Where do new growth opportunities come from for information flow advertising?

01. The development of information flow advertising : origin, birth, and germination

Advertising is inseparable from media. Similarly, information flow advertising also requires a feed flow environment to make the advertising native. As early as 2006, Facebook launched the feed flow style. Unlike the general feed flow, Facebook's feed flow at that time had two core characteristics: algorithm-generated feed flow and continuous refresh. It is the birth of this streaming environment that has changed the way users read and think, and laid the foundation for the birth of information flow advertising.

When search advertising supported most of the Internet advertising, information flow advertising developed its own definition logic around 2010, and then formed several major information flow advertising factions: social flow, information flow, and the up-and-coming tool flow and PC information flow.

Information flow advertising faction-1

Information flow advertising exploded in 2016. Based on the original information flow advertising, major domestic Internet companies combined their own differentiated advantages to deduce a unique information flow advertising plus model. For example, Momo inserted very native app download ads in a very tool-oriented section called “People Nearby”, opening up a new world for information flow advertising media - a tool-type application platform .

Information flow advertising faction-2

360 combined its strong search advantage on the PC side and its advantage in user search data reserves to form an advertising model with dual engines of search and information flow, shifting everyone's attention directly from the mobile side to the PC side, becoming the first major Internet company to launch PC information flow advertising.

02. Trends in the changing information flow advertising industry: Users have demands, and bottlenecks in industry development emerge

As a result of the industry trend, the market share of information flow advertising has been expanding year by year. Since 2014, the share of information flow advertising has continued to expand, and is expected to account for 27.6% in 2019. The overall market size has reached 109.04 billion yuan, and is expected to double in size in the next 3-5 years. Information flow advertising will be a new advertising track with great potential for a long time to come.

Information flow advertising market share

Good news for the industry: users are more receptive to information flow ads. Wang Heng shared through an industry research report that whether it is the user's ad browsing time, click intention or ad recommendation conversion rate, they are all better than other forms of advertising. The high acceptance and tolerance of information flow ads shown by users is both an encouragement to industry practitioners and an unexpected surprise.

Information flow advertising user browsing time

The tragedy of the market, the bottleneck of the development of information flow advertising began to emerge. At present, all industries are bearing the impact of the disappearance of the demographic dividend, and the information flow advertising industry is no exception. Whether it is information flow, video flow or social flow, it shows the characteristics of slowing user growth. The slowdown in the development of this streaming environment is affecting the industry growth rate of information flow advertising.

The demographic dividend of mobile Internet disappears

At the same time, the content of various information flow platforms is highly homogenized, and it often happens that the same content creator opens accounts and posts on different information platforms, resulting in a high degree of content overlap between the information platforms, which reduces user appeal and thus affects the delivery and conversion of information flow ads.

03. Growth point of information flow advertising: mobile tool scenarios + PC scenarios

The demographic dividend is disappearing, content is becoming homogenized, where will the future growth points of information flow advertising lie?

The amount of information flow in mobile tool applications is considerable. Mr. Wang Heng shared that the growth in the time users spend on tool apps has exceeded that of video and communication chat apps. In other words, tool apps not only have tool attributes, but also reading attributes. For example, Moji Weather not only allows you to check the weather, but also news. We call this tool information flow. The tool information flow in vertical fields such as browsers, wireless Internet, weather, and food is quite considerable, and it is one of the new opportunities for information flow advertising in the future.

The amount of tool information fluid is considerable

A typical example is 360’s tool matrix (360 Mobile Guard, 360 Mobile Assistant, 360 Browser, etc.). 360 Information Flow connects 360's full range of high-quality products, covering users' fragmented time and multiple leisure scenarios. Through 360 Behavior Chain Big Data targeting, advertisements are displayed in information flows such as information navigation, news reading, and content browsing.

360 tool information flow part of the media display

Complementary breakthrough of PC-side information flow . PC flow is highly complementary to mobile flow and will become a key breakthrough category for the future information flow advertising industry. In terms of user terminal usage, PC and mobile terminals dominate during office hours and non-office hours respectively, and the proportion of Internet access on PC has increased in recent years. In most occupations, the usage time of PC even exceeds that of mobile terminals.

Mobile and PC user behaviors complement each other

At the same time, the large PC screen also has the unique advantages of concentrated user attention, large creative space, and a large number of advertisements, making it an important breakthrough channel for mobile information flow advertising during the bottleneck period. Taking 360 Information Flow as an example, 360 has become the largest PC information flow product in China by virtue of its content layout and product matrix. 360 Quick News is not presented as an APP product, but as a multi-scenario companion for users, covering work, commuting, leisure and other scenarios. This is achieved by combining 360's many product lines. The 360 ​​tool product matrix is ​​based on the 360 ​​Quick News super information pipeline, which can effectively reach users' fragmented time. As its slogan says, it allows users to "read information anytime, anywhere."

In summary: Looking back at the birth, development, explosion and current bottleneck period of the entire information flow advertising industry, it is not difficult to find that the feed flow environment has contributed to the birth of information flow advertising. With the disappearance of the demographic dividend and the emergence of content homogeneity problems on information platforms, the information flow advertising industry has entered the most intense red ocean competition period. Tool-type information flows have emerged, and PC flows have made complementary breakthroughs. Perhaps they can lead the information flow to a new blue ocean.