The cost of acquiring customers ranged from a few yuan to tens of thousands of yuan. In that era of crazy traffic...

From PC to mobile Internet , a group of Internet finance that took advantage of the bonus period has risen rapidly.

But now, the traffic dividend has disappeared, and a crazy, legendary traffic era has ended in a hurry.

The cost of acquiring customers has soared from a few yuan to several thousand yuan, or even tens of thousands of yuan. Internet finance, standing at a crossroads, is at a loss...

With all the traffic divided up, users no longer interested in novelty, and traffic giants engaging in crazy exploitation after monopolizing the market, how can Internet finance survive in this bloody sea where there are no fish to catch and fierce competition?

The following is a special financial plan, the first article on the traffic system, that crazy traffic era, and those bloody historical details...

01 Savage Age

At the end of last year, the Internet finance platform where Dai Xiaoli worked finally met Baidu's promotion requirements and got a pass - after hundreds of emails of communication, it finally crossed Baidu's rigid threshold.

Starting from May 2014, Baidu is no longer a place where all Internet finance players can enter and exit freely, but requires a VIP pass.

But a few years ago, Baidu was an open door, a place of fame and fortune where one could enter by spending money.

"We didn't catch the best time," Dai Xiaoli admitted that Baidu promotion used to be a powerful weapon in the battle among Internet finance platforms.

"Yu'e Bao is a symbol. Before that, it was the industry's enlightenment period. After that, it entered a period of explosive growth and the era of traffic dividends began," said Zhao Xuechao, channel director of Xiangshang Financial Services. He remembered that the traffic legend of Internet finance on Baidu suddenly became popular.

At the beginning, there was no SEO ( Search Engine Optimization) position on various platforms, and everyone’s approach was to “buy keywords .”

But in fact, at the beginning everyone played it in a wild and direct way, directly purchasing keywords (competitor words) from other platforms.

Qin Yuanxin, the former head of operations and promotion of a well-known platform, revealed that at that time they would have a "confidential communication meeting" every month, with all the senior executives sitting upright and "seriously discussing which platform names and keywords to purchase this month."

They use the most insidious trick to snatch away the popularity and brand that other platforms have worked so hard to build.

As a result, when searching for any platform on Baidu, their platform always comes first.

Although he was scolded and criticized in the industry for half a year, "Everyone said that we were shameless and engaged in malicious competition, but we used this thing to gain hundreds of thousands of seed users and raised 1 billion yuan in financing ," Qin Yuanxin said.

At this time, Qin Yuanxin calculated the cost of acquiring customers. At the lowest, an investment user only cost a few dollars.

And cases like this are just a microcosm of that crazy era.

A large number of platforms can easily harvest millions of traffic by relying on their recklessness and cunning.

But as more and more competitors emerged, everyone realized that traffic was suddenly no longer fun. Everyone was a "lamb to be slaughtered", and Baidu was the real winner behind the scenes.

02The Real Winner

At this time, Baidu almost monopolized 80% of the traffic on the PC side. "Whoever controls the traffic controls the world", and it became the overlord of the era.

After the monopoly is formed, everyone can only be repeatedly exploited under the Baidu ecosystem.

In order to defend their own positions, if Internet financial platforms want to avoid having their keywords purchased by others, they have to purchase a "brand zone".

To put it bluntly, it is paying protection fees to Baidu.

"The core of the brand zone is to ensure that it appears first and on most of the screen when users search for it," said Zhao Xuechao. "The purchase price will also vary depending on the popularity of each keyword."

This means that the prices in the brand zone will continue to rise as the platform becomes more popular. The prices of some well-known platforms’ brand zones can reach millions per month.

It has just begun.

Under Baidu's "bidding ranking" mechanism, everyone is like falling into a huge black hole with no hope of survival.

"When the industry first emerged, everyone rushed to the front and put the traffic in their own pockets first," Fang Cheng, brand director of a top ten platform in Beijing, recalled. "There were only a few key words: investment, financial management , and P2P . Everyone was scrambling for them, and the prices went up as a result."

Internet finance platforms are engaging in an "arms race" in Baidu promotion, with the prices of words such as financial management, online lending, and P2P rising all the way.

"Investing 1 million in a month? Don't even think about making any noise. Investing 10 million is just the beginning," Qin Yuanxin said, adding that the annual online promotion expenses of various platforms have begun to be calculated in billions.

"In the later stages, the cost of clicking on keywords on our platform reached dozens of yuan. We asked our employees to put our official website in their favorites and never click on keyword searches ," said Qin Yuanxin. The prices were so high that no one could bear to click.

But Baidu was extremely happy with this money-burning war until May 2014.

At that time, all the employees of Wangwang Loan, which had been online for only 5 months, disappeared. Many clues in the industry led to speculation that this was a premeditated scam.

Wangwangdai was once promoted with V certification on Baidu and is a major financial backer of Baidu. Since Baidu could not find the person in charge of Wangwang Loan, it became the target of public criticism.

Under heavy pressure from public opinion, Baidu launched the "Internet User Rights Protection Plan" and planned to compensate Wangwang Loan investors.

At the same time, more than 800 P2P online lending platforms were taken offline, and the company claimed that “it is better to kill a hundred by mistake than to let one go.”

And then, a reshuffle of the industry swept in.

According to Zero One Financial data, as of January 2017, there were 3,233 problematic P2P platforms, accounting for 66% of the total number of platforms.

The Internet finance industry has been labeled as "high-risk", and Baidu has had to tighten the entry threshold many times. Only after multi-dimensional assessment of the platform can it obtain a "VIP" pass.

Amid the bloody battle, the Baidu traffic era belonging to Internet finance came to an end.

"For us, getting Baidu's pass is not for acquiring customers, but for increasing credibility at most," said Dai Xiaoli.

Including Baidu promotion, the entire PC traffic is in a stage of decline, and users have been divided up.

"Facts have also proved that there is indeed little traffic now, and the number of customer conversions is only about dozens per day," Dai Xiaoli gave a vivid example, "Each traffic channel is a pond. The number of users in the pond is fixed. Each platform catches a lot of users, and the later the platform enters, the more difficult it will be to catch users."

For example, for the keyword "financial management", the initial price for a click was only 1 yuan, but the latest price is 33 yuan for a click.

Note that this is just the click-through page, what is the registration conversion rate ?

"The highest was over 10%, and now it has fallen to around 1,700," said Lei Zhou, partner of Wangcai Valley.

What is the conversion rate from registration to investment?

"Generally it depends on the popularity of the platform, and the percentage varies," said Lei Zhou.

In this way, it costs thousands or even tens of thousands of yuan to convert traffic into investment users.

How can this business continue?

03The rise of mobile

In 2014, the era of mobile Internet came in an overwhelming manner with a subversive attitude.

At this time, all Internet users began a great migration from PC to mobile - the PC era dominated by Baidu ended.

"Is Toutiao the biggest challenger to Baidu in the future?" Caijing asked a sharp question during an exclusive interview with Zhang Yiming, CEO of Toutiao.

Zhang Yiming thought for a moment and said, "I am not Baidu, why should I care about this issue? We are mainly looking forward and running forward, not looking left or right."

But through the entire interview and behind various details, we can already vaguely see some genes and bloodline similar to those of Robin Li in this science and engineering man.

Toutiao has achieved 550 million installations and 70 million daily active users. Undoubtedly, it has once again become the traffic overlord in the mobile era.

The Internet financial platform that hastily withdrew from Baidu has cast its expectant eyes on the newly emerging Toutiao.

In 2015, many platforms began to switch to Toutiao, trying to catch the traffic dividend train.

After getting on the bus, I found out that I got on the wrong bus.

Baidu generally has users who are willing to invest and actively search, so the conversion rate is relatively good; while Toutiao pushes content to interested users.

For financial products , unless there is a very strong demand to buy, otherwise, trying to find a user is like looking for a needle in a haystack and the results will be minimal.

On the other hand, Toutiao has always boasted of "big data push", but at present, the algorithm is not yet mature, the content has been criticized for being vulgar, and the corresponding precision marketing is difficult to achieve the expected results.

"The cooperation with Toutiao is mostly to increase brand exposure, but it is not a strong point in terms of customer conversion rate," Fang Cheng also discovered this.

In the end, Toutiao became the "brand choice" rather than the "customer acquisition choice" for most Internet finance.

At this time, the APP war also began.

Compared with Baidu's monopoly on the PC side, customer acquisition on the mobile side is much more diverse.

For example, in application markets such as the APP Store and Android, a set of " ranking manipulation " industry chains has been formed - by inflating comments and downloads, the APP is pushed to the top of the rankings.

You can also cooperate with apps with large installation volumes to direct traffic to each other.

At this time, another wave of dividends emerged - the era of WeChat arrived.

The platform that appeared in the form of WeChat service account started a harvest drama.

"Wukong Finance is one of the few platforms that truly seizes the traffic dividend of mobile terminals," said Liu Siyu, CEO of 51 Finance.

In September 2014, Wukongli was launched with only 100 “seed fans”.

Jiufu CEO Sun Lei said that they came up with a new way of playing called "everyone spreading", which uses the social nature of WeChat and the power of "relatives and friends group" to promote products.

The way to play is that every user will have an invitation code, and every time they invite a friend, they can get a privilege capital of 1,000 yuan. The principal cannot be withdrawn, but the generated profits can be withdrawn.

At this time, Baidu's bidding war has made the cost of acquiring customers as high as 1,000 yuan. A profit of 1,000 yuan is only a few yuan, which is far from the cost of acquiring customers.

"These 100 people, through dissemination and fission, became 1 million after 80 days," said Sun Lei.

This strategy was later used by other Internet financial platforms and became a common tactic.

But the short bonus period did not last long.

According to Analysys data, in 2015, the number of mobile Internet users in China reached 790 million, and the demographic dividend disappeared.

By 2016, according to data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the number of mobile Internet users in my country had reached 980 million.

It is almost impossible to attract new users, and the market has been completely eaten up.

This also means that the era of mobile Internet traffic has been closed.

Whether it is Baidu, Toutiao, or the super APP WeChat, the traffic giants monopolize the market. All players can only struggle to survive by paying huge "traffic fees" under the rules they set.

It’s like a ranch, where all the people are the cattle and sheep of the traffic giants.

"Sometimes, we feel like we are working for traffic giants, and all the profits we earn are harvested by the giants," Qin Yuanxin said. In order to acquire customers, annual expenditures exceed 50% of the company's total expenditures, or even higher.

"Because there are no new users, the conversion rates of various channels have dropped rapidly, and the industry's customer acquisition costs have risen to thousands of yuan." Qin Yuanxin thought, how much money does an investment user need to invest to cover these thousands of yuan in costs?

Once you fall into the quagmire of burning money to acquire customers, profit will become a distant wishful thinking.

Years later, Qin Yuanxin left his original company and went to a new field that had nothing to do with finance.

"Traffic has almost pushed 80% of the platforms into a dead end. This is a war with no possibility of survival." He doesn't want to participate in this war anymore.

A few years ago, a female CEO sat opposite Liu Siyu and said that she wanted to take out a few million to run a round of advertising and take another chance to see if the platform still had "vitality."

"Don't invest. If you don't have a budget of 10 million a year, don't do it. Shut down the platform and maybe you can lose less." Liu Siyu couldn't use the coldness of a businessman to face the determination of a woman who was bound to fail in the end.

He deprived her of the glimmer of hope that had kept her sucking and holding on until this moment.

This is the current situation of the industry. Most platforms have been pushed to the edge of death by traffic giants, and the only thing left is the final chord of hope...

(After the traffic giants formed a monopoly, a third-party traffic industry chain was formed. They joined hands with the platforms to try to break free from the highly aggregated traffic effect and break the monopoly. Will they find another way to break through the siege? Or will they be unable to escape the fate of death? Please read the second article in the series of topics on traffic in Yiben Finance, "The Ultimate Battle of Traffic".)

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This article was compiled and published by @一本财经 and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!