QQ, Weibo, Momo: Social media cannot escape the fate of social media

• In 1994, the first Internet BBS in mainland China, Shuguang Station, was launched. After that, BBS websites such as Shuimu Tsinghua, Mop, and Xici Hutong appeared one after another, and domestic social media officially entered its growth period.
• In 1999, OICQ, which was called "the hungry ghost elf" by Tencent people, was born. Tencent QQ took the lead in the field of instant messaging and became the king of social networking.
• Blogs were introduced to China in 2002, and BlogChina was founded based on this prototype. With the help of the "Mu Zimei" incident, major websites have entered the blog market, and portal websites such as Sina and NetEase have launched their blogs one after another, and portal blogs have exploded.
• In 2005, Xiaonei.com was launched; in 2008, Kaixin.com was launched, and SNS websites such as 5Q.com and Diaipian.com were launched one after another, showing strong vitality.
• In 2007, Fanfou, known as "China's earliest microblog", was launched, but it was shut down two years later. In 2009, Sina Weibo quietly went online, officially entering the microblog era.
• WeChat was launched in 2011. Since then, WeChat has been unstoppable, gradually invading other players' territories and becoming the dominant social network. In the same year, Momo entered the stranger social network track, causing a huge response.

Since then, Internet products such as Xiaohongshu and Douyin have been launched one after another, and have all entered the social field. The social track is full of smoke, and new social products continue to enter the market, trying to tell new stories. To this day, although social products such as QQ, Weibo, Momo, and WeChat are still active on the application list, there are also countless social products that have become the tears of the times, and even worse, they have disappeared before they can be known by the majority of users.

From being a popular star to being old and frail

Social interaction is an eternal need of human society, but no product can last forever. Even veteran players such as QQ, Weibo, and Momo are inevitably overwhelmed, after all, there is no shortage of storytellers in this field.

The decline of QQ is mainly reflected in the decline of monthly active users. QQ is the undisputed number one player in the IM field, and the key to the success or failure of instant messaging software lies in the active user base. The continuous decline in monthly active users has dragged down QQ.

In the second quarter of 2016, QQ's monthly active users reached 899 million. Since 2017, there have been signs of continuous decline. In the following two years, QQ's monthly active users have been hovering around 800 million. By the first quarter of 2019, QQ's monthly active users were 823 million, while in the first quarter of 2020, QQ's monthly active users were only 694 million, a drop of nearly 130 million users in one year.

By the first quarter of 2021, QQ's monthly active users were only 606 million, and it lost nearly 90 million users in one year. In the second quarter of this year, QQ's monthly active users were 591 million, and by the third quarter, QQ's monthly active users had fallen to 574 million. In other words, in the first three quarters of 2021, QQ lost an average of 16 million users per quarter. Judging from the continuous decline in QQ's monthly active users, this data seems to have room to fall.

Weibo's decline is reflected in the growth of revenue and net profit. Judging from Weibo's financial reports over the years, Weibo has fallen into a growth bottleneck. From 2018 to 2020, Weibo's total revenue was US$1.719 billion, US$1.767 billion, and US$1.69 billion, with growth rates of 49.4%, 2.8%, and -4.4%, respectively; the annual net profit was US$573 million, US$493 million, and US$315 million, with growth rates of 63.7%, -14%, and -36%, respectively. In the past three years, Weibo's revenue and net profit have not been optimistic.

The decline of Momo is reflected in its inability to develop. As of the second quarter of 2021, although Momo has been profitable for 26 consecutive quarters, the decline in user data has confirmed Momo's decline. For Momo, survival is not a problem, but development is.

Momo's monthly active users and payment rate are both stalling. Since the second quarter of 2018, Momo's monthly active users have continued to decline year-on-year. By the fourth quarter of 2019, Momo's monthly active users had only increased by 1% year-on-year. In the first quarter of 2020, Momo's monthly active users went directly into negative growth. The year-on-year growth rate of paying users has also been declining since the third quarter of 2018. In the first quarter of 2020, Momo's paying users decreased by 1.2 million year-on-year.

This also led to a decline in both Momo's revenue and net profit. From the first quarter of 2020 to the second quarter of 2021, Momo's revenue has declined for five consecutive quarters. Among them, the net revenue in the first quarter of 2021 decreased by 3.4% year-on-year, and the net profit attributable to Momo decreased by 14.3% year-on-year.

Whether it is QQ, whose users are continuously decreasing, Weibo, whose revenue and net profit are declining, or Momo, which is experiencing sluggish development, they have all lost their room for imagination. The three major social software have all gone downhill at the same time.

QQ: I can’t learn to let go

Although QQ has completed the transition from the PC era to the mobile era, it has not learned the new era's concept of "letting go". Of course, QQ has also done some subtraction, but it has not fundamentally solved the problem, nor has it been able to mobilize the vitality of excellent products.

On the one hand, QQ cannot get rid of the burden of the PC side. The PC era witnessed the golden decade of QQ, and it is undoubtedly the most successful social product in the PC era. But the tide of the times is rolling forward, and QQ, which retains the characteristics of the PC era, is not necessarily suitable for the mobile era that is changing faster and faster.

First, it lacks the logic of mobile IM. In the mobile Internet environment, regardless of whether the user is online or not, the software will assume that the user is always online, which is also an important logic of mobile IM. However, QQ's "offline, online, invisible" and other states are characteristics of the PC era, and this function is still maintained today. The product characteristics of the PC era conflict with the logic of the mobile era. This product contradiction may make QQ further and further away from user needs.

Second, the bloated product system has made it lose the elderly and office scenes. "Big and comprehensive" is the way Internet products are presented in the PC era, while the mobile era requires more precision and simplicity. QQ's products are too heavy with functions such as Centimeter Show, Weishi, Interest Tribe, and QQ Views. Various fancy functions have aggravated the loss of users in the elderly and office groups.

From the perspective of the elderly, QQ has too many functions and is not easy to operate. They are less receptive to new things and can only avoid QQ due to its complex functions. From the perspective of the workplace, QQ has mixed information and messy pages, which greatly affects office efficiency. The rise of software such as DingTalk has also replaced QQ in the office scene.

Most importantly, QQ’s “youth” strategy has also earned it the label of “lower age”, with more and more people born in the 1980s and 1990s leaving QQ.

On the other hand, QQ's subsidiary products have not played their due value. QQ has developed a series of subsidiary products in the process of development, including QQ Space, QQ Farm, QQ Wallet and other gameplay. These subsidiary products have played a role in improving the ecology of QQ in its early days, and they also have their own highlights, but they cannot continue to shine for QQ's business.

Take QQ Wallet as an example. QQ Wallet lacks payment scenarios in daily life and it is difficult to play the role of payment. The earliest consumption scenarios of QQ Wallet are to purchase Q coins and membership. Since then, QQ has been running wild in entertainment scenarios such as "games, two-dimensional, and live broadcasts". Other players have already focused on daily life scenarios and have become one of the important payment methods, such as WeChat Pay and Alipay. QQ is also unable to enter the payment field due to the lack of payment scenarios in daily life, and it is difficult to meet the payment needs of users.

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Weibo: Self-restraint

Weibo’s crisis stems from its failure to learn lessons and allowing traffic to overwhelm the platform, putting itself in danger.

First, Weibo has not found a new growth engine. Weibo's revenue business is divided into two parts: advertising business and value-added business. However, from Weibo's financial reports in recent years, it can be seen that Weibo's advertising business accounts for about 90% of its total revenue each year. This means that Weibo's next development will continue to rely on the growth of advertising revenue, but there are still many unstable factors in the advertising business.

Secondly, Weibo is moving away from the track of social media. Social media is a platform for people to share opinions, insights, experiences and views with each other, allowing the general public to pay attention to public affairs, express their opinions and participate in social affairs. This is also the reason why Sina Weibo can beat the other three major Weibo players, but now Weibo is losing its advantage.

First, the trending searches have changed. People often joke that Weibo feeds Sina, and trending searches feed Weibo. It is no longer a secret that trending searches are bought and sold. According to Caijing Tianxia Weekly, the publication price of three trending searches is about 1 million yuan; the price of opening the screen is about 2-3 million yuan, and this is the price for one day. Trending searches are no longer about reporting current events, but anyone with money can get on the list. For example, in 2018, the trending search farce of "Ziguangge gutter oil" was no longer a place to pay attention to current events.

The second is the out-of-control fan economy. The fan economy has made a huge contribution to Weibo's revenue, but the out-of-control fan economy has also made Weibo unable to cope. On Weibo, it is common for people to abuse and tear each other apart for their idols, such as the 227 incident; and it is not surprising to pay for idols to get on the charts, such as the fan battle between Jay Chou and Cai Xukun and the "milk dumping" incident. The fan economy has added a bit of smoke to Weibo and is constantly squeezing out other user groups.

Third, supervision is not in place. As we all know, Weibo does not produce content, but only reviews content. Since Weibo has the responsibility of reviewing, it should strictly review the information posted on the platform, reasonably screen public information, and remove the false and retain the true. However, Weibo did not learn the lesson of the "big V jailed" incident in the early years, and once again became a manipulation field for public opinion and the birthplace of false news.

Weibo's ecosystem is deteriorating, making the user experience worse and worse. Users cannot get the public information they want from Weibo, but are instead surrounded by all kinds of chaos, so they will naturally migrate to other social media platforms.

Finally, the failed strategy failed in the live broadcast and short video fields. Weibo saw the trend of short videos as early as 2013, and invested in technology and provided traffic support to Miaopai, all of which demonstrated Weibo's ambition for short videos. However, Miaopai tended to Weibo's centralized thinking and could not catch the attention of users at all. After Douyin and Kuaishou became popular by relying on decentralization, Miaopai was powerless to resist. After that, Weibo also launched a number of short video applications, but the trend had passed, and even the restart of Weibo Video Account failed to make a splash.

Momo: A social business that cannot be saved

Although Momo's founder has always emphasized that Momo is a social platform, judging from its revenue structure, the social business, which only accounts for 30% of its revenue, cannot support Momo's commercial ambitions, and Momo is gradually losing its social base.

First, the mixed social network has dampened the enthusiasm of users. The threshold for stranger social networking is not high to begin with, and once the platform users are not managed properly, various problems will quietly arise. The harassment of male users on the platform has caused female users to flee Momo. Without female users, male users will naturally lose confidence in the platform.

Secondly, the strategy of casting a wide net cannot retain users for Momo. Momo launched a number of social products, including Shishi, Qiaoqiao, Cue, Hertz, ZAO, and Duidui, trying to squeeze into the social field from multiple dimensions, but the diverse social product matrix failed to make a splash in the social market. The only popular ZAO also quickly died due to network data security issues.

In addition to the failure of its own incubated APP to help Momo, the acquired Tantan has also become a drag on Momo. Since the completion of the acquisition, the growth of Tantan's paying users has been extremely limited. Data shows that Tantan's paying users account for 26.7%-35.7% of Momo's total payment. In other words, the increase or decrease of Tantan's paying users directly affects Momo's revenue. Although Tantan's losses are narrowing, Tantan, which has been in a loss state for three years, has lowered Momo's net profit growth.

Third, the traffic of stranger social networking itself is coming to an end. With the diversification of the ways of making friends on the Internet, users' choices of dating platforms have also become more diversified. Under the impact of various social modes, the traditional form of stranger dating is no longer attractive. The epidemic has also reduced the demand for stranger dating and accelerated the collapse of Momo's social business.

Momo's poorly managed social business has spawned all kinds of chaos, which has not only given rise to the rise of other stranger social platforms, but also accelerated the loss of platform traffic.

Baptism of the times

QQ, 22 years old, Weibo and Momo, 11 years old, have gone through the era of mobile social networking and video social networking, and are now moving towards the era of virtual social networking. They survived the first two social battles smoothly, but now that they are plagued by serious problems, can they survive the third battle smoothly?

The era of mobile social networking: WeChat is competing for talent

WeChat was first created to counter the impact of MiTalk on QQ and to expand Tencent's social group. Later, WeChat not only defeated MiTalk, but also became a nightmare for other social products.

For instant messaging software, simplicity is the greatest success. After more than ten years of accumulation, QQ at that time provided more and more functions for users, but many middle-aged and elderly people did not know where to start. Therefore, WeChat, with its simple operation and simple interface, made social interaction simple. The straightforward chat method won the favor of the elderly and working people.

As WeChat accumulates acquaintance social relationships, social networking with family, friends, and colleagues as the core forces users to stay on WeChat or switch to WeChat, exacerbating the loss of QQ users. WeChat has gradually developed into a comprehensive life software that integrates payment, travel, epidemic prevention and other functions, achieving full coverage of life scenarios, and further taking away QQ users.

2013 was the most unforgettable year for Weibo, but it all started with the launch of the WeChat public platform feature in 2012. When WeChat became the focus of the mobile social track, more and more Weibo big Vs and celebrities opened their own WeChat public platforms, plunged into the social relationships of acquaintances, attracted users through public account writing, and embarked on the path of self-media.

According to the Statistical Report on the Development of China's Internet, in 2013, the number of microblog users declined by 22.8%, and the time spent on microblog products increased by only 12.7%. By the end of 2013, the number of mobile microblog users was 196 million, a decrease of 5.96 million from the end of 2012. At the same time, the utilization rate of mobile microblogs was only 39.3%, a decrease of 8.9 percentage points from the end of 2012. In 2003, when the Internet was penetrating, the user utilization rate of microblogs continued to decline, which was a big blow to microblogs.

For Momo, WeChat is like a sword hanging over its head. Momo was launched on August 4, 2011, and WeChat launched its LBS function, People Nearby, on August 3. In addition to bringing a sense of oppression to Momo, WeChat also caused irreversible user loss.

When two strangers chat very well on Momo and develop a stable social relationship, they will naturally turn to acquaintance social networking, and then flow into WeChat, completely entering the acquaintance social networking stage, and Momo's active users will face complete loss. In the transformation of stranger relationships, Momo has become a diversion tool, and WeChat's acquaintance social networking has become the biggest winner.

Video social era: video platforms compete for user time

When the traffic dividend has reached its peak, user time has become the focus of competition in Internet competitions. Throughout this competition, video platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou, and Bilibili have become the software where users stay the longest.

According to Jiguang Big Data, the average daily usage time of Kuaishou users in Q3 2021 reached 125.3 minutes, a year-on-year increase of 30.9%, while the average daily usage time of Douyin reached 144.6 minutes. According to QuestMobil statistics, in March 2019, the average daily usage time of mobile social and short videos was 98.2 billion minutes and 35.8 billion minutes respectively; by June this year, these two figures were 95.3 billion minutes and 88.8 billion minutes respectively, and the user time of short videos increased by 148%.

According to the data, users spend more than two hours a day watching short videos, which are taking up more and more time. According to the "Entertainment and Media Industry In-depth Report", the duration of QQ users has dropped from about 50 minutes to about 30 minutes. Not only can QQ not retain users, but the duration of users has also gradually declined, and in the end, only the address book full of memories is left.

The user time spent on Weibo is even less optimistic. According to Analysys Qianfan statistics, from May 2019 to April 2020, the average monthly user time spent on Weibo hovered around 10 hours, which translates to an average daily user time of 20 minutes, far less than that of Douyin and Kuaishou. And according to the trend, the average daily user time spent on Weibo is still declining.

Weibo has lost not only user time, but also advertising business. According to Weibo's prospectus, the number of its advertisers has been declining. From 2018 to 2020, the number of Weibo's advertisers was 2.9 million, 1.6 million, and 2.4 million, respectively. By June this year, Weibo's advertisers had been halved to 600,000.

In the social track, not only is Weibo's commercialization blocked by short video platforms, but short video platforms are also eroding Momo's commercial capabilities.

Momo's main revenue currently comes from live show business, which inevitably requires a large number of beautiful anchors, but the huge traffic and super money-printing ability of the two major platforms, Douyin and Kuaishou, have also robbed Momo of its anchor resources. According to media reports, affected by the epidemic and Douyin's strong support for anchors, 40% of Momo's anchors have left Douyin.

The monetization methods of Internet companies are nothing more than advertising, value-added services, and paid services. However, now that the pattern has been determined, if short video platforms want to get a piece of the pie, they need to cut a few pieces of meat from other players. Unfortunately, QQ, Weibo, and Momo, the three leading players in the social track segments, have become the first targets to be cut.

The era of virtual social interaction: the social metaverse becomes a strong rival

There are always new ways to play in the social track. With Zuckerberg changing the name of the Facebook Group to "Meta", the social metaverse has been pushed to a new height. China has also been involved in the social metaverse for a long time. For example, Soul, which focuses on soul social networking, and Xirang launched by Baidu are reshaping the discourse power of the social track, which will undoubtedly impact the old social platforms.

In fact, the biggest advantage of the social metaverse is virtualization. Every user has a virtual identity in social interaction, and there is no need to worry about the various problems that exist in real social interaction and separate real life from the social metaverse. The social metaverse platform relies on technologies such as 5G, XR, and real-time Internet, supplemented by multiple gameplay methods such as games, to create an immersive virtual social interaction for users and draw an ideal world for users.

The social metaverse is becoming the new darling of social networking. For example, Soul, the dark horse of the domestic social metaverse, has shown strong vitality.

According to Soul's prospectus, Soul's DAU has reached tens of millions, a year-on-year increase of 94.4%. Soul's average daily DAU opening times are 24 times, the highest in the industry. Since July 2020, Soul's monthly MAU user growth rate has remained above 105% on average. In terms of user stickiness, in March 2021, the proportion of monthly active days exceeding 15 days reached 56.4%. Among users who were active for more than 15 days in December 2020, 78.4% of users still maintained the same level of activity three months later.

The prospectus also shows that from 2019 to the first quarter of 2021, Soul's revenue was 70.7 million yuan, 498 million yuan, and 238 million yuan, respectively. In 2020, revenue increased by 604.3% year-on-year, and in the first quarter of this year, it increased by another 260% year-on-year. Soul is creating a new focus on social networking with a strong growth momentum.

QQ, Weibo, Momo: Can’t escape the fate of social networking

QQ, Weibo and Momo each represent the social segment. They have gone through countless ups and downs, but they have all survived tenaciously. QQ tried to position itself as a younger audience to boost monthly active users. Weibo and Momo tried to diversify and explore a healthier business structure. This shows that they are not sitting still, but they have not achieved much so far. So, what will be the fate of QQ, Weibo and Momo's social network?

First, they are left in the memory like the early social pioneers. Kaixin.com, which was used to steal vegetables and grab parking spaces, and Renren.com, which was used to find classmates, were all leaders in the social field and had their own glorious years. But the sun will always set, no matter how dazzling it is, it will also fall from the west. Kaixin.com and Renren.com have become beautiful memories of the post-80s and post-90s, and QQ, Weibo, and Momo will also become the memories of a generation.

The second is to take the initiative and win back a city. In the social track with novel gameplay and numerous competitors, if old players such as QQ, Weibo, and Momo want to continue to occupy a place, they must change their past defensive state and use offense instead of defense to change their passive situation.

Looking at the changes in the social track, it has experienced an evolution from basic social interaction to content social interaction and then to spiritual social interaction. This shows that user needs are not limited to existing social interaction, but are turning to the innovative "next generation social interaction". "Next generation social interaction" needs to rely on technology to help everyone get rid of the traditional "Chinese loneliness" and bring users pleasant spiritual enjoyment in any context.

For QQ, Weibo, and Momo, based on user psychology, they rely on technology to establish new social relationships. In addition to satisfying users' basic social experience, they also take into account users' psychological needs. Perhaps, through the refined operation of the platform, they can compete for existing users and recall silent users.