Can "useless" paid content activate Douban, which has been slow for twelve years?

Last Friday, the poet Bei Dao did a session on Douban to interact with netizens.

Several days before the event, Douban posted an event preview in a prominent position on its homepage. The theme of this interaction is #Bei Dao talks to you about poetry#. Douban netizens can ask Bei Dao any questions related to poetry.

This is a very new thing for Bei Dao, who moved abroad 28 years ago and has been silent for many years after returning to China, as well as for those netizens who grew up reading his poems.

"As a poet, what kind of person are you in life?" a Douban netizen asked Bei Dao. Bei Dao's answer was as honest as ever. He said that he was "a boring person, dull and monotonous" and "chasing the ticks of the clock every day."

1 hour, 28 questions and answers, an online interaction that did not attract much attention on the Internet (putting aside the "troublemaking" by internet celebrity Dagugugu Chicken), Bei Dao was deeply impressed by the questions asked by Douban netizens.

If it weren't for this collaboration, he would have had almost no contact with the Internet in his life. In fact, Bei Dao opened his own Douban account a few months ago with the help of Douban staff.

On March 8, the audio program "Wake Up - Poetry Class of Bei Dao and Friends" (hereinafter referred to as "Wake Up") edited by him became the first audio program launched on Douban's paid product Douban Time . His Douban account gained more than 6,000 followers within 5 hours.

Douban Time launched two paid products, "Wake Up" and "Bai Xianyong's Dream of the Red Chamber"

The popularity of "Wake Up" exceeded Bei Dao's imagination. Within one week of its launch, "Wake Up - Poetry Class by Bei Dao and Friends", priced at 128 yuan, sold over 10,000 copies. The 68-year-old Bei Dao has become Douban’s “new internet celebrity” and has his own “fangirls”.

The market performance of "Wake Up" also exceeded Yao Wentan's expectations. However, as the person in charge of Douban Time and Douban's vice president in charge of content, she felt that choosing "poetry" as the first product to debut was not a difficult decision.

"Didn't someone say that there are two things closest to God, one is poetry and the other is music," Yao Wentan told San Sheng. "We chose poetry as the entry point for Douban Time, mainly because it is highly consistent with Douban's temperament."

It is easy to experience what Yao Wentan calls the "Douban temperament" in "Wake Up". For example, at the beginning of each issue, Bei Dao recorded the same opening remarks: "Great poetry is like spiritual fission, releasing huge energy, and its rumbling echoes reach us through the mist of time."

"Reaching us through time" is also what Douban wants to do. "The original Douban users are no longer as active as before, as their time is divided," said Yao Wentan. "We need to reactivate these people."

Douban, which has been around for twelve years, has a group of interesting users, but this group of people has always been in a state of "small country with few people", and everyone is "growing" in their own spiritual corner. The launch of Douban Time is precisely the anxiety that Douban is facing at the moment.

After "Wake Up", Douban Time launched "Bai Xianyong's Detailed Explanation of Dream of the Red Chamber". The logic of the two paid content is the same, using courses taught by cultural celebrities to interact with young people on Douban.

Bei Dao and his friends read poems for "Wake Up"

Inspiring Douban through paid columns on Douban Time and cultural celebrities is just a small start. A greater effort that Douban Time needs to make is to discover the big names in various industries who are "lurking" in Douban. In the future, film critics, music critics, and photographers will all be included in Douban Time's payment system.

Yao Wentan prefers to use the word "growth". "The reason why Douban Time is called Douban "Time" is that the deeper meaning is that we hope to grow together with users."

From poetry to Dream of the Red Chamber, Douban Time starts with "classics"

Douban Time launched its first paid content product, "Wake Up"

Douban Time currently has two programs online, "Poetry Class" of "Wake Up" and "Pai Xianyong's Detailed Explanation of Dream of the Red Chamber". It’s not a hit content and can’t teach people how to make money, but these “useless” things sell quite well.

When selecting content, the first thing Yao Wentan and her team thought of was to bring classic content to Douban.

These "classic contents" include literary works such as poetry and novels, as well as movies , music, and even design and architecture. Yao Wentan and the planning team thought of dozens of topics, and then selected those that best reflected "Douban user needs" and were feasible to promote.

After the Chinese New Year, multiple projects were launched simultaneously. In terms of presentation format, some are text, some are audio, and it depends more on the fit with the project. There is no particular preference.

"Wake Up" and "Bai Xianyong's Detailed Explanation of Dream of the Red Chamber" were the first two works to "come out".

Setting "Wake Up" as the first column also conforms to Douban's latest definition of creating a "spiritual corner". "Everyone wants to enjoy their time in a spiritual corner, and poetry is a good entry point. So the first column "Wake Up" is about 'Poetry is like a beam of light that can illuminate people who wake up'. This kind of spiritual temperament is very consistent with Douban users." Yao Wentan told "Sansheng".

The original work of "Wake Up" is a collection of poems selected and edited by Bei Dao himself. After the book had become a best-seller, the copyright holder, Huozi Culture, considered that a deeper interpretation was needed, and only then did they reach a consensus with Douban Time to create an audio interpretation column.

This format is naturally different from earlier podcast-style reading programs. Based on the original book, the audio program provides a deeper interpretation of the text. It's not like reading, but more like a lecture.

In "Wake Up", Douban Time, Huozi Culture and poet Bei Dao jointly selected 52 poems, and then asked different poets to interpret the related works. Bei Dao and Douban spent a lot of time selecting suitable "lecturers".

"Why let Liu Wenfei talk about Pushkin? Because he specializes in Russian literature and is also a translator. He is the best and most suitable person to talk about Pushkin," Yao Wentan told Sansheng.

Even harder than finding people is getting them to “speak” in the right way. Most of these “lecturers” are academics and university professors and have no experience in producing audio. When the first batch of recordings were collected, no one was satisfied with the results. The biggest problem lies in the understanding of the scenario. "The first thing we tell the lecturers is that you are talking to one person, not a group of people," said Yao Wentan.

The two paid programs, "Wake Up" and "Pai Xianyong's Commentary on A Dream of Red Mansions", have two important partners, namely Huozi Culture and Utopia. Both parties also "went with the flow" to finalize the programs.

Yao Wentan’s collaboration with Utopia started earlier. In 2015, Ideal Country established the "Kanlixiang" brand with the aim of "leveraging Ideal Country's rich author resources and utilizing new media and technologies to develop cultural products in various forms."

Subsequently, Kanlixiang launched a number of cultural video programs, including "One Thousand and One Nights" by Liang Wendao, "Locals" by Chen Danqing, "Heard" by Ma Shifang, and "Round Table" by Dou Wentao, and Yao Wentan was the producer of these programs.

Before cooperating with Douban on paid columns, the two parties had actually been cooperating on a small scale, such as e-books, Douban paper books, etc. This partnership continues into Douban Time’s projects.

"Bai Xianyong's Detailed Account of Dream of the Red Chamber" is the first product of the cooperation between the two parties. The discussions started in December last year and lasted for four months.

The program's audio editor Zhang Dengyi told Sansheng that the most difficult problem is that the quality of the original course recording cannot be changed. During the editing process, the recording quality of the first 30 minutes of one CD was particularly poor. In desperation, they had to contact Pai Hsien-yung, who had already returned to Taiwan, and typed out the spoken transcript of the recording word for word and re-recorded it.

Up to now, the production and launch of columns on Douban Time have not yet formed a complete cycle. Yao Wentan said that it will gradually return to normal track starting from April.

“Useless” Douban paid content

In the view of writer Fang Jun, the rise of knowledge payment comes from the abundance of knowledge, not its scarcity. The abundance and ubiquity of content make people willing to pay to filter out higher quality content.

What really ignited the trend of paying for content was the "star" product Fenda . The Fenda APP was launched in May 2016, and its transaction volume exceeded 18 million in 42 days, triggering a carnival among celebrities and ordinary people, and the slogan of paying for knowledge began to spread.

Since June last year, Himalaya FM has transformed into a knowledge payment platform, 36Kr's paid column has been launched, Luoji Siwei has focused on the " Get " app, Zhihu Live, and Weibo has launched Q&A, etc. Content payment has become an area that major platforms are actively deploying.

Douban has also launched its own paid content product - Douban Time. The first episode of Douban Time, "Wake Up", also attracted widespread attention when it was launched. One reason was because of the big trend of content payment, and the other was that the column launched by Douban Time had a unique temperament and was worthy of Douban.

In fact, after nearly a year of development, content payment has formed two product logics.

One is an e-commerce platform similar to the "Get App". Luo Zhenyu once said that the logic of Luoji Siwei is to squeeze out the water from knowledge and compress it into "capsules" to feed those who pursue speed and efficiency. The other is a platform logic similar to Zhihu and Weibo, which has a sufficient number of users and then develops user value.

Obviously, the logic of Douban Time belongs to the second type, which also determines that Douban Time is currently an embedded function growing in the Douban App and needs to rely on the 150 million Douban users.

This platform-type product logic may also explain why "Fenda" has gradually become silent from a hot product, because it does not have high-stickiness inherent users. This is exactly the advantage of platform-based paid products. For the platform, it is an incremental increase. If it is done well, it is fine. If it is done poorly, it will not have much negative impact on the platform.

After the rise of content payment, the first thing to be affected was the competition among major platforms for "knowledge stars".

In fact, this is exactly what Yao Wentan is facing now. "I suddenly discovered a terrible problem these two days. Some platforms sign contracts with cultural figures, which fill up the speakers' time with high-frequency programs, leaving them with no free time to do programs on other platforms."

What Yao Wentan complained about was that these speakers and programs did not match the temperament of those platforms, but were still attracted away by capital.

Concerns about the prospects of paid content may always be there. Someone once said that generally a creator’s knowledge and skills can be taught within half a year, which also indicates that these "fast food" columns will become more and more watery in the future.

This is exactly where Douban Time wants to differentiate itself. To some extent, Douban Time provides "useless" content in the current environment.

Regarding this differentiated product, Yao Wentan summarized the significance of Douban Time as "it is better to teach a man to fish than to give him a fish." "It is something that seems useless but is meaningful to your life."

"Useless" content has become Douban Time's most distinctive feature in this wildly growing content payment field. Of course, all this depends on the current Douban. For Douban, which is relatively short of capital, this is a fast path that is in line with Douban's temperament and can quickly enter this market.

Return to the exploration of Douban user value

The day before Douban Time went online was Douban’s 12th birthday.

In a column on PenAiteZhi, the author pointed out that the reason why Douban is slow is because of its business. "Because in terms of products, Douban has been rapidly trialing, erroring and iterating, whether on PC or mobile."

In Yao Wentan's view, after twelve years of development, Douban has accumulated a group of interesting users. This group of young users in first- and second-tier cities has shaped Douban's brand.

Yao Wentan agrees with Douban's definition of "spiritual corner". "In the noisy Internet life, Douban can bring you content that brings you beautiful inner feelings. It is a spiritual corner for you."

In fact, Douban’s slowness on the business level refers to its slowness in developing user value. There are nearly 250 million spiritual corners on Douban, but these corners are in a state of "no communication" with each other.

What Douban needs to do now is to break down the barriers between these corners, so as to exert economies of scale on a large user base.

In fact, Douban made great efforts in developing user value last year. The reason why we established Feichuan Pictures under Douban Reading is that we took a fancy to the rich original literary works on Douban Reading.

But the pace is not fast enough, and the mission at this stage falls on Douban Time.

For Douban, it has already established solid tool- based application products, such as various movie and book ratings, but what it lacks is content-based products.

"Douban Time is not just a paid product. Many people are paying for it, and we do the same, but it is not like that at all. We still consider it from the perspective of the Douban platform itself," Yao Wentan told San Sheng.

After first recruiting external celebrities such as Bei Dao and Bai Xianyong to represent Douban Time, Douban Time's long-term goal is to discover the big names "lurking" among Douban users. Commentators, musicians, architects, photographers, etc. on the site will be reincorporated into this system as content producers.

Yao Wentan is currently doing this. In mid-April, Douban Time will launch a paid text column, "They are all very young creators, but they are really great."

In Douban Time’s plan, this group of people are Douban users themselves, but they are “diving” very deeply. Douban Time finds them one by one, lets this group of people create, and lets people with similar interests build content products of the same system.

"Constructing systematic classic content" is the effect Yao Wentan wants to achieve in the paid column. "If you are a user and you subscribe to a movie column, you will have sufficient knowledge about movies from the column in this year."

Perhaps looking back now, Douban should have started mining its users a long time ago. The big names who were active on Douban early on moved to WeChat public accounts after the platform itself lacked a good recommendation mechanism. In a sense, public accounts are also paid content products.

It is clear that the Internet is not only noisy, but the competition for users is always ongoing. For Douban at present, Douban Time is aimed at two levels. In terms of time, "good content and creators here will make you spend more time on Douban"; in terms of space, "these contents make Douban an online literary and artistic exchange space." Perhaps another way to express it is that Douban just wants to improve on the content level that it didn't do well before.

Yao Wentan prefers to use the word "growth". "Since Douban Time, we have attached great importance to exploring user value. Therefore, growing together with users will be an important part of the growth of the Douban platform. As Douban platform grows with users, it will naturally grow as well."

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