QQ21 years old: How to make money from this generation of young people

Are you still using QQ now?

If we use 400 million global daily active users to draw a dividing line for today's active social products, the ones that make the cut are WeChat, which is 9 years old, Instagram, which is 10 years old, WhatsApp, which is 11 years old, Facebook, which is 16 years old, and QQ, which is 21 years old. From OICQ, QQ to Mobile QQ, QQ has unknowingly become the oldest mainstream social product.

In just over a month, QQ will celebrate its 21st birthday. In these 21 years, according to official data released by QQ in 2019, half of QQ members are born after 2000, and 67% of the daily posts on QQ Space are from those born after 2000. In other words, QQ is the home of young people, and QQ has a huge influence among young users.

Excerpted from the 2019 Post-00s Social Behavior Data Report

As a product of the PC era, QQ is now considered old compared to many new social products. Since its birth in 1999, QQ has experienced the glorious era of "the family of love" and completed the transition from PC to mobile Internet, and finally settled on the main theme of youth entertainment.

But compared to its junior WeChat, QQ seems to be less important now. The "beep beep" message sound and the constantly changing gray/color avatars that used to be heard on computers are now being "abandoned" by grown-up people, accompanied by complaints about its "bloatedness and obsolescence."

As the creator of QQ, Tencent founder Ma Huateng once said: I am increasingly unable to understand the preferences of young people, and this is my biggest worry.

The era of mobile internet belongs to the post-90s and post-00s. Whoever can gain their support and love will be invincible on the internet. For example, Soul, which is based on anonymous social networking, and Jike, which is based on interest-based social networking (it has been offline for rectification). They are all the darlings of young people and therefore have hope for development.

QQ, which is no longer young, is becoming more and more anxious. Previously, Tencent launched the simple mode of QQ. On April 14, QQ added the learning mode in the official version 8.3.3. In this competitive mobile Internet era, the "old" QQ is still trying to change in order to win the favor of young people.

QQ’s positioning decision at the age of 21

In the growth of QQ, there are three very important "rivals", one is MSN, one is 360, and one is WeChat.

The biggest obstacle to QQ in its early days was MSN. When MSN entered China in May 2005, many Tencent employees were worried that MSN would strangle QQ like IE did to Netscape. But in the end, QQ successfully captured the young population and defeated the giant that entered China.

Early MSN interface

The reason for the victory, apart from the well-known stories such as Ma Huateng dressing up as a little girl to chat with users, many people ignore the importance of the QQ Show product.

In 2002, a young man named Xu Liang came to Tencent. He was the first product manager of Tencent. Xu Liang saw virtual avatars and clothing products on a Korean social networking site, sayclub, so he also developed QQ Show, which was very popular among young people and helped QQ find a way to monetize for the first time.

On the other hand, MSN was not well prepared for localization, and the chat room format was only popular among working people. At the same time, MSN accounts were often hacked. Even after the update, there was a problem of garbled Chinese characters. Both security and local operations were not up to standard.

In 2005, Ma Huateng announced Tencent's first organizational structure reform. Since then, Tencent began to develop in a diversified manner around QQ. Since then, it has launched a number of products named after QQ, such as QQ Space, QQ Show, QQ Pets, Tencent News and many other products.

QQ numbers gradually replaced mobile phone numbers among young people and became the social "code". Under the attack of QQ, MSN was eventually defeated and officially withdrew from the Chinese market on October 31, 2014.

QQ encountered a crisis in 2010. The "3Q War" between 360 and QQ became the most important turning point in QQ's subsequent development.

On September 27, 2010, Qihoo 360 released a "privacy protector" to collect information about whether QQ software violated user privacy. On November 3, Tencent unilaterally announced that it would stop running QQ software on computers with 360 software installed. Users must uninstall 360 software before logging into QQ, which put users in a dilemma of "choosing one of two options". From 2010 to 2014, the two companies staged a series of Internet battles and embarked on the road of litigation.

With the Supreme People's Court's ruling in October 2014 that Tencent's QQ did not have a dominant market position and rejecting Qihoo 360's appeal, the "3Q War" was finally settled.

After the "3Q War", Ma Huateng used a metaphor to describe Tencent, saying that it was like an elephant growing in a room. After it grew bigger, it would bump into the elephants next to it if it moved. It had no idea that it was no longer a small animal and that the elephant had to bear greater responsibilities. This was a valuable lesson that QQ brought to Tencent.

The "3Q War" prompted Ma Huateng to launch the "Diagnose Tencent" campaign, which also made QQ try to become more open. In 2010, QQ had about 450 million active users. With its huge social resources, QQ's game open platform was launched. In September of the same year, QQ launched an open platform (QQ Alumni) to provide basic support for social resources for ecological partners.

In addition, JD.com, Didi, and Sogou have all joined the Tencent QQ ecosystem. Sogou has become the assistant of QQ Pinyin, JD.com has carried out in-depth cooperation with QQ Yixun and PaiPai, and Didi is directly in the QQ wallet to facilitate users' travel.

Although QQ’s partner ecosystem cannot be said to be successful, it was an exploration of business cooperation earlier than WeChat.

With the advent of the mobile Internet era and the emergence of smart phones, netizens have gradually turned to mobile Internet. QQ, which is rooted in the PC side, cannot be changed on a large scale, so this task was handed over to WeChat.

WeChat was born on January 21, 2011, led by Zhang Xiaolong, the head of QQ Mail at the time. The emergence of WeChat was not accidental but inevitable, as it followed the trend of the times in the development of the Internet. When WeChat was first launched, QQ became WeChat's nanny, directing its own user resources to WeChat.

WeChat initial interface

It took WeChat more than 400 days to reach the goal of 100 million registered users, while QQ took more than three years. The rapid development of WeChat also made QQ's position awkward. At that time, QQ was faced with the situation of supporting its "rival" WeChat while thinking about where to go.

"The crisis we are facing is a turning point," Yin Yu said with mixed emotions when he was interviewed by China Entrepreneur. "If mobile QQ had not been launched in 2010, it would have been successful, but Tencent might have lost the current WeChat."

In fact, QQ Mobile was not willing to admit defeat, and its innovation in the mobile era was not as good as WeChat. Yin Yu only knew that WeChat was going to launch the red envelope marketing campaign a month before WeChat was going to launch the classic "Spring Festival Gala Red Envelope" campaign. "My heart sank and I thought, the turning point has come."

The Spring Festival Gala red envelopes helped WeChat to hit a heavy blow in second- and third-tier cities. "All the lower-tier users were connected, the network effect immediately emerged, and the snowball kept getting bigger and bigger." WeChat's user data curve rose sharply, with DAU exceeding that of QQ and the gap getting bigger and bigger.

The rise of WeChat seems to be inevitable, while QQ inevitably declined. In the first quarter of 2013, QQ began to reach the 800 million mark. It was also from this year that the growth of QQ's MAU slowed down significantly. In the first quarter of 2015, it showed negative growth for the first time, down 1.92% year-on-year.

The number of monthly active users of QQ Space, the “friend circle” of QQ, has also declined. In the first quarter of 2017, the number of active users of QQ Space was even less than that of the same period three years ago.

In contrast, WeChat, a mobile social app launched in 2011, experienced explosive growth in monthly active users at a rate of 100% to 200% before 2014. In the fourth quarter of 2016, it officially surpassed QQ to become the largest social application in China.

At this point, QQ must decisively seek change. WeChat has forced QQ to face a positioning decision for the third time.

At the QQ forum of the 2016 Tencent Global Partner Conference, QQ officially announced its "entertainment social ecosystem" concept for the first time. Yin Yu, then vice president of Tencent, further explained: "Entertainment and social networking are a natural fit. Entertainment injects dynamic content into social networking, while social networking provides a circulation platform for entertainment content to be experienced, shared, discussed and recreated."

QQ combines entertainment content with social platforms as a new development direction. Embracing young users has become the original intention of QQ's entertainment and social strategy.

The rebirth of middle-aged QQ

Although QQ’s “entertainment social ecology” strategy was announced in 2016, it was actually launched earlier.

In early 2013, the Social Networking Group (SNG) where Tang Daosheng worked took charge of the newly incorporated mobile QQ and Super QQ businesses. The mission given to him by Ma Huateng was "to ensure that QQ is not abandoned by this group at any time."

Subsequently, Tang Daosheng chose to target young people under the age of 25, and helped QQ complete its relevant layout for young people by adding a variety of new functions.

On the road to "younger", QQ has become more open while maintaining its own IM business. QQ has begun to try to innovate in the three dimensions of "community", "information flow" and "short video".

In 2014, mobile QQ launched the interest-based public theme community "Interest Tribe", which was connected and linked with QQ groups with common interest tags.

In May 2014, the predecessor of QQ's "Interest Tribes" was launched in internal testing.

QQ users can communicate in "interest tribes". The person in charge of QQ interest tribes once said: "The strongest interaction is not between friends, but between people with the same interests." Interest tribes have brought together young people scattered on QQ and increased user retention time.

After Baidu Tieba failed to transform smoothly in the mobile era, mobile QQ used "interest tribes" to accept these forum friends, and QQ has since had a forum-like product. Later, ByteDance's "Feiliao" also used this model to try to attract young people who are interested in social networking, but it was too late compared to mobile QQ.

With the advent of the short video era, the strong rise of Douyin and Kuaishou has once again made QQ smell the crisis.

So QQ made another major innovation and launched an independent product DOV based on QQ Diary. This is a brand new short video community developed with the image of DOV, the polar bear in QQfamily. Its product positioning is QQ intimate social networking, and it has won praise from Lenovo Music Store. QQ also chose to cooperate with Weishi in short videos, but the response was mediocre.

QQ has not missed out on the era of information flow explosion. "QQ Kandian" was launched in November 2015. This information product built around information flow mainly targets young users, such as comics, science, COSPLAY, etc. It is committed to creating high-quality content and social interaction platforms that young people love.

In 2018, Yang Dazhi, product manager of QQ Kandian, said: On the day when Zhao Liying and Feng Shaofeng officially announced their marriage, Feng Shaofeng posted an official announcement on Kandian, which received 240,000 Biu shares, far exceeding the number of reposts of his official announcement on Weibo.

Previously, after Tencent Weibo failed in its challenge to Sina Weibo and Tiantian Kuaibao failed in its challenge to Toutiao, QQ Kandian fought a good battle. At the 2017 financial report meeting, Ma Huateng bluntly stated that QQ Kandian "has achieved great success" in the past year, and emphasized that "the proportion of Kandian users is as high as 70% those born after 1995."

The key to QQ Kandian's success is that its close social relationship chain ferments and spreads layer by layer, strengthening the circulation of Kandian content. In addition, in addition to using recommendation algorithms, QQ Kandian also involves social distribution. Since then, WeChat's "Kanyikan" has also tried social distribution. It can be said that QQ Kandian has paved the way in advance.

The data of QQ Kandian is indeed very impressive. In September 2018, the DAU of QQ Kandian had reached 100 million, and nearly 70% of the active users were born after 1995, who are true Internet natives and the new generation.

After finding it difficult to achieve disruptive innovation in social networking and attract young people, QQ introduced communities, news, short videos and other content, trying to attract young people through entertainment.

The unfinished journey of QQ Experimental Field

QQ has become a test field for PCG. Tencent will put many new features on QQ for trial and error, and find out what young people like. But will users buy into QQ's entertainment innovation?

Judging from the data, QQ's user pool has not increased.

According to Tencent's fourth quarter financial report in 2020, the number of monthly active accounts on QQ smart terminals reached 647 million, a year-on-year decline of 7.5%. In the third quarter of 2019, the number of monthly active accounts on QQ smart terminals was 653.4 million, a year-on-year decline of 6%. In other words, in just one year, the number of monthly active users of QQ has dropped by 160 million.

Unlike WeChat, which chose to commercialize its platform after its monthly active users almost stagnated, QQ's positioning among young people has led it to upgrade its tools for young people in addition to entertainment, in an attempt to make breakthroughs in education and office.

Data shows that during the epidemic, more than 120 million users used QQ group classroom live broadcasts, online tutoring courses, and homework management tools to assist.

In QQ's latest version 8.3.3, QQ has added a "QQ Learning Mode" to focus on more efficient learning; mobile QQ supports screen sharing, allowing collaborative office users to conduct quick demonstrations, meetings, teaching and other work; in group chats, you can swipe left to enter the application panel; full-screen video in the chat supports long press to identify QR codes, and there is no need to wait to jump; the space has also undergone new changes, and a new way of playing "Centimeter Stepping" has been added to the interaction, and users can visit each other through QQ Centimeter Show.

"Life interests are the source of inspiration for work, and I also enjoy expressing emotions through product creation," Tang Daosheng once said. Because of this, although Tang Daosheng later left SNG, his innovative ideas on QQ were inherited by the newly established PCG. QQ has also since transformed itself and started to seek a new path for social networking.

Tech Planet has exclusively reported on the development of several new social products by the PCG business group, such as "Youji", "Maohu" and "Dengyu Diaoyou". These products have more or less the shadow of QQ. For example, they are all from Tencent PCG's Tencent Net Vision Technology Co., Ltd., and the login entrance retains the QQ login method.

QQ is still pursuing the path of youth. Recently, QQ launched a community function called "Small World", which allows young users to share and communicate through the INS+video model.

Although the era of QQ has come to an end, QQ is becoming an indelible sentiment for every generation of netizens. QQ is constantly changing itself, and a generation of young people is getting older. Will QQ stay young forever?