Judgment on the future development of content ecology: channel opportunities may disappear

The recent news about Uncle Tongdao must have made many people increasingly restless, and the news about content entrepreneurship will only add fuel to the fire. So is it really an opportunity for everyone?

I have three judgments.

Two judgments about IP content

1) Disappearance of channel opportunities

When Weibo first started, it was the world of joke tellers, and the entire industry chain was basically controlled by three major factions: Bai'er, Loushi, and Gushan. Everyone could play together, but if Party A needed to spread the content, it had to go through these companies. Therefore, these companies that monopolized the channels basically became the myth of this era in terms of revenue.

Using the same strategy, Wemdia wanted to migrate to WeChat a long time ago. At that time, a blue banner saying "I am a member of Wemdia" appeared at the bottom of each self-media, which was a big deal but ultimately unsuccessful.

But why is there no phenomenal company on WeChat that can monopolize KOLs again?

Weibo is an open platform, so a message can be shared through multiple "reposts" to maximize its value. The cost of participation is very low, but it can create a huge topic. However, in the WeChat ecosystem, the cost of participation is very high. It is impossible to get other KOLs to repost an article. At most, some public accounts can be promoted to each other.

The advantage of channels is that everyone can collaborate more closely, and the content itself does not need to be particularly high-quality. Even if the content of the second-party company is basically average, you can always find a few channels to push the content. The content created by dozens of small accounts is no less disseminating than that of a large account, and the overall price is even cheaper. Gushan started out by seizing this point.

Therefore, any valuable open platform, as long as it has mechanisms such as forwarding and liking, will produce an ecological group. In the past, webmasters who started out with SEO all relied on external link exchanges to form groups. Later, water armies began to form groups, Taobao fake orders also formed groups, and later Weibo formed groups. The market of Zhihu was also secretly taken over by several companies. However, only WeChat did not have the phenomenon of close grouping.

WeChat's decentralized ecosystem also means that if a big account wants to bring small accounts along, the cost it needs to pay is much higher than before. The combined dissemination volume of several small accounts can no longer surpass that of a big account as it did in the Weibo era. Therefore, it is impossible to fundamentally monopolize Party A, and then monopolize the resources of small accounts. Instead, it becomes more cost-effective to deploy a big account (for example, deploying Mi Meng). The profit chain is broken, and ultimately everyone can only fight on their own.

But all this is returning the content to its essence.

2) Content costs start to increase

Since the channel cannot be the first, the content naturally becomes more important.

Previously, most of the posts on Weibo were written by joke makers, most of whom were young people born around the 1990s. But on WeChat, the old people are in charge again. Many high-quality classic public accounts such as "Mimeng", "Yi Tiao", "Financial Gossip Girl", "Care for Gossip Growth Association", etc. are all operated by teams. Before starting public accounts, they already had strong experience in traditional media operations, but they just transferred their experience in producing high-quality content to WeChat.

The experience requirements for content creators have indeed become higher.

In addition to WeChat content, "short videos" and "live broadcasts" have also become popular recently. Compared with the jokes, videos and live broadcasts that were less than 140 words in the past, they require extremely high costs. On the other hand, since short videos and live broadcasts are "heavy content", unlike reading a joke that only takes a few seconds, users need to spend a lot of time in them, so there is a higher return on user experience.

For users of short videos and live broadcasts, the time cost they spend needs to be far less than the experience they gain, which means that the content must be solid, and relying on channels to push it will not work.

However, the "Get" APP did a good job. It saw that the future belongs to the era of heavy content. Users are willing to pay more "time cost" + "money cost" in exchange for "better user experience". This logic has actually been proven by movie theaters long ago, and it integrates proven celebrities in the industry, which can guarantee the output of content experience.

Therefore, as content costs become heavier and monetization models become more complete, content entrepreneurship is becoming more and more like a traditional business, with visible costs (staff salaries, office space fees, etc.) and clearly visible cash flow (content charges, advertising revenue). Therefore, its investment model should not be venture capital-style. In the absence of revenue and users, the model of first increasing the number of users will no longer be suitable for evaluating content entrepreneurship, but should be measured based on costs and revenue.

A judgment on non-IP content

Users will not spend all their time obtaining IP content, they also need information content, which will become more and more popular.

Information recommendation products have been booming in recent years precisely because of this trend.

Kevin Kelly mentioned the concept of "flow" in "The Inevitable". Everything in the future will flow anytime, anywhere, upgrade, change, and be everywhere. This can also be used to understand why the current information flow is so popular. Currently, all news clients basically adopt the information flow model, and they all see the same prospect.

The current tool-type products are increasingly questioned by investors in terms of monetization and are facing many difficulties, but the information reading + advertising model can enable them to be monetized smoothly. Information flow has been added to Sohu.com, information flow has been added to WiFi Master Key, and information flow has been added to Baidu Netdisk. In the future, I predict that more and more products will join in, and information flow will be everywhere. This is the general trend.

From the perspective of technological development, technology is constantly liberating us. For example, buying groceries, cooking, eating, and washing dishes used to take up a lot of time, and people had to cook every day, wasting a lot of time on it. But now cooking has become a hobby for more and more people, because we are already highly dependent on food delivery platforms. This time is saved, and the time saved is bound to be used for reading or entertainment, and the information flow model provides such value.

The book "A Brief History of Information" gives an example at the beginning: Africa relies on drumming to transmit information. Although the information transmitted is extremely large and inaccurate, it is still possible to obtain correct information. For example, the drum sound may convey "Man far away, the woman who misses you is at home taking care of the children, cooking at home, waiting for your return..." But it can accurately let the other party know that they hope to let him go home.

The higher the degree of information redundancy, the more accurate the information can be. Although it goes against our common sense, this is the law of the world. Therefore, I judge that both deep information content and shallow information content will be improved in the future, but the demand and value of shallow content will grow more explosively. After all, people can only have a little depth after extensive reading, and deep reading cannot make people understand one or two things at once. In the end, they still need to rely on more extensive reading as the basis for understanding.

People are always willing to sacrifice the depth and accuracy of information in order to gain breadth of information. The same is true in our expression. We usually prefer to send ambiguous emoji expressions rather than type because of our pursuit of efficiency. And behind this pursuit of efficiency is the fact that we need to continuously output more redundant information to the other party to fully ensure the accuracy of our own information.

Rumors do not stop with wise people. Rumors always stop when information is redundant and the fools become wise.

So where are the opportunities?

There are currently two opportunities for content entrepreneurship. One is to produce high-cost premium content. When the value of channel bundling decreases, the value of high-cost premium content will continue to increase. Of course, it also needs to be adjusted according to objective market feedback. The market does not mean that the more you pay, the greater the return, especially in the cultural industry.

Another one is to create shallow content and output more redundant information, which is also where the value lies today, and major platforms have prepared advertising monetization and subsidies for you.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.