Are new media and fan economy a cognitive bubble?

Once deep-rooted ignorance and arrogance become a trend, the damage they cause is far greater than a hurricane - unfortunately, most people choose to turn a blind eye.

1. The neglected fan life cycle

Take new media operation (and all fan economies based on subscription relationships) as an example. It is also an important part of the large operation system. However, whether in marketing or Internet operation , the customer life cycle (traditional market) and user life cycle (Internet) are elements of strategic thinking points - but they are rarely mentioned in the fan economy.

Friends who are not familiar with it can briefly review the two major concepts:

Customer life cycle: the entire period from the first time a customer uses a brand's product to the time they no longer use it. It usually includes stages such as customer's first consumption, increased consumption, high-frequency consumption, weakened consumption, and exit from consumption.
User life cycle: the entire time span from the first contact with the product to cognition, experience, start of use, habit of use to exit the product.
*Note: The specific stages vary slightly depending on the type of product.

When it comes to fan economy, why do few people raise and discuss the issue of “fan life cycle”?

Statement 1: I am not referring to the life span of the internet celebrity (or self-media author) itself, but the life span of their fans from attention to loss.
Statement 2: Fan economy refers to all new media , self-media, Weibo, Zhihu big V , entertainment influencers and other general content products based on "follow" relationships (note, they are products). The following text mainly uses public account operations as the explanation object.

Is this issue insignificant to the operational results of the "fan economy"? no.
Is this question not suitable for the actual operation of "fan economy"? no.
Or is this problem so "hidden" that most people cannot see it? You are half right.

First of all, the existence of the fan life cycle is indeed vague and hidden, but it is certain that there is someone in the industry who is not aware of this "big problem", and there are deeper motives behind it.

Next, let’s start with this “hiddenness”.

Li Shaojia reminds: The views in this article may be applicable to many situations, but they may not be comprehensive. Please be sure to read it critically, as it is more of an intellectual enlightenment.

2. Cognitive Bubble Brought by Existing “Fans”

If you have operated an independent APP product, you should have an intuitive understanding of user "churn" - after all, most user churn and "uninstall" behavior occur at the same time.

But if we put this matter in the context of "fan business", things will be very different. The actual "loss" of fans and the behavior of "unfollowing" are mostly not synchronized.

As for public accounts , after all, subscribing to a certain number of public accounts will not take up much mobile phone memory. Since it is more convenient for me to "ignore" an account than to "unfollow" it from the perspective of attention, I am too lazy to do it.

The tiny difference in "user exit costs" between the two has created two huge gaps. The user base of independent APP products is of great reference value, but the number of fans in the "fan economy" is a big bubble.

This is the fundamental reason why the "fan life cycle" of the fan economy lacks a sense of existence - most of the users who have disappeared are still "following" you (real zombie fans).

But, so what?
What a fuss! Wouldn't it be enough to just roughly discount the total number of fans when assessing the company's commercial value?

Well, if the problem was so simple, then there would be no need for Li Shaojia to launch this article as a special topic.

The "fan life cycle" has a poor presence, but the lack of presence does not mean poor importance, just like the status of the concept of "bacteria" in medical history - bacteria have an even worse presence, I mean in the long history of medicine, but since it was first discovered in the 16th century, it has completely changed the development trajectory of Western medicine.

What I want to say is that although the concept of "fan life cycle" is neither original nor new, the industry has never "paid attention" to it. However, once we introduce (it must be introduced) this concept into fan business. It may also bring about disruptive changes to the value assessment, strategic orientation, and future development trends of all fan businesses.

To make you more aware of the difference, let's take an example:

Suppose the typical fan life cycle of a well-known toxic chicken soup public account (let’s call it “Meng Ni”) is one year.

Note: Typical refers to its mainstream fan group. When it comes to individual fans, each person’s life span is bound to be slightly different. Therefore, when evaluating the fan life span, the average value of the mainstream fan group is more considered.

"Meng Ni" took advantage of the bonus period of public accounts in 2015 to develop rapidly, with a net increase of 7.3 million fans throughout the year (that is, a net increase of 20,000 fans every day).
At the beginning of 2017, if the total number of fans of "Meng Ni" was 9 million - this data was one of the important bases for the advertising market to evaluate its advertising value.
But if we take into account the "bubble property" of the total number of fans, how many actual effective fans does "Meng Ni" have?

In fact, taking into account the one-year lifespan of fans, as of the beginning of 2017, all the net new fans in 2015, after following for a year, got tired of following, and can be said to have been "completely lost". However, a conservative estimate of only 40% would unfollow the fans (this is still an overestimate, as the actual unfollow time of most people is much longer than the "lifespan" itself).

In other words, the real number of effective fans of "蒙你" in early 2017 was:
9 million - 7.3 million * 60% (followers have been lost but not unfollowed) = 4.64 million.

4.64 million VS 9 million, is this contrast scary to you?

Don’t worry, the following analysis is truly more shocking.

Following this line of thought, let us think about whether the data of our daily net increase in fans is also inflated?
According to the formula currently given in the background of the official account, just the daily “new additions - unfollowings” is the net increase in fans?

Obviously not.

The actual net increase in fans should be:
New fans – Net new fans per day in the previous cycle (typical fan life cycle)
*According to this algorithm, in the long run, the number of unfollowed followers is a natural phenomenon and does not need to be deducted again to avoid repeated deductions.

For example, in the above example, Mengni had an average daily net increase of 20,000 fans in 2015. One year later, on this day in 2016, if it had 15,000 new fans, then its actual number of fans would be approximately:

15,000-20,000 = negative 5,000

In other words, the daily increase of 15,000 is actually a daily net loss of 5,000!

This is the truth that most fan economies are unwilling to face, especially for content providers with a short "fan life cycle" (such as entertainment accounts). Not to mention rapid growth, for many self-media that rely on the bonus period, just "maintaining" them is already a headache.

For this purpose, I specially selected a group of relatively good self-media accounts to verify them.
For about half of the samples, there has been almost no significant increase in reading volume from the beginning of last year to today, but the number of fans announced by these accounts has increased dramatically.

Therefore, as far as the fan economy is concerned, the actual signal released by the slowdown in growth is: recession. The continuous increase in the number of fans conceals a truth that most people are not aware of (and a few are unwilling to face).

Therefore, the "decline in reader activity rate" that has been hotly discussed in the public account circle since this year is not the essential problem. The essential root cause is that they have ignored the "fan life cycle", a factor with extremely low presence but huge impact - they have not deducted the users who have lost due to the decay of fan life cycle.

Nominally having hundreds of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of fans always makes one feel safe and comfortable, so why would one expose it and bring trouble upon oneself?

Therefore, the commercial value of a public account (fan economy) is very much like a reservoir, and the life cycle of fans is the "depth" of this reservoir. A reservoir with a shallow foundation but a large area can usually be filled up quickly. On the surface, it looks like "a thousand miles of lakes with abundant water resources." However, once it encounters a dry season, just like after the WeChat bonus period is over, the growth rate of new fans slows down, and it soon "bottoms out" and its life dries up.

3. Introduce the concept of fan life cycle and rethink new media operations

It can be seen from this that:
The "fan life cycle" is like the soul of the fan economy. It has a low presence and is difficult to quantify, but its length is one of the crucial "weights" to the size of a fan economy.

Today's society blindly worships dataism. In the name of false rationality, it oversimplifies thinking, greatly increases the weight of quantifiable data, and ignores indicators that are difficult to quantify. Anything that can be linked to specific numbers is "scientific and professional", otherwise it is just "empty words".

If you want to impress investors , bosses, and supporting colleagues, you don’t rely on “insights”, but on who cites more data, who has the “higher-end” algorithms and formulas… This seemingly professional “pseudo-professionalism” has become the mainstream today.

At this point, we must also be vigilant:

The fan operation ideas of new media and the user operation ideas of independent apps seem similar, but in fact they are very different.

Take the idea of ​​"fine-grained operation" for example. For example, independent APP users need to pay great attention to the guidance of novice users, but the focus of fan operation is not here.

For example, the daily active users of an independent APP are measured by the number of users launching the APP (logging in). When this idea is transplanted to the operation of public accounts, it is natural to use "reading volume" as the core reference indicator of activity.
But there is a big difference here.

The behavior of users opening independent apps can basically be confirmed as "active user behavior", but what about readers clicking on official accounts? There are too many distracting factors: typos, red dot obsession, being “tricked” by the title , forwarding just based on the title…

The reason why content products have commercial value is that they attract the user's "real attention". How can the behavior of "opening and closing instantly" (also recorded as reading volume) be regarded as effective active value?

So, what is the accurate indicator to measure fan activity?

In fact, I have already proposed this in (Minimalist Data Analysis : How to Use Data to Insight the Truth). We should not only look at the number of readings, but should also pay attention to the "reading completion rate" (the indicator of active rate should be "effective reading number", and the indicator of reading completion rate is much more demanding, but I think it can feedback more valuable information)

However, the irony is that from a technical point of view, it is very simple to count the "reading completion rate" or even the "effective reading number", but there seems to be no content platform that provides this data to content operators (so I can only roughly count it through complex algorithms every time).

Why is the number of complete readings (effective readings) still not popularized? They are key indicators that more accurately reflect the value of public accounts.

Perhaps that's the problem.

Capitalists use activity rate as an important value assessment indicator for Internet business. If the activity rate is linked to the number of readings, it will not only be easy to count, but more importantly, the numbers will look good. More importantly, it can also cover up the valuation bubble.

Otherwise, if a reading volume of over 100,000 shows a reading completion rate of only a few hundred, how embarrassing it would be for investors and advertisers.

Li Shaojia proposed the official account value formula two years ago:

The value of a public account = the number of active subscribers * the quality of users * the influence on users

This formula actually applies to all fan economies. The reading completion rate actually reflects the "number of active users" and "influence on users".

So, in order to stand out from the highly homogenized battlefield of fan economy, in addition to rethinking the "activity rate" and "influence" of fan economy and optimizing the "reading completion rate" in operational strategy, what other changes need to be made?

Of course, "extending the fan life cycle" must be elevated to a strategic level.

4. What factors determine the fan life cycle?

If we fully understand the previous analogy of the value of a public account to a "reservoir", it should not be difficult to understand: extending the life cycle of fans is far more important than "promoting user activation".

To this day, almost all new media organizations still focus their public account operations on attracting new users and promoting activation (and of course monetization) when deploying strategic resources and implementing operational strategies.

The number of fans is growing slowly? External traffic , mutual promotion, increasing the frequency of posting...
Is the reading activity rate low? Planning activities, H5, getting influencers to share, viral communication ...

This kind of linear thinking of treating the symptoms when there is a headache and the symptoms when there is a foot pain is often useless except for alleviating the contradiction. Sometimes it is even a poison to quench thirst (such as blindly burning money for subsidies and reckless expansion).

Most of the time, the first answer that comes to our mind can only solve low-value problems at best. If a high-value problem is so simple and clear, how can it be "high value"?

Returning to the issue of fan economy, the industry currently believes that: the overall environment is not good, the bonus period has passed, the activity rate has declined, and the competition is fierce... Aren’t these problems caused by the "straightforward strategy" adopted by many public accounts over time?

The way out of the predicament is not to attract new customers or promote activation, but a new perspective - thinking about how to effectively extend the life cycle of fans.

How to extend?
Disclaimer: The following policies only apply to "fan economy" related "pan-content products" ( live streaming influencers themselves are a type of content product)

Let’s take a quick look at the main factors associated with the fan life cycle:
Content attributes
User awareness level
Content Depth
The difference between content growth rate and user self-growth rate
Extent of spending users

(1) Content attributes

"Pan-content products" are also a type of product. Let's take a look at some typical products to see how different attributes can extend the lifespan of users:
Product tool attributes > social attributes > pan-entertainment attributes

PS: The reason why I emphasize "attributes" is that most products have multiple attributes. For example, Taobao 's main attribute is e-commerce tools, but there are also social and entertainment attributes, but they are not dominant.

This is not difficult to understand. For example, some users will use Taobao and JD.com for a lifetime (as long as these companies do not go bankrupt). The same may not be true for social networking, such as QQ, Momo, Douban and now WeChat. It is hard to say. Not to mention entertainment, which are short-lived and numerous.
Note: I am only talking about most cases, not absolutes. Some entertainment products have a long life cycle. For example, killing games (including their various evolved versions such as Werewolf ) seem to have been popular since the last century.

Statement: Li Shaojia has always advocated the "principle of moderation" and has never said that people should not have entertainment, but that they should know when to stop. Please do not speculate or distort my intentions at will.

So, a simple summary is: tool (resource) attribute > social attribute > pan-entertainment

(2) User awareness level

Generally speaking, the higher the cognitive level of fans, the shorter the life cycle of a certain type of content. To put it bluntly, smart people are not so easy to fool and are more likely to see through the essence from complex appearances. Naturally, they have many requirements for the creativity and aesthetics of the content.
This may verify from another perspective: why many successful Internet companies today have a mainstream user group that "happens" to be "naive" users - this type of user has a long life span and is relatively easier to accumulate a large number of "active users".
The above conclusion actually explains the phenomenon at the beginning of the article - some people boast: the world will become more beautiful as the masses become dumber - perhaps these people also understand that the success of most entertainment products is based on the premise of the masses' stupidity.

(3) Content Depth

So, from this perspective, is it wrong to position the content of a public account as "in-depth" from the beginning? Or will this be an extremely bumpy road?
not necessarily.

In the eyes of most Internet businessmen, "naive" users are a piece of fat and tender meat that everyone wants to take a bite of. In addition, the simple content, low threshold and serious homogeneity naturally lead to extremely fierce competition (which unfortunately seems to be the current situation).
In addition, the spread of revolutionary human culture has always had one characteristic: fast, fierce, and wide. What will happen if the mainstream ideology changes suddenly overnight (from stupidity to clarity)?

Well, you are all high-level readers, so let me take this issue a little deeper: From the perspective of ecology and corporate strategic configuration, it is almost impossible for an organization that is over-optimized in "shallow content positioning" to gain any competitive advantage in "deep content positioning."
According to Taleb (author of The Black Swan): This is a fragile system.

We must keep our feet on the present while keeping our eyes on the future.

(4) The difference between content growth rate and follower growth rate

We should not think in a linear way, and we should not look at problems with a static way of thinking.
In reality, as users grow, your content itself can also grow.
Therefore, it is not difficult to understand that if the product's self-growth rate is slower than the user's self-growth rate, the user life span will be greatly shortened; otherwise, it will be greatly extended.

(5) Spending fans

For example, monetization that harms the interests of fans, or launching a large amount of low-quality, homogeneous content, will shorten the life span of fans.

6. Three major directions for improving the fan life cycle: tool-based, social, and organic content

Based on the above in-depth analysis of the factors associated with the fan life cycle, we can also explore three major coping strategies without changing our own content positioning:

(1) Adding tool attributes to content

The eternal value of tool attributes has always existed like a bug. It's like the glasses I wear. To be honest, I really don't like them, but I still have to rely on them.
Correspondingly, any type of "general content product" can actually extract its "tool attributes", such as:
Beautiful internet celebrities, can you release some "matching tutorials" or "makeup tutorials"?
For workplace content, can we provide some consulting services and career assessment services?
Even comic public accounts, such as Hunziyue, can launch some tutorials on tools for car maintenance and protection.
As for the " mini program association" provided by WeChat public accounts nowadays, there are even more examples that can be used as tools, which are not listed here one by one.

However, although the tool attribute can serve as a moat temporarily, its threshold is actually not high after all. If other similar competitors also provide the same "service", we will have to find other ways to make a living. For example, the following...

(2) Adding social attributes to content

Many people understand "socializing" in a "literal" sense - dealing with people, joining an organization.
This may be one of the reasons why " community operation " became popular since the year before last. As far as I know, the reason why most "socialization" ultimately fails as "advertising groups and red envelope groups" is that the root of the problem is precisely "treating communication as interaction" and "treating communication as socialization."
What is your emotional foundation?

The essence behind social interaction is a kind of interpersonal emotion, or more deeply, a kind of "difficult to adapt to pleasurable stimulation." This is why people feel happy when they are with someone they like (not just their lovers ).
By the way, material stimulation brings more dopamine but no sense of happiness.

Or to put it simply, increasing social attributes means increasing users' happiness.
How to stimulate specifically? You can refer to the previous tweets of "Less Overtime":
Users (fans) start to leave at an accelerated rate, what else can you do?
I won’t go into details here. Please note that this tweet is just a kind of heuristic thinking. You can come up with more and better ideas based on these thoughts.

The combination of tool attributes and social attributes can be said to be a fan business with certain vitality. However, I can only say that it is "not bad" and it is still some distance away from "excellent".

So, what should an “excellent” or even “outstanding” general content product look like? Here is the cure:

(3) Organization becomes “organic” and the content itself continues to transform

From the perspective of bio-neurology, at its root, human cognitive orientation is based on the "economic principle" - that is, to obtain the greatest cognitive effect with the least processing effort.
Of course, most of us choose how to allocate our attentional resources based on our intuition—the brain’s innate decision-making algorithms.
That is, content that is “slightly” above the fans’ cognitive level is most easily interpreted by the brain as “interesting.”
If it is simple (and seen through), it is boring;
If it is too complex, the brain will not be able to recognize it and will be interpreted as boring.

Therefore, for any general content product, in theory, as long as the "transformation speed" of our content can continue to keep up with the pace of fans' "cognitive upgrade", we can extend the life cycle of these fans indefinitely!

By the way, even if user cognition itself has not been dramatically upgraded, with the changes in the external environment and the subtle influence of social ideology, our content must also undergo a phased "pupa transformation".

The "transformation" mentioned here does not refer to the tinkering at the content level or changing the soup but not the medicine, such as beautifying the typesetting style, making the language lively and vivid (the so-called personalization), etc., but the upgrading of the "core of thought".

Take "less overtime" as an example. If you are a regular reader, you will notice that it has gone through five stages of "transformation":
Stage 1: Casual experience sharing Stage 2: Practical skills sharing Stage 3: Practical tool-oriented topic sharing Stage 4: From point to surface, scientific topic sharing Stage 5: The fourth area of ​​knowledge combination topic sharing that actually improves user thinking (testing)

Of course, this is by no means limited to content positioned as " dry knowledge". But it is suitable for all forms of general content.
Take a joke-making entertainment account, for example. It also considers its own user base and gradually “transforms”:
For example, from:
Stage 1: Curiosity-based entertainment Stage 2: Allegory-based entertainment Stage 3: Knowledge-based entertainment Once again, I emphasize that this is just an instructive analogy. In actual combat, you should consider the direction of "pupa transformation" in combination with your own business background and user groups.

In fact, almost all immortal works in all walks of life have this characteristic - it seems that you can gain some unique experience by "reading" at different stages of your life, such as "Dream of Red Mansions".
Of course, perfectly integrating content at different cognitive levels into a static work usually results in a masterpiece of the time... Don't worry, fans won't have such high demands on content producers, you just need to keep up with the same pace as their cognitive upgrades.

So, what is the essence of these "pupa transformations"?

It is the continuous self-breakthrough of content producers, which then conveys to readers a completely new perspective of appreciation or thinking.
It is not micro-innovation, but substantial innovation, constantly breaking through the upper limits of content producers themselves.
It does not change the content positioning, but is a substantial upgrade based on the previous content.

This is also in line with the self-growth model of human thinking:
We start with a simple goal, such as when a baby is hungry, he or she "commands" the parents by "crying", and then slowly acquires complex "social" skills - this whole process has undergone countless "substantial breakthroughs", but we have forgotten to extend this ability to the "post-education" era.

Note: How to gently handle the generation gap among fans with different cognitive levels will be discussed in future topics.

VII. Ending

The history of human civilization seems to have always had a tendency to "not turn back until hitting the wall". Unless it suffers a fatal blow, it will never learn true humility and complete openness.
There are many kinds of bubbles, but the biggest bubble is undoubtedly the cognitive bubble - it's not that people are not smart enough to see through it, the problem lies precisely in the fact that people "see through it but cannot see through it."
In particular, when everyone thinks that the earth is the center of the universe, who dares to stand up and say: The earth is just a tiny existence in the universe.

but.

People don't necessarily have to do something based on the truth, but they at least have the right to defend their own knowledge of the truth.