The second anniversary meeting of the Aqiyi Bubble Community was almost overrun by fans. A group of invited media reporters looked around frequently, among the fans waving their hands in time with the music, watching the unfamiliar "fresh meat" on the stage while waiting for Tang Xing, CTO of Aqiyi and founder of the Bubble Community, to come up to the stage to speak.

Everyone is curious about Bubble Community. Although it was launched back in 2015, Aqiyi rarely talked about it in public, and there were only a few reports about it. It wasn't until they received an invitation that some people realized the Bubble Community existed.

The number of daily active users peaked at 68.49 million, and many were surprised to see it appear in the warm-up video. In the world of Chinese mobile Internet, not many products have a DAU (daily active users) that exceeds this value.

According to statistics from Aurora Big Data, in September 2017, there were only 16 APPs in China with DAUs over 70 million. Ranking 17th was Honor of Kings, with 67.956 million.

And Bubble Community is not even a standalone APP, its entrance is hidden in the Aqiyi APP. According to the product logic of Bubble Community, this is an intentional move by Aqiyi.

Tong Xing, CTO of Qiyi and founder of Bubble Community

Video sites are fine with content, so why do they need to be social?

Before Bubble Community, Aqiyi had made another social product, but it failed. However, Aqiyi doesn't plan to give up on its social attempts.

Tang Xing explains Aqiyi's obsession: "Every Internet company wants to keep users on their platform, rather than having them come and go like running water when there's content, or leave when there's no content. Especially for video sites, if you have exclusive content, if you have good content, I'll come to your platform, if you don't have any more, I'll go to the next one."

Tang Xing believes that socializing can increase Aqiyi's stickiness with users. At the launch two years later, he used data to validate his judgment. After users used the bubble community, the average daily playtime within the Aiki App increased by 24 percent, and the number of monthly launches increased by 160 percent.

The importance of socialization is self-evident, so Tang Xing thought about how to design this product for LoveQiYi.

Users usually want to interact with each other after watching a video. They go to posting bars, microblogs, Douban to post, or express their feelings, or comment and troll. Tang Xing believes that Bubble should shorten the path to fulfill users' needs, so that users can complete these actions within the Aqiyi APP, and 'one-stop' solve users' needs for commenting, sharing, stargazing and other interactions.

Bubble is defined as an "entertainment fan community," so in its frequent version iterations, it has added features such as graphics, short videos, polls, interviews, and star support, following the needs of fans. This year, the per capita time spent in the Bubble community peaked at 15.37 minutes, an increase of 18.7 times over the same period last year - the most direct feedback on the effectiveness of Bubble's product design.

The integration of Bubble into the QiYi App has already been completed, according to Tang Xing. In the menu bar at the bottom of Aqiyi APP, there is an entrance to the bubble community; users can see the circles they have joined in "My" (i.e., personal center), and can quickly enter the stars, movies and TV dramas, or circles of interest they have already paid attention to; when the video is played on half-screen, there is a "bubble" page at the bottom, and users can browse the posts and pictures sent by other people at any time; under the state of full-screen playback, the upper-right corner of the bubble community also has a quick entrance, which makes it convenient for users to share relevant content.

At the bottom of the screen, there is a "Bubble" page where users can view other people's posts and pictures.

The Aqiyi App's traffic flow to the Bubble community has been remarkable. Today, Bubble has 198,000 active circles; Luhan's circle has 16.805 million fans, making it the celebrity circle with the largest number of fans; and Diligaba's appearance on "Here Come the Stars" to interact with netizens reached a readership of 13.86 million.

In turn, the bubble community has also brought popularity to Aqiyi's video content. This year, the bubble community channeled 63.826 million streams for the promotional video of China Hip Hop alone.