How big is the space for content e-commerce that directly realizes the value of the knowledge economy?

At present, with the popularity of " Fenda ", "Zhihu Live", "Luoji Siwei", and "Li Xiang Business Review" in the "Get APP", the discussion of knowledge economy has become popular on the Internet almost overnight. Following the content entrepreneurship boom, content e-commerce is hot again, as if giving entrepreneurs in the content entrepreneurship boom a shot in the arm, and providing a smooth road for content e-commerce to realize its value...

However, as an observer, Dao Ge repeatedly thinks about the core of this hot content e-commerce phenomenon. Although it objectively exists as a basic or standard model for content entrepreneurship monetization, its development space is limited. The core essence lies in the fact that the volume of content that can be used for direct e-commerce monetization is not large, and it has strong O2O service attributes, which seriously limits the size of its market. Just like the current situation of WeChat brushing reading volume, it has a lot to do with the insufficient overall supply of high-quality content and the fact that there is not much high-quality information that can be produced at such a high frequency.

There are two mainstream models of content e-commerce. The first is that content itself is sold directly as a commodity, a typical example of which is paid reading of content. The so-called content can be directly sold as a commodity, such as the membership fees of "Luoji Siwei" and the paid subscriptions in "Li Xiang Business Review". All belong to this category. The second is that content itself is used as a tool to achieve traffic aggregation or value output, and ultimately guides consumers or audiences to consume through e-commerce to achieve the effect of content attracting e-commerce transactions. This is the so-called content leads to the monetization logic of e-commerce transactions.

As for the content that is directly traded as a commodity, most of the time the selected materials are concentrated on a personalized knowledge with personal characteristics, and more often on the experiential component, which is often expressed through content of an opinion nature, or achieved through a good user experience (such as short video live broadcast , etc.). Compared with the massive amount of popular news information content, its total amount of knowledge is relatively small, or in other words, its summary information on the core laws of all things in the world, especially the basic common sense that has direct guiding significance for people's daily lives, is itself limited. Therefore, the range and absolute number of materials that can be sold are small.

However, all of this content is concentrated in a small elite group, the top 1% of the audience. Therefore, the number of people who can monetize content through e-commerce is very limited, and the overall market capacity becomes very limited.

The truth is simple. In a sense, there is only so much knowledge and experience that is truly useful to the audience. There are only two ways to communicate and express simple truths more efficiently and to achieve greater value. One is to complicate the simple truth. For example, some consulting agencies and transformation consultants do not talk about solutions directly at the beginning. They first talk about many social phenomena, and then deny everything that an enterprise has done before. Before talking about its core things, most of the content is actually garbage, which is to cover up the simple core of knowledge and experience.

Another way is to conduct offline experiential teaching , such as scenario teaching, hands-on case teaching, face-to-face guidance, etc., the so-called offline education. In the process, in order to achieve the ultimate effect, the so-called auxiliary teaching experience process design, auxiliary communication skills, auxiliary scene influence, auxiliary equipment, etc., the auxiliary content almost exceeds the essence of the core knowledge. It is not so much the realization of the value of the content itself, but the realization of tools such as education process design and scene equipment. For example, for over-packaged moon cakes, the price of the moon cakes is not so much the value of the packaging materials, if the cost of the packaging materials exceeds the cost of the moon cakes themselves.

Therefore, the knowledge economy itself is an objectively existing content monetization model, and content e-commerce, which is more inclined to the e-commerce of knowledge and experience, is the most direct way. However, due to its inherent characteristics of personalization, O2O attributes, and limited overall size, the final result is that although it is a monetization method, its scale, or the room for imagination, is not large, and the ceiling is obvious.

In order to cover up this reality, various ways of monetizing the pan-knowledge economy, such as content e-commerce, consulting, and training industries, are all over-packaging knowledge and experience itself as auxiliary content, which ultimately leads to over-packaging of knowledge and experience content. While failing to enhance the overall dissemination of knowledge and experience in society, it also wastes more time of more people, because excessive packaging and experience settings may not really play any substantial role in the final dissemination of knowledge and experience content, but in reality it costs everyone's time.

The tide of knowledge economy is coming, and content e-commerce, as a way to directly realize the value of knowledge economy, has limited development space, relatively high threshold and immediate ceiling. It can be used as an auxiliary monetization model, but it may not be a long-term solution as a core business monetization model.

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The author of this article @Luan Chunhui is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!