Quote:I am not a gamer or avid user of WeChat's ecosystem so I find your thoughts and user experience interesting. Thanks for sharing.
Tencent is monetising live streaming e-commerce on Video Accounts even though they have chose not to monetise e-commerce on Mini Programs. This confuses me. But they must have well-considered this dichotomy.
Do you have any thoughts on their Cloud business? I am skeptical of both Ali and Tencent's strategy of being a B2B cloud provider, why would this business fit with their core B2C business? I became less skeptical of Tencent after reading Pony's dressing down speech to the company, where he directed that Tencent cloud should avoid being an aggregator and focus (seems to be a very narrow focus) on Tencent's existing strengths/products: enterprise productivity apps and mini programs.
Video Accounts monetisation is easier as Douyin/TikTok has done that successfully.
VA is still quite far behind Douyin in scale, technical etc.
Imo, short video monetisation is also easier due to its addictive (or you can call it stickiness) effects.
As in, easier to earn $ from alchohol, cigar than most other products.
Imho, even games have more positive values than short videos, but alas, short video is darn addictive (brainless + addictive, who can resist).
Short video also easier to embed ads and somehow it's auto-played right? so the click through is high.
Not sure if I interpreted you correctly, but cloud is naturally B2B.
Earning $ in Cloud biz can only be B2B, as in how many people will pay for cloud services?
That said, I'm quite happy with the downscaling of cloud biz players in China.
Tencent is now focusing more on their strength, eg: in video streaming, messaging etc, from what I know quite a lot of video streaming products are using Tencent PaaS or SaaS.
Previously the players are in war of grabbing the general Infrastucture (IaaS) market (big but commodity)
but now, they are focusing more on Platform (PaaS) & Services (SaaS).
IaaS is imo, low margin and hence need huge scale, AWS is the leader here, how you fight with the Walmart of the cloud?
So far, the best way is to learn from Microsoft example.
Microsoft leverages on their Office365 suite (SaaS) and soon CoPilot will be another magic bullet, to grab the market share from AWS. I mean why you still use AWS if most of products you use are in Microsoft cloud, bcos it'd be more seamless.
So the current development of cloud players trying to differentiate their offerings is great and it should create different giants with their own strength, for instance could be:
Video streaming, messaging, games go to Tencent.
AI, auto-driving go to Baidu.
eCommerce go to Baba.
Supply chain go to JD.
etc etc.