In this year of the knowledge economy, content started to make money, but is it a sustainable business?

On December 4, 2016, Himalaya FM's first "123 Knowledge Carnival" came to a close with a final transaction volume of 50.88 million. This time, this shopping carnival, which is no less than Double 11, is not about trading physical goods, but about knowledge that cannot be seen or touched.

In 2016, platforms such as Zhihu Live, Fenda , and Dedao emerged. This method of systematically organizing and refining knowledge and then packaging it to provide it to users has discovered new value for the knowledge economy.

It can be said that 2016 was a year of explosive growth in knowledge payment . Although it did not come from nothing, the development of the knowledge economy in the Internet era has shown a different posture, whether it is the formation of users' payment habits or the rise of multiple products or platforms.

Consumers never really paid for content

In the early days of human civilization, the forms of content creation and dissemination were very simple, but with the invention of computers and the advent of the information age, the extremely rich media forms and increasingly diversified content sources in modern society have provided the content market with huge room for development. But whether it is a short message in a newspaper or a best-selling book, although content production has long become a business, it has never been priced based on its value itself.

In today's content market, content products are almost always priced based on their dissemination media, and prices have little correlation with the value of the content itself. Publishers set prices for books based on production and distribution costs, and the same is true for movies and music. A copy of Southern Metropolis Daily costs 2 yuan, a copy of China Business Network Weekly costs 10 yuan, and an ordinary 2D movie ticket now costs about 30 yuan. But can you say that the content itself is worth that much money?

With the advent of the Internet era, the distribution costs of content products have been further reduced, and the sources of content acquisition for users have become more diversified. The surge in content sources has intensified market competition and further promoted the freeization of content. Chris Anderson, former editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, mentioned in his book Free:

The 21st century is an era of economics based on computer bytes. If something is transformed into computer software, when it reaches a large number of users with production and circulation costs approaching zero, its price will also approach zero.

For all content producers, the price is lowered by the average cost of production and uppered by the consumer's willingness to bid. When consumers' willingness to bid is at a low point, only reducing costs can ensure continued profits. In response to this, major media organizations have chosen to introduce third-party advertising to help them share the costs.

As a result, the production and sales of media content has become a business like this: attract users with high-quality content, but the content is almost given away for free; by inserting direct or indirect advertisements during the user's content consumption process, the user's "attention" is grabbed, thereby obtaining orders from advertisers.

Since advertising is directly linked to traffic, in order to get more advertising, content platforms focus more on acquiring traffic. However, high-quality content does not necessarily attract users. A rigorous and solid report may not be able to compete with a sensational headline. Many excellent media outlets that have put a lot of effort into content quality may not necessarily earn more advertising revenue.

At the same time, advertising as a profit model for the media has a ceiling, and the quantity and quality of advertising will affect the quality of the content, and the quality of the content directly affects consumers' evaluation of the media and platforms and their consumption decisions. Many people have turned to watching the “pure version” of TV series online because of the “5 minutes of drama and 2 hours of commercials” on TV.

On the one hand, it is impossible to make money from content, and on the other hand, advertising as a profit model does not seem to be sustainable. Traditional content payment seems to have reached a bottleneck.

Content started to make money this year, but this trend has been around for a long time.

Although paying for content has been around since ancient times, in the "free first" Internet age, paying for content still seems a bit "atavistic." Especially in 2016, which is known as the "capital winter", knowledge-based paid products represented by Zhihu Live, Fenda, and Dedao can still gain a place in the silent Internet market, which is quite worth our consideration.

In March 2015, Ji Shisan, the founder of Guokr.com, announced the launch of "Zaixing", where users can make an appointment with an "expert" from different fields on the Zaixing platform for offline question-answering at a price ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand yuan.

On April 1, 2016, Zhihu launched “ Zhihu ”, which uses a scratch-off lottery format to guide users to pay for “censored” key content and see the truth. Later, "Zhihu" was revised and voice answers and "eavesdropper" mode were added.

On May 15, 2016, Guokr launched Fenda, which encourages users to ask paid questions to experts from various professional fields through voice answers. The participation of internet celebrities , big Vs, and stars (such as Wang Sicong and Papi Jiang) has made Fenda unprecedentedly popular. Just one and a half months after its launch, Fenda already has more than 10 million listeners, 1 million paying users, and a transaction volume of more than 18 million yuan. After the Series A financing , Fenda’s valuation exceeded US$100 million.

On May 17, 2016, Zhihu launched Zhihu Live, which enables interactive communication between “guests” and “audiences” in the form of real-time chat. The "audience" needs to buy a ticket to participate in the Live, ask questions to the "guest" in the form of AMA text, and the "guest" answers in the form of voice. As of January 12, 2017, Zhihu has held more than 1,500 Zhihu Lives, with 737 “guests” earning an average hourly wage of 10,980 yuan. The maximum number of participants in a single event was 120,000, and the highest income from a single Zhihu Live event was 190,000 yuan.

On June 5, 2016, the "Get" platform under Luoji Siwei launched its first paid subscription column - "Li Xiang's Business Insider". Currently, the column has more than 88,000 subscribers and annual revenue exceeds 17.51 ​​million. The Duoduo platform already has more than a dozen well-known columns, including "Wu Jun·Letters from Silicon Valley", "The Road to Financial Freedom", "Li Xiang's Business Insider", "Wan Weigang·Elite Daily Lessons", and "Xue Feng Concert". As of December last year, Duoduo's subscription column revenue exceeded 100 million.

(Image from: Jianshu)

When the war of Internet content has shifted from the "battle for platform traffic" to the "battle for knowledge payment", Weibo, which has nearly 300 million monthly active users, has inevitably become a new big player in the field of knowledge payment.

On December 16, 2016, Sina Weibo launched the “Weibo Q&A” feature. The platform gives bloggers the authority to set the price for asking questions. Fans can ask questions to bloggers in a paid form, and the bloggers will answer them in text form. In addition to the paid Q&A format, Weibo Q&A also allows users other than the questioner to pay 1 yuan to "watch the answers", and the answers that are initially in a "paid" state will be made public for free after three months.

Simply put, Weibo Q&A is equivalent to the text version of Fenda. But for Weibo, a company with huge traffic and diversified profit-making methods, it does not seem to be in a hurry to be a pioneer in knowledge monetization. According to data released by Sina Weibo, in 2016, of the 11.7 billion yuan in revenue earned by Weibo's self-media , e-commerce revenue reached 10.8 billion yuan, advertising revenue was 430 million yuan, and content payment was only 470 million yuan. Weibo CEO Wang Gaofei once said:

Weibo Q&A is not a sub-product of Weibo, nor will it have an independent entrance. It is one of the "self-media empowerment tools ", just like rewards and paid subscriptions.

Judging from the overall situation in 2016, content payment, or more precisely the knowledge economy, has gradually moved from a niche to the mainstream and has become an important part of the emerging Internet economy. But in fact, content payment has already entered people's lives invisibly several years ago.

In the era when smartphones were not yet popular, in addition to circulating physical books that were almost torn apart among classmates and friends, many people may have had the experience of downloading various pirated novels online. At that time, all kinds of txt documents in computers and mobile phones were like magical artifacts. Later, with the increase of high-quality content, literary websites such as Qidian Chinese Network and Shanda Literature successively launched paid reading models and began to cultivate people's habit of paying for content.

Later, the popularity of mobile devices such as smartphones, laptops, and tablets opened a new chapter in content payment. Nowadays, we can not only download and buy genuine books online, but also listen to music, watch TV series, and even take classes and study at home as long as we pay a fee.

From traditional media such as the Wall Street Journal launching paid subscriptions, to Guokr launching the online education diversion website MOOC Academy, to video sites such as iQiyi, Youku, and Tencent launching paid membership packages, and the increasing number of paid genuine audio sources on NetEase Cloud Music and QQ Music. It can be said that although there has been a trend of paying for knowledge in the content payment field in 2016, years of market education and increasingly strong demand have already cultivated people's habit of paying for high-quality content.

In the early days of the Internet, technological innovation reduced the cost of information dissemination to an unprecedented level. Exchanging free content for traffic, and then exchanging traffic for advertising, once became a model for the Internet business model . People of that period were thirsty for knowledge as if they had just been rescued from an information desert, hoping to obtain as much information and news as possible.

But what follows is information overload. Although the cost of obtaining information has been infinitely reduced, filtering out the most valuable information from massive amounts of information has become an extremely costly task. When people's concern about time costs gradually exceeds the channel costs of obtaining information, the demand for high-quality content is gradually amplified, and the pricing of content begins to gradually return to its value itself.

With the development of mobile Internet , payment scenarios represented by WeChat rewards and video website subscription services have provided good market education for content payment. Coupled with increasingly convenient and diverse mobile payment methods, people now have the demand and ability to pay for high-quality content.

What is more noteworthy is that with the rise of the emerging middle class, paying for high-quality content actually satisfies a kind of middle-class anxiety that is prevalent in society. In Murong Xuecun's article "The Anxiety of China's Middle Class", China's middle class are not only anxious about their property, but also worried about bad air, food of questionable quality, and even the government's policies and legal environment. In short, the advent of the information age has not only brought more convenient ways to obtain information, but also brought people more "space for worries". As long as the information can be obtained, it may become a source of anxiety for people.

On the one hand, this anxiety reflects people's uneasiness about information asymmetry, and on the other hand, it also shows their desire for high-quality content. When the Get column analyzes the economic trends for people, when the experts in Fenda provide healthy diet plans, when the Zhihu big V gives practical knowledge about anti-smog masks...regardless of the results of "learning", people's anxiety about information and knowledge can be cured to a large extent.

What are the characteristics and risks of these paid contents?

From traditional news to customized information services, paying for content is becoming more and more commonplace, but in the era of knowledge economy, paid content has a different color.

Broadly speaking, the various types of content we obtain are actually a "recombination" of the myriad of information in the world. For information and us, the audience, the flow of information between the two is unequal, and various communication media are responsible for breaking this unequal relationship.

In the DIKW system, information is divided into four levels: data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. Each level has more characteristics than the next. The data layer comes from the original observation and measurement data, on which analysis is added to form information. The knowledge layer adds "how to use it", while the wisdom layer focuses more on the future and contains implications and lagged effects.

(Image from: Pinterest)

Initially, the mission of the media was merely to satisfy the most basic right to know, and the news information disseminated was universal and still at the information level. This type of information is fast and timely, and can attract considerable traffic in a short period of time, thus creating economies of scale. For this type of content, its intrinsic value has little to do with pricing.

But when the value of the content itself becomes the pricing standard, the era of paid content has truly arrived. This type of content adds more personalized results of mental labor on top of basic information, ultimately forming a "comprehensive content service package" centered on knowledge and experience. This type of information is closer to the knowledge level, and even transcends the knowledge level and moves closer to the wisdom level.

The operation and distribution of this type of content has gradually moved away from traditional media and become closer to the publishing and education industries. Luoji Siwei CEO Tuo Buhua once pointed out that Get hopes to create two kinds of knowledge:

• Stock knowledge: in the past, it was mainly in the form of publication;
• Incremental knowledge: In an ever-changing world, a large amount of knowledge that does not have time to be written into books will be synchronized to users as soon as possible. Even if it is later falsified, it can be provided with updates.

On the one hand, the new form of content payment has a shorter "publishing" cycle; on the other hand, through the use of richer carriers and innovative Internet technologies, the new form of content payment can connect users' personalized knowledge needs with experts in various industries in a customized form, realizing "making money from education in a media way."

Just like “limited edition” to fashion luxury goods, scarcity is also the basis for content to be “sellable”. Guokr CEO Ji Shisan believes that content is only worth paying for if it meets at least one of the two requirements: scarcity or customization.

In more cases, paid content is increasingly becoming "knowledge fast food" when people want to quickly master a subject.

Many people must have had this experience: following a lot of public accounts on WeChat but not having time to read them, and subscribing to columns on Duoduo that are constantly updated but not having time to read them... This behavior of "buying books like a mountain falling and reading books like pulling a thread" actually comes from our deep knowledge anxiety in the era of information explosion.

The publishing cycle of best-selling books is getting shorter and shorter, the list of must-read books is getting longer and longer, and when others are discussing the best buzzwords of the year, you are still regretting the hot news you missed because you accidentally fell asleep last night. When the speed of reading gradually cannot keep up with the speed of information updating, an inexplicable feeling of anxiety sweeps over me.

In this situation, even if we buy a book but don't read it, subscribe to a column but don't listen to it, or just glance at the answers from big Vs, our anxiety can be cured. Because under one's own psychological suggestion, buying it is equivalent to reading it in the future, and reading it is equivalent to mastering it. More convenient content-paying products such as Fenda and Get can directly provide us with compressed and practical knowledge, which can meet our learning needs in fragmented time anytime and anywhere. This kind of "dry goods" learning has subverted the traditional "accumulation and then release" learning logic and has become a ritual proof to satisfy our knowledge anxiety.

At the same time, the new content payment platform shows very obvious entertainment and social characteristics. Ji Shisan once said:

We need to have fans. Only with fans can you get attention and what you say can create better value. This should be the result that every intellectual should aspire to. Why do you reject him? As intellectuals, don’t we need fans? Therefore, knowledge economy + fan economy is what Fenda wants to do. We must be determined to do the knowledge economy, and we must be determined to have fans. There is no contradiction at all.

Unlike previous social platforms (Weibo, etc.) that only provide pictures, texts, or group videos and live broadcasts , platforms such as Fenda provide a more private and customized social experience. By spending only a few to dozens of dollars, you can have an "intimate contact" with a celebrity, and the introduction of the "eavesdropping" mechanism brings people's instinct to voyeurism to the extreme. Just like the most popular question on Fenda is "What posture does Wang Sicong like", when knowledge-based learning that requires more effort and time is placed next to curious entertainment gossip, human nature will most likely tend to choose the latter.

Considering the time cost required for screening, users often pay for people rather than content. When sponsoring a Live event on Zhihu or subscribing to a column on Get, in addition to the established social relationships, the content provider's impressive resume and high ratings are also important criteria for users to choose to pay. The big Vs and big names on the content payment platforms are gradually becoming "knowledge influencers", and knowledge learning based on following the big Vs is increasingly becoming a fan behavior full of ritual.

Under this human instinct, the entertainment and social aspects of paid content overshadow its knowledge aspect, and it is unlikely that knowledge will be truly traded. The platform may eventually become a celebrity influence monetization platform under the banner of knowledge.

Can the paid content market make knowledge sexy?

There are currently two types of users in the content market. One is "everyone", which can also be called "everyone", and the other is individuals with special needs. For "everyone", their needs are often focused on basic information and news, and they pursue essential content that is universal, cost-effective and efficient; while for individuals with special needs, the real value of content is what is attached to basic information.

The logic of content products that meet the needs of "everyone" is similar to that of the PC era, which is to expand the platform, provide as much information as possible, attract traffic, and then monetize the traffic through advertising. For example, Toutiao does not produce content itself. After becoming a super large traffic platform, it relies on advertising distribution to make profits. As analyzed above, in this type of product, it is unlikely that the content itself will be charged.

(Image source: PPTMind)

As the cost of obtaining free content becomes lower and lower, and the demand for more high-quality content brought about by "consumption upgrade", "everyone" is slowly transforming into individuals with special needs, and high-quality paid content is gradually becoming the "new rigid demand" in the content market. Through celebrity endorsements, group effects and other means, added values ​​such as identity, social status, interests and hobbies can turn content into a kind of "social currency", which is a shortcut for ordinary people or the "pseudo middle class" to quickly achieve class leap.

It can be said that in the era of paid content, the real pain point of users has become creating a sense of group belonging or ritual through content, and what can make users want to pay must be high-quality top content.

From the supply side, high-quality top content is scarce, and due to the non-standard nature of content products, high-quality and sustainable content output cannot be guaranteed for either content producers or content distribution platforms. This determines that paid content platforms will ultimately not be able to take the "mass" route and become a high-traffic platform like Taobao.

However, the "centralized" nature of the paid content market does not conflict with the diversity of content. Ji Shisan's assistant Wu Yunfei believes that in the Internet environment, the definition of knowledge is not just what is on the top of the ivory tower. Everyone is multifaceted and diverse, and what they think of as knowledge is not the same, but if the right things can reach the right people, this knowledge is valuable.

Just like some people on Fenda follow the gossip about Wang Sicong and Papi Jiang, and some people care about economic data and housing price trends, the threshold for paid content only screens out people who are unwilling to pay for content, and it cultivates users' payment habits. For the paid content market that is exploring business models, providing "dry goods" to those who want them and satisfying those who like entertainment gossip is indeed a way to maximize profits.

After all, knowledge has never been something high-brow, and when knowledge begins to become a business, in addition to discussing whether it should be done or not, we should pay more attention to how to monetize knowledge in the best way. Nowadays, whether it is content products or other products, the era of "charging too early will harm user experience" has long passed, and only "simple and crude" money-making methods are disgusting. Truly brilliant paid content will have a profit model conceived from the very beginning of the product's launch, while cultivating users and the market, allowing users to willingly pay for high-quality content.

For users living in the era of information explosion, 2016 has seen a wave of "centralized baptism" of content payment products. With the increase in the number of products and the innovation of gameplay, users' tastes are gradually becoming more "picky". Before they become aesthetically fatigued with the knowledge economy, the threshold for paying for content has become higher. Therefore, it remains unknown whether the content payment business model currently explored can continue to exist.

The Science Squirrel Club once said that science should be made sexy. Although the monetization of knowledge is still in a relatively primitive and primary trial-and-error stage, it has at least ushered in an era of knowledge sharing and users willing to pay for high-quality content. In order to make knowledge more sexy, content payment has taken the first small step.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

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