, and has no time to tell stories to Erbao after returning home.
The same is true of Himalaya's AI-powered intelligent creation tool "Cloud Editing". "Cloud Editing" integrates functions such as intelligent volume, intelligent soundtrack, tone-to-text editing, AI segmentation, intelligent detection, and one-click filming, which users can operate conveniently. In the past, audio editing had to be heard from the beginning to the end, and editing while listening, and the time consumed was proportional to the duration of the audio. "Cloud Editing" can convert audio to text, using AI technology to convert audio content into text, and users can directly edit audio through text like editing documents.
On the whole, Himalaya's profitability comes from the all-round promotion of content, model, technology and organization.
Offline activities such as the platform's "Podcast All-Stars" and "Podcast Development Conference" have increased the opportunity to reach users and opened up the way to combine online and offline. On the basis of insisting on investing in content and technology, the upgrade of the organizational structure drives Himalaya to continuously iterate on itself, and constantly adapt to new changes through customer service, technological innovation and ecological development. The platform integrates internal resources and shifts from growth-driven to in-depth creation of user value, in order to achieve a win-win situation for C-side, B-end and P-side, that is, content producers. This makes creators, content ecology, user experience, and platform commercialization form a positive loop, which is also the beginning of sustainable growth.
It is precisely because of the ability of audio to travel through cycles that the ear economy needs long-termism – this is the answer given by the steady pace of Himalaya, and it is also the only way for the industry to sail into the deep sea.