A brief history of operations: everything you want to know and don’t want to know

I must be honest, this article is the most time-consuming and labor-intensive one I have ever written, no doubt about it. The article you are reading is the fourth version I have written. I abandoned the previous three versions, totaling 20,000 words.

SO, watch and cherish it.

A brief history of operations , just four short words, means that we need to traverse the history of the Internet for more than 20 years and summarize and understand a main thread from it, so as to best enable you friends to understand "operations", a special Internet position.

Which main line is the most valuable?

We have tried the “time and event” main line, such as the year when the Internet was born, the formation of business models, the Internet bubble, Internet 2.0... We have also tried to divide it according to the dimensions of Internet business competition, such as the start-up period, the division of princes, the three-legged tripod, the post-three-legged era... We have also tried to divide it according to the functional attributes of the Internet... We have even considered the perspective of capital operation...

However, no matter which of the above perspectives is used, we believe that it is not only unable to help operators clearly understand the ins and outs of "operation", but it is even more difficult to gain insight into the essence of operation and its future direction.

Finally, I decided to return to "people", that is, to try to sort out the development and evolution of "big operations" from the user's perspective. After all, "users" are the core of our operations and work that has never changed.

Based on this consideration, after some research, we successfully linked together the Internet's more than 20 years of dominance, and summarized it into four stages of operational evolution:

1. Operational buds: creation and enclosure
2. Operational development: Seizing the entrance
3. Operational upgrade: Grabbing attention
4. The rise of operations: full closed-loop user services and building an ecological chain

The following is a detailed description of these four development stages. By reviewing the brief history of operations, we can gain insight into the essence of operations : that is, what is operation, what will it become , and how should we, as tiny individuals in the torrent of the Internet age, survive ?

Phase 1. Operational budding: creation and land grabbing (approximately 1994-1998)

background:

The Internet can be said to be an inevitable derivative of the computer industry. The U.S. government, scientific research, and some businesses have been using LANs since the 1970s. In 1983, the National Science Foundation of the United States built a wide area network connecting various American universities and supercomputer centers, which was the prototype of the Internet. In the early days of the Internet, only a small number of people used it, and it could only be operated using computer language (everyone was a programmer). You can imagine how high the threshold was.

It was not until 1994 that Netscape developed the first graphical interface browser , laying the foundation for low-threshold access to the Internet for the general public. At that time, there were very few people using the Internet, but millions of copies were sold in less than a year, which shows how popular it was.

In our country, it was in 1995 that China Telecom opened two Internet access nodes in Beijing and Shanghai, allowing the public to "surf the Internet" for the first time. 1995 can also be said to be the first year of Internet commercialization .

That year, Jack Ma founded China Yellow Pages. In order to attract customers, he lied: "Bill Gates said that the Internet will change every aspect of people's lives..."

In fact, Bill Gates never said this. Netscape's IPO in 1995 did not attract his attention. At that time, he believed that the Internet was just an application on the operating system (it was not until 2000 that Microsoft's IE browser finally defeated Netscape).

Of course, Jack Ma’s lie successfully enhanced the commercial value of his website in the minds of users (this is what operations do), and it is not an exaggeration to say that it promoted the development of the domestic Internet industry...

Here, we should solemnly crown Mr. Jack Ma with the title of "the founder of domestic Internet operations". I think no one will object.

It is not difficult to imagine that the users of the first stage of the Internet were almost typical intellectuals : IT, scientific research, government affairs, college students, financial professionals, etc.

Most of the Internet business leaders we know today have emerged from this group of people: Jack Ma, Pony Ma, Robin Li, Lei Jun , Zhou Hongwei, Ding Lei, Shi Yuzhu, etc.

In the early days of Internet commerce, whether in the United States or in China, all Internet companies (or individual enthusiasts) were simply trying to do one thing: what exactly can users do online?

In the early days of the Internet, there were few users, few tools , and little content . Apart from competition from some more mature Internet products (browsers, portals) in the United States, everyone was basically still in the exploration stage.

Typical Internet products in the first stage include: BBS, e-mail, instant messaging tools, personal homepages, navigation, portals, etc.

At that time, the survival of Internet companies depended mainly on deceiving venture capital, and the founders had to sell everything they had to raise money . People were still unsure how far Internet commerce could develop until pioneers such as Yahoo (mid-1990s) and Google (late 1990s) explored a clear path: attract users with free content, resources, and services, and make profits by selling advertisements by attracting the attention of massive users. Thus, the spring of the Internet has arrived.

So, where are our operators at this stage?

Yes, those founders (who usually also serve as technical, product, and public relations managers). At that time, the means by which Internet companies acquired new users were very simple, and they were nothing more than:

Gain media attention with product features and use traditional media exposure (laying the groundwork for Internet CEOs to become Internet celebrities );

Gain user reputation, recommendations from well-known webmasters, external link indexes, etc. (the predecessor of KOL) through product value;

By making paid products free, they can achieve the effect of self-propagation (early software was mostly paid. The famous Hotmail quickly spread by providing users with free email services, gaining half of the Internet users at the time);

It can be seen that the first batch of operators in the early days of the Internet were the bosses themselves. The operation strategy is mainly based on technical means, supplemented by business cooperation.

Since most of the first batch of Internet users (senior intellectuals) knew very well why they went online and were extremely picky about websites, there was no issue of "deliberately" creating user activity or increasing stickiness at that time. The so-called content operation, user operation , and event operation that we widely know today did not play a big role at that time.

The metaphor here is: operations must be carried out in combination with the current macro characteristics (cognitive level) of Internet users.

Phase 2. Operational development: Seizing the entrance (approximately 1998~2005)

background:

The myth of Internet companies such as Yahoo getting rich through listing has stimulated the rapid development of the Internet industry like hormones. The content, tools, and number of users (total number of Internet users) on the Internet are growing exponentially. Traffic, the core of Internet companies’ profitability, has become the goal that all companies blindly pursue.

Internet applications at this stage have taken shape: search engines (Baidu went public in 2005), instant messaging (Tencent went public in 2004), B2B (Ali rose after SARS), B2C (Joyous, eBay), the three major portals (Sina, Sohu, NetEase), online games (Shanda, NetEase, Giant, Tencent)...

Under this background, the number of new Internet users increases rapidly every year, which is now called the "bonus period". However, the problem lies precisely here. The new Internet users' understanding of the Internet is far less than that of the first generation of Internet users . Therefore, " where users start their Internet journey " has become a gold mine of traffic and naturally a battleground .

It is conceivable that the operational work at this stage is still centered on acquiring the absolute number of users and pursuing the cost-effectiveness of traffic, rather than paying special attention to user experience. The operational strategies that were particularly characteristic of the time were:

Plugin promotion, pop-up ads (these are not worth imitating), advertising revenue sharing with major webmasters, etc.

Internet cafe promotion (online games). Internet cafes were the main entrance for new Internet users to access the Internet at that time, and they provided an excellent model for online game companies to cooperate with Internet cafe agents to sell game point cards.

Hot-selling products attract traffic ( e-commerce ), for example, Joyo sells cheap and popular single-item audio-visual products and books, which in turn attracts a lot of user word-of-mouth and attention.

In addition, there is nothing worth elaborating on promotional methods such as SEO , forum soft articles, competitive rankings, celebrity endorsements, and traditional TV advertising.

Operations at this stage are still mainly driven by top-down business. In addition, with the widespread popularity of the first generation of UGC products (blogs, forums), word-of-mouth communication and content operations (soft articles) have also been widely used. However, apart from the makers, planners, and business operators of operational strategies, the work of other operational executives is still not very valuable. In today's terms, it is still "miscellaneous operations."

It is worth mentioning that compared with the first generation of netizens, the new generation of netizens’ understanding of informatization and the Internet is still at a very immature stage. However, new Internet applications continue to emerge, Internet policies and regulations are lacking, and the financing environment has deteriorated from being redundant to being a bubble...all these factors have led to chaotic and disorderly operations and even unscrupulous means . There are many measures that come at the expense of user interests, such as rogue software, pop-up ads, and paid rankings. These have left many sequelae for subsequent operational development. To this day, many companies are still attracting new users without considering the long-term consequences.

When we are widely disturbed by all kinds of "clickbait", "vulgar content" and "fake dry goods " on various new media platforms today, I wonder if you have thought about how similar all of this is to the promotion methods of rogue plug-ins and pop-up advertisements that were widely used in the past to gain traffic - in essence, they all take advantage of the user's ignorance (previously at the technical level, now at the ideological and cognitive level) to consume the user's time and attention resources.

This also shows that the capital market's view on the commercial value of Internet companies (over-focus on traffic) will greatly affect the way Internet operations are conducted.

The final outcome of this stage is the formation of search, e-commerce, and instant messaging as the basic entrances to the Internet. Unfortunately, to this day, many companies still do not have a rational understanding of the value of entry traffic.

Phase 3. Operational upgrade: Grabbing attention (approximately 2006~2011)

background:

Internet users at this stage are significantly diversified: old netizens have become more picky about various products, while new netizens, who have an absolute numerical advantage, are truly dominating the direction of major Internet products - products are more likely to meet the needs of mainstream users. This is also the evil consequence of data-only KPI orientation, and it lays the groundwork for the vulgarization of Internet culture.

Of course, the good side is that this stage is also an era of the rise of grassroots Internet culture and the comprehensive awakening of individual consciousness of netizens. With the rise of the second generation of UGC products (Douban, Zhihu, Weibo), SNS, new media, social online games, online videos, and virtual communities have further strengthened and promoted all of this development.

At this stage, Internet giants have taken shape, with BAT dominating the market. The remaining surviving Internet companies either continue to rely on their early prestige to survive, or have their own unique characteristics and firmly occupy a small part of their own vertical fields. However, it is almost impossible for them to replace BAT (pre- mobile Internet era).

In this era, there are only two ways for us operators to acquire users:

One is to quickly acquire users by purchasing traffic. Of course, this is usually expensive and almost impossible for most small startups without a large amount of financing.

Therefore, we can only consider the second approach: gaining users’ attention and creating secondary dissemination through various contents and activities in various UGC communities or new media (note that the conceptual scope of new media is larger than WeChat public accounts . For example, early portals, blogs, and Weibo all belong to the category of new media) to obtain free traffic .

For Internet startups in the post-Internet bubble era, cash flow awareness has been deeply rooted in the minds of bosses... This ultimately formed the content operations, event operations, etc. that we are widely familiar with today.

Due to the lack of intellectual property rights, the trend of copycatting and plagiarism once flourished and even continues to this day, while innovations with real substantive value have become increasingly scarce. With the serious product homogeneity, the sharp increase in the cost of acquiring new users, and the lack of user patience, ensuring user retention and activity rates has become increasingly important. Therefore, "user operation" to ensure user satisfaction also began to operate independently as a full-time, professional position. After all, it is easy to copy products, but "operation" is an invisible and intangible soft skill that is difficult to copy.

In the later stage of this stage, as the growth rate of the total number of Internet users slowed down (after 2010), the Internet changed from being "popular" to "universal". Therefore, the total amount of attention of netizens - the total time spent on the Internet - has begun to reach saturation (each person has limited spare time). Obviously, the competition among Internet companies has completely evolved into a more brutal "cross-border" competition: for example, if people play more online games, they will naturally spend less time watching online videos and information; if they browse Weibo more, they will naturally spend less time on Zhihu...

Therefore, starting from this stage, the operator's ability to create "general content" to "attract user attention" has become particularly prominent. Some bosses even directly equate operations with jokes, which is laughable.

Although we named the operation at this stage "grabbing attention", in fact, this legacy of "grabbing users' attention" has continued to this day and even firmly occupies the mainstream operational thinking . On the one hand, this operational mindset is the result of the combined influence of “Internet universalization,” economic slowdown, and the social atmosphere of “entertainment to death.” On the other hand, it is also due to the fact that the entire industry’s top-down operational mindset has not yet been reversed .

However, once operators focus too much on grabbing users' attention, it will inevitably lead to sensationalism, impetuousness, and even deceiving users... Although it may be effective in the short term, in the long run, with the improvement of the overall quality of the whole people, these practices of "pursuing superficiality and ignoring internal strength" will inevitably lose the trust of users and ultimately backfire. Today, we have clearly seen the trend that users have become increasingly concerned about the integrity and morality of companies (the most typical example is the "Putian incident" on a certain website a while ago).

Hereby I appeal to all new operators: learn some real skills and work hard, instead of indulging in various "quick success theories", "clickbait headlines", "black studies that exploit the dark psychology of human nature", etc...

Many people who have little work experience and social experience take advantage of the "comfort mentality" of many new operators who are eager to achieve success and lazy to think, and attract the attention of a large number of new operators by fabricating various "quick-fix techniques" and misleading their understanding of operations...

It is really heartbreaking that so much time is wasted on this during the years when new operators need to accumulate knowledge the most.

Phase 4. Operational Rise: Fully Closed-Loop User Services and Building an Ecosystem (2012-Present)

background:

The popularization of mobile networks, the reduction of data traffic charges, the rise of smartphones, and the accumulation of big data and technology over the years have ultimately given rise to a new mobile Internet industry. The further development of the Internet of Things, virtual reality, etc. based on this background finally verified what Jack Ma said 20 years ago - the Internet will eventually change every aspect of people's lives: from LBS-based social, travel, sports, various UGC communities to the popularity of the Internet celebrity economy and sharing economy, food delivery O2O , Didi Taxi , knowledge sharing applications, live video , virtual reality games represented by Pokemon go, etc.

At this point, the Internetization of life and the Internetization of life have finally become a reality.

Let us summarize the Internet business at this stage. We believe that there are two most epoch-making features:

Feature 1: The Internet is deeply integrated into life

Previous Internet applications were more about moving offline scenarios online, providing users with "optional" methods that were either more efficient, faster, or cheaper, but did not really change people's living habits.

Today's Internet commerce is deeply integrated with users' lives, work and even careers: for example, one does not need to carry cash when going out, merchants engage in online marketing , and users place orders and make payments via mobile phones. The entire online and offline process has been perfectly connected. For example, the work experience stored in one's "head" can be monetized directly through knowledge sharing platforms without relying on employers. Hobbies, specialties and even private life can also be monetized through live broadcast platforms ... and similar businesses that deeply integrate virtual and reality will continue to increase.

All of this continues to challenge users' ability to accept new things.

Feature 2: Layout and construction of platform ecological chain

At this stage, the so-called "Internet access advantage" and "advantage in gaining user attention" no longer have the necessary competitive barriers. As Internet users as a whole become more rational and mature, and information becomes more symmetrical, people tend to pursue pragmatic values ​​- which platform can bring more lasting value to users and which platform will eventually win all users.

As for "entrance" and "attention", they can only become "path traffic" and have no advantages at all.

In this context, whether it is an e-commerce platform, a social platform, or a content platform, its core is not limited to providing direct value to users, but to building a high-value ecological chain for users, so that users of different categories can find their own position on the platform and cultivate their own internal and external value . The end result is that all users can profit from the platform (not necessarily money, but also a sense of accomplishment and belonging), but at the same time they cannot leave the platform.

Among them, the most typical one is WeChat official account . It is no exaggeration to say that official account supports thousands of enterprises and individuals and bundles together millions of interests. It has long surpassed the Internet applications in the general sense.

Based on these two characteristics (deep integration and building ecological value), we operators must be clearly aware that the work of operations has been upgraded from simply "attracting attention and delivering product value" to "promoting user usage, cultivating user habits, building and improving the platform value chain (assisting in verifying platform value)."

At this point, from attracting user attention, delivering product value to acquire users, cultivating user habits, improving user satisfaction (generating secondary dissemination), to building and improving platform value , the Internet operation job has formally integrated the closed loop of all aspects related to user work, and the requirements for professional ability are very high.

Yes, at this point, our operators’ mission has reached its historical peak.

Metaphors from the Brief History of Operations

I have talked so much in the previous article, almost covering the development of the Internet, changes in commercial profits, changes in the maturity of netizens, and changes in the nature of operational work. It is worth mentioning that the four development stages of the above operations are not "truncated" transitions, but "gradual" transitions. For example, even today, there are still Internet products and operation models in the second, third, and fourth stages, as shown in the following figure:

Through all of this, we can dig out four metaphors from this brief history of operations, which will enable us to have a more systematic and thorough understanding of operations, a new and important position:

Metaphor 1: Operations determine the life and death of an enterprise from the very beginning, which means that operations is destined to be a high-pressure position.

To this day, there are still some people (and even companies) who believe that products and technology are the core driving forces, and operations are subsidiary. This is entirely due to a lack of understanding of Internet business.

Operations determine the lifeblood of an Internet company - the number of users. In the early years, operations work seemed to have no dedicated personnel, which was not because it was not important. On the contrary, it was actually directly managed by the number one or two figures in the company... Today, with the full expansion of operations business, a large number of manpower is needed, which gives rise to the illusion of "low operational threshold". But any Internet company with a little common sense understands that operations are a matter of life and death .

Therefore, it is normal for us operators to pursue KPIs closely. On the contrary, if the team works loosely and is full of chatter, then you'd better be alert: either you are not doing what operations should do, or the leaders of the entire team do not have a clear positioning of operations.

Metaphor 2: The “time metric” for acquiring users should be above all else, but the industry only focuses on CAC (customer acquisition cost)

Characteristics of the Internet such as zero marginal cost and demand-side economies of scale (the more users use a product, the more valuable it is) determine the importance of "speed". Most current Internet operators only focus on the "cost of acquiring a single user (CAC)" when allocating budgets, and spend a lot of time collecting and analyzing data. This parameter is easy to quantify, but we must avoid putting the cart before the horse and being led by the question of "whether it can be quantified". The "time" factor that is difficult to quantify is what we should always keep in mind.

For example, after live streaming became popular, many knowledge communities were obsessed with finding experts to share their experiences live, but this process is time-consuming and laborious. Are the benefits of spending so much time really worth it (for platforms that provide knowledge value services, can live streaming really allow listeners to obtain better knowledge value besides being a novelty)? Would it be more appropriate to spend the same amount of time carefully selecting truly valuable content or providing consulting services to user groups? These are all worthy of our deep reflection. CAC is too superficial. What’s more important is: Time

Being trendy doesn’t necessarily mean being effective . You need to first figure out your own positioning so that you won’t be influenced by the outside world. The winner-takes-all rule determines the importance of “time perspective” in the minds of operators

Metaphor 3. The current operations industry is artificially dividing the division of labor in operations positions, which is wrong.

From the entire brief history of operations, it can be seen that the reason why we currently have the so-called content operations, event operations, and user operations positions is due to the stage-specific historical reasons of operations. However, this functional division of labor and positioning has obvious limitations (reflected in the above-mentioned descriptions of the third and fourth stages of operations).

As an emerging position that is only around 20 years old, operations has never had authority and does not need authority .

For example, the division of job responsibilities is very questionable, and more flexible operations positions are needed now. As an important and highly changeable position, operations especially require in-depth thinking that is scarce in this impetuous era: such as a deep understanding of product value, subtle insights into changes in the mentality of various types of users, cognition of the nature of various types of traffic, and the ability to create a win-win situation for upstream and downstream industries and even competitors...etc. All of these require us to study hard and practice to gain something.

So, please don’t complain “Why do I have to be involved in everything?”, or think “I am only responsible for the content, I don’t care about other things”, or “I am only responsible for serving KOL users, I don’t need to understand products, communication, and user experience”…

Operations is a position where many tasks are closely linked to each other. If you only focus on your own little piece of land, you will always be an outsider .

Metaphor 4: The "multi-dynamic" nature of operations determines that operations refresh knowledge much faster than other positions

Looking back at the history of operations, no matter the goals of our work (from attracting new users, keeping active to cultivating user habits and even shaping the ecosystem), the content of our work (from simple traffic to comprehensive user operations), the objects of our work (the cognitive level of Internet users), the various tools of our work, and user channels, these five core elements have been "continuously refreshed" due to the rapid development of the Internet industry, which seems incredible in other industries.

For example, in traditional manufacturing, construction, catering, medical care, education, tourism, and various people's livelihood industries, management ideas and work skills that have been around for decades or even hundreds of years may still be useful today, but in the Internet industry, what is popular this year may become obsolete next year.

This obviously places higher demands on the operators' work capabilities: in addition to mastering the underlying unchanging factors (such as human nature, user behavior, and social psychology), they also need to refresh their various cognitions in real time , broaden their knowledge, master the latest industry trends, work more efficiently, and obtain more valuable traffic.

So, if you lack curiosity and are not keen on exploring new things, operations may be a painful job for you .

Summary: The concept of operating the industry is well known but has many flaws. An operator must have "everything a great person needs"

A while ago, I saw a question on Zhihu about how to learn "operational knowledge". The answers were almost all based on the same homogeneous routine of "content operation, event operation, merchant operation..." Judging from the evolution of operations, these answers were off base from the outset. Later, Li Shaojia will rebuild a set of "Introduction to Operations" knowledge system based on the evolutionary logic of operations. Interested friends can pay attention. In fact, this article can also be regarded as a prequel to "Introduction to Operations".

We operators need to be knowledgeable and open-minded: we must have both emotional thinking and rational thinking of systematic thinking. We must also be strong and hard-core in character and actively strive for resources. When promoting projects, we need to have the courage to burn our boats and leave no way out.

An operator is a master of all kinds of skills.

Finally, please stop having immature ideas about playing around with work, such as "the operation threshold is low, the operation is suitable for transformation, and the operators have low self-requirements".

Remember, from the day we engage in operations, the life of the product and the future of the team are in our hands. Please be sure to maintain the necessary awe.

This is the fate of operation and also the pride of operation .

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The author of this article @李少加 is compiled and published by (APP Top Promotion). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!