Three questions about knowledge payment: How to monetize? User retention? Content operation?

Wu Bingjian : I have invested in a knowledge payment company before. I found the founder on Zaihang. The CEO wanted to do an O2O printing project at that time. I said it was totally unreliable, but you are a very interesting person. Let’s establish a connection first. If your project is transformed, we can talk about it again.

From then on, this guy basically called me once a week for almost three months. He made three products in three months. The last product was called Panda Academy. It had one million users in the first month after it was launched. He did two things:

First, we condense a classic book of, for example, 500,000 words into 50,000 words, and then arrange it by day to make a six-month plan for you.

Second, use the community to supervise each other and stimulate your enthusiasm. Just do these two things, and the product form is very simple.

Later on, this project became the first one among our investment projects to break even.

So after observing this phenomenon, I started to look more at knowledge platform-type products. Through these products, I saw products like Lizhi Micro Course and Qianliao, and found that the amount of data was also quite scary.

Why is the payment for knowledge growing so fast? Can knowledge actually make money?

After thinking about it, I think there are a few points:

First, the realization of knowledge redefines knowledge. I have summarized a formula:

Good knowledge = new knowledge dissemination path * new knowledge density.

What does it mean? How did we acquire knowledge before Baidu came out? Either through reading or asking people, or after Baidu came out, I obtained it through Baidu.

Later, after some vertical websites came out, we obtained it through the vertical websites. Later, after WeChat came out, we obtained it through WeChat's point-to-point and face-to-face communication in Moments.

But you will find that we may still have some distrust in the previous knowledge dissemination paths. If you go to Baidu now, you will have a serious sense of distrust. So, can some big Vs or people around me give me some content that they have chewed over and then imparted to me.

Therefore, the path of knowledge dissemination is changing, and to a large extent, it is a change based on trust.

For example, Luoji Siwei . Later, I thought about why we started to mention Luoji Siwei. In fact, it was because we had trust in Luo Pang. Why did the amount of information we received increase so quickly later? It was Luo Pang who transferred this sense of trust to other big Vs.

So why is Qianliao growing so quickly? Because on the WeChat platform, it will produce medium V, big V and small V. Each public account may have 30,000 or 100,000 fans who generate trust. At this time, companies like Qianliao and Lizhi Micro Class provide them with a SaaS tool , which becomes a tool for building trust.

So to sum up, the first part is the change in the path of knowledge dissemination.

Secondly, the density of knowledge is actually changing. In the past, we were very patient when asked to read a book like "Out of Control", but today, few people can do this. The density of knowledge is too sparse. We need knowledge that has been squeezed out of water but still retains its nutrients.

The reason behind this is largely because everyone's time is becoming more and more fragmented. In fact, everyone hopes to get things done within half an hour or an hour, including VC. In the past, working in VC may have required reading a lot of reports and then chewing over a lot of things again. Now let's listen to what the experts around us say about this matter, and it will be more efficient to read the report later.

That is to say, this wave of so-called knowledge monetization is due to changes in knowledge itself, which mainly occurs in the path and density.

Second: What does this wave of knowledge change look like?

It's a bit like a new placebo, a new sense of ritual. In fact, the education we have received since childhood is that there is a golden house in books. On the one hand, reading brings us knowledge, but to a large extent it gives us a sense of ritual and makes our hearts feel more peaceful.

When I saw things like Lizhi Micro Courses, I began to define this group of users as "readers". In the past, when we were in junior high school, we all read a magazine called "Reader". The teacher told us that this book had many beautiful articles that could cultivate our minds. In fact, reading that book was of no use at all, but the entry threshold to reading that book was very low, making you feel like you were reading it every day and as if you were gaining something every day.

Why do we need this sense of ritual? It’s because we feel anxious in our hearts, and the anxiety comes from three aspects.

The first reason is largely due to the change of roles. We change from students to white-collar workers, from girls to mothers. These are all role changes. Therefore, we can see that there are a lot of maternal and child -related things on platforms like Qianliao and Lizhi Microclass, which have strong tool attributes.

For example, there is a lot of content teaching students how to enter the workplace, and a lot of content teaching wives how to prevent mistresses and how to deal with relationships with their husbands. In other words, after you finish listening to these courses, can you really prevent mistresses? It can't be prevented, but it makes you feel that I have listened, I have done my best, and I am learning every day. In other words, this is a feeling of anxiety about role change.

The second kind of anxiety I think comes from seeing what’s happening to the people around you. When I saw that XX suddenly made 300 million US dollars, I felt very anxious about this matter. That is to say, you would wonder why someone around you suddenly became strong and why I didn’t. So you will see that a lot of content in Lizhi Micro Courses is related to the content in the airport, such as how to become Jack Ma , and so-and-so teaches you how to make 10 million. This is the anxiety that arises after seeing the people around you become so and so.

The third sense of anxiety comes from the goal we set for ourselves since childhood, what kind of person we want to become. To achieve that goal, we repeatedly read books and attend tutoring classes. This is a long-term motivation. In fact, everyone is alleviating this anxiety to a certain extent.

There is one thing I haven't figured out yet and I'd like to discuss it with you all. Currently, for these platforms, the so-called "knowledge" has become a new and efficient way to obtain traffic , but it is not particularly clear how this wave of knowledge platforms will monetize it. How do we turn cash flow into revenue, and how do we turn revenue into profit?

Qu Kai : I would like to add another question. Although these platforms acquire traffic quickly, can they retain it?

Wu Bingjian : Yes. This is a rather difficult thing. When users listen to someone’s micro-course, it is based on their trust in that person, not the platform. So even though they have added fans, it is difficult to direct traffic to other anchors later.

Ji Shisan : In fact, we talked about many issues just now. For example, what may be hidden is how big the market is and how you make users feel like they have won a prize. This actually involves some specific product and operational techniques.

You will find that things that really sell well actually emphasize the sense of return, and the feeling of what you have gained at the last moment after listening to it. We are very good at this aspect, and we are quite good at it. Several other tools are slightly worse. Platforms that focus on content operations will basically work very hard in this regard. An article must make it clear what you have gained by paying for these 30 minutes and spending these 50 yuan.

This addictive feeling is actually very easy to achieve through technology and product operations . We were just talking about books, but the performance in this area is quite different.

Of course, we have been talking about the size of the market today. It is indeed difficult to judge how big the market is, but we do see a very obvious trend that more and more people are willing to pay for virtual things through small payments on the Internet. I think this habit is actually developing rapidly. From a field perspective, we think this is called the integration of publishing, media and education.

The big background is that the big products in these three areas in the past have actually become traditional and impractical. Education is too heavy. We have a demand for education, but it is too heavy to meet our needs today.

Publishing is too heavy. It takes half a year or a year to publish a book of 300 pages. Sometimes the author can finish writing a 100-page book, but in order to publish a book, he has to write 300 pages. When you, the reader, read it for half a day, you may find that there are only 20 minutes in the middle that you think are valuable. So why not find those 20 minutes and give them to you? This is actually the case.

The same goes for the media. How much can you really remember after reading through a large number of articles? In fact, I may read twenty articles a day, but I may only remember a few points. Can I bring these points to you and use various methods to help you remember a few points from the twenty articles you read today?

So I think everyone today is talking about the anxiety about knowledge updating, all kinds of anxieties. However, all kinds of anxieties have been solved in the past through the three fields of media, publishing and education. However, the products provided by these three fields are not good enough. Today, a new field has emerged, and this field is called knowledge payment.

It doesn’t matter whether it is called knowledge or not, but it tries to solve the psychological needs and comfort that people are looking for in this field. Moreover, its solution seems to be better than the solutions in the original three areas, or may better meet people's modern psychology. It is lighter, and its sense of gain will be very emphasized.

It makes you feel close to the personality through voice and video, and it is very well organized. In the past, I might only get 20 pages out of 300 pages. Today, we will take out the most useful parts. For example, when recording a 30-minute script, you actually need to revise it ten times and repeatedly think about what the user really needs.

The publisher might say that you should just put everything you want to say in one book. What I mean is that we should read the 300 pages and take out the most important thing that everyone wants to buy.

In addition, I am optimistic about the heavy operation type. I don’t believe that there is much opportunity for tools. A team can produce similar tools in half a month or a month. We must focus on operations in accordance with the overall idea to ensure the final user experience of each event. In the end, the focus was still on operations and copyright.

Other discussion summaries:

1) Should the platform be high-end or “low-end”?

If a platform wants to increase traffic and grow bigger, it must definitely lean towards the majority of users. For example, Ruke ’s goal this year is to resolutely develop in second-, third- and fourth-tier cities.

2) Can pure tool-based products based on WeChat also be big enough?

This type of product may be compared with the previous Weidian tool platform, both of which are empowerment tools based on the WeChat platform.

We discussed this issue at the time, and after the event ended, we saw the news that Youzan, created by Bai Ya, was listed in disguise, which was also very interesting. This may mean that even if it is a pure tool, it can be successful without considering traffic and entrances?

3) Should we focus on operations or tool platforms?

The tool platform first obtains traffic, and then can do heavy operations, depending on the conversion rate . The question with operations-heavy things is how sustainable and scalable they are. Moreover, the emphasis on operations means that the market is destined to be fragmented rather than monopolized. Each platform may have a number of IPs, so the development potential may be limited.

4) Does paying for knowledge really solve anxiety and is it sustainable?
“I never really finish a lot of the books I buy, but I keep buying them anyway.”

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