In the second half of the Internet, will the traffic dividend disappear? There are 3 operating directions

In a speech this year, Xing Ge mentioned that after more than 20 years of development, China's Internet has officially entered the second half, and its most notable feature is the disappearance of the traffic dividend.

The second half of the Internet has been quoted repeatedly in the past few months. However, this week I also saw a point of view that there is no second half of the Internet at all, because the era of artificial intelligence is coming and various industries will have a completely new operating model.

Looking back at the entire business world, whether online or offline, a big competition is actually the competition for traffic. So for offline stores, location is extremely important. As for the secret of Starbucks ' success, Howard Schultz once talked about it in a sharing session: location, location, location! A good location means better customer base and customer flow. The quality and quantity of customer base have a fatal impact on offline stores.

Back to online, traffic was previously controlled by the three major portals. Baidu was just a technology company, doing things that Sohu, NetEase and Sina were unwilling to do personally. At that time, when people turned on their computers and clicked on the browser , the portal website would pop up.

Later, as more and more websites appeared and the demand for search became increasingly strong, Google and Baidu seized this opportunity and became the entrance to all websites, and Baidu controlled the traffic. It is easy to understand why Baidu spent a lot of money to acquire hao123. This website covered the homepages of countless users' computers at the time.

Nowadays, you can look at the sources of your information, which basically come from various apps, such as WeChat , Toutiao , and Duoduo . Even when searching for information, the proportion of our use of Baidu search on mobile devices has greatly decreased. The overall traffic is no longer limited to one company, but is becoming more and more dispersed.

When we were doing channel operations , we initially focused on SEO because if done well, it could increase a large amount of traffic to the website. Baidu also made money without doing anything for ten years because of this. Later, in the era of mobile Internet , channel operations will focus on ASO and carry out relevant promotions in the application market to increase the search and download volume of the APP.

Of course, there are also many Internet companies that try to use offline channels to promote APP, which is generally referred to as ground promotion . One of the main reasons for returning to offline promotion is that the cost of online traffic is too high. A click on some games and financial apps costs dozens of yuan, and acquiring an effective user costs over a hundred yuan.

And how should we deal with the current traffic problem?

1. Improve your own services and content . When traffic becomes more and more valuable, improving your own products will undoubtedly greatly improve conversion effects. Instead of trying to get more traffic, you might as well think about how to convert existing traffic more effectively and generate greater value.

2. Think outside the box to find traffic . For example, the offline promotion mentioned above is that some Internet companies break out of the limitations of obtaining traffic online and try to do offline, and then attract more companies to follow. Similarly, products like Kuaishou and Toutiao have been able to successfully acquire users in fourth- and fifth-tier cities that were previously neglected, achieving rapid growth. For example, the cost of acquiring users in universities is relatively low offline.

3. Shift from a single channel to multiple channels . In the past, whether it was SEO or ASO, it was all about digging deep into search engines or application markets. But now traffic has been dispersed to various segmented products. What we need to do is to find where our target users stay, make breakthroughs there, and obtain traffic through multiple effective channels.

The above are some of my thoughts on current traffic operations.

Some self-media people may also feel the dispersion of traffic. For example, my own public account has increased from 10,000 followers to 20,000, but the number of readers has not changed much.

The essence of a public account is to provide the right value to the right people. Those who are not the right people will only pay attention to it occasionally, and in the long run, it will not be of much value to each other.

I hope that my daily sharing will be of value to everyone who follows me.