Three questions about WeChat commercialization: The biggest challenge comes from within Tencent

[[127933]]

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and chaotic, and darkness was over the deep. The Spirit of God was moving over the water. God said, "Let there be light," and there was a game center. God saw that this was good, so he separated WeChat. God called himself a service and called others interruptions. There is a service experience and user interruptions. This is WeChat 5.0. ——"Product Bible·Genesis"

Tickets, tickets, tickets.

Mr. Ma Huateng, a low-key boss who is not good at communicating with the media, may have been inspired by the movie "2012". He ignited the trend of the word "boat ticket" in mobile Internet reports. The word "boat ticket" has become another popular word after "entrance", and practitioners and the media have quoted it one after another.

The word "boat ticket" is tied to WeChat. This domestic mobile Internet product, the biggest winner so far, may not be able to laugh at the big winner, or its profit margin is exaggerated by the public opinion that gives it unlimited praise. The commercialization of WeChat is likely to be a booming false fire.

Our first question is:

When WeChat becomes an application black hole, can it swallow everything?

Behind the entrance is the competition of user time and frequency of use. Today, WeChat has become the winner of the mobile terminal. It has firmly occupied people's address books and established its own relationship chain through the introduction of QQ relationship chain. On this chain, it devours users' time and energy. We call WeChat, which firmly occupies the user's desktop and has an absolute advantage in frequency and time of use, "application black hole". It will become the entrance to other low-frequency APP applications. Even in 5.0, APPs such as "shooting plane" and "every day love elimination" have become built-in APPs of WeChat.

Not long ago, the head of the Credit Card Center of China Merchants Bank inadvertently complained about WeChat during a chat with us. WeChat does not allow the WeChat account of the Credit Card Center of China Merchants Bank to activate the Credit Card APP through a redirect, and only allows the browser to be opened in WeChat. China Merchants Credit Card is a typical case of WeChat service account, but the cooperation between the two parties is not very pleasant.

We can understand the attitudes of both WeChat and CMB Credit Card. For CMB, it is good that WeChat can provide a platform for serving customers. However, although these users are WeChat users, they are also CMB Credit Card users in the final analysis. Why do I need WeChat's permission and even corresponding fees to serve my customers? What's more, the service experience that CMB Credit Card APP can provide is far better than WeChat.

For WeChat, what it needs is to firmly grasp the users and lock in the traffic. No matter which enterprise needs to provide customer service, it needs to charge per capita or directly give annual fees. Therefore, it also prohibits corporate service accounts from using WeChat to support its own users and promote its own APP. After all, the mother cannot control the child when he grows up. Although most corporate APP users and WeChat users may be the same type of people, the game between APP and WeChat is a zero-sum game. If one gains, the other loses. If there are more CMB credit card users, WeChat will receive less money.

This situation is not limited to WeChat. For example, independent e-commerce companies will continue to build their own e-commerce platforms after entering Taobao and Tmall. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. The game between enterprise service apps and WeChat service accounts will continue, but any capable and aware enterprise will take a two-pronged approach. They will neither surrender to WeChat and sit back and wait for death, nor will they completely give up WeChat.

Our second question is:

Can WeChat perform well as both a referee and an athlete at the same time without being divided?

The earliest and most absurd attempt to commercialize WeChat came from Dai Zhikang's team. The failure of the micro-life service project is predictable. As a service covering the whole country, it requires a lot of manpower and material resources to try to do O2O. Sales require a carpet-style sweep of the streets, and service control also requires a lot of management resources. In a word, it is not economical, and it can't beat more professional teams like Meituan and Dianping.

For a large and widespread product like WeChat, its commercialization should be carried out in a platform manner rather than entering into specific businesses and wasting energy and costs.

Whether it is games or e-commerce, WeChat’s biggest weakness is that it can never straighten out the separation between referees and athletes. For example, it focuses on e-commerce, but Tencent’s e-commerce has both platforms and Yixun. When it makes games, Tencent has both its own game content and distribution channels.

Zhou Hongyi once said that the advantage of 360 in game distribution is that they don’t make games in the first place. In other words, 360 is only a referee, not a player.

In fact, the separation between the referee and the athlete is also reflected in WeChat 5.0. WeChat, in the name of user experience first, believes that WeChat public accounts will disturb users, and is divided into service accounts and subscription accounts. However, their game center appears on WeChat in a dignified manner. Of course, the biggest irony is that WeChat does not have the courage to place the game center in all versions, because there is a referee above WeChat - Apple APP Store.

Our third question is:

In addition to games, what new value space can WeChat develop?

After Weishihuo, WeChat also tried to charge for emoticons and games, which were actually left over from QQ. The popularity of "Shoot the Plane" and "Love Elimination" made the capital market see the huge potential of WeChat. In fact, to put it in an inappropriate way, this can also be regarded as an internal struggle of Tencent. Tencent already holds the position of the leader in the game industry. As the top player, there will not be much room for improvement if QQ, QQ and WeChat fight each other.

The three major ways to monetize the Internet are games, e-commerce and advertising.

WeChat is reliable in making games, but it is also unreliable. There is a saying that goes, "We are standing on the top of the mountain, and there is no way to go." Tencent is so strong in games that it can split the revenue 1/9, with Tencent taking 9 and developers taking 1. This is also the best of strong channels. WeChat still retains the genes of Tencent's strong channels, but the game industry needs content. We do not deny Tencent's strong game development capabilities, but game development is not WeChat's sphere of influence.

WeChat can also do e-commerce, but the key is that Tencent's e-commerce is tied to it, and they will rise and fall together. Taobao has clearly banned WeChat, and other e-commerce companies may also easily let WeChat control their traffic. Even if it focuses on O2O, even if WeChat opens links to Dangdang and Amazon China by scanning, this cooperation model will still face our first and second problems: first, companies will not easily give up the initiative, and WeChat has a limited share of the cake. In addition, due to the separation of the referee and the athlete, WeChat will face internal pressure.

As for advertising, WeChat needs to face several obstacles when doing advertising, including distribution channels such as 360 Mobile Assistant and 91 Mobile Assistant, Taobao Alliance, and more importantly, Baidu, WeChat's biggest challenger.

In our opinion, there are two modes of mobile Internet entrance: one is the APP black hole mode and the other is the search engine, and the two most potential competitors are "WeChat" and "Mobile Baidu".

Let's take a look at the secret battle between the two. WeChat 5.0 has launched the "Scan" street view, QR code and other functions, and the iPhone version of Baidu has also recently moved the QR code and other scanning functions that were originally placed in the secondary function area to the front. The "Scan" function of WeChat 5.0 is not so much "augmented reality" as it is "search" in essence. This is not surprising. Google's wearable device collection product is "Google Glasses". According to Marshall McLuhan, "Google Glasses" is an extension of the human eye, while the search engine is the collective outsourcing of the human brain. Similarly, the smartphone camera is the extension of our eyes, and it is essentially a search. WeChat's "Scan" can be seen as Tencent's low-key entry into mobile search.
http://d9.sina.com.cn/pfpghc/576ff1ee75fa430c8a0d9806ce8c1482.png

Not long ago, at Baidu World, Robin Li proposed the concept of Light APP. The so-called Light APP is actually "web APP box computing", with Baidu Cloud as the underlying technology and Baidu advertising system revenue as profit sharing. For WeChat, its advantage lies in the traffic and user base of entering the search, and it can firmly grasp 2/8 of the search advertising, but in the long-tail market, it lacks the corresponding capabilities and genes - after all, Tencent Soso is indeed a hopeless person.

Well, as users of WeChat, we are indeed grateful to Tencent for this product. Zhang Xiaolong is indeed an excellent product manager, and WeChat is indeed the biggest winner in the current stage of mobile Internet. However, its future is somewhat over-expected.

The biggest challenge for the future of WeChat's commercialization may not come from outside, but from within Tencent. The success of WeChat and the failure of Soso actually tell the same story.