Why is Moji Weather considered the most unsuccessful tool-based product?

Following Meitu's listing in Hong Kong, Moji Weather, a unicorn weather application company, announced that it would also be listed on the Growth Enterprise Market. It has already submitted its prospectus to the China Securities Regulatory Commission, with a maximum fundraising target of 338 million yuan.

Tool -type products have always been one of the types of products that I have focused on. Those who have read my articles may still remember that Moji Weather is one of the products that I have used as a counterexample many times, because this company perfectly verifies the paradox that "as long as I have a large number of users, I will definitely make money."

Let’s first look at Analysys’ third-party data:

The number of monthly active users is 107 million, and the penetration rate in the weather application field reaches 56.67%. According to Moji Weather's prospectus, it has accumulated 470 million installations and 35 million daily active users. There are not many companies with over 100 million monthly active users, so they are still quite valuable just from the user data perspective.

In the APP ranking list in November 2016, Moji Weather ranked 23rd overall, which makes it a very well-known company. Even the weather categories in Apple APP Store and many Android app stores use the Moji Weather logo as the category logo.

Weather is a basic need, but for users, Moji Weather is not a basic need.

For a company with hundreds of millions of users, its revenue in the first half of 2016 was 107 million yuan, which means that its AR PU value per user was only 0.15 yuan. I think this is the most failed of all tool-type products.

The following is the revenue structure of Moji Weather in the first half of 2016:

Advertising accounts for a high proportion of the commercialization of most tool-type products, and Moji Weather is no exception. The combined proportion of brand advertising and performance advertising can reach 98.7%.

Cheetah Mobile is also a company that focuses on tool-based products. According to financial report data, its online advertising revenue in the first half of 2016 was 1.931 billion yuan, and its monthly active users as of Q2 were 623 million. That is to say, Cheetah Mobile has 6 times as many users as Moji, and its advertising revenue is 19 times that of Moji.

Why can’t Moji Weather increase its revenue?

1. Low user opening frequency and short usage time are the biggest obstacles to advertising monetization

Although Moji Weather claims to provide entrances to multiple advertising locations such as splash screen ads, home page banners, dressing assistants, feed streams, weather details page banners, and current scene communities, although there are many locations, the number of users that can be reached is really limited.

This is a weather information push I received this afternoon from Moji Weather. This content basically covers my information needs as an ordinary user who needs to query the weather. Tomorrow's weather, temperature range, air conditions, restricted car numbers, so the question is, what else do weather apps need besides the above?

If a push message can provide most of the information, why would users open the app?

Even if the user does not see the push content and needs to manually open the APP to check the weather information, it is completely sufficient to open the APP and check the weather and temperature trends on the main interface within 10 seconds. Think about the usage scenarios of Moji Weather again. When do we usually need to check the weather the most? Morning! According to third-party monitoring data, the most active time for users is between 6 and 9 in the morning, which is the time after users get up. Why do we need to use Moji Weather? Check the weather before going out and decide whether you need to add more clothes and bring an umbrella. For ordinary users, this point in time is when they are in a hurry to go out, not their free time. Moreover, as a tool-type product, users have very clear purpose requirements for it. In Zhang Xiaolong's words, "use it and leave", and they will not stay at all.

"A good product is one that you use and then leave" is Zhang Xiaolong's hope for WeChat . However, for Moji Weather, use and leave has become the biggest nightmare. If all users leave, who will watch the ads?

Products that attempt to monetize through advertising all attach great importance to the display of advertising. After all, whether it is brand advertising or performance advertising, value can only be generated if it can reach users. Brand advertising must be seen by users, and performance advertising must be clicked by users.

Cheetah Mobile's flagship product, Clean Master, has had a cleaning results page since the initial version of the product. This page was originally unnecessary. After the user completes the phone cleaning process, the cleaned data can be displayed directly on the main interface. There is no need to open a separate page. However, from the perspective of commercialization, the cleaning results page is a good advertising implantation page. Now the commercialization of Cheetah Clean Master relies heavily on this results page. Below the cleaning data display, it puts in its own product recommendations, game recommendations, and application recommendations. Commercialization must be considered from the very beginning of the product, and user habits need to be cultivated.

Of course, Moji Weather has not failed to work hard to increase the frequency of use and extend the time users spend using it. The current scene community, news and life information are Moji's attempts in terms of content attributes. However, these points are of little use.

Shijing Community is a module that Moji Weather has been working on for a long time. It aims to allow users to share pictures and communicate, hoping to create a community similar to Instagram. However, the most important thing about building a community is interest aggregation. Is weather an interest? Not really. Few people take weather as their hobby. Without common interests, it is impossible to form the most basic synergy of the community. So what about not just limiting it to weather, but also being a photo sharing community? If you have Moji Weather installed on your phone, you will find out when you open it that the pictures in it are all at the level of casual shots, with no aesthetic appeal at all, and no trace of official Moji operations . Compare them with the pictures in Instagram, the two are definitely not of the same level. Another important factor that brings people together in the community is to attract people with high-quality content.

2. The huge mistake in smart hardware is the grave of Moji Weather

Air Fruit is a smart hardware released by Moji Weather in 2014. In fact, looking back, smart hardware is a very suitable path for Moji Weather. The free APP has attracted a large number of users. With the serious smog in cities such as Beijing in recent years, many people have already had a demand for air purification equipment. It happens that the weather APP is also an important channel for checking PM2.5 and other air indexes. The population and demand are very well matched, which is also in line with the current scope of "smog economics". In fact, there is a huge market space.

However, Moji Weather made a machine that can only detect PM2.5 values ​​but cannot purify the air, and it sells it for 999 yuan. The Xiaomi Air Purifier and Baomi Air Purifier, which were also released in the second half of 2014, are priced lower than this. They can not only detect but also purify the air. As an ordinary user, which one would you choose?

In fact, I don’t quite understand why Moji Weather has not adjusted its thinking on smart hardware when Air Fruit has been selling so poorly. It is still buying Air Fruit and has not tried to make its own air purifier. According to data disclosed by Moji Inc., sales of smart hardware in the first half of 2016 reached 1.2102 million yuan. Based on the average customer price of 999 yuan, only 1,200 units were sold.

Meitu, a company that went public not long ago, has low advertising revenue, but its revenue from selling mobile phone hardware accounts for 95% of its revenue. Its revenue in the first half of 2016 was 585.5 million yuan, nearly 6 times that of Moji Weather.

Is there still room for growth for Moji Weather in the future?

A comment on 36Kr said that Moji Weather is a company that treats advertising as a product and advertising services as half of its main business. As a company that produces tool-based products, making advertising more refined may be a way of survival.

I agree with the second half of the sentence. It is valuable to use a refined operational approach to commercial advertising. But for Moji Weather, there may not be many opportunities, because the market no longer has the air for it to continue to grow. Now almost all mobile phone manufacturers have built-in weather applications, and the products are very sophisticated and, more importantly, free of advertisements.

According to Moji Weather's prospectus, the revenue contributed by the top five customers currently accounts for 79.51% of the total revenue, including Tencent, Alibaba, and Blue Label. The overly concentrated customer distribution also means a higher risk. This is a stock market. Once the user data of Moji Weather starts to decline, its advertising monetization space will also hit a ceiling.

The transformation to tool-based products is an issue that many companies are thinking about nowadays. Communities, e-commerce , and smart hardware are all better ways to increase the ARPU value of a single user, but Moji Weather tried them one by one, and although they all failed, it could only choose an advertising monetization model with a lower ARPU value. In the future, Moji Weather will not only need to consolidate its existing user base, but also find ways to increase advertising conversion rates in order to achieve revenue growth.

Chai Ke from Dayima once said: If users are only regarded as traffic, then traffic has only traffic value.

So I think Moji Weather is the most failed of all tool-type products, so it can only be listed on the A-share market.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media information flow

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