Analysis of iReader vs. WeChat Reading Products

Books are the ladder of human progress, but paper books are heavy after all and cannot be carried around. In response to this situation, e-books began to be widely used and reading software emerged like mushrooms after a rain. The author of this article will take the three softwares, iReader , NetEase Wugou Reading, and WeChat Reading , as examples to analyze their differentiated strategies and share them with you.

1. Competitive product selection

1. iReader (a veteran in reading, with a strong track record)

According to the 2020 iReader semi-annual report, in the first half of the year, the company continued to develop commercial value-added services in the process of continuous integration of the new Internet monetization model that combines paid and free services. The number of users continued to grow, with an average monthly active user base of 170 million in the first half of 2020.

2. NetEase Wugu Reading (quality selection, niche and unique)

NetEase launched "NetEase Wugu Reading" in 2016. Its "one-hour free reading" payment model of "true knowledge comes from time" has become a breath of fresh air among many reading software.

3. WeChat Reading (Overtaken halfway, a rising star)

Currently, WeChat Reading has 210 million registered users and more than 5 million daily active users, of which young users aged 19-35 account for more than 60%, and users with a bachelor's degree or above account for as high as 80%.

Image source: Cicada Master

2. Community structure and operation of each product

The above three apps all make reading easy in terms of reading experience and access to book resources. In addition, all three apps have community functions. I think there are two problems that communities in reading apps should solve:

• First, when users don’t know what book to read, the community provides the source of the book.
• Second, reading itself is a kind of consuming activity that requires concentration. It is very difficult to concentrate on reading, especially under the interference of mobile phones. Therefore, it is important for users to be motivated to use reading apps.

1. iReader: I draw according to the post and I will say what I want to say

Let’s first take a brief look at iReader’s social practices. After entering the "Discover" entrance of iReader, the APP will recommend other users to follow and build a social circle. The users provided by the platform are all ordinary users, of various types, and seem to be randomly assigned by the system.

In addition, among the user groups, even for iReader authors or online writers with a large number of fans, there is no traffic gap. For example, this person who claims to be "No. 1 on the Popularity List of Great Gods" only has over 10,000 fans. That is, in the iReader community, KOLs do not play a strong leading role on the platform, and the status of users is relatively equal, with less stratification. Since there is no differentiation, how does the iReader community work? The answer is through "circles".

When you click into the square, you will see prompts and classifications of popular circles. First of all, these circles are not classified by book type, but mainly by interest, and the categories are numerous and messy. As long as users are willing to look for and create, a dog or a sentence can become the smallest logical unit for building a circle. Except for some online articles, most circles have nothing to do with reading, and even include travel, finance, movies, exams, etc.

The circles that are popular and related to reading are basically online literature, and published literature accounts for a smaller proportion.

Looking more specifically at each circle, I clicked on the circle page and thought I entered the Baidu Tieba-Iphone Reading Special Edition. On the left is the circle in iReader, and on the right is Baidu Tieba. Through comparison, I think the circle is the evolution of Tieba. For example, the operation of the circle is based on the administrator system of Tieba, with bar rules, point level system, and even a series of operations such as clocking in, replying, and adding to the favorites are exactly the same.

The community of iReader is organized in circles. In each circle, users spontaneously generate points, speak, reply, and check-in. The hottest topics discussed are online literature, with content focusing on the plot and characters of novels. Most of the content is shared spontaneously by users, and the quality of the content is not high. It is a small circle for communication among the same kind of people.

After consulting the user portrait survey report of iReader, we found that the highest proportion of iReader users are male, married, born after 1985, with an income of more than 5K, and a bachelor's degree or above. The monthly active users of iReader remain at around 150 million, which is different from the content popularity and popular content groups within the circle. I speculate that it is the young people under 18 and between 18 and 24 who love to read online articles who are using the circles, rather than the main users of iReader. In other words, most of the main users of iReader have not entered the "circles". The subsequent popular browsing and interaction numbers have once again verified the gradual silence and decline of this circle. I only miss the nights more than ten years ago when we were busy chatting on the forum. That was everyone’s lost youth.

In addition, is there any need for iReader’s popularity, which is extremely inconsistent with its monthly active users and has nothing to do with books, to exist? It looks very much like the recommended page ads that come with the browser. "Discover" should have been placed on the first-level page as a social function, but the designer hid the entrance among a bunch of other functions. It is like a secret garden that only people in the circle know about, and it is difficult for new users to find the entrance. Could it be that even the product manager of iReader has shown helpless lack of confidence in his own circle?

2. NetEase Wugu Reading: The reading version of Zhihu, aiming for high quality

Let’s take a look at NetEase Wugou Reading. In solving the problem of what books to read, the homepage of Wugou Reading has content-based book recommendations, specifically stories, news or hot topics, etc., which are combined with books related to the topic. The prompts will also tell you the number of books involved in the content, so that users can click in to see the specific recommended books.

I think that compared to the "forced popularity" that has nothing to do with iReader, the recommendations of Snail Books are still related to "reading". The outputters and gatekeepers of content-based book recommendations are "reading leaders" who need to be screened and promoted, and the quality of the content can be guaranteed. However, when browsing specifically, some of the content is still far-fetched and the degree of integration needs to be improved.

In addition, I think the sliding banner at the top has an inappropriate naming hierarchy. For example, in the picture, "Know a little about economics", does clicking on it lead to a book about economics? But in fact, it is not. This is just a recommended book in the "Daily Book List" called "Understand a Little Economics". It should be at the same level and parallel with the level of "Read a Book Thoroughly", but some are at the first level, and some are at the second level. There is a problem with the overlapping of levels.

In addition to recommending books through article content, another way to solve the problem of what books to read is the "reading leader mechanism." Unlike iReader, the user recommended to you by the Snail Reading Platform at the beginning is the lead reader. At first, the readers were fixed publishing houses, writers or book reviewers, but this did not provide a channel for users to rise up. First, many fixed readers are just a name, like musicians on QQ Music or NetEase Cloud Music. They will only send you a private message when they release a new album and ask you to pay. They may not use the platform to post updates or communicate with readers at other times. Moreover, one needs 400 realm points to follow the leader, so it is not something that can be done casually, and a relatively high threshold is set. Secondly, since users cannot become leading readers, their willingness to output content for the platform will be greatly reduced. Therefore, Snail Reading launched a leader reader promotion mechanism, that is, every user can accumulate "realm points" through continuous high-quality content output and obtain the status of leader reader. (The official said, "If you can do it, you can do it." The user thought, "Okay, then I can do it.")

The leaders set up by the official itself and the leaders who are promoted through the screening mechanism not only jointly create high-quality book reviews, book lists, and answers to topics to provide users with guidance on what books to choose, but also encourage users to read more, output more high-quality content, become leaders, and gain motivation to read.

In order to solve the problem of motivation for reading, Snail Reading also has a co-reading mechanism, that is, one user creates a group, and other users can choose to join or watch, and read and annotate a book together in a cycle of 21 days. On the one hand, the reading progress and ranking are both visible, and finally the income of Snail Shell is also distributed according to the ranking. People from the same group will have pressure to force users to finish reading the book. While reading, you can also see the comments of other people in the group, and group members can continue and answer. It is worth mentioning that the reading group can also choose to let others "watch", but the comments and other operations of the watching users will not be displayed and are only for their own browsing. This provides a channel for some people who want to understand the book or want to see how others read the book.

Judging from the viewing group I selected, the participation rate in the comments is still very high, and the discussions are quite lively, but I personally don’t like it very much because some of the comments contain more content than the text, which is not suitable for first-time viewers or people who don’t like being interrupted.

"Watching" to some extent reminds people of the "Question Watching" on Zhihu. Users need to pay to browse the answers to relevant questions by big Vs, and in reading, they can see how the big guys read a book.

If Snail Reading is combined with this topic function, it will become a mini Zhihu. From the above analysis, I personally think that the “Reader + Question” function is the NetEase Snail version of Zhihu, which focuses on higher-quality recommendations and encouraging reading behavior. This is different from iReader, which focuses on expression and sharing through "Tieba" but lacks high-quality content, and users themselves are motivated to produce and share higher-quality content.

When you're reading a book, it's easy to underline it, but it's really hard to write something. But if you ask a small question about the reading content or answer other users' questions, the direction and purpose will be clearer. The inner nature of "loving to teach others" is also inadvertently stimulated, and both the questioner and the answerer can gain a sense of recognition and output after reading.

Since it already gives people a full "Zhihu feeling", it is better to add a pop-up window after the user finishes reading a book, allowing readers to ask questions about the book, or invite other readers who have read the book to answer the questions. This will form a closed loop of the question-asking function, and "Thank you for the invitation" can also be an exchange and sharing of insights on the content of the book.

3. WeChat Reading: Building WeChat communities based on WeChat

The last one is WeChat Reading. WeChat Reading is placed at the end because WeChat’s social users are very different from the first two. From the login interface, WeChat Reading limits users to WeChat Reading as the only entry point, which means that subsequent friend-based operations are basically one’s own WeChat friends or other users who use WeChat. Therefore, the source of reading and the motivation for reading are based on WeChat friends.

Of course, this is also the basis for the large number of WeChat users. Compared with the previous two apps, the time cost for users to build a social circle is very high. The connection base based on the WeChat community can improve the efficiency of building a social circle on the reading platform to a certain extent.

When it comes to what books to read, the first way WeChat Reading recommends books is to recommend books that many of your friends are reading, and the second is to recommend books that are placed on the bookshelf of a specific friend. Both of these methods can only be achieved on the premise of following your WeChat Reading friends, and are recommendations based on close relationships. The books read by a vivid close relationship object are more reference-worthy and practical than the hobbies of a stranger. In addition, WeChat's information expansion path of "people-books-people" is different from the other two communication methods of "books (content)-people".

Another very unique source of reading content for WeChat Reading is the linkage with public accounts. Users can choose to open the content of public accounts on WeChat in the way of WeChat Reading, so that the articles are arranged like chapters of a book. They can also browse the historical content of public accounts and take notes directly in WeChat Reading, and read the content of public accounts as books. WeChat public accounts are divided based on individual accounts on WeChat. It is not convenient to search by collecting them, and reading them separately cannot expand the relevance between articles, making it inconvenient for continuous reading and summarization. WeChat Reading just happens to provide a new idea for its own public account reading content: "reading public account articles as books", and to a certain extent it has also saved the situation where the public account content that has been stranded due to the impact of short videos has been ignored.

In terms of motivation for reading, WeChat Reading provides many activities based on sharing connections among friends to obtain books or unlimited cards, and there is also paper books that can be obtained by "cutting orders" like "Pinduoduo". However, the activities are similar and there is nothing special about them. The feasibility of this behavior not causing users to be disgusted lies in the particularity of reading behavior. Imagine that when someone gives you a Pinduoduo bargaining link, although you help out for the sake of face, deep down in your heart you will still suspect that the other party is taking advantage of you. But no one would ask the soul-searching question, “There’s something wrong with this person. Why does he always read books?” Therefore, it is the special nature of the act of reading that reduces the resistance to sharing. There is a consensus on the idea that "reading is a good thing and it is the ladder to open the door to the world."

In addition, the formation of reading teams similar to NetEase is also a way to encourage users to read, but its rules are relatively loose, the tasks are simple, and the scale is small, which is in line with the characteristics of friends knowing each other and acting more casually. But it also determines that the mobility of its group members is not as strong as that of NetEase Wugou Reading, and the people who come and go may be the same few people around.

In addition, for me personally, it is WeChat’s strong connection community based on WeChat friends, where the friends we contact all have offline connections, that determines that its “anti-connection” measures are more important than those of other platforms.

The books placed in the bookshelf and the specific reading tracks, who can see them and who can't, just like the content in the circle of friends, may all be created and screened by users. Just imagine that Zhang San, who usually doesn't read books but plays games all the time, has a bookshelf full of hardcore books on politics, economics, and philosophy; while Li Si, who is usually well-mannered and talkative, has a bookshelf full of online novels such as "The Domineering CEO Falls in Love with Me". The availability of image contrast makes management more important.

Therefore, "private reading", "alternative bookshelf", and whether to enable consent to interact with friends are particularly important in WeChat reading. It is important to have someone to accompany you, share with you, and understand you during the reading process, but reading itself is a relatively private behavior, and "distance" is also indispensable.

But the author still has a question, that is, the ratio of WeChat users converted into WeChat Reading users. After a simple and very unscientific questioning of five friends, we found that the number of their WeChat friends and the number of people using WeChat Reading are mostly around 30%. If WeChat can increase this ratio to 40 or 50, based on the number of WeChat users, the number of WeChat Reading users will be very considerable. However, there is no entrance to WeChat Reading within WeChat, and a large number of WeChat users don’t even know the existence of WeChat Reading. How can WeChat expand the number of WeChat Reading users, which is mainly composed of WeChat users?

WeChat Reading does not have a social plaza like iReader and NetEase Wugou Reading. Based on the contact chain of WeChat friends, you may try to move the activities in WeChat Reading to WeChat, and try to achieve user gathering and connection in the form of WeChat groups, so as to form a feedback effect.

In addition, through communication and my own actual experience, I have hardly seen any sharing links related to WeChat Reading in other places on WeChat, such as Moments. So is the diffusion mechanism based on WeChat friends ineffective? Perhaps it is a kind of inner monologue of the user:

"I just want you to accidentally discover my unique and noble taste, and it would seem too pretentious if I posted it."

Author: Yiji

Source: Yiji