Moji Weather is about to go public. How far can Moji, which makes 99% of its profits from advertising, go?

The business model of tool products has always been a difficult problem that entrepreneurs are troubled by, especially when they reach a certain scale. Now the weather tool Moji Weather is also going to be listed. Unlike Meitu, 99% of Moji Weather's profits come from advertising. How far can Moji go with its single profit model?

1. What about Moji Weather products?

As is international practice, let us first introduce Ink Weather.

Moji Weather was founded in 2010. Its main products and services fall into three categories: providing users with weather forecasts, current scene communities, news and life information services through the Moji Weather app in a free model; providing advertising and marketing services to commercial advertisers based on the Moji Weather app; and selling Air Fruit, a smart hardware that can monitor surrounding weather conditions.

Let’s look at the products first.

There are several main scenarios for weather applications:

1. When the weather is bad, I open the app to see how long the weather will last.
2. When you wake up in the morning, you open the app to check the weather, but the demand is not very strong. Generally, users will judge whether it is a good day based on whether there is sunshine outside the window. If there is no sun and it is cloudy, they will open the app to check whether it will rain.
3. If you plan to travel to a certain place, open the weather app to see the future weather conditions there.

These three scenarios should be the scenarios that every weather app should satisfy users. However, when Uncle Ding downloaded and opened Ink Weather again after many years, what he was greeted by was the background of a Mercedes-Benz speeding on the highway. In addition to the real-time weather and temperature, the visual center of the entire picture was on the Mercedes-Benz background and a little man.

To check the future weather forecast, you need to scroll down to another page. The Mercedes-Benz background still makes Uncle Ding feel uncomfortable. If you continue to scroll down, you will see various advertisements and information. Clicking the button on the upper left of the status bar will take you directly to the " Today's Headlines " page. Of course, this is Moji's strategy in information and an attempt to transform tools into communities. The same attempt is also made in the second Tab - Time Scene.

The real-life picture community is a good entry point for Moji to enter the community. Everyone likes beautiful things, and they are easy to share, especially when traveling. On the other hand, it allows people who are away from home to open their homes and take a look at the scenes of their hometowns. When they miss their hometowns, it can encourage users to share their current feelings and scenery. The design of a large camera button floating in the finger touch hot zone is also to encourage users to share.

In the last tab, my personal page, there are modules such as friend dynamics, leisure and entertainment, Moji hot spots, functional services, etc. This is also what Moji hopes to create a closed loop from tools to social networking to services. However, during the experience, the functional services are all based on H5 design, with slow response speed and poor interactive experience. This is also a problem with H5 embedding.

I will just briefly introduce the product here. The design is quite standard, and there are too many advertisements, consulting and other contents other than weather. But Moji has managed to go public anyway, which is very rare. This is also what I want to talk about regarding the monetization model of Moji Weather.

2. Moji Weather has a single profit model

Checking the weather is a basic need for people, and Moji Weather seized the opportunity to retain the first batch of users early on. As of today, it has achieved 470 million installations, 35 million daily active users, and 107 million monthly active users. Its penetration rate in the weather application field has reached 56.67%, making it a unicorn in the weather field.

But let's take a look at the revenue structure of Moji Weather in the first half of 2016:

| An attempt to transform from tool to community

The first is the low frequency of ink and the limited time of use. Three main scenarios have been mentioned above. After users obtain weather information, they basically will not open the app a second time. It is a common feature of tools to use it and leave it. Although Alipay is also a national-level product, it is far less active than WeChat . Therefore, Alipay’s series of actions this year are all aimed at increasing the frequency of user usage.

Moji is no exception. The purpose of Moji Weather is to create a community for sharing scenery. The most important thing about a community is the aggregation of interests, which Moji Weather obviously does not have. From the perspective of a scenery sharing community alone, on the one hand, the quality of the pictures is not guaranteed, and on the other hand, the weather application itself is limited in its attributes and its sociality is too weak, making it difficult to succeed.

As for other information content and services, Uncle Ding does not want to comment on them. Putting a lot of content that is not related to the weather not only takes up memory, but also makes users feel confused.

In 2016, Moji Weather proposed the concept of "Weather+". Instead of piling up a bunch of information that few people read, it is better to create some practical functions of Weather+, such as Weather+ Travel, which plans routes, transportation, clothing, etc. for users based on the destinations entered by users.

Or from the perspective of care, users can set the city where their relatives are located, and receive intelligent push messages based on the weather conditions in their city, as well as reminders to add clothes and other thoughtful functions. This will also increase the frequency of user usage. Starting from this basis is always better than piling up consultations.

| Smart hardware Air Fruit failed

Air Fruit is a smart hardware launched by Moji Weather in 2014. In fact, it was a very good idea to release a smart hardware that combines software and hardware after the free app gained a large number of users, but Moji ruined this good hand.

Rather than understanding the current air quality, users need solutions. A piece of hardware that can only detect air is sold for 999. In comparison, the air purifiers with detection and purification functions later launched by Xiaomi and Cheetah Mobile are only 699. This directly announced the failure of Air Fruit and missed a good opportunity to make smart hardware.

| Advertising is actually doing well

After failing in community and hardware, Moji Weather had no choice but to choose the advertising monetization model. A comment on 36Kr said that Moji Weather is a company that treats advertising as a product and advertising services as half of its main business. As a company that produces tool-based products, making advertising more refined may be a way of life. This may be the biggest inspiration that Moji Weather has given us.

However, all major mobile phone manufacturers have their own weather apps and their product designs are not lazy. The key is that there are no advertisements. How far can Ink Weather, which is full of advertisements, go? Let's wait and see.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media information flow

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