Taobao Live has set its KPI for the year 2024.
On March 28th, at the 2024 Taobao Content E-commerce Gala, Cheng Daofang, General Manager of the Content E-commerce Business Division of Taobao Group, revealed the growth targets for Taobao Live for the fiscal year 2025: a 100% year-on-year increase in user scale, a 100% year-on-year increase in the number of live broadcasters with monthly transactions exceeding one million, and an 80% year-on-year increase in GMV. To achieve this goal, Taobao will allocate an additional ten billion in cash to promote content e-commerce operations.
This appears to be a somewhat aggressive target. In 2023, the year-on-year growth rate of Taobao's content consumption user base was 44%, with 12,000 live broadcast rooms achieving monthly transactions over one million. After revitalizing Taobao Tian as Alibaba's top priority, Alibaba's investment in Taobao Live has increased, and the pressure on live e-commerce has also grown.
In terms of the direction of capital investment, Taobao Live mainly hopes to drive growth by building a talent ecosystem and a store broadcast ecosystem. Cheng Daofang stated that out of the ten billion in cash, more than four billion will be used to support the growth of talents, three billion for the construction of the store broadcast ecosystem, while also focusing on the growth of the industrial belt live broadcast ecosystem.
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In terms of talent construction, First Financial Daily previously reported that this year Taobao established a live e-commerce company, mainly focusing on providing new live broadcasters with a half-year "full custody service". Cheng Daofang said today that in addition to funds, this year, hundreds to a thousand Taobao Xiao Er will join the "full custody service". This also means that after setting a target of a 100% year-on-year increase in live broadcasters with monthly transactions over one million, Taobao needs to accelerate the resolution of the supply issue of its platform's live broadcasters.
At the same time, store broadcasts, which account for 64% of Taobao Live's GMV, will become a key focus for Taobao Live to seek GMV growth. In the past, store broadcasts have long existed with problems such as difficulty in differentiating live broadcast products from brand store shelves and unclear price differences. Some stores have heavily invested in live broadcasts but only achieved the effect of "pre-sale consultation".
"Organizing large-scale events" will become one of the key directions for Taobao Live to drive the growth of store broadcasts and talents in 2024. Cheng Daofang said that many store broadcasts can achieve a growth of 5-10 times the daily sales volume during the 618 and Double 11 periods, proving the capabilities of store broadcasts during promotional events. In the future, Taobao Live hopes to promote "large-scale" live broadcasts for many stores, "Tmall has 300,000 brands, and if each brand does a large-scale event once a month, it can be very imaginative."
However, "large-scale events" will also further challenge the pricing power of brand products. Compared with talent live broadcasts, in the case of a fixed brand product plate, store broadcasts "large-scale events" need to trigger sales growth with lower prices, which also tests the profit margins of many brands. Last year, Taobao once implemented a "gambling" approach in store broadcasts, where merchants were given a rebate after achieving a certain transaction target in live broadcasts. Cheng Daofang said that in the future, Taobao Live's ten billion in cash will also be used to subsidize the product prices of store broadcasts in the form of red packets. From this perspective, the platform will "subsidize" the profits of high-quality store broadcast merchants through various measures, but in essence, low-price competition in live broadcasts will still further "roll" towards brands.
In 2024, Taobao will further promote the integration of live broadcasts and browsing. In December last year, during a major change in the core management team of Taobao Group, Cheng Daofang transitioned from being responsible for Taobao Live to being responsible for Taobao Live and the content business division, and the Taobao Live and browsing teams were merged. How to revitalize the grass-plant ability of browsing has always been a challenge for Taobao. Cheng Daofang revealed that currently, Taobao has reduced the types of content on the homepage, returning to the goal of focusing on products to do content, and compared to the past "full content", it has reduced the distribution of non-personality content. In the future, how to cultivate high-quality browsing content and further help bloggers realize the link from establishing browsing personalities to carrying goods will be a challenging long-term issue for Taobao Live.
It is worth mentioning that Mu Shan, General Manager of Tmall's fast-moving consumer goods industry, also revealed at the meeting that the top live broadcast host of Xiaohongshu, Zhang Xiaohui, will join Taobao Live in the near future. At the beginning of the new fiscal year, Taobao Live, which has announced its KPI for the next year early, has put pressure and ambition on the table, and the platform competition in the live broadcast industry will also further intensify.