Paying for content, just old wine in new bottles?

Today I want to talk to you about the hottest topic right now, which is the knowledge economy and content payment .

I usually don’t take notes. I only do pattern recognition, which is a more advanced ability than taking notes on a certain basis.

When doing pattern recognition, I first have to determine who you are; what things in the past you may be connected to; whether I can find the answer from past experience; and if I can’t find the answer, what kind of innovation I should make.

In fact, most of the problems in this world are:

Old problems, old solutions;

Old problems, new solutions;

New problems, old solutions.

Only a few are new problems and new solutions.

If you encounter a new problem, do you know what to do? Leave it to those who can do it. Why should ordinary people waste their energy doing this? Isn't this just competing with yourself? So when I encounter this difficult problem, I usually avoid it and give up.

I learned a very important learning experience from the college entrance examination: What should I do if I encounter questions that I absolutely cannot answer? Give up, I don’t want it anymore. I don't want these 20 points. After deducting 20 points from 750, there will be 730 points left. Can't I just get a little more points from the remaining 730? In life, I can't get every card in my hand, I just want to win the one I want.

When it comes to paying for content, what I want to talk to you about is: new problems, but most of them are old solutions.

But many people are very anxious now. What are they anxious about? See our Huahua (the leader of the East China region of Noteman ) seized the opportunity, and Teacher Xiaodi seized the opportunity. Don’t even compare yourself with Luo Pang, let alone Jack Ma . We don’t actually envy others’ success. What we envy are the people around us who are similar to us - how did they succeed? This will put a huge amount of pressure on us.

But I generally don’t look at why he is successful now. I find that the things in this world that I understand most deeply all come from my past observations of the world, and very little from my imagination of the future world. I have no imagination about the future world, I don’t know what it will be like, I’ll see when it comes.

A question came to my mind: the so-called content economy, to put it bluntly, was called the "spiritual civilization and cultural market" in the past. It turns out that the party has a saying: "It is difficult for us to meet the people's growing spiritual and cultural needs." Have you heard of this saying? It is now called "content economy". Don't you recognize it just because it has a different name?

So do ordinary people want to watch the show?

Do you want to read the newspaper?

Do you want to listen to some music?

Do you want to dance?

Do you want to learn?

Well, it already exists! So it’s about giving money or not? If a good school charges you 10,000 yuan, would you dare to bargain? To this day, it is much easier to charge high prices for offline education than online education.

However, when we talk about "content economy" today, we need to break it down into more details. Why?

You know what the best content is? Make movies and TV series. When Huang Xiaoming came, didn't you all run to see him? We have to admit that this person's influence and energy exceed ours. This can also be considered content economy, but are you planning to do this as well? This depends on talent, appearance, aptitude and luck.

So basically, when people talk about "content economy", no one will say "I want to be Huang Xiaoming" or "I want to be Zhou Xun", right? In fact, when we talk about "content economy", we default to crossing this area out, but in fact it is a very large area.

There is another piece, singing. Is the market for singers small? There are concerts one after another, but you still haven't crossed this part out. So let me tell you a secret here. When we talk about “content economy”, ordinary people feel that “it is within their reach if they just jump a little bit.” There are many large markets that you cannot reach even if you jump, so you cross them out yourself.

Do you know why everyone likes to be a "knowledge expert"? Because ordinary people think they can learn too. What are people best at? Self-deception.

Therefore, in the spiritual, cultural and civilization needs, we have crossed out singing, movies and TV dramas, and finally arrived at a pleasant market - non-essential and low-frequency - which is learning.

There is at least some entertainment in studying, such as reading newspapers, books, and talking to experts, so we all had emotional mentors in the past, and we still have them now. In the past, if we wanted to obtain some knowledge or information, we might buy a newspaper. My favorite newspaper when I was a child was Reference News. Many boys loved reading Reference News, and I especially liked the military edition.

Later I stopped reading newspapers and started reading Sina . Since I started surfing the Internet in 1998, I read the news on Sina. But what are you watching now? Toutiao and others are adopting the content algorithm recommendation method at this time. Why is this happening? Because we are in Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou, many people are either on the bus or on the subway. On the subway during rush hour like in Beijing, the problem is whether you can squeeze in. Sometimes it is so crowded that you can't even take out your cell phone, let alone read a book, a newspaper or anything else. But the demand is still there, so everyone will take out their phones to check out Toutiao and the like.

What are the characteristics of Toutiao? It only has a small screen. No matter how big your phone is, the screen is only that big. I rarely see people taking out an iPad to read on the subway. The iPad cannot be operated with one hand. What’s the problem with the small screen? The problem with small screens is that in order to grab attention, every platform will push a lot of pop-up windows, making people feel that they are missing out on a lot of information in the world! If you don’t check the WeChat group for 3 minutes, you will feel like you have missed a lot of red envelopes, right?

This kind of thing makes us very anxious. In today's society, in addition to the information explosion, another thing that causes us anxiety is that we currently lack a sense of security under the pressure of life, and the emergence of artificial intelligence and big data makes people feel that many jobs are indeed facing elimination.

Under such circumstances, our requirements for knowledge products have begun to upgrade. It doesn’t mean that we will stop reading newspapers or listening to the radio, or that we will stop watching content programs at all, but the format has to change.

In fact, in the field of content payment, there are only three models.

One model is that I create a platform, and we originally called this platform "media", which may be newspapers, magazines, and journals; the second type is people, such as Zhang Quanling, who was originally the big sister among the anchors at CCTV. Some of these people are called chief writers, some are called speakers, and some are called anchors. The teacher is called the lecturer. There is also another one called service.

In fact, there are some other things that I have skipped, such as intellectual property protection. It seems that there is still no way to do this online so far. It still has to be done offline. You still have to submit materials, provide proof, and go there to get the stamp.

1. Media

It turns out that everyone’s favorite product in the media sector is books, which earn royalties and royalties. But writing and selling a book is difficult. If an ordinary author can sell 10,000 copies of a paper book on business and management, he should give himself an egg, no, two eggs.

In the past, there were very few books published because the approval of publishing numbers and the quality of content had to be guaranteed. Later, the publishing industry gradually became market-oriented, and many publishing houses began to sell book numbers. The difficulty of publishing books decreased, and more and more books were published. There are so many books that people find it hard to choose. Every time there is an event like 618, people buy bad books. Good books are not available or are not discounted. Now everyone feels that just choosing, buying and reading books has become very difficult.

So Fan Deng Reading Club came out, and Teacher Fan Deng told you: From now on, I will recommend 50 good books to you every year, and I will also have many big names to guide you in reading. You only need to pay 365 yuan a year, one yuan a day. Mr. Fan Deng has brought this model to the pinnacle in China. It has just exceeded 1 million users, which is equivalent to a production value of over 100 million yuan. This is a very powerful model.

Fan Deng Reading Club is equivalent to shallow reading. What is "shallow reading"? It turns out that we have this model in newspapers - a summary of a book, writing an article to help readers understand the book. Fan Deng simply turned this into something that can be heard through sound.

Why do people use sound to listen now? Because we spend all our time in the car and on the subway, we can't take out our phones to look at them. Now everyone should understand what I mean: the needs have not changed, only the form has changed.

Let’s take a look at Shidian Reading. Do you know what market Shidian Reading has replaced in my mind? What is the name of the most successful magazine in China? "Reader", don't you know that the best-selling soft article in the world is chicken soup?

Now many people are saying, why is the circle of friends full of chicken soup? The era of Weibo and blogs is all about chicken soup, isn’t it? When there were no blogs, we also listened to emotional programs on the radio. "Reader" has been sold for decades. Which article is not chicken soup? It's nothing more than chicken soup of various grades. "Zhiyin" is the chicken soup for square dance aunties. It is enough for you to understand this definition. Look at the model. Its essence is chicken soup, which can satisfy people at all levels.

When chicken soup at all levels can no longer satisfy him, he will definitely do something called "building a marketing matrix." So, when and who started building the marketing matrix?

In the beginning, "Zhiyin" only had one magazine, called "Zhiyin". Later, "Zhiyin Overseas Edition" was published. The overseas edition was not enough, so later the upper and lower versions of "Overseas Edition" were published. Now the most powerful one is called "Zhiyin Manke". When a magazine expands from one to several, is that a media matrix? Today we changed our name to “ WeChat Matrix”. The previous one was called Weibo Matrix. Is there any difference?

So if you talk to me about new media , I won’t talk about it directly. I will just watch how the old media works and fight you with the old media’s tactics - the key is that many people don’t know the old media’s tactics.

Li Xiang’s Business Insider is a newspaper. What kind of newspaper? "Reference News", but it does not talk about politics, it only has an economic and cultural edition, strictly speaking, it is an economic news edition. It's just that he has his own preferences when it comes to breaking news. He prefers to choose from the big guys and the opinions in the hot articles. In this way, he can see some exciting opinions in a very short time and save time.

So, what is the marketing model of periodicals and newspapers? Subscription. At the end of each year, the post office or your company will send you a list, and then you tick the boxes on it to order "Fairy Tale King", "Children's Literature", "Youth Literature"...

After subscription, journals and newspapers basically know how many subscriptions they can get in a year. This amount is called "circulation." If the circulation of a magazine or newspaper exceeds 5 million copies, he can use this circulation to operate advertising. Newspapers do not make money. The money is paid by advertisers, and they make profits in this way.

Later, newspapers were directly replaced by the free information on the Internet, but now paying for content is essentially using the modern Internet model. When information is flooded, it promises to provide high-quality information, so users have to pay. But the psychological suggestion and mental model of paying is still newspapers, but many people don’t know it.

Journals have changed on the Internet. The costs of production, printing, transportation and distribution can be saved to zero. It turns out that the cost of making a copy of "Reader" is definitely not zero. First of all, it costs money to print it, and it also costs money to deliver it to you, and this amount of money is not low, so if "Reader" is to be sold for at least 5 yuan.

But if you write articles on WeChat, the platform server belongs to WeChat, and the server and traffic resources all belong to WeChat, so can you set the price directly to 0? So it subverts the advantages of paper magazines, being faster and lower cost. Therefore, new media similar to magazines do not need any money and can make money by selling advertisements. The original magazine also made money by selling advertisements.

2. Characters

In magazines and newspapers, some people are particularly good at writing and readers love them very much, so they will be invited to write a column, and they are the chief writers. Who is the best columnist in the history of Chinese newspapers? Jin Yong! Now we have entered the era of "content economy" that everyone is talking about, but who can write a column better than Jin Yong?

What does the chief editor do? Write a column. Of course, writing a column is a little different now. Gudian wrote a column called "Super Individual", which is very good. But this column is not like a complete column, it is very well structured. However, in the past, the very best structured writings were all stories, and the classics were about practical content. The challenge of practical content is that after reading the previous week's content, you are required to connect the thinking of the past two weeks to the next week, which is too challenging for ordinary people. To make the challenge easier, the story is the simplest.

Then someone might ask: Why doesn’t Luo Pang write stories? Excuse me, is it our turn to enter the paid content market for story writing? Shanda Literature has been doing this for many years. What are Guo Jingming and Han Han doing? We who are engaged in knowledge-based IP need to remain calm. We have divided up the market, and if we find a small piece of meat left, we can go and take advantage of it.

The host is “I am very good at speaking”, I can ask someone to help me plan how to talk about this topic, and then I will talk about it. For example, the talents of the writers of "Luoji Siwei", "Xiao Shuo" and "Dong Wu Relativity" are beyond the expression of words, so they can just ask you to write for them: "Please help me write the story drafts, I will buy the manuscripts and I will tell the stories."

There is also a type of people who have extremely useful information, like my friend Xiao Qiu Shui. She has extremely useful information on knowledge management, so Himalaya invited her to give classes to help people who have no patience and no time to read, and learn through listening how to build a knowledge system in fragmented time. This is the speaker.

In the past, lectures were given offline, such as a paid open course, or internal training within a company. When it goes online, it becomes a micro-class, live broadcast , video recording, or it may become a one-on-one lecture. For example, there are many one-on-one English teaching by real people. One-on-one is the most common in the education industry, like tutoring. Is tutoring a content economy? It’s the same with tutoring, except the fees are a little lower. The one-to-one market is actually the largest, but the key is that the unit price cannot be raised, and individuals cannot make much money, unless you build a platform.

Now you see the power of pattern recognition. Suddenly you realize that the world is so simple. Why read so many books?

3. Services

There is also a type of market called service market, which is generally difficult to rely on individuals.

The first category is called consulting report. There are some consulting reports in China that are read by people working in IT and the Internet. The China Internet Research Center publishes a report on China's Internet every year, and everyone goes online to download it for free.

Consulting companies like iResearch publish reports on the current status of Internet development in various industries every year, and McKinsey publishes reports on many industries every year. Are they valuable? If you want it, just buy it. The consulting industry has always been selling reports.

One type of report is the standard version of my industry research. If you want it, I will sell it to you. Another way is that if your business needs me to diagnose something, we can sign a service contract, and I will issue a report after the diagnosis. If I want to do all the things that need to be implemented later, that is called coaching, which is charged separately from the report.

Recently, Weibo created a column called Weibo Q&A, which was learned from Fenda . On Weibo, you ask me a question and I answer your question in detail in text. Weibo invited Zhang Yu from Union Medical College.

On Weibo, someone asked Zhang Yu a question in text: What disease do I have and what should I do? Zhang Yu wrote a very long article. If you want to take a peek, it costs one dollar. I checked and found that he wrote an article about some disease and more than 7,800 people read it. In essence, it is equivalent to him issuing a diagnosis report for you. Do you think the patient cares about that dollar? Patients care whether you are from Union Medical College. As long as it is from Union Medical College, 2 yuan or 5 yuan is no problem, because I care whether the suggestions and plans he gives are inspiring to me, and I will pay for his brand and expertise. But if Zhang Yu left Union Medical College, or even if Union Medical College said it had fired him, would you watch it for 1 dollar?

If you want to charge for services or prepare reports, it is difficult to do it on an individual basis. In the end, you must transform from an individual into a platform - Noteman is an example.

NoteHero provides note-taking services for others, and it can also be done as an individual. If you have a good reputation, people will still ask you to do the job. But if you want to turn it into a business, into a replicable model, then you must build it into a platform.

The second is to provide consulting services. Now everyone knows a consulting platform, Xing, on which you can buy one hour of other people’s time.

Has there ever been a question like this: I am in Hangzhou, which restaurant is good? Is this a problem? There is no need to exaggerate this issue, but the demand for this kind of question is so great that Baidu created Baidu Knows. However, it was originally impossible to charge for short Q&A questions. Now some people are willing to pay for these questions, so Zaixing launched a new platform - Fenda.

Now if we look back, the content payment market we are talking about has actually been cut a lot. These are the things we are talking about now. If you are studying how to grab dividends from this, I'm sorry, it's not about how to grab dividends, but how to make money with the old model? Then under the new model, what changes and modifications should I make, what should be inherited, what should be grafted, and what should be changed?

Speaking of changes, there is one more thing to mention. Once you come up with a product, make it and then sell it. At the beginning, we find 1,000 seed users , and then spread the word through word of mouth. 1,000 becomes 10,000, and 10,000 becomes 100,000, right?

However, this law of dissemination is the law of dissemination for free content products. Once the product becomes paid, the gap between free and paid is beyond your imagination. There is no snowball effect. The real effect is called fan wall.

What is a fan wall? I have a group of loyal fans. What are loyal fans? When I say I want to release something but haven’t sold it yet, they will say “Uncle, I’ll buy it.” I ask “You don’t even know if it’s good or not?” They will say “As long as it’s released by you, I’ll buy it.” I advise them “Calm down, buy it only if it’s useful, why buy it if it’s useless?” They will say “I like you!”

The conversion rate of loyal fans is almost 100%. As long as they know, they will definitely buy.

Then I started influencing my old fans.

What is an old fan? It means that they have followed you for at least half a year and know you relatively well, either by commenting on you, liking your posts, or interacting with you. The conversion rate of these old fans will decrease, but the radius has become larger, so the speed at which my area expands far exceeds the speed at which it decreases, and sales are still going up.

After the old fans ran out, the message started to spread to my new fans. These new fans have been around for less than half a year and don’t know much about me. They may have followed me for some inexplicable reason. Then two days later, I pushed an article to you and you realized that you followed me, but you couldn’t even remember when you followed me.

If this product happens to be what new fans want, the copywriting is well-written, the price is reasonable, and if they see the good reputation of many old fans, they may buy it. However, the conversion rate will drop even more sharply, but the radius of new fans will be larger, so in the short term you will see that your performance is still growing.

Then your sales will drop directly to 0 at the worst. I have seen that 90% of the content products have achieved zero performance after their fans have been exhausted.

In order to solve the problem of fans overdraft, another method called "making waves" was adopted. Creating waves, for example, I already have 1 million fans, and I and Noteman promote each other, exchange resources, and invite bigger people to promote each other in waves. But this wave only shook twice, and sales went down again. So if you want to make a good product, it’s not just about quality, you also have to establish a sustainable sales channel - this is a business issue, and most people who create content don’t understand business at all.

I want to tell you that it is not a snowball effect, but a cliff-like climbing curve. What is better than a cliff-like curve is to create more waves. Once you have used up the waves, it is very likely that your sales will drop to the stage where it is difficult to maintain the normal operation of your product.

If your wave falls but does not hit the bottom and can support the team, then you are actually OK.

If you make drinks that are particularly delicious, users will repurchase them. Some people say that content products can also be repurchased. Sorry, is it easy to develop a course? Buy another one? Even if I take notes, I can only take notes for 365 sessions a year at most. Therefore, production capacity is limited, and its consumption frequency is very low. Content consumption is a slow-moving product. How slow is it? If a person buys two courses a year, he is a top student. There are very few people in China who read a book every month.

Although every market has its difficulties, the market is still as big as the original demand. Moreover, as people's cultural level continues to rise, the total demand in this area is expanding. However, in the Internet age, many things have become free, and we have to find a charging model again, which is equivalent to the situation of those who first sold newspapers.

Why? At first, no one bought it and no one ordered it. Later, it gradually became popular and everyone was willing to pay to subscribe to a newspaper. I also went through this stage. How many labels there will be in the future actually depends on how many labels we have in the past in newspapers, radio, television, in the fields of anchors, writers, and speakers. We can then go and check them.

Then some people say that the uncle has already gotten used to the PPT, but I will get old, okay? Do you think Jin Yong still writes martial arts novels? He stopped writing after the 1960s and 1970s. Later, Wen Ruian and Huang Yi came out.

If we want to understand its present, we must first understand its past.

Question and Answer Session

Question: Uncle Qiuye, do you think Fenda has a chance?

Answer: I am very optimistic about Fenda. The first book about Fenda, which is about to be published in the country, was written by me. As soon as the Fenda came out on May 15 last year, I started my plan to write a book on June 15, and my manuscript was almost finished by the end of July. But I was very depressed when I encountered the suspension of Fenda. This suspension has ruined all my plans. I didn't expect it to stop for so long, 48 days in total. I still can’t exit after stopping, why? Because I don't know if it can survive.

But even if it dies, Fenda is still a very important product. Because from a knowledge point of view, two problems have not been solved:

The first is payment for knowledge. I provide you with a knowledge product, how do I charge you? In fact, in the past, this could be purchased even with Alipay .

But there is a second problem with knowledge. Knowledge is different from a cup. Once you sell the cup to me, it no longer belongs to you. I can smash it or burn it, and you have no right to interfere. But knowledge is like this. Ke Zhou gave it to me, he still has it, and I still have it. Then I gave it to Teacher Xiao Di, and Teacher Xiao Di still has it. The total amount of the three of us increased, but we didn't lose anything.

So, is there value in the dissemination of knowledge? It is valuable. Some people can spread the message to 50 people at once, and some people can spread the message to 10,000 people. So can this contribution be measured?

It was not measurable before, but Fenda used the mechanism of eavesdropping to solve the problem of interest distribution in the field of knowledge dissemination. This is a great innovation. Knowledge can be purchased and shared so that everyone can benefit. It is just a matter of defining the proportion of benefits in the future.

So far, the payment method provided by Alipay does not meet the value definition of knowledge dissemination. Fenda provides us with a new idea. From this perspective, it cannot die.

But it is not a platform-level product, and we don't expect it to become like Jack Ma's Alibaba , or a small tool that each of us uses to solve the problems of question-and-answer charges and dissemination and distribution. Once it becomes stable, it will definitely survive, so Tencent is willing to invest in its A round.

Q: I am a note-taking expert and a junior student. I am currently on the path of a slash youth, but people’s time and energy are limited. How can I make effective use of time and learn some skills within a limited time?

A: Let me give you some simple suggestions.

The first suggestion is that if you already have a clear goal, such as becoming an excellent note-taker, then cut out all other goals that are not essential to achieve.

The second suggestion is that since you are preparing to develop a skill, the basic method of developing a skill is to ask the most professional people to give you the most intensive practice in the shortest time. In this way, your abilities can improve rapidly in a short period of time and reach a plateau in a short period of time.

What does it mean to “reach a plateau”? For example, in swimming, after intensive training with a coach, you can swim a certain number of meters in one minute. This means you have reached a plateau, and at this point you basically have the ability.

Then in the future when you attend lectures outside and take notes, you will be obviously better than the average person. At this time, you can get motivation and feedback from outside. But many people make a plan, like to make a study plan, like to write down how much they will learn every day, and check the progress and percentage. How can you learn like this? What is learning? When I don’t want to learn, I just study according to the schedule; when I want to learn something, I will study it without sleep for several days and nights or even a week or two, and suddenly I understand it all!

For ordinary skills, it’s not advanced mathematics, nor is it the kind of research on the atomic bomb. It’s just ordinary skills. If you do it much better than the average person, you can do it in half a month. If you can't figure it out in half a month, what are you doing? This is how I lead my core team. In this way, the talents in my team will come out. Once they come out, I don’t have to worry about them because they know about it. After that, we just need to address his character weaknesses and his lack of knowledge and experience, and leave it to time. You see, married people know certain things, and people who have argued with their mother-in-law know certain things - these cannot be solved by me teaching you.

Question: Uncle Qiuye talked about the benefits of paid content today, and I felt very disappointed. I felt like I had reached all the highest points, such as Fan Deng and Luoji Siwei. We want to move forward in this direction and we are also running a book club, but we are not as high-end as Luo Zhenyu and Wu Bofan. But now we are very confused. What should we do in the future?

Answer: Here is a reminder for you, what does “how many labels were there in the past” mean? Let me tell you directly how I find the tags. The name of every best-selling book on the market is a label. This market is far from entering the stage of competition. Only one market has been divided up, and that is best-selling novels. But every book in the business and management field, there are so many books that were hot sellers back then, selling for more than 20,000 or 50,000 copies. What about these books now? Now is the time to revive them in new forms.

In the field of reading, there are two types of reading: shallow reading and deep reading, which are meant to help you learn the knowledge of this subject to the fullest. You can ask the author for the copyright and cooperate with him. From the perspective of positioning, there is actually no limit to the number of positions. But what are the disadvantages? Luo Zhenyu builds a platform, so he always makes the most money. If you are writing a book now, your ambition should not exceed the return that a best-selling author could get .

If you have the ability to expand the readership of this book by 10 times, then you may get 5 times more return than the previous author. The key thing I don’t know is how everyone understands the term “dividend”. I guess, when many people hear the word "bonus", they think of millions, and that one million is so easy to earn.

I have been working in the university for so many years, and my annual salary is only 100,000 yuan. It takes me 10 years to earn 1 million, but why can you surpass me in just two or three years by creating paid content? Then all of us university teachers will be fired. You have to know that there are quite a lot of professional and competent teachers in these areas, but they are just doing scientific research and doing what they like.

So we must never underestimate the difficulty of competing in the field of knowledge, which is no less difficult than becoming a movie star. The reason why you think you can start a business in the field of knowledge is that celebrities give up as soon as they see their faces, and singers give up as soon as they open their mouths - because you all know that it will never be possible. When it comes to learning, many people think they are quite capable of learning.

I have known since I was a child that I have a better learning ability than the average person. I know this. Many people only know that he can get the same score as me, but he will never know that my learning ability is better than his - because I didn't try hard. Many people asked me, "Uncle, what do you do every day?" I am very tired because I spend all my time chatting during the day, so I work at night, but I only work three or four hours a day, there is not that much to do. Of course, chatting is also a very important task because it can increase feelings and emotional connection is still very important.

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