From Weibo to Toutiao to Zhihu, where are the three content giants going?
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Weibo's market value today has reached 10 billion US dollars, Toutiao 's valuation is rumored to have reached 9.2 billion US dollars, and Zhihu has completed a US$100 million Series D financing . At this point, the three giants in the content industry have officially formed. Weibo's market value today has reached 10 billion US dollars, and the outside world's valuation of Toutiao is rumored to have reached 9.2 billion US dollars. Zhihu recently announced that it has completed a US$100 million Series D financing round. The investor is Today Capital. All the original directors and shareholders including Tencent, Sogou, SAIF, Qiming, and Innovation Works also followed suit, making it an industry unicorn. At this point, the three giants in the content industry have officially formed. Weibo's Second Rise Is Indispensable to Social Media Since 2012, the voices criticizing Weibo have never stopped. Weibo, which was once sought after by countless people, has become a chaotic battlefield of micro-businesses, zombie fans, toxic chicken soup, and joke tellers. More and more users have begun to leave Weibo, and the platform's activity and revenue have continued to decline. After Alibaba acquired a stake in Weibo in 2013, although it solved Weibo’s funding problem, it still failed to change Weibo’s fate. Under the impact of WeChat Moments and official accounts , Weibo’s value even fell to the bottom. However, with the passage of time, especially after several major social events caused a sensation on Weibo, people began to realize the diffusion and influence of Weibo social media. On the one hand, WeChat 's audience is relatively limited. If one wants to expose a certain event, the circle of friends to be sent is limited to one's own circle of friends. On the other hand, when one opens WeChat's circle of friends, one may learn more about the life information of the friends around him, but when one opens Weibo, one can quickly learn what new things have happened today and what hot topics everyone is paying attention to. As a result, celebrities, vertical influencers, self-media and media organizations began to return to the Weibo stage, which also led to new growth in Weibo users. Toutiao becomes a dark horse in content, and is the first to promote interest media Compared with the bumpy road of Weibo, Toutiao's development has been smooth sailing. On June 3, 2014, Toutiao completed its Series C financing with a valuation of only around US$500 million. However, just two years later, Toutiao's valuation was rumored to have soared to US$10 billion. As a news client, Toutiao's value is also being favored by industry and investors . The essence of Toutiao is a platform for gathering and redistributing information. The platform itself does not produce content. Toutiao has a high degree of control over upstream content production through the use of Toutiao accounts, and then analyzes and filters the information of content creators through technical algorithms, and then pushes it to users. What makes Toutiao popular among users is that their interest recommendations based on big data algorithms allow users to see content that interests them. Zhihu has become an industry unicorn, which also relies on valuable content According to Zhihu, as of January 2017, Zhihu has more than 65 million registered users, with an average of 18.5 million active users visiting and using the platform every day. Throughout 2016, Zhihu users asked more than 6 million questions, wrote more than 23 million answers and 1.51 million articles. After completing its Series D financing, Zhihu truly became a unicorn in the knowledge industry. Compared with Toutiao's rapid growth, Zhihu has always been considered a slow company in everyone's eyes. In September 2015, Zhihu announced that it had received US$55 million in Series C financing. After rapid development in 2016, the value of its platform quickly doubled. Different from Weibo's social media and Toutiao's interest media, Zhihu focuses more on sharing valuable knowledge. In the past few years, Zhihu has left everyone with the impression of being a question-and-answer platform. Since last year, Zhihu has started to slow down. They have successively launched institutional accounts, advertising products, bookstores, Zhihu Live, Zhihu and other products, improved the copyright content protection mechanism, coordinated with Tencent and Sogou products, and built their own advertising product system. It is the accumulation of the past five years that has allowed the knowledge value of the Zhihu platform to gradually be released. Xu Xin, the founder of Capital Today, which led the D round of financing for Zhihu, has given a very accurate affirmation of Zhihu's value. She said: "The spring of content has just begun. Zhihu's question-and-answer model is very sharp and its moat is very deep. Regarding content, we think there is a '1% rule': from the perspective of the crowd, there is 1 opinion leader among 100 people. So the key is to do it early and firmly grasp that 1% of opinion leaders, while also ensuring a fair mechanism and unobstructed upward channels so that new users also have the opportunity to grow into opinion leaders - the accumulation of time is the moat." From this point of view, Zhihu has built a broad moat for itself through the accumulation of opinion leader users over the past five years. Weibo, Toutiao, and Zhihu, who can go further? A long time ago, I said that Weibo and Toutiao would have a battle sooner or later. As a mobile communication platform, WeChat's main function is still to facilitate communication between users, while Weibo and Toutiao are getting closer and closer in the social + media field. Zhihu also has the characteristics of social media. As content giants, which model can go further? I. Similarities and Differences in Development Trajectory When Toutiao first started recommending content of interest, it relied on sharing data from social platforms such as WeChat, QQ, and Weibo as an important reference. As Toutiao grew in size, it began to focus on cultivating its own social attributes and began to gradually penetrate between Toutiao accounts and fan interactions. As a social platform, Weibo has begun to look more and more like a media content platform. From launching headlines to supporting Weibo self-media, Weibo has even begun to draw on Toutiao's interest recommendation model. Some Weibo users have begun to discover that the Weibo information they post is not pushed directly to every fan. Instead, an interest recommendation mechanism is used to push the content to a small number of users first, and then decide whether to continue pushing the content to more fans based on the interest of these users. Weibo's content display page is also beginning to look more and more like Toutiao. Zhihu does not adopt this kind of interest-based content distribution mechanism at all. Instead, it explores knowledge sharing in different scenarios to attract users who are interested in a certain topic or industry to gather together to share their insights. By exploring user needs and polishing detailed operations , it maintains steady growth in both user volume and user stickiness. Judging from its development trajectory, although Zhihu is a content platform, its ultimate direction is completely different from that of Weibo and Toutiao, and the secret war between Weibo and Toutiao has also begun to escalate quietly. 2. The size of the content overlap Today's Weibo content is expressed in a variety of forms including pictures, text, videos, short videos , live broadcasts , and many other areas, covering all aspects of entertainment, sports, technology, finance, social life, etc. In terms of its overall content, entertainment and life occupy the mainstream of Weibo content. Toutiao was initially positioned as a news content aggregation platform. As more and more users started to join Toutiao, it gradually became an account like Weibo. Not only can the media publish news articles on it, but more and more users can also post updates on products, pictures, videos, short videos, etc. The originally serious media reports on Toutiao have also begun to become more and more entertaining and life-like. Especially in September 2016, after Toutiao announced an investment of 1 billion to support short videos, it will have more intense content conflicts with Sina Weibo 's Miaopai short videos. When it comes to the content on the Zhihu platform, the first word that comes to mind is often professional. By focusing on professionals from various industries in China to answer professional questions, the content of the Zhihu platform has completely taken the route of knowledge content, which is very different from the content of Weibo and Toutiao. Yang Dong, partner of SAIF Partners, commented on Zhihu content: "The more professional and personalized the content is, the more interesting and valuable it is. Zhihu does a very good job in professional content and personalization. The quality of questions and answers is very high. It is a very rare platform." 3. High and low user positioning Regarding the user positioning of the three major content platforms, Weibo, Toutiao and Zhihu, Zhihu's positioning is directly aimed at the emerging middle class and the intellectual class, and its population positioning level is the highest, followed by Toutiao. Weibo's user group is the youngest, but Toutiao has a higher user overlap with Weibo in terms of entertainment and life. The user's positioning determines the quality of the content. Toutiao's principle towards vulgar content is "not to actively push vulgar content", which has a lot to do with Toutiao's user group. However, for a content platform, content with better quality and higher value will inevitably win users' long-term attention and higher loyalty, and can also bring users a better continuous experience, and the user stickiness will be stronger. On the contrary, although vulgar content has won the reading needs of many general users, it is inevitable that people are somewhat worried about how long it can last. Weibo, Toutiao, and Zhihu, which one can bring more value to content creators? Today, paying for knowledge is becoming a popular trend. For different content platforms, those that can bring long-term profits to content creators will inevitably win their support in the end. In 2015, Weibo announced a plan to support contracted self-media, investing RMB 150 million worth of resources to fully support contracted self-media, and continuing to help contracted self-media increase their income through rewards, paid reading and commercial sharing. However, Sina Weibo's paid subscription content that is truly related to self-media has not been going smoothly, so Weibo has begun to follow the example of Fenda and Zhihu Live and started launching paid Q&A on Weibo. Compared with Weibo, Toutiao seems to provide greater support for self-media. At the 2015 Creator Conference, Toutiao launched the 1,000-person 10,000-yuan plan and the 100-group 10,000-yuan plan. The move in September last year was even bigger, announcing that it would set aside at least 1 billion yuan to support short video creators. Zhihu platform does not adopt the means of subsidies at all, but instead helps users to truly realize value. At the same time, the difference in user positioning largely determines the profitability of the platform's content and the users' ability and desire to pay. Without any subsidies, more and more professionals are earning considerable income through the Zhihu Live platform. Since its launch on May 14, 2016, Zhihu Live has held more than 1,500 events, with 737 speakers earning an average hourly wage of 10,980 yuan. The highest income from a single Zhihu Live event has reached 190,000 yuan. From a long-term perspective, professional organizations and individuals on the Zhihu platform can use the platform to obtain long-term, stable and good income. For the two major content giants, Weibo and Toutiao, what they need to think about is whether the content creators on the platform can still generate sufficiently high income once the platform’s financial subsidies stop? Of course, big Weibo accounts obviously still have obvious advantages. A few of them have millions of fans, and their annual advertising revenue is also quite substantial. But what about the author of the headlines? Its fate is completely controlled by Toutiao's algorithm mechanism. When Toutiao has recommended content, its exposure will be higher, but when there are not enough recommendations, its e-commerce and advertising revenues will inevitably drop significantly. Weibo, Toutiao, Zhihu, which one can provide more reference for entrepreneurs ? In the microblog world of the past, after a melee among many microblog platforms such as NetEase Weibo, Tencent Weibo, Sohu Weibo, and Sina Weibo, only Weibo was left; today, there are more and more platforms imitating Toutiao, and Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu have also joined this content interest distribution platform war based on big data algorithms; and the fact that Zhihu platform can have today's accumulation of knowledge-class users is due to its accumulation over the past five years. For entrepreneurs, whether it is Weibo, Toutiao or Zhihu, the difficulty and possibility of imitating and learning their models to gain a foothold in the content field can be imagined. However, there is one thing that is truly worth learning from for us content entrepreneurs, and that is the professional content payment mechanism on the Zhihu platform. For most content creators, it is no longer possible to become a super-big name like Luo Ji Si Wei and Mi Meng by relying on their content, and it is also difficult to attract a large number of fans. What’s more, Toutiao and other companies adopt an interest recommendation mechanism, and the fate of content entrepreneurs is completely in their hands, not in the hands of the entrepreneurs themselves. Therefore, if content entrepreneurs want to achieve greater commercial value, they must find a vertical field that suits them, delve deep into this field, and continue to provide users with professional and valuable content, especially for users with the ability to pay. The reference value that Zhihu platform provides to content entrepreneurs is of great significance. From this point of view, Weibo is difficult to be disrupted due to the rapid dissemination characteristics of social media; Toutiao has become the mobile information platform with the longest user time among content distribution platforms thanks to its interest recommendations, and it is difficult to be defeated; Zhihu is unique and difficult to be copied due to its professional content and its positioning as an intellectual class user group. The giants in three different content fields are also beginning to truly take shape. Weibo and Toutiao are learning from each other. Their entertainment and lifestyle-oriented characteristics determine that they will face certain competition in the future. Zhihu will continue to delve deeper into the field of professional knowledge and lead the trend of knowledge payment. For our vast number of content entrepreneurs, vertical professional content may very well be our only way out.Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising The author of this article @刘宽 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting! |
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