A brief analysis of the advertising profit model of self-media from three dimensions

Although "everyone is a self-media " and "everyone is a channel for speaking out", content that does not generate traffic has little commercial value. Not to mention the stars and internet celebrities who have commercial performances, live broadcast rewards, and Taobao e-commerce , can self-media people with tens of thousands of fans use their fans to make a fortune through advertising?

All signs indicate that self-media advertising is “really valuable”! For example, there are all kinds of fast food news on the Internet, such as " Mimeng can earn 200,000 yuan for one soft article", "A full-time mother turned into a self-media expert by cooking, with a daily income of up to over 1,000 yuan", and "Papi Jiang 's advertisement was auctioned for 22 million yuan"! So is being a self-media person really a high-income career? Acquire users through content and then sell them to advertisers. How feasible is the business logic of content entrepreneurship ?

However, data shows that more than 70% of self-media people have monthly revenue below 5,000 yuan, and only 10% of self-media people have monthly revenue exceeding 10,000 yuan.

At the same time, advertising profits account for the bulk of monetization. 35.5% of self-media make profits mainly through traffic owners and other traffic sharing, and 30.7% of self-media make profits mainly from soft-text advertising, also called native advertising .

Therefore, most self-media people do not have an easy time. Not only do they have difficulty making profits, but they also suffer from operational difficulties.

Three major difficulties in self-media operation

1. Traffic: How to increase the number of fans?

However, there is an obvious ceiling for the growth of fans of self-media. Taking WeChat public accounts as an example, it is very impressive if the number of WeChat public accounts of the top self-media breaks through, and there are very few self-media with more than one million followers. Compared to an internet celebrity, it is very common for them to have millions of fans on Weibo, and some can even reach tens of millions.

2. Activity: How to retain users?

How to maintain long-term browsing of users? The core of self-media platforms is to turn content into products, helping users solve problems and existing as a tool . For self-media that are mainly operated by individuals or small teams, it is not easy to continuously provide high-quality content.

3. Commercialization: How to brand?

The key to the commercialization of self-media lies in the realization of personal charm. However, in the virtual space, where the interaction level is particularly weak, it is very difficult to enhance personal charm and build a personal brand. How to establish a stable and personalized brand and operate it well may be the key to creating a self-media business model .

Self-media with advertising-based profit model

Pattern Analysis

The model is mature, with traffic monetization achieved by attracting and retaining users through free content.

Ad Type

1. Platform Advertising

(1) Mode

A method of obtaining corresponding revenue share by displaying advertising content allocated by the content platform.

(2) Analysis

This is the main source of income for most self-media. The characteristic is that the operation method is simple, and self-media people only need to be the entrance of traffic. Such as the good Guangdiantong on WeChat public accounts and the headline advertisements on the Toutiao platform.

2. Native Advertising

(1) Mode

Provide personalized advertising based on its own brand characteristics and advertisers' needs.

(2) Analysis

It is one of the sources of income for the top self-media. Its characteristics are that it requires high content output capabilities of self-media people, in-depth understanding of advertising products, and strong fan stickiness. At the same time, the charging price is not cheap.

Thinking: Why are self-media ads worth advertisers' money?

1. Traffic value - accurate user

When you have users, you have the capital for business transactions. The so-called traffic thinking is to become channels that can reach users. A self-media with a group of fans and a stable reading volume is a traffic entrance. A class monitor who has a certain voice in a class is a traffic entrance (ordinary students may not attract the attention of others and are less valued). If you have a large circle of friends , you are also a traffic entrance. You will find that these users do not actually belong to you, but their attention is a resource that you can control.

Here is a short story I saw recently!

A challenge in Stanford University's entrepreneurship class: They need to use the five dollars in the envelope as start-up capital to make as much money as possible within two hours. They have four days of planning time. Once the envelope is opened, the task begins. Finally, they have three minutes to make a PPT report in class. If it were you, what would you do?

Conventional thinking is to maximize the use of the five dollars of resources you have and look for low-cost, high-income jobs. So many students used five dollars to buy materials and then helped others wash cars or opened a juice stand.

But in fact, the team that made the most money didn't use the $5 at all, because limiting your vision to $5 would reduce a lot of limitations, and $5 would basically be equivalent to nothing. Look beyond the five dollars and look for business opportunities to start from scratch. For example, one team made reservations at restaurants in advance and then sold each seat for up to $20 as Saturday approached to customers who didn't want to wait.

But there are also people who don't need either the $5 or the two hours of money-making time. They believe that the most valuable resource is the three-minute presentation in class. Stanford is a world-renowned university, and not only do students want to get in, but companies also want to hire people. So this team sold the three minutes of class to a company and asked them to run a recruitment advertisement. It was that simple and I made $650 in three minutes.

The story is over and it’s time to think: There are only dozens of students in a class, and the traffic is not that large, so why can they make so much money? Will I earn more if I have hundreds of people in my circle of friends?

It was not the case at that time. The above case is not a case of traffic thinking but user thinking. Although the traffic of a class at Stanford University is small, the marketing users based on the recruitment scenario are accurate and valuable. For example, Restaurant Boss Insider has only 220,000 fans but can reach a valuation of 100 million. In addition to the industry and brand value, the most important thing here is that it has many core users and accurate fans.

The more precise the users are, the greater the advertising value. A big difference between self-media and traditional media is that self-media can attract a group of fans with relatively concentrated portraits through content with more distinctive personal colors, bringing more precise traffic value to the brand. In particular, vertical self-media can steadily gather large audiences. Although their number of fans is smaller than that of platform-based online media or large marketing self-media accounts, users have stronger demand for the content of public accounts, longer stickiness, and the target audience of advertisements is more accurate.

2. Monetization – High Conversion Rate

In this society that advocates precision marketing, although many platforms have large traffic, their conversion rates and transaction volumes are not as good as those of self-media, because a lot of traffic is paid invalid traffic. The reason why self-media marketing can achieve high conversion rates is on the one hand because user positioning is more accurate, and on the other hand because of the value of content marketing , which can arouse a certain psychology of the user and make him temporarily become another person. This is the "psychological arousal value." For example, Wen Yi’s official account once sold 15,000 chopping boards worth thousands of dollars but with sales of less than 10,000 in Asia in just 10 minutes. Under normal circumstances, a person would not go against his or her cognitive habits to buy a product that costs far more than the normal price. However, self-media content, through the continuous description of the beautiful and ultimate cooking experience, makes people yearn for it and temporarily become a person who "advocates the beautiful and ultimate cooking experience", thereby stimulating consumption behavior.

Therefore, simple traffic strategies can only promote users’ simple behavioral decision-making purchases, while content marketing methods can change people’s cognitive minds, enhance their purchasing motivation, and thus promote the purchase behavior of complex decision-making products.

3. Brand – word-of-mouth improvement

The purpose of advertising is not only to increase awareness but also to enhance reputation. Self-media content can guide public opinion and promote the brand rather than just the product, thereby enhancing the brand image and guiding users to improve word-of-mouth. An excellent article or short video with soft advertising is essentially good content, and many people are still willing to share and forward it, which forms social free self-propagation. From experience, the self-media on Zhihu is more suitable for rational public opinion control, which is an essential strategy for crisis public relations. We-media on WeChat is more suitable for outlining and shaping the brand image, and using good writing skills to explore the deeper levels of the product.

If what you are familiar with are long texts and short videos, here we introduce a novel content carrier - jokes. It could be a short and sharp piece of wit or it could be rich and interesting serious nonsense.

Take SNH48's Li Yitong and Xue Zhiqian as examples. In the early stages, they relied on long skits to gain traffic and fan favorability, rising from the bottom like the male protagonists in hot-blooded anime. There are not many young idols who are so good at self-marketing. On the contrary, cultural media companies with professional joke tellers as their core industry are thriving. "Uncle Tongque" (King Kong Culture), "Bai Er" (Tooth Fairy Advertising), and "Mr. Sales" (Lou's Culture) almost monopolize the resources of joke tellers.

summary

Currently, the advertising model is still the mainstream of self-media profitability, but for content entrepreneurs this is not a highly profitable and sustainable model. This can be seen from the two huge obstacles it encounters - content and monetization. Therefore, the development of self-media must tap into more user value, data value, and personal IP value, and move towards e-commerce, community , derivative service, and platform paths. In the final stage, self-media will no longer be self-media, but will take off the shell of self-media and become a real company that can retain users and has more business imagination, such as Get and Poisonous Tongue Movies .

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