How to capture users from the new Internet model

The Internet model from 2012 to 2015 mainly consists of four steps.

Old Model

The first step is to spend money to buy traffic.

The second step is to provide subsidies to promote transactions.

The third step is large-scale financing, to see who has more generous subsidies, or who raises funds faster and has a larger layout, and then merge. The purpose is to clear the market.

In the fourth step, monopoly emerges. The so-called market clearing mentioned just now refers to price increases, and companies can now make profits.

Nowadays, many giant companies or other platform companies, such as Didi, follow similar models and processes. However, today, the previous model cannot be replicated. Why? Because we were stuck at the first step of buying traffic, the value of traffic may have increased ten to twenty times compared to the beginning of 2013.

New Model

Thus, a new model emerged. Content is very important in the new model.

The first step is to define a set of values.

The second step is to gather fans, and this can be done on a large social platform. Large social platforms have already gathered everyone together, and we can attract a group of fans just by posting content on them.

The third step is that with fans, our values ​​can drive transactions.

The fourth step is to create an independent APP to overcome the bottleneck of user numbers. Where will the final destination be in the fifth step? I don't know either.

Let's compare the new model with the old one.

The old model has high capital consumption and can only be profitable after the market clears. It is large in scale and phenomenal.

The new model has low user acquisition costs, quick profits, and is small and beautiful. There is actually no positive or negative connotation between the new and old models; they are simply distinguished by the span of time.

We have made two very important definitions in the new model, one is traffic secondary distribution and the other is IP decentralization.

What is secondary distribution of traffic?

Mainstream platforms bring users together, and users find their own corresponding values. The top content based on these values ​​begins to flow to other applications, and this flow can lead to commercial monetization. This flow state is called traffic secondary distribution.

In this secondary distribution of traffic, large platforms and new applications and content actually have a complementary relationship. It is not a question of who replaces whom. Large platforms achieve full coverage of users, and new applications enable in-depth communication and transactions among users.

Why do large platforms play a very important role in logic and user coverage? Let’s look at the data first. This data basically shows that WeChat has covered all mobile Internet users in China, and Weibo covers 40%. One of the great things about Weibo is that it covers most of the people born in the 1990s in China. WeChat covers almost all users, and Weibo covers a specific group of people. This group of people has great consumption potential in the future. These are the two largest platforms in China.

There was a problem at that time. About 2012 or even early 2013, if you made an APP to acquire users, you would find that the users at that time were all over the country and no one knew where they were. So I had to constantly reach users through various channels, wash traffic, and filter out users. This was the situation back then. Not used now, why? All Chinese netizens are on the two social platforms, WeChat and Weibo. There is no need to find them through any other channels, just these two channels. Everyone is on them. The only thing you need to do is to find the users you want to reach on these two platforms.

When we gather fans on large platforms, we will find several problems. The defects of large platforms are concentrated in three aspects: monetization, real-time interaction and in-depth communication.

Regarding Weibo, it has failed to establish monetization methods for top content. At the same time, it also failed to provide more advanced means for top content to interact with its fans. I posted a Weibo and within two hours 20,000 people responded. How can I communicate with everyone? There is no way to filter out the content that you want to communicate.

Regarding WeChat, the official account itself has no interaction, and WeChat defines its own official account as a one-way communication thing. WeChat groups are limited to 500 people. I have seen companies that produce top content managing more than 2,000 groups at most. The cost was too high, so they later disbanded the groups as they felt it was not feasible.

As a top content creator, I have attracted millions of fans on WeChat and Weibo. Next, I want to do something that WeChat and Weibo can’t do, so I can only take my fans to other places. For example, if I want to have an in-depth communication with my fans, such as live streaming , many fans will go to another APP.

This flow has no cost and no fee. Generally speaking, when a group of users move from one APP to another, the transfer cost is very high. However, the top content I just mentioned that brings fans to the site has no cost. This is fundamentally different from the previous round of Internet entrepreneurship , as the flow of users can be achieved at a very low cost.

The salient features of secondary traffic distribution

There are two notable characteristics of secondary traffic distribution. When top content chooses new applications outside the platform, it is most concerned about whether the application can meet its needs in a complete, efficient and cost-effective manner, and no longer considers whether the application has enough users. At the same time, the user acquisition cost of new paths such as the selected applications or methods will be lower, theoretically significantly lower than that of games , O2O , e-commerce and other applications in the past two years.

We just mentioned that the cost of acquiring users for the selected applications is very low. The top content has its own fans, so the acquisition cost is very low. Let’s take a look at the Inke data or Luoji Siwei data. These leading data have very low user acquisition costs.

The subscriptions to Logical Thinking ’s official account exceed 8 million, with over 3 million users paying for its content and over 1 million users paying for its products. His public account is used to purchase goods, the so-called e-commerce business, and he sold 200 million worth of goods. Did he buy any volume for e-commerce? Since Luo started his WeChat public account , he has never bought a penny of volume, so the company's profit margin is also very high. Because there is no buying of volume, he has achieved 3 million content payments and 1 million product purchases with 7 million fans. The conversion rate is also around 50%. So after we collected the data of companies that have done well in this regard, we found that they basically have this conversion rate.

Luoji Siwei then developed its own APP, and the APP was officially released with relatively decent content in May this year. In June, the number of users of the above service exceeded 1 million, in August it exceeded 2 million, and now it is about to exceed 3 million. Without buying a single user, the APP has achieved nearly 3 million users, and the sales revenue of this APP this year will not be less than 50 million. Where does its quantity come from? It was directed from the Luoji Siwei public account. So you can see the role of traffic. But why does it lead to getting it? There is a limit to the number of fans you can gather on WeChat and Weibo. To reach that limit, you have to create your own APP.

Vertical brands or standalone tool applications face challenges

Why?

Users no longer follow the platform, but follow the top content.

Gao Xiaosong, he moved from Youku to iQiyi, and we found that more than 90% of users don’t care which platform Gao Xiaosong is on. All of them have the same opinion: as long as Gao Xiaosong is still doing the show, it doesn’t matter where he is.

There are definitely opportunities in head content and tool applications. Why do you say that?

First, top content has a huge impact on users and has enormous economic potential.

Second, tool applications with complete functions, efficient use and the ability to transform economic benefits can attract participation from top content, thereby driving low-cost inflow of user traffic.

Third, the flow cost of user traffic is reduced.

Since the second half of 2013, IP has become a topic sweeping the entire entertainment industry and a standard feature of games. More than half of mainstream TV dramas are related to IP. It has also become a way for entertainment companies to increase their valuations.

What is IP? Does it reduce the cost of acquiring users?

Why has IP become so important? As we said, the cost of acquiring top content is relatively low, but traffic is incredibly expensive. For example, in the gaming industry, at the beginning of 2013, a gaming company paid two to three yuan to buy an active user. This year, the most exaggerated figure I have heard is one hundred yuan to buy an active user, so traffic is too expensive.

So everyone started looking for IPs, as the cost of acquiring users through IPs is relatively low. But IP will also increase in price because everyone is scrambling for content and content will increase in price. Sooner or later, the cost of bringing users to IP will be the same as the current online marketing cost. Does IP still make sense? Is this the status of video websites? It is becoming increasingly unaffordable, and I find that the cost of bringing users to myself through IP is also rising, so it may not be appropriate to rely on buying this.

What are the characteristics of IP? What changes has it brought to the development of the Internet?

What else is important besides channels? The users brought by IP are naturally accurate. All other Internet channels are too fragmented. The serious fragmentation makes the entire marketing strategy complicated. In the end, we have to rely on advertising to make money. Advertising must be accurate, especially in the digital age. Eighty to ninety percent of digital marketing on the market is fake. The users brought by IP are very precise, and this change in marketing channels will also continuously increase the value of IP.

The right to filter information has been transferred. In the past, we relied on the media to filter information, but now we actually rely on our own circles to filter information. What do our circles rely on? It must depend on certain content. Therefore, our information filtering relies on circles, and this circle is gathered by content. Therefore, the right to filter information is equivalent to giving IP the right to filter information, and the value of IP is even greater.

Let me give the simplest definition of IP. IP must have values. In addition, every time the IP is developed in content form, its IP must evolve forward instead of going lower and lower.

For example, adapting a novel into a movie. Everyone has discovered that this movie is a continuation of the novel. The worldview may be bigger, the concepts are bigger, the values ​​are further developed, the characters are also developing, and the plot is also developing. This is the transition from novel to movie. From movies to games, it opens up a wider range of imagination.

Let’s take a look at “Captain America”. The connotation of Captain America’s entire IP is the recognition of American society’s values ​​and culture, rather than just an animation mission.

Captain America first appeared in 1941, during World War II. The United States did not participate in the war at that time. Why did this thing exist? Because it embodies the American desire to participate in World War II to save the world. Later, when the Pearl Harbor incident occurred, Captain America led the entire American people to fight against fascism. The image of Captain America particularly represented the American spirit at that stage.

But once the war was over, the image of Captain America had no idea where to go and began to slowly fade out of the comics world. The 1960s have come back into people’s attention. Why? Because he is not facing a world where good and evil are clearly distinguished, patriotism is re-endowed with a different spirit. What do people imagine Captain America to do today? Fighting terrorism and opposing evil forces is terrorism.

By 2016, everyone will find that with the changes in the Middle East, people's perception of terrorism has begun to change and become less clear. Was it right or wrong for the United States to attack Libya? So we find out that in the next comic Captain America is an undercover agent of Hydra. Suddenly, the world's good and evil began to blur in Captain America. We can find that the development of Captain America IP follows American society and the mainstream views of the people. This is the real value, the real IP.

Why does IP fragmentation occur on the Internet?

Our people born in the 1990s or 2000s grew up in a good environment, but this group of energetic people encountered a very harsh reality. Today in the field of Internet entrepreneurship , many are second-generation entrepreneurs. They either belong to a certain circle or a certain system, or have such a network of relationships in Alibaba or Tencent to have opportunities. The Internet is already like this. Think about other circles in this society. If there is no class mobility and the economy is not growing, what can we do? In fact, everyone is just like in the United States and Japan. They are starting to pay attention to their own lives, and their values ​​are beginning to diversify. It is useless to pay attention to society, so I can only focus on myself.

At the same time, there have been major changes in the way we disseminate information.

From the supply side, in the past, television and radio were one-to-many, but now all information is scattered across various apps. With the rise of social networks such as Weibo and WeChat, the information we see is all spread by the people we follow. The WeChat system is more closed, the groups are small circles, and the official accounts do not have any centralized traffic entrances. There are even various restrictions on subscriptions and push notifications to official accounts.

From the demand side, what people consume is not the product but the sentiment behind it.

Our choice of information is segmented. Everyone gets information through Moments and their Weibo friends. There is another important feature here: there is a high degree of identification within the circle, but there is a strong sense of isolation and even exclusion between circles. If you have time to study the circle culture of post-90s on Weibo, you will find that they mind people who are not very related to themselves entering their circle, and they are very exclusive.

Users live online. Why do you say that? We have calculated that in 2015, Android users spent three hours on their phones every day, while iOS users spent even longer. What does this mean? This means that users spend one-sixth of their waking time online. Can we still call this the Internet? We should say live on the Internet.

First, large platforms have obvious value - they greatly improve the time and capital efficiency of upstream and downstream positioning in the industrial chain. The overall traffic of large platforms will be further consolidated in this process.

Second, the definition of top content can be lowered, and a limited number of fans can already generate greater commercial value, because users gathered because of the content are naturally accurate, have a sense of identity, and have room for long-term, multiple, and in-depth exploration of commercial monetization value.

Third, the scope of top content will be very broad , and will continue to spread from current talk shows, fashion experts, e-sports anchors, literary and artistic internet celebrities , writers, etc., to include sports, education, military and other directions, and the forms of expression will also develop into more forms besides the current human-oriented ones.

Fourth, the value of traditional broad-channel traffic may be challenged , and the new generation of tool applications choose to use top content traffic instead of broad-channel traffic.

Fifth, a group of small and beautiful companies will emerge , with decentralized values ​​and tools focused on high-quality products.

Sixth, large platforms will also participate in this round of competition for top content and tool applications . Unlike in the past, large platforms will adopt a model of splitting up teams and operating them independently.

If you start a business, please remember these six words: content, transaction, and interaction. When designing all business models and creating product content, if you can implement these three words at the same time and implement them very well, your product will definitely be successful.

In the future, the new Internet model must be one that has low user acquisition costs, quick profits, and is small and beautiful. The era of relying on subsidies, buying traffic, and spending money like crazy is gone forever.

This is the best era. As an operations practitioner, if you want to quickly grow into a senior operations professional who can stand on your own, what should you do? I believe that building one's own operational knowledge system is a top priority.

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

The author of this article @Liu Jianing Compiled and published by (APP Top Promotion), please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!