Author |Liu Baodan.
Edit |Zhou Zhiyu.
After three years of rectification, Alipay's commercialization began to accelerate, and the core point is content.
At the beginning of the year, Alipay quietly started a small-scale test of the "interest community" product. Previously, Alipay has added ** channels and started live streaming, all of which are aimed at strengthening the content ecology and bringing more entertainment and consumption choices to more than 1 billion users.
This means that Alipay also wants to become a platform with community and social attributes like Douyin or Xiaohongshu.
For a long time, although Alipay has a large number of users, the user stickiness is not enough, resulting in its traffic but difficult to monetize, more just as a payment tool.
Nowadays, the commercialization through content also reflects Alipay's anxiety to a certain extent.
Ma Yun is no longer the actual controller of Alipay, and Ali has also begun to access WeChat payment, which means that Alipay will move towards independent development. At the same time, Alipay is also facing competition from Douyin and others in the payment field.
After 20 years of development, Alipay has once again come to the crossroads of fate. This time, it wants to take a long-term view and plan a new way out for itself.
Attack
Internet companies hungry for traffic and content have made social networking a battleground, and Alipay is no exception.
Recently, some Alipay users have found that at the top of the Alipay APP message page, a new "interest community" entrance has been added. Click in to find various interest groups, such as cycling, hiking, camping, etc., similar to Douban's interest groups in the same city.
This small change has attracted a lot of attention. On February 23, the entry "Alipay re-wading into social networking" appeared on the hot search, with 48 million views. Alipay insiders said that this piece has not yet taken shape, and if it invests more in the follow-up, it will make an official announcement.
In fact, this is not the first time Alipay has launched a social product. 8 years ago, Alipay tried to enter the social field and launched the "life circle" on the homepage, but due to individual users posting *** and vulgar content, the product fell into huge controversy. Subsequently, Peng Lei, then chairman of Ant Financial, sent an internal letter to reflect.
Alipay's short-lived attempt to socialize ended in failure, and Alipay's development direction has refocused on finance and commerce. Nowadays, with the relayout of social products, Alipay intends to get up from where it fell.
The changes don't stop there. Recently, Alipay has renamed the life channel in the center of the menu bar at the bottom of the app to ** channel to highlight the content mentality. The channel is a content platform that combines Douyin and Xiaohongshu, where users can swipe short**, watch live broadcasts, browse** content, etc.
In addition, it is reported that Alipay has successively poached many employees from Douyin and Xiaohongshu last year to focus on content. In this regard, Alipay insiders said that there was indeed a case, and said that it was normal for Internet companies to poach each other.
This series of changes shows that Alipay is increasing the layout of the content ecology. In fact, in the past four years, Alipay has gradually raised its content to an important position in order to accelerate commercialization.
Since 2022, Alipay has carried out several product revisions, the core of which is to build infrastructure around the content ecosystem. For example, Alipay upgraded the life account from a single form to support short, live broadcast, and other content forms, and aggregated it into a content channel.
The content strategy is an important part of Alipay's closed loop of commercialization. Alipay's advantage lies in merchant resources, as long as the gap of user stickiness is filled, a complete business closed loop can be formed.
Bai Wenxi, chief economist of IPG China, believes that the purpose of content is to increase the length of users' stay on the Alipay app, not only Alipay, but also technology companies such as Meituan, Didi, and Alibaba have traffic anxiety, and turning to content is a common practice in the industry.
Alipay's business logic is to enhance user stickiness through content, and then the merchant will undertake these traffic, and finally realize it by helping the merchant to improve the efficiency of its operation. This is the fundamental logic of Alipay's digital transformation to commerce.
To this end, Alipay has launched a number of commercialization tools. Last year, Alipay began to make efforts to bring goods through live broadcasting, build a live broadcast position of live broadcast treasure through multiple channels, and launched the commercial promotion platform "Lights" to serve merchants to accurately acquire customers.
However, in order to truly achieve a closed business loop and enhance user stickiness through content, Alipay faces no small challenges.
According to data from QuestMobile, during the Spring Festival in 2024, the average daily usage time of the Alipay app will only be 94 minutes, less than one-tenth of Douyin and Kuaishou, at the bottom of the platform with more than 100 million daily active users, people's attention is mainly in the two major fields of short** and mobile social.
In order to develop a high-frequency social scene in the low-frequency use scenario of payment, Alipay's transformation has just begun.
Grow
For users, the impression that Alipay is a payment tool has long been ingrained.
20 years ago, Alipay became a link in the closed loop of e-commerce transactions, and now it has grown into a national-level financial app with 1 billion users and 80 million merchant resources.
Alipay's brilliant achievements in the past are inseparable from Ali's support; In the future, Ali and Alipay will develop independently, and open the payment entrance to WeChat Pay, etc., will put pressure on Alipay's future development.
On January 5, Alipay was officially changed to no actual controller, and the founder Ma Yun became an ordinary shareholder, which means that Alipay will be managed by the board of directors and management as the actual controller in the future.
Prior to this, Alipay and Ali had begun to draw lines, for example, Ant executives no longer appeared on the list of Alibaba's partners. In terms of equity, Ali and Alipay have also become non-consolidated related parties, and last year Ant bought back shares, and Ali, which holds 33% of Ant's shares, did not participate.
In addition, the entrance of Alibaba's core e-commerce payment is also gradually opening to WeChat Pay, and Alipay's exclusive payment status may become a thing of the past. In the future, Alipay and WeChat Pay will compete for the payment share of e-commerce.
In addition to the old rival WeChat Pay, Alipay's pressure also lies in the fact that more and more new opponents have emerged, and content platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou have begun to threaten Alipay's foundation in the field of financial payment.
In the past few years, live streaming e-commerce has experienced rapid development. Taking Douyin as an example, by the end of 2023, the transaction scale of Douyin e-commerce will exceed two trillion yuan, which is the scale that took 11 years to reach. The rapid growth of e-commerce transactions will lead to an increase in payment demand, and Alipay, which started as an e-commerce transaction, knows this.
Douyin has great potential in payment, financial management and credit, taking credit as an example. According to market sources, around the end of 2023, the lending balance of byte-based companies such as Douyin has exceeded at least 300 billion and is approaching 400 billion. Although Byte responded that the information was untrue, Douyin still has a very advantage in entering the financial market with huge traffic, and it is an opponent that should not be underestimated.
There are various signs in the fields of finance, e-commerce, and content that Alipay must improve its own development moat as soon as possible and find new growth points in order to stand out from this unprecedented reshuffle and stand out from the crowd.
In addition to the content field, Alipay is also aiming at the digital track of merchants. Linking the marketing ability of users and merchants, this is Alipay's longboard that is better than others, and Alipay should also further strengthen this.
During this year's Spring Festival, Alipay seized the marketing window to upgrade the "Jiwufu" to the "Wufu Festival", attracting users to participate in the carup of red packets, and at the same time introducing traffic to merchants to achieve the reach of users and merchants.
Previously, during the Hangzhou Asian Games, Alipay launched the "Smart Asian Games One-stop Pass", which provided viewers with 28 one-stop services such as ticket purchase, travel, viewing, accommodation, dining and travel, linking more than 20,000 merchants, and more than 200 million people watched the Asian Games on Alipay's life account.
From the perspective of business performance, in the past year, partners such as Mini Program service providers, SaaS service providers, cloud platform service providers, and MCN institutions have diversified growth, and the scale of Alipay Mini Program merchants has also increased by more than 150%.
However, whether Alipay's business model itself can turn around ultimately depends on whether Alipay can retain users through content. From this point of view, Alipay still has a long way to go in the future.
In 2024, Alipay will usher in its 20th year of development, which is a new beginning for Alipay to move towards independent development, and also represents future challenges.
Whether Alipay can lay a new foundation in addition to payment is not only related to its own development, but also a demonstration of whether the financial platform can successfully transform. This is destined to be a road full of thorns, and Alipay's new challenge has begun.