2017, the Warring States Period of information flow advertising!

The information entrance of mobile Internet has changed from people looking for information to information looking for people. With this change, the way advertisements are distributed has also changed. Ad words have become ineffective, while in- feed ads have emerged.

Since last year, information flow advertising has entered the Warring States period, with companies such as Baidu, 360, Toutiao , and Tencent joining the information flow advertising war. It can even be said that as long as a product has a little traffic , it will dare to change its homepage to an information flow mode.

Content distribution can determine where money flows, and this is the value of information flow advertising.

In a standard mobile information flow product, the user's usage process is as follows: "The consumption of each feed (reading/watching/commenting/forwarding/liking/collecting) is independent of each other, and the content of the previous feed is not necessarily (or even definitely not) related to the content of the next one. From the user's experience, he is actually constantly "jumping" from one feed to the next, with a high degree of 'segmentation'."

When the degree of segmentation is high enough, commercial value emerges: "As users continue to "jump" from one feed to the next, opportunities for commercial value to be "interspersed" arise. In other words, when you insert commercial advertisements into the feed stream, users will not feel that you have interrupted the original user experience. There is actually an opportunity to insert advertisements between any two feeds. The only question is to what extent this "valve" is controlled."

Information flow advertising is the core of this competition. This is because pure traffic has become too expensive since last year, and the attribute of content products that bring their own traffic has allowed the advertising dividends to slowly begin to erupt.

However, the battle of information flow advertising is at the stage where the foreplay has just ended and the protagonists have all appeared on the stage. Each participant is vying for this piece of fat meat based on their own strategic direction, product tone, resource team, etc.

1) Baidu: Artificial intelligence is fading, is it too late to revisit content?

Baidu's latest Q4 financial report shows that online marketing revenue (2.328 billion), which still accounts for 88.7% of total revenue (2.623 billion), has once again fallen by nearly 9% year-on-year. Baidu's net profit in 2016 fell by 62%. From this perspective, we can actually see why Robin brought out content distribution again in his 6,000-word internal letter and placed it at the top of the four major strategies.

Baidu's intention to seize the information flow advertising market through information flow products has actually been known to everyone for a long time. Baidu only started to integrate information flow into its products such as the Sohu.com app on a large scale in 2016, but less than half a year later, it had already started to put advertisements in them. It is said that the traffic of Baidu mobile information flow has increased 20 times in 3 months.

Moreover, information flow advertising can also replace the shortcomings of Baidu's traditional PC search. The original model was that people looked for information, and you would search for it only when you knew of a brand, but now what if a brand new brand wanted to advertise? Now, when information finds people, the information flow will actively recommend and users will generate advertising consumption.

Unfortunately, Baidu did not reap the benefits of this information flow advertising. Most of Baidu's content can only be seen after users actively search for it. This form has created a unique advantage for Baidu's ad words advertising, but it has also hindered Baidu's progress in developing its own information flow products. In the era of mobile Internet , native mobile phone apps are naturally closed, and the information within them is difficult for others to search, so these apps form isolated islands one after another. The foundation of Baidu's indexing has been broken, and there is no chance to rebuild it.

Unfortunately, all of this is based on the premise that a large number of indexable websites must exist first. Without an information portal and unable to index everything, how can Baidu distribute content?

Without information flow, there will be no information flow advertising.

Baidu's fate may have been sealed.

3) 360: PC + mobile phone linkage, cross-terminal marketing is the highlight

Qihoo, which returned from delisting in the United States, has always kept a very low profile. In fact, 360 has the largest navigation, the second largest search, security guard and other trump products on PC, and mobile products such as mobile assistant, security guard, mobile browser , Huajiao, Beijing Time and so on. It entered the content distribution many years ago and joined the battle for information flow advertising.

On the PC side, 360 has two advantages. One is that it ranks second in market share in PC search and ranks first in the number of active users of 360 Navigation. The other is that Security Guard is still the product with the highest installation rate, which is the foundation of its success. At present, 360 Navigation covers more than 500 million netizens per month, with an average daily click rate of 670 million times. On the navigation page, information flow advertising content has been quietly launched.

On the mobile side, in addition to the strong performance of information flow of products such as 360 Search and 360 Browser, the news information distribution APP Beijing Time, which is a cooperation between 360 and Beijing Television, has brought together a professional editing team from Beijing Television to provide high-quality information flow content. At the same time, Huajiao, where senior executives such as Zhou Hongyi frequently appear, has also injected infinite imagination into the future development of video information flow.

360 started out with tool products such as Security Guard. Faced with the general trend of information flow, 360 has also proposed a new idea for the information flow of tool products: scenario recommendation. 360 Security Guard's startup assistant, which has 514 million users, has always been 360's flagship product. It comes with a prompt function for displaying the boot time and following the prompts to optimize the computer boot speed. Analysis shows that after turning on the computer, users will generally casually check out current affairs news. In order to meet the needs of users, the assistant is transformed into a news navigation tool to connect and interact with the 360 ​​news information flow page, carefully accompanying users who like to turn on the computer to read the news, and providing users with efficient, convenient and personalized content services.

The simultaneous development of PC and wireless terminals helped 360 gain an advantage. Since it is not that threatening, 360 chose a pack of wolves tactic, teaming up with mobile apps such as NetEase News , Toutiao and Momo, opening up off-site ADX traffic, and providing advertisers with one-stop delivery services through its long-established ground agent sales team.

At the same time, compared with pure mobile products such as Toutiao, UC and Yidian Zixun , 360's advantage in information flow advertising is that it can form a linkage through search + display on the PC side and download + use on the mobile side. Through a variety of redirection technologies, 360's information flow advertising can carry out full life cycle marketing and wake up at the right time. It is said that during last year's Double 11, Suning.com carried out one-stop advertising through the 360 ​​platform, and achieved nearly 5 million new mobile APP user downloads through the PC+mobile display style.

I believe that 360 can still achieve great things in this market through its long-term data accumulation, inherent advantages on the PC side, strong growth on the mobile side, and a mature advertising team (Toutiao only started to build a similar ground force last year).

3) Toutiao: Toutiao model is a pioneer in the industry, and the extremely high online time is a barrier

This company may be one of the most popular companies in the past year, apart from its live streaming and shared bicycle projects. Its founder Zhang Yiming claimed that the daily active users have reached two-thirds of the Sogou app, and the online time has reached an astonishing 76 minutes. While its revenue was only RMB 1.5 billion in 2015, it reached RMB 7 billion in 2016, which is about one-tenth of Baidu's. The number of people in the sales team will double this year, possibly approaching 10,000, and a system similar to Phoenix Nest is also being built.

Do products with longer online time necessarily have higher commercial value than products with shorter online time? Generally speaking, yes.

As for the "advertising valve" mentioned above, its size basically depends on the content attributes of the product feed: the more irrelevant the content is to the user and the less private it is, the easier it is for users to accept advertisements when they see them, so it doesn't matter if the advertising frequency is a little higher. So, for example, in a stream of 100 normal feeds, Toutiao can put more ads than Weibo, and Weibo can put more ads than WeChat Moments .

Among the two such trivial contents, this NetEase game advertisement is not so eye-catching. If this ad appeared in the information flow of Zhihu app, what kind of experience would you say it would be?

Based on the user base of Toutiao (170 million monthly active users) and online time (76 minutes), after multiplying the two, you will find that its advertising inventory is the largest among all information apps. In addition, information content itself is the least private, which also means that the advertising capacity that Toutiao can digest may be the largest in the industry.

Toutiao has indeed accumulated a massive amount of user data, and the team’s genes are also good at technology. Toutiao’s personalized recommendations usually happen like this: When Toutiao knows that a reader has read an article about the NBA and finished it, this feedback will continue to strengthen, and eventually it will learn that this person may like the NBA and is a male. The information flow ads pushed to him will be accompanied by pictures of basketball and sports, rather than wedding dresses and maternal and child products.

But we know that Tencent, relying on the advantages of its super giant ecosystem, is trying to encircle and kill Toutiao through various methods, both overt and covert. It is no wonder that Zhang Yiming, who is not afraid of any giant, mentioned in an interview with a financial reporter half helplessly and half teasingly: "T (Tencent) in BAT is still very strong, and we have not escaped gravity yet."

4) Tencent News + Tiantian Kuaibao : Product matrix efficiently linked, blocking Toutiao from the front and back

For Tencent's products, the starting point has always been high, whether in terms of user scale or resources provided. However, such large-scale investment and support for comprehensive information products is rare in Tencent's history.

Its product matrix is: Tencent News + Tiantian Kuaibao, but these two themselves are not the focus. The focus is that WeChat and QQ have provided entrances to these two app news plug-ins, and push notifications every day. You know, the monthly active users of WeChat and Mobile QQ are both at the level of over 800 million. This is as difficult to solve as when PC QQ used the pop-up window in the lower right corner to drive other products. Tencent's 2016 annual financial report just released mentioned:

“Our news services (including standalone news apps and news plug-ins within our social platforms) continue to lead the industry in terms of daily active accounts. Tencent News, as the most popular professional news app in China, focuses on in-depth news content. Kuaibao has also become one of the most popular news apps in China through its attractive and highly personalized leisure reading content.”

It can be seen that, basically, Tencent News is benchmarked against apps similar to traditional portals, while Tiantian Kuaibao is benchmarked against the new generation of apps led by Toutiao that focus on personalized recommendations.

According to data from Questmobile, Tencent is indeed the temporary leader in terms of monthly active users. The combined monthly active users of Tencent News and Express reach 300 million, but the average daily usage time per person is only half of that of Toutiao.

We can see from the above picture that Tencent News and Tiantian Kuaibao are pinching Toutiao in terms of user numbers.

What puts Toutiao at a disadvantage in its competition for advertisers is that the ecosystem backed by Tencent is complex yet comprehensive. Thanks to efficient delivery systems like Guangdiantong and high-quality resources like Moments , Tencent seems to be at ease in the battle for information flow advertising. First of all, for top-tier customers, the scale of their advertising needs to be configured with a variety of advertising packages to consume it. From information to community, from text and pictures to videos and live broadcasts, Tencent can undoubtedly meet all the needs.

As for the differentiated advertising demands of small and medium-sized customers, such as advertising based on gender, age group and geographic location, Guangdiantong's system has become very mature today.

Now, Tencent, which has invested in both Zhihu and Kuaishou , has covered all content forms visible in the Internet world in my opinion. By continuously eroding the share of information flow advertising through content, Tencent is indeed a player that everyone fears in this battle.

At the same time, Tencent has retained its strongest means of competition. As shown in the figure below, according to Titanium Media , a year later, after sharing a Toutiao link to Moments, friends could not see it, but the sharer himself could see it on his own homepage.

Although it is said that the abnormal situation has disappeared after three hours, this is not the first time it has happened to Toutiao. At the same time, the Uber China official account that was shut down two years ago and the Taobao link that cannot be shared until now are constant reminders to us that if Toutiao really pushes Tencent to a certain bottom, this big move will still be released at any time at the critical moment.

Conclusion

Under the premise that mobile Internet apps exist in the form of isolated islands and information is scattered in a variety of applications, although Toutiao will indeed snatch a lot of advertising revenue that should have belonged to Baidu, it is unlikely that this company will directly replicate Baidu's former glory, at least not through the product form of information flow alone.

The final outcome of the information flow decisive battle should be the products with large traffic, including Tencent products (Tencent News + Tiantian Kuaibao + WeChat official accounts + Moments), 360 and Weibo, UC Yidian, etc., including portal apps, and Baidu itself, which can also index PC web pages and a small amount of mobile H5 content. All of the information flow advertising pie will be divided according to their respective traffic, distribution efficiency and commercialization capabilities.

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

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