Xing Ming, President of Tianya Community: I accidentally entered IT industry. Five reflections I have made over the past 17 years

What I wanted most was to be a journalist, but somehow I ended up in the IT industry.

In 1999, when Sohu.com was extremely popular, I quit my job as a civil servant and started a local portal website called Hainan Online. At that time, Tianya Community was a sub-channel of Hainan Online, but it operated with an independent domain name.

In terms of entrepreneurial capital and team, since I had been trading stocks in my spare time, I accumulated my first pot of gold, which was about 20 million yuan. Therefore, I am the one who provides the funding for Tianya and I am also the boss. A group of friends flew to Haikou and started working.

In March of this year, after hard work by the founding team in Haikou, the Tianya BBS page was launched. The first forum I opened was the stock market forum, because I really like discussing stocks with people online. We gathered the same group of people, and we all did it because we liked it. After all, before this, like many early Internet users, I paid a hefty phone bill every month just for those virtual IDs on the Internet, including both friends and enemies.

In terms of users, Sohu.com happened to be renamed Sina.com . Due to the adjustment of its positioning, a large number of elite netizens who were accustomed to forums left for Tianya Community. Most of these people come from institutions such as universities, social science academies, and Xinhua News Agency. They are the first group in China to access the Internet and have knowledge. They form the genes of Tianya.

In terms of operations , Tianya adopted a hands-off approach in its early days. Because at the beginning all our focus and energy were placed on Hainan Online, Tianya Community grew naturally. Even when it continued to rise in Alexa's global ranking and reached the 300th or 500th place, there were still only a few people maintaining it.

At that time, moderators were recruited voluntarily from netizens. The site completely decentralized the management power. Moderators were approved by the site manager and had a high degree of autonomy over each section. Users generate content, and at that time we followed the needs and feelings of users. All the columns were opened at the request of netizens, such as the Stock Forum, Guantian Tea House, and History Discussions over Wine, etc.

It was not until 2002 that Tianya drafted the first "Tianya Basic Law". This document, which is regarded by netizens as the "Constitution" of Tianya Community, stipulates two contents: restricting power and protecting rights. The former is aimed at site administrators and moderators, while the latter is aimed at netizens. The core value is: to focus on netizens and strive for the greatest common denominator that allows everyone to live in harmony.

Under clear institutional guarantees, the early Tianya community presented a free and relaxed public opinion environment and a democratic governance atmosphere. In the "Kanten Teahouse" where opinion leaders gathered, "overthrowing the moderator" (netizens were dissatisfied with the moderator and demanded his resignation) became a very popular thing for a while. The moderators were overthrown every now and then, just like the election of the prime minister in Japan. (Note from the Catcher's Note: Guantian Teahouse mainly discusses topics related to politics, philosophy, society and culture.)

1. User Value

In November 1999, Ning Caishen published an article titled "Tianya, This Rotten Place" on Tianya Forum, in which he used the opposite of what he meant to express his deep affection for Tianya. This year, Tianya was rated as China's "most humane community" by Computer News.

In April 2002, Murong Xuecun began to serialize the online novel " Chengdu , Please Forget Me Tonight" on Tianya. In just a few days, the number of readers exceeded 200,000. As a result, Murong Xuecun became famous, and Tianya also became famous.

Then in 2004, I organized a "Golden Crow Award" on Tianya, the main content of which was to spoof actors. Millions of netizens actively participated in it. There were posters, theme songs, and they could canvass for votes. It was more lively than the Oscars .

The concept of IP is very popular nowadays. In fact, Tianya is a potential untapped IP gold mine. Many movies , such as "Go Away Tumor Man", "Charlotte's Troubles" and "Ghost Blows Out the Light", have their origins in Tianya.

These are the foundations of Tianya. The core of a community is its foundation. The reason why Tianya was so popular at that time was that we did not commercialize it too early, maintained the most natural state of development, and screened out the best genes.

Many old Internet people still remember the bubble in 2000-2001. At that time, online advertising had not yet taken off, and domestic Internet companies went through a painful period of searching for profits. Everyone used various methods to increase revenue, such as frantically downloading ringtones and MMS.

In order to stick to its original intention, Tianya did not take any measures, neither did it attract venture capital nor advertising. The only thing it did was to control costs. At that time, there were only two technicians in the entire Tianya community, and they worked in two shifts to handle network failures around the clock.

After the cold winter, NetEase chose a diversified development model. The unsustainable Xici Hutong was acquired by eLong (note: it was called eLong at that time) at a very low price. Most of the narrow-market communities were sold or closed, and Tianya has developed from a stockholder forum into a comprehensive forum. In 2003, the number of members increased to 3 million, with daily visits of nearly 20 million and 30,000 people online at the same time every day.

One day in July 2005, we found that Tianya was ranked 135th in the world on Alexa, 30th among Chinese websites, and first among community websites.

In this snowstorm, Tianya's victory lies in persistence and its victory lies in temperament.

2. Financing

People outside think that Tianya can maintain a certain lofty attitude because we have never lacked money. In fact, from 2000 to 2004, we were under tremendous financial pressure. We often went without paying salaries for several months. Netizens were even discussing donating to Tianya, which is now called "crowdfunding."

At this time, many people came to Tianya and wanted to invest in it. The first investor who came to me was Wang Gongquan. We discussed Tianya's business model together. For example, the main gate is free, but the small gate is charged. It is free to enter Tianya, but some of the functions inside can be charged. Although the discussion was lively, the investment was not agreed upon. Afterwards, Wang Gongquan also said: If we don’t talk about commercialization at all, from a community perspective, I particularly like Tianya.

In 2004, both Sina and Sohu extended an olive branch to Tianya, but they wanted to acquire it rather than invest in it, and I didn't want to sell Tianya. The delay in raising funds resulted in some business units of Tianya being reduced to only one person during the most difficult times. But we restrained the desire to spend money on heating, controlled costs to preserve our combat effectiveness, and tried every means to survive the winter.

In 2006, we finally received angel investment from Lenovo and Zero2IPO. In 2007, it completed financing from Google and Lenovo, in which Google held a 6% stake. In addition, there are some individual angel investors investing together with Google and Lenovo, such as Jiang Nanchun of Focus Media and Zhang Ying of Matrix Partners China.

Why choose these investors? Because they are not so harsh, they are more tolerant towards Tianya and not so impatient. However, in the year when Tianya received angel investment, Chen Yizhou acquired Xiaonei.com, Sina Blog had been online for a year, and the Internet had entered another era.

Image source: "iResearch: 2016 China Mobile Social Series Research Report"

Google invested in us at that time in order to compete with Baidu. Baidu already had two products, Tieba and Zhidao, at that time, so Google worked with us to create Tianya Laila and Tianya Q&A. It doesn't know how to manage original content under China's regulatory environment and thinks we have experience.

In 2009, China launched the GEM, and at that time some relevant personnel were very keen on us listing on the GEM. Less than a year later, Google announced its withdrawal from China. We took the opportunity to propose buying back Tianya’s shares in an effort to dismantle the company’s overseas structure. This is what I thought at the time. There was no Weibo at that time, and the largest online speech platform on the entire Internet was Tianya, which had a huge influence.

But lengthy negotiations with Google put a stop to that. If you ask people to withdraw their shares from your company without any reason, they will definitely not agree. The negotiations lasted nearly two years, and the repurchase was done at a three-fold premium. After we got everything done, we found that listing on the GEM is no longer the same as it used to be and we have to wait in long queues.

At this time, Tianya no longer met the requirements for listing on the Growth Enterprise Market. The brokerage firm told me that I needed to have a profit of 30 to 50 million. Tianya really can't package a profit of 30-50 million.

Later, people kept asking me: If Tianya had successfully gone public in the United States in 2008, what would it be like today?

3. My reflection

Over the years, I have done a lot of reflection:

The first reflection is the delay in financing.

For many years, Tianya has maintained a low-input, low-output operating state, and as a result has missed some motivation and opportunities to connect with capital. Tianya was very famous at that time, and it was a mistake not to raise large-scale financing at that time. We used our own funds for seven years before we started to introduce external capital, while many Internet companies received external investment on the first day of their establishment.

If we had raised more money at that time and considered profitability later, we might have become a super company. But we don’t have access to capital, and at the same time we are implementing a big platform strategy, which makes us feel a bit stuck and awkward.

The second reflection is the failure in timing.

After buying back Google's shares, we changed the VIE structure to a domestic structure too early, which prevented foreign capital from investing in us. Domestic RMB funds were relatively cautious about investing in Chinese Internet companies in those years.

The third reflection is that we were not focused enough on the entire business, which resulted in us not having a major breakthrough in user traffic .

At the same time, competition is becoming increasingly fierce, and many vertical giants have emerged in many sub-sectors. For example, in the stock market forum, Oriental Fortune and Snowball have emerged, and they are diverting users from our stock market forum. The rise of blogs and Weibo has also attracted a large number of our writers and opinion leaders.

The fourth reflection is that talent has always restricted Tianya’s development.

Some people have been suggesting that we move away from Hainan. In fact, we have a fairly large office in Beijing, and at one point we had a dual headquarters layout, but we later found that the management efficiency was not high. We always think that Beijing is too impetuous and the talent mobility is high, but we ignore the fact that core personnel sit in Haikou for a long time and it is easy for them to lack understanding of the industry.

The fifth reflection is that we have not tapped into the gold mine of users.

Tianya users have published more than 8,000 books in the past. Publishing houses and film and television companies are all looking for material on Tianya, but this has almost nothing to do with us. Moreover, we did not retain opinion leaders. The departure of many super IPs and opinion leaders such as Kong Ergou, Xiong Dun, and Dangnian Mingyue resulted in a hot news topic being widely discussed and complained about on Weibo, and grassroots users were naturally lost along with it. Opinion leaders have had better opportunities and a bigger stage, but Tianya's development has not kept up with their growth.

In fact, these have a lot to do with my own personality. A very fatal thing in Tianya's genes is that it is not sensitive to business and is even somewhat averse to it. This is the reason why Tianya Community survived, but it is also the main reason why it has not been profitable for a long time. However, without the support of a mature profit model, the survival of an online community is uncertain, not to mention maintaining an independent humanistic style.

Over the years, we have seen some of our peers who were more glamorous than us, but suddenly disappeared. The reason why we have experienced so many setbacks and are still on the field is that our roots are deeper. The coconut trees on Hainan Island were blown almost close to the ground by the wind, but they were still able to survive. Tianya is just like the coconut trees on Hainan Island, tough and tenacious.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

The author of this article @刑明 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting! Site Map