Papi Jiang got famous on short video. Can the company she founded do the same?

The shift in media formats gave papitube room to survive — and created every problem it now faces.

Papi Jiang founded her short-video company more than two years ago.

From April 2016 to now, the company called papitube has grown from one person to 100, moved offices three times, signed more than 60 video creators, and turned an overall profit. At its second-anniversary celebration, chief operating officer Huo Nifang announced a plan to sign 100 creators by the end of the year. On the surface, papitube has nothing to worry about.

Except Douyin.

Douyin already has 150 million daily active users. It still calls itself short video, but it is really a different kind of entertainment product altogether. Fifteen seconds is far shorter than the three-to-five-minute videos papitube specializes in. papitube has tried to fit itself to Douyin in order to reach the enormous audience there. As for the results, Huo Nifang says: "For our veteran creators, it works for some and not for others."

Because advertisers keep pouring budget into short video, Huo Nifang believes the format has not hit its ceiling. So she doesn't see Douyin as a competitor, but as a challenge thrown up by a shift in media format. Which raises a question: as media formats reshape how consumers spend their leisure time all over again, what will short video become?

There is something paradoxical about this — two years ago it was Papi Jiang who led the wave from long video to short video, and now short video is itself being battered by video that is shorter still — but it goes straight to the heart of the matter. The shift in media formats gave papitube room to survive, and it created every problem the company now faces.

If you had to sum up what happened to video over the past decade, the most obvious change is that it kept getting shorter. Viewers who in 2008 could still switch on the television and sit on the couch all afternoon had, by 2014, learned to download an episode of U Can U BiBi onto a phone to pass the time on the commute. The spread of mobile devices and the growing fragmentation of leisure time both laid the ground for short video.

The media has called Papi Jiang China's first internet celebrity, but in short video the earliest breakout hit was an app called Xiaokaxiu. It came out of the innovation division of the short-video platform Miaopai, and its core feature was lip-syncing. Users could pick an audio clip from a library and, following the subtitle prompts on screen, record themselves acting it out in an exaggerated way. Fresh, funny, and pushed along by celebrities such as Wang Luodan and Zhang Yishan, Xiaokaxiu once passed 5 million daily active users and more than 15 million users in total, and produced an average of 1.2 million original short videos a day.

Before long, Xiaokaxiu faded. It worked more like a post-production tool for making videos, and because it offered a single feature, everything it produced looked the same. The lesson of Xiaokaxiu was that without a wide enough range of content, short video could not become a form of entertainment the mass audience would accept.

That is exactly what Papi Jiang gave short video. She began posting short videos in October 2015. Riffing on Singles' Day, comparing Shanghainese with English, rules for male survival, film reviews — the subjects ranged widely, and what they shared was humor with a hint of something more underneath. She also posted on a steady schedule, which trained the audience to tune in regularly. She was a hit almost immediately. And once she had stayed popular for more than half a year, it meant she had laid out a path that later short-video creators could copy.

papitube runs on a set of rules distilled from why Papi Jiang worked. Huo Nifang believes the key to short video is the creator, who has to turn the content into a person: "I am Papi Jiang, a woman who combines beauty and talent." She is convinced that "papitube is essentially building personified IP, so personal charisma matters a great deal."

Lang Jinghe, a creator signed to papitube — these days he prefers to be called the director of the Bigger Institute — stresses something else: "The films we used to make were by the book, they had rules. Short video isn't as bound by rules. To keep the pace faster, if the last word of a sentence isn't finished, we cut it right there." Pace leads him on to composition, camera work, and lighting: "As long as it hits hard, that's enough."

But personification and fast cutting may only be necessary conditions for a successful short video, not sufficient ones; copying the formula by rote doesn't work. Yitiao set off a wave of lifestyle-aesthetics content, but it did so on the strength of a consistent shooting style. Food videos don't necessarily need fast pacing either — Rishiji doesn't cut especially fast.

In the short-video industry Papi Jiang created, there may be only one rule about content: to succeed, a short video has to make itself into a small television program with steady content and a steady schedule — whether that program is a talk show or a shopping guide, cooking or fitness, celebrity interviews or short history pieces. Only on that foundation can style and personality become a real advantage. Otherwise personal charisma draws attention for a short while, then scatters just as fast because nothing follows it.

Making small videos is, after all, not the same as making television. Short video needs no vast studio and no dozen camera positions; set up an iPhone in a room and you can shoot three to five minutes. Short video also has the internet platforms' nearly unlimited distribution, and doesn't have to fight for limited airtime on a limited number of channels.

So the rules of short video are entirely different. The barrier to entry is low, people hoping to repeat Papi Jiang's success have poured in, and the competition has grown fiercer. In the month after Papi Jiang announced papitube, the company received more than 20,000 video and written submissions. In early 2018, a short-video industry report from the short-video platform Meipai and the consultancy Analysys said the number of short-video organizations in China had reached 1,700 in 2017, and would likely reach 3,300 in 2018.

Audiences, meanwhile, may already be used to paying for Nirvana in Fire or U Can U BiBi. But next to television dramas and variety shows that keep getting more polished, short video — because it is easy to make — feels to viewers more like an ordinary way to kill time than entertainment worth paying for. Apart from Kanjian, which makes short history videos, and Xinpianchang, which teaches film and television production, there are few cases of anyone paying for short video.

With few ways to make money and fierce competition, short-video production companies usually take the form of MCNs. The idea comes from the United States. YouTube, launched in 2005, gave a great many ordinary people the chance to become famous on video. Bundling a lot of those ordinary video creators together produced the multi-channel network, or MCN.

MCNs appeared to help video creators with the problems of making, distributing, running, and monetizing their work, and to use scale to build leverage with advertising clients and distribution platforms.

papitube grew in the MCN form too. By the time it was founded in 2016, American MCNs had already gone into decline, because YouTube's revenue share was so thin. With no mature model to copy, papitube had to feel its way. Huo Nifang describes the process this way: "We kept digging ourselves into holes, kept walking into walls, kept making mistakes — and out of all that, found that maybe this is how it should be done."

Advertising was the first thing to go wrong. Before April 2017, after a period of trial and error, Papi Jiang herself had worked out a set of rules for dealing with clients and pricing deals. But on advertising for the other creators, papitube could find no way in. "None of the deals closed, or very few did," Huo Nifang recalls. "The creators were anxious, and so were we."

"Later we had a creator coordinator who really understood the creators, and she helped us negotiate the business deals. And — huh — we found deals suddenly closed easily." At the time papitube didn't really know how to solve the problem. Looking back now, Huo Nifang says: "Understanding the creators is actually very important. When you're talking to a client, understanding what the creator's content is about matters a lot."

The other problem was that as papitube expanded and more creators joined, the producer team swelled. Once the producer team had 30 creators to look after, Huo Nifang found it could not give any of them enough support. "Everyone was fairly confused and didn't have a clear sense of return on investment. Follower growth on each account was clear enough, but how well each account was making money could be pretty murky."

The person who worked with Huo Nifang to fix this was Wang Haiping, president of papitube's parent company, the Taiyang Chuanhe Group. In August 2017 the two of them reorganized papitube, splitting the single producer team into production groups. Each group is led by one producer, and its members include content roles such as editing and filming as well as the people who handle distribution and monetization, such as social-media operations and business development. Each group carries performance targets, follower counts and profitability among them.

None of this was complicated at bottom: divide up the responsibilities and let every employee know what they are supposed to do. papitube now has four production groups handling more than 60 creators. Their work is not, in fact, all that different from before. Huo Nifang still counts it as an important turning point: "People have clearer goals now — they know what they want a creator's follower count to look like, and what a group's revenue should look like."

Huo Nifang thinks papitube's structure is now basically mature. It divides into three parts: the marketing department finds new talent, the production groups bring that talent to maturity, and the business side then takes over so the creators can earn.

papitube is, of course, only one form Chinese MCNs have taken. Each company chooses differently: some study what users like on different platforms and design a creator to fit, while others build different kinds of program around a single fictional character.

Advertising is at the moment almost the only reliable source of revenue in short video. Because new media has hit traditional media far harder in China than in the United States, short video is one of the few places advertisers can go when they look for somewhere to put their money. In April 2016, Papi Jiang auctioned the pre-roll slot on her videos for the first time; it went for 22 million yuan, twice what people had predicted. But the auction was itself a piece of marketing, and papitube cannot repeat a one-off event with its other creators.

MCNs compete hard with one another. Huo Nifang believes that as long as advertising clients keep shifting more of their budgets into new media, the short-video industry will keep growing. That is true enough: short video, even as it grows more stylized, has opened up plenty of possibilities for brand marketing, and between making films for brands and simply taking ad placements, MCNs will not go out of date any time soon.

What is worth watching is the audience's attention — or rather, its habits.

Kuaishou, Douyin, and Huoshan Video came out of nowhere, which shows that shorter video has become a new media format in its own right. According to QuestMobile, in March 2018 online video apps' share of total app time fell to 8.8%, from 10% a year earlier, while short video's share rose from 1.5% to 7.4%. Within short video, the fastest growth came from the apps built on 15-second clips: Kuaishou, Douyin, and Huoshan.

These 15-second videos, more fragmented in form, fill in more fragmented pockets of time; users would rather give their uninterrupted hours to long video.

That leaves short video in an awkward spot. For papitube, the first issue is the content itself. Lang Jinghe's Bigger Institute is one of papitube's best-performing accounts. But his product reviews get a far chillier reception on Douyin, where clearing a thousand likes already counts as standing out. "It's still nowhere near a success. Running an account on Douyin is really hard," he says.

Lang Jinghe does try to make things specifically for Douyin — shooting vertical video, for instance, to match how people watch there. He also pins some hope on Douyin itself: "I think Douyin will change, will get more open, and its content will get more varied."

papitube likes to stress "never forget why you started, stay free and easy." That slogan, set by Jiang Yilei — Papi Jiang's real name — when she founded the company, gives creators full say over their own work and spares them from being pushed into making particular things. Huo Nifang says: "We don't insist that creators have to move over to [Douyin]. Some can move, some can do both at once, and we also need to watch for the new people emerging in new media formats… As for our veteran creators, we'll help post some things on Douyin and help make new things too — it might work for some and not for others."

Lang Jinghe makes a joke at his own expense: "Because we're not good-looking young things." But the problem is nowhere near as light as that.

The 15-second video has also weakened the MCNs' bargaining power. A Douyin video runs 15 seconds, and there is always a flood of new content coming. In short video, the relationship between the people who make content and the platforms that carry it has been turned upside down.

An earlier report by Sanshen said Douyin splits revenue with MCNs seven-to-three, a bigger cut than Weibo's fifty-fifty. Douyin also signs users with large followings itself, and bans the accounts of anyone it finds has signed with an MCN.

The irony is that an MCN already is a bundle of short-video creators tied together, which in itself means the people making content are already the weaker party next to the channels. All of it means that even if papitube catches the Douyin wave, Douyin will squeeze its room to move even further.

papitube belongs, beyond any doubt, to the content-making side, and so, as media keeps fragmenting, it has ended up on the losing end.

As things stand, it may be too early to say that 15-second video will replace three-to-five-minute video. Just as text was never replaced by video, and film was never replaced by television, several media formats will probably coexist. But the time users spend on entertainment is not going to grow, which means short video will have to work harder to get the same result.

Huo Nifang knows this: "Whether short video is saturated depends on new industries — on whether the next media format isn't video at all, for instance. If space for ads opens up somewhere else, short video may not hold up."

For now, she has no answer either: "I haven't thought about it that deeply. [The new media format] probably hasn't even appeared yet. Before there was an iPhone, who would have thought of shooting short videos?"