Written by Wang Huiying 

Edited by Ziye 

With 1 billion users, Alipay, a national-level app, is not lacking in users, but extending their dwell time is not an easy task.

With the development of e-commerce, Alipay pioneered mobile payments. With 800 million monthly active users and 80 million merchant resources, it is almost a ceiling-level app in China.

However, as a tool-type app, Alipay is characterized by poor user stickiness, short dwell time, and users using it and leaving immediately.

In the current era of peaking internet traffic, if you can't grab users' time, you must find a solution. Alipay's solution is to create content.

Over the years, to attract users to stay, Alipay has been cultivating a content ecosystem: upgrading its Life tab, constructing graphic and video short videos, and entering the live streaming e-commerce field.

Starting in May last year, Alipay officially opened up to content creators and successively released multiple cash incentive policies. By June 12th this year, Alipay launched the "Content Hundred Billion Support Plan," expecting to invest 10 billion yuan in cash and 10 billion yuan in traffic to support high-quality creators by the end of the year.

This indicates that Alipay has taken another step forward in content and begun to explore content commercialization ecosystems to a greater extent.

However, climbing the steep slope of content is not an easy road, even for a national-level app like Alipay. It not only needs to consider how to change users' perception of Alipay but also face competition in the content market.

Becoming a comprehensive super app is a consensus among all players in the internet industry in the era of stock. For Alipay, breaking through itself, expanding boundaries, and finding more growth is a necessary path.

1. How is Alipay doing with content?

It's hard to imagine that 70% of Alipay's users, which originated from financial services, use non-financial services.

Behind this is a core question that Alipay has been pondering over the past two years: how to bring high-quality content to 1 billion users and extend from a pure tool platform to a comprehensive content platform.

Looking back at Alipay's journey towards content, as a latecomer in the content race, Alipay is climbing the steep slope of content from 0 to 1 by building a creator ecosystem.

At the beginning of 2022, Alipay announced the upgrade of its Life tab, supporting content forms such as short videos and live streaming in addition to graphics and text, and launched the "Video Channel" at the center of the App's homepage as a ground for connecting users, institutions, and merchants;

In May 2023, the Life tab officially opened up to individual and institutional creators, marking the comprehensive opening up of Alipay's content ecosystem;

At the beginning of this year, Alipay launched an internal test of a service called "Interest Community," positioning it as a place to discover interesting and popular activities, find peers and teams, and experience trendy life;

In two years, Alipay's homepage has been filled with "content." Recently, when Insight opened Alipay's bottom "Video" channel, it found that the channel has gathered five sections: Follow, Short Drama, Euro Cup, Live, and Discover.

Image source: Alipay's "Video" interface 

Centering around videos and live streaming, Alipay's content commercialization process is also accelerating. On August 17th last year, Alipay officially launched the commercial promotion platform "Denghuo," including three public domain promotion products: "Quanyuzhitou," "Searchbao," and "Brandbao."

At the end of November last year, Alipay announced that the merchant entry process for live streaming had been fully simplified and the threshold lowered, while the product recruitment system was officially launched and opened to merchants. Before the Spring Festival this year, Alipay's Life tab emerged with the first merchant Life tab with over 10 million views.

However, after more than two years of content layout, Alipay has not yet formed users' habits. "I haven't opened Alipay in a long time, and I found that the middle tab is short videos, which feels strange," such discussions are not uncommon.

It can be seen that for a financial tool platform to make short videos, changing users' impression is not easy.

But Alipay has no intention of giving up and is even increasing its investment.

On June 12th, Alipay held its first Content Open Day for creators. At the event, Alipay also responded to these doubts. Li Jun, General Manager of Alipay's App Business Group, said, "Alipay is not only a national e-wallet but also a national life assistant. Users express and interact through carriers such as short videos, live streaming, communities, and groups. Content has become a crucial link between users and services. Contentization is also one of the keywords for Alipay in 2024."

To retain users, ultimately, it relies on increasingly rich and high-quality content, and the emergence of high-quality content is inseparable from creators. Essentially, Alipay is now thinking about how to attract more creators and motivate their enthusiasm.

At the Content Open Day, Alipay announced that it would invest 10 billion yuan in cash and 10 billion yuan in traffic to support content creators and would also introduce advertising resources worth 1 billion yuan to provide commercial monetization opportunities for creators.

Image source: Alipay Open Platform WeChat public account

Specifically, Alipay launched the "Content Hundred Billion Support Plan," expecting to invest 10 billion yuan in cash and 10 billion yuan in traffic to support high-quality creators by the end of the year, assisting creators' growth through a "3+1" model, namely three major incentive policies and one commercial monetization opportunity.

Investing real money in creators is not only to encourage creators to create high-quality content but also an important means to deepen content commercialization. It is also the underlying logic of retaining users with high-quality content, indicating that after one year of fully opening up its content ecosystem, Alipay is about to enter a new stage.

2. Being closer to money, can it achieve differentiation?

After turning to content, Alipay's competitors are no longer just payment-enabled apps but a host of short video platforms. To bypass competition, it must first embark on a path of differentiation.

"Alipay's content is not meant to be like Douyin or Xiaohongshu, but to integrate with in-app service scenarios based on Alipay's user mindset and create content with Alipay's characteristics," said Guo Hong, the head of content operations at Alipay's App Business Group, when discussing content positioning.

Indeed, whether it is market positioning, user mindset, or user personas, Alipay is very different from platforms like Douyin and Xiaohongshu.

Compared to other platforms, Alipay's biggest uniqueness is that it is closest to money, which is also the most distinctive aspect of Alipay's content ecosystem.

In terms of video categories,顺应 Alipay's user mindset, pan-financial content related to "money" has also become the fastest-growing vertical on the platform.

According to a report released by Alipay in April, the number of creators in pan-financial content has increased sixfold in the past six months. Currently, over 150 fund companies, securities firms, and others have joined Ant Wealth to provide users with investment education, companionship, and other services. Content published by various institutions and creators has increased 2.5 times in one year.

Data shows that one out of every five Alipay short video users enjoys watching pan-financial content. Additionally, 70% of million-follower finance bloggers on the entire network have joined, and more and more financial creators are joining this blue ocean.

Sun Dalu is a creator in the financial field on Alipay's Life tab. She officially joined Alipay on January 22nd this year. Her first content on Alipay received 1.73 million views, so updating content on Alipay has become her main job. Five months later, Sun Dalu's earnings on Alipay exceeded 49,000 yuan.

In fact, from the perspective of platform positioning and user mindset, it is natural for Alipay to create pan-financial content. Over the years, Alipay has cultivated users' trust in finance and wealth management, especially among this generation of young people who enjoy making money and studying investments. They need videos that are closer to professional and practical knowledge. With the support of such videos, Alipay's Life tab content can truly land in users' commercial behaviors and also feed back into Alipay's user dwell time and activity.

In addition, on Alipay, content that is "practical," "quality," and "informative" receives more attention, and the pan-lifestyle field has also become an important vertical. Alipay data shows that pan-lifestyle bloggers who publish content about food exploration, travel, and the like are the highest-earning creators among all.

For example, the blogger "Haibianerdogge" has operated his Life tab on Alipay for three months since joining and achieved a monthly income of 100,000 yuan through the revenue-sharing plan. However, Insight found that besides a video with 19,000 likes, most of "Haibianerdogge's" recent videos have only received a few likes, exposing that users have not yet formed a habit of consuming content on Alipay.

"Haibianerdogge's" Life tab, image source: Alipay

To a certain extent, this will affect creators' motivation to produce content. After all, the motivation for continuously producing good content is for creators to obtain tangible benefits. As mentioned above, Alipay has already launched the "Content Hundred Billion Support Plan" to help content creators monetize.

It is worth noting that in the past, Alipay mainly relied on "digging" authors to accumulate the number of creators, and there were very few native creators on Alipay.

"Alipay is different from other platforms in that when we first started developing, there were actually very few creators spontaneously on the platform," said Wang Yao, the head of content products at Alipay's App Business Group, at the event.

At this Content Open Day, Alipay said it would introduce some small and medium creators to build its own featured bloggers. To this end, Alipay has launched a new star-making plan, aiming to support a group of million-follower KOLs within the next year and become benchmark authors representing the platform.

In terms of the top creator ecosystem, Alipay is still continuously recruiting. Alipay will also upgrade its revenue-sharing plan for creators. After the upgrade, it will combine billion-level traffic, double the total revenue-sharing incentives, and increase support for high-quality original authors. According to the recruitment plan, top creators who join through this plan will receive a guaranteed incentive of at least 5,000 yuan per account, with a maximum monthly income of up to 30,000 yuan through the recruitment plan alone.

When announcing the new incentive policies, Alipay clearly stated that it would consider the interaction between creators and users and provide preferential weight to authors who do better in this aspect.

Wang Yao added that Alipay will strengthen the construction of content notification messages in the future, allowing users to receive push notifications such as creators' replies and interactions with comments, thereby enhancing user stickiness and promoting them to develop the habit of consuming content on Alipay.

With continuous investment, Alipay's confidence comes from its achievements in content creation over the past year. In the past year, monthly active creators on Alipay's Life tab have achieved a 10-fold increase, the daily average number of content consumers has increased by 8 times, and the average daily content consumption time has doubled year-on-year.

It can be foreseen that based on the mindset of "being closer to money and services," Alipay's content ecosystem is also beginning to develop its unique characteristics.

However, compared to other platforms, whether Alipay is a worthwhile traffic lowland depends on its subsequent content operation strategy and whether it can truly help creators earn money.

3. Why must Alipay create content?

In the planning of Li Jun, General Manager of Alipay's App Business Group, Alipay is a lifestyle service platform that accompanies users in all aspects, a vivid, interesting app filled with the flavors of human life, and contentization is a crucial part of achieving this transformation.

This is the ideal image of Alipay, namely, from "Alipay for payments" to "Alipay for life."

However, why is a tool-type app so persistent in creating content? With over 1 billion active users, 800 million MAU, and 80 million merchant resources, why is Alipay not satisfied?

Essentially, these impressive numbers and traffic potential have not yet been fully tapped.

An obvious problem is that users' behavior on Alipay in the past was mainly passive. For example, users would only think of opening Alipay when they had practical issues such as payments, utility bills, and social security and provident fund inquiries, which is not as high as platforms like Douyin and Xiaohongshu in terms of daily usage.

In fact, this is a common problem among all tool-type apps, where users use and leave immediately, rarely staying, and generating very little active traffic, let alone retention.

The most prominent example is Alipay's "Collect Five Fortunes" event during the Spring Festival every year. Although it increases user activity on Alipay during the Spring Festival, this activity is not sustainable.

According to QuestMobile statistics, during the 2023 Spring Festival, among apps with daily active users exceeding 50 million, Alipay had the shortest average daily usage time, only 7.8 minutes. In most cases, users spend less than 5 minutes on Alipay.

To solve this problem, more content is needed to help Alipay retain users.

Image source: Alipay Open Platform WeChat public account 

Zhuang Shuai, the founder of Bailian Consulting, analyzed for Insight, "Alipay's content creation is aimed at enhancing user stickiness on the one hand and promoting financial and advertising businesses on the other."

As early as 2020, when Ant Group sought to go public, its prospectus put "improving user activity and expanding the user base" at the top of its development strategy. The reason is simple: "If consumer and merchant participation and activity on the platform decrease, it will severely impact financial performance."

For a long time, Alipay has relied on the Alibaba ecosystem, and many Alibaba platforms can provide transactions and traffic imports for Alipay. However, now Alibaba itself is facing traffic anxiety, and even Taobao's payment method is not dominated by Alipay alone. More importantly, Alipay has now become an independent company separate from Alibaba. How to spontaneously drive traffic is the next challenge Alipay must face.

In Zhuang Shuai's view, Alipay has been operating as a platform for many years, but improving content diversity poses a significant challenge. "Because Alipay is a platform with a stronger financial attribute, content related to finance and economics receives more attention. Additionally, with the development of content diversity, the requirements for content governance, traffic distribution mechanisms, and content monetization will also increase."

In the current era of stock internet, everyone is anxious about traffic, and releasing the maximum potential from