A profound transformation is quietly taking place within the Alipay app, where the once seemingly elusive content ecosystem seems to have gradually found its index.

In recent years, Alipay has been actively cultivating its content ecosystem: opening up life accounts, introducing graphic and short videos, venturing into live streaming, and more. In May last year, Alipay's life account officially opened up to content creators and released several cash incentive policies in succession. In November, UGC entry was fully opened. By June 12 this year, Alipay launched the "Content Hundred Billion Support Plan," expecting to invest 10 billion yuan and hundred billion traffic to support high-quality creators by the end of the year.

Alongside the further advancement in content, Alipay's exploration of content commercialization has also been put on the agenda.

Besides content, if you're a heavy user of Alipay, you might have noticed another change: the addition of a smart assistant by swiping down on the app's homepage, utilizing AI technology to provide personalized answers and services. Compared to previous years, the changes in Alipay's product have been more significant than ever before.

To understand these changes, starting from Alipay's positioning and market environment might be the optimal solution. Today, Alipay has evolved from a single payment tool into a platform providing comprehensive services, becoming one of the largest service-oriented super apps in the market. Facing fierce market competition and the diversification of user needs, Alipay, through the combination of AI and content, is attempting to better promote the precise matching of services and user needs, which is evidently the motivation behind this transformation.

However, the challenges faced by Alipay are also evident. Despite its vast service ecosystem, its development rate is only 10%. How to tap into the enormous potential hidden within? Whether Alipay's ongoing "content + AI" dual-spiral strategy can effectively reconstruct and activate its app, making it a more active and personalized service platform, is not only a question that Alipay needs to answer but also a focus of industry attention.

01. Alipay Starts to Enter the Content Arena

Frankly speaking, from a visual perspective, Alipay's foray into content easily gives the outside world a sense of "locking the stable door after the horse has bolted."

Compared to content platforms like Weibo, TikTok, and Xiaohongshu, Alipay's attempt at contentization started relatively late. As a tool-type app in the public impression, it has a high daily open rate, but users tend to use it and leave, without a strong content soil.

However, the so-called "disadvantage" of tool-type apps is also a crucial advantage from another perspective. We cannot ignore the fact that its 1 billion user base makes it a national-level product that leads other apps in a cliff-like manner, similar to WeChat and TikTok. Moreover, the precedent of WeChat Video has proven that building a content ecosystem on a large enough traffic base also has the possibility of catching up later. Not to mention that in today's era where content consumption has become popular, complementing content construction has become a must-have option for internet platforms.

From a practical perspective, although starting late, Alipay's content deployment has also found its own rhythm through exploration. Its earliest content attempt was the launch of life accounts in 2015, initially serving as a tool for businesses and institutions to send graphic and textual information to their followers. Since 2022, Alipay announced the upgrade of life accounts, supporting content forms such as short videos and live streaming, officially catching up with the era's fast train.

According to official statistics, the monthly active creator scale on Alipay has increased by more than 10 times year-on-year, the daily average content consumption user volume has increased by 8 times, and the average content consumption duration per user has doubled. 300 million people have followed official institutional accounts in Alipay's financial community.

Observing the changes brought about by content from another perspective, we can also discover that some new trends are gradually emerging within Alipay. Content derived from the broader financial field, in line with Alipay's original positioning as a financial tool, has released unique creativity and vitality. Data shows that one out of every five life account users on Alipay enjoys content related to broader financial topics. Young people passionate about making money are finding their electronic "pickles" on Alipay.

Due to its proximity to the "money bag," the 2024 Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders' meeting chose to broadcast live on Alipay for the first time. On the night of the live broadcast, 3 million people joined the "#Receive Wealth and Make Wishes#" session in the Alipay Berkshire Hathaway shareholders' meeting live room, turning it into a temporary wishing pool for wealth among netizens.

Building official content display and interaction windows, incentivizing content creators through various policies, and focusing on supporting content that aligns with the platform's ethos are conventional growth paths for a content platform. However, when it comes to Alipay's content efforts, there are some differentiated positions that deserve special mention.

The first is what role Alipay intends content to play. First and foremost, it is certain that Alipay will never become, nor does it intend to become, a TikTok or Xiaohongshu. As Guo Hong, the head of content operations for the Alipay App business group, put it, "Alipay's content is not meant to replicate TikTok or Xiaohongshu, but rather to integrate seamlessly with in-app service scenarios based on Alipay's user mindset and create content with Alipay's unique characteristics."

After conventional content platforms accumulate a user base, their top priority is to establish a path between content and advertising monetization. However, for Alipay, which is service-oriented, content is more like a lubricant, a filler, and the flesh and blood of the ecosystem. In short, Alipay is not creating content to collect advertising fees, but to prosper the combination of "content + service" and amplify its original advantages.

Taking Xiaohongshu as an example, in the consumption chain, Xiaohongshu's advantage lies in the pre-consumption stage, i.e., content seeding. In contrast, Alipay's strength lies in the middle and later stages, closely related to consumption behavior, or what could be termed "weeding." What Alipay needs to complement is seeding content. Therefore, in terms of content types, Alipay primarily promotes content related to broader financial and lifestyle topics, thus transforming from a "payment-focused Alipay" to a "lifestyle-oriented Alipay".

The second is the specific operation of embedding content into the platform ecosystem. From the current business advancement, we can extract a logic: Service A attracts users - Content keeps users on the platform - Overflow to Service B.

User retention through content is the core, and it is also the key to transforming from "being passively chosen by users" to "actively engaging users." Alipay has chosen short videos as the main content format, which is market-proven as the most efficient content genre for increasing user duration. Moreover, the information flow presentation has been changed from a dual-column format to a single-column immersive format that best captures users' attention.

A noteworthy case demonstrates why short videos on Alipay are currently in their prime. Bo Zai, a post-95 exploration blogger with only a few hundred thousand followers in the short video sector, successfully achieved monthly earnings of over 200,000 yuan in his first month on Alipay, gaining nearly 70,000 new followers in less than half a year. His first viral video, "Street-Side Tin Lunch Box Meals in Harbin," achieved over 46 million views.

However, when it comes to content creators, it must be pointed out that as a "rising star" in content, Alipay still has a long way to go in accumulating IPs and creating influential top creators. Currently, it lacks a "breakout" IP or celebrity blogger to change public perception.

On a positive note, in terms of cultivating user mindset, Alipay's other ace, AI, is playing a unique role.

02. Playing Another AI Card and Catching the Wave

Regarding the currently hottest AI Agent, Bill Gates once predicted that as the next platform, the Agent would revolutionize the way applications are accessed. Users will no longer search for websites, log into productivity websites, or shop online, but instead delegate everything to the Agent.

According to media reports, on April 26 this year, Alipay began a grayscale test of a brand-new AI Agent for services on its homepage. As mentioned earlier, creating content is to enrich Alipay's "flesh and blood," while AI's role in its service "skeleton" is to extract its essence.

In terms of entry, Alipay places extremely high importance on the AI Agent, giving it the top pull-down position on the homepage. Users can find this AI smart assistant by continuously pulling down on the Alipay homepage.

Functionally, Alipay's AI smart assistant focuses on daily life services, differing from common "conversation partner"-type AI products on the market, such as Baidu Wenxin and ByteDance Doubao. It is not a standalone app but is integrated into the Alipay app, providing users with over 8,000 digital life services in areas such as travel, health, government affairs, and finance, resembling a "handy and capable life partner."

Therefore, Xinlichang believes that Alipay's current launch of an AI assistant is not to catch the trend and compete in the large model market but rather to customize and prosper Alipay's own ecosystem as the primary objective.

The flipside of being large and comprehensive is being numerous and complex. Currently, Alipay covers over 8,000 services across more than 150 service scenarios, including 700 million financial users, 600 million medical users, and 500 million travel users, making it a gathering place for multiple vertical user groups. Accurately locating and addressing their individual needs within such a vast user cluster is precisely the domain where artificial intelligence excels.

In terms of the current product, the travel, health, convenience services, dining and entertainment, and consumption management services offered by Alipay's AI "smart assistant" have basically covered the high-frequency scenarios of users' daily lives. Users can use it as a life encyclopedia or handle practical matters. With proper prompts, they can even take advantage of deals, surpassing ordinary "app navigation" and condensing the high functionality of an "assistant" into the product.

For example, in travel scenarios, after testing, Xinlichang found that by conversing with the smart assistant, it can directly provide ticket purchasing recommendations based on the destination and travel time. When inquiring about dining recommendations around attractions, it can also list recommended venues while briefly explaining the characteristics and reasons for the recommendation. From a product design perspective, it balances both practicality and personalization. Some life service functions originally provided through mini-programs, such as utility bill payments and bill management and analysis, can now be accessed with a single click through the conversation window.

An even more interesting aspect is that leveraging this AI assistant to take advantage of deals has become simpler. By entering "check if there are any coupons" in the conversation box, besides already claimed coupons, there are also many recommended product coupons, saving users time while also providing them with tangible benefits. Even this query can be combined with "qualifiers," such as the tested coupon for a hamburger fast-food chain, but the drawback is that this function seems to have some limitations currently, as brands like Luckin Coffee, Starbucks, and Pizza Hut are still not searchable.

Furthermore, Alipay has combined content and AI to explore even more possibilities. For example, when searching for "interview tips for college students," the smart assistant can not only provide textual advice but also search and recommend suitable videos within the app, making the answers richer and more diverse.

Another perspective worth anticipating is that AI itself is still in a stage of rapid development with immense potential. Alipay's AI assistant is not a "complete entity," and future technology赋予了它探索更高上限的可能性. Exploring directions such as simplifying service operation difficulty, deepening service invocation capabilities, expanding service linkage ranges, and even achieving cross-scenario, cross-platform comprehensive services are all possibilities.

China does not lack smart assistant products, with Baidu Wenxin Yiyan and ByteDance Doubao focusing on conversation and creative assistance for C-end users, and DingTalk Super Assistant and Feishu Smart Partner targeting B-end users for industry applications and workplace efficiency.

Overall, the application of new technologies must start from one's own product positioning to become practical. From this perspective, Alipay's choice to launch an "AI service assistant" focusing on daily life is a break from industry frameworks and a "customized" implementation.

03. Can the "Dual Spiral" Reconstruct the App?

If we consider "content" and "AI" separately, there are many platforms that focus on one aspect. However, observing the changes in the Alipay app, the synergistic value of content and AI is a more noteworthy focus. In Xinlichang's view, the stable dual-spiral structure formed by the two can truly influence the evolution of Alipay's ecosystem.

First, let's discuss the degree of adaptability between the dual spiral and the original system, which is the underlying logic of whether it can reconstruct the app's ecosystem. Users generally have an impression that Alipay is "all-encompassing," but as a comprehensive app, content has been lacking. The app ecosystem is analogous to a natural ecological park. If there are only animals and no plants or insects, it would constantly require external supplies and energy to maintain. Creating content is to introduce new species.

At the same time, Alipay itself is an internet transportation hub, but the actual development rate of its vast service ecosystem may be only 10%. According to Alipay's latest commercial vitality report, the app is not short of service-oriented traffic, with diverse service scenarios, large-scale service users, and 900 million high-net-worth members.

What it needs is an intelligent hub to activate various scenarios, enabling users attracted to specific services or content on Alipay to access a vast array of daily life services through the built-in smart assistant, achieving "instant response" from point to surface.

On top of that, the refinement of the content + AI system itself involves whether it can elevate the upper limit of the entire app ecosystem.

As mentioned earlier, Alipay has made many constructions in content areas such as broader financial topics, immersive flows, and local life, which are relatively conventional content accumulations that align with users' consumption habits. This content plays a bridging role in carrying the original service traffic, increasing user duration, and guiding them to overflow to more services.

The AI smart assistant, on the other hand, plays the role of a growth "catalyst." The product design itself revolves around efficiency, meaning that while content is responsible for activating more user behaviors, it also makes their specific operations more convenient and efficient by lowering the threshold for service invocation, avoiding potential user loss during the conversion process. This horizontal synergy with content makes the platform ecosystem even more prosperous.

For Alipay, the dual-spiral structure should also have a longer-term consideration for ecological health.

Because the platform itself has strong comprehensive service characteristics, creating content on this platform, in addition to conventional, mass consumption-oriented content, also needs to consider creating special content tailored for platform services to bond the vast content and service system and enable them to operate synergistically.

For example, if we frequently visit various content communities or social platforms, we may notice a strange phenomenon: many users need to search for tutorials on Xiaohongshu or TikTok to fully understand many services on Alipay (such as checking social security, booking visas, etc.). Searching for "Alipay" guides on Xiaohongshu will reveal many shares teaching you how to "discover hidden functions" or "find practical tools."

The discussion of "how to navigate Alipay" does not take place on Alipay's own platform, indicating that the internet potentially hides a lot of traffic created by Alipay that spilled outside the platform due to the incomplete nature of the past system. Therefore, Alipay plans to launch short articles and recommended tutorial-type short videos to address this issue.

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