Mobile phones and live streaming will be the first to face a wave of closures. Consumption upgrades have become a trend in the second half of the Internet.

The Internet is hailed as another productivity revolution after the Industrial Revolution. Futurist Kurzweil said that people from the last century who had no access to the Internet might be "scared to death" if they came to this day, while if you wanted to "scare the hell out of people" in the world half a century ago, you might have to find people who did not have agricultural civilization dozens of centuries ago. This shows how great the changes the Internet era has brought to us are.

After the rapid development of mobile computing, the advent of the mobile Internet era has once again expanded the boundaries of the Internet to an unprecedented height. After forward-looking companies such as Giant and 360 brought the concept of free to the technology circle, with the huge dividend of Internet user growth, users and traffic became the object of competition among all parties. New ways of playing, such as low-priced mobile phones and live broadcasts of beautiful women, which were unimaginable in the past, quickly subverted people's worldview.

However, since 2016, the industry generally believes that mobile Internet has entered the second half, and the future market will change from model-driven to service-driven. In the past 20 years, with the rapid development of the Internet, the number of Internet users has also increased dramatically. However, since last year, all Internet companies have felt that the advertising promotion capabilities of various channels are getting weaker and weaker, and the cost of acquiring users and the difficulty of promoting daily active users are increasing. Coupled with the huge profit and financing pressure in the capital winter, these factors have jointly triggered the crazy bankruptcies of Internet companies in the past two years.

The growth of Internet users has stagnated and the myth of the eyeball economy is difficult to continue  

In 2012, it only cost one cent to acquire a user for an app or a public account. This cost has increased a hundredfold in many industries. According to recent calculations by a statistics company, the cost of acquiring a user has increased sharply to more than ten yuan. You must know that in the current Internet model, whether the user base is large enough often directly determines the financing ability of an Internet company. You must know that before financing, recruiting new members to expand the scale, spending money to buy users, and brushing data, and quickly laying off employees after financing are common in financing stories, and even Didi Taxi, which has formed a monopoly in the industry, is not immune to this.

Therefore, as the cost of acquiring users increases, Internet companies are crying out that they can no longer play and are starting to look for offline companies or channels to cooperate with. Even Jack Ma said at the 2016 Yunqi Conference: pure e-commerce cannot continue to be popular. He also boldly predicted: with the emergence of new retail, new manufacturing, new finance, and new technologies, e-commerce will soon be eliminated. If things go well, e-commerce may start to decline after this year's Double Eleven.  

The reason why the survival space of the current "Internet model" is being squeezed is actually very simple. The number of Internet users in China is approaching saturation and the growth is gradually slowing down, while the number of Internet companies is increasing, making it increasingly difficult to convert user traffic into cash flow. The Chinese-style "Internet myth" has become a huge bubble.

Once the "driving force behind the bubble" - capital - begins to adopt a cautious and conservative investment strategy, the Internet companies that have lost their blood transfusion channels and insufficient their own hematopoietic ability will only end up in destruction.

The rules of the Internet have changed as it enters the second half

In fact, the number of Chinese Internet users had experienced a brief stagnation in 2010, but with the popularization of Wi-Fi and later 4G and the reduction of Internet access costs, the Internet usage scenarios of Internet users have increased significantly, and the total Internet usage time of Internet users has continued to grow rapidly. According to statistics at the end of 2015, the average daily mobile phone usage time per person in 2014 and 2015 is as follows:

With the stagnation of Internet user growth, the average online time of Internet users can be counted, so it can be said that the total Internet market of all people in the country can also be estimated, which can be regarded as a fixed value. Countless Internet companies are competing for these limited user resources, which is also the fundamental reason why this war is becoming more and more brutal.  

The above chart shows the proportion of time spent on mobile Internet companies in 2016. Tencent surprisingly occupied nearly 70% of the time of users. As a social tool based on the Internet, WeChat is an irreversible trend of regional monopoly. This is also inevitable when the Internet was built at the bottom in the first half. As the dividends of Internet growth disappear and the Matthew effect becomes prominent, the Internet has officially entered the second half. The past Internet gameplay with free and massive information is no longer "playable".

The Internet is made or broken by content

Massive content has indeed played a great role in the Internet's victory over traditional media. However, as the Internet has developed to this day, the problem we face is no longer a lack of content, but rather an overcapacity of content. We have to browse hundreds of Moments every day, filter out what we are interested in from a large amount of news, and decide which article to read, which video to watch, and which game to play from various public accounts. In the era of content explosion, we simply don't have time to carefully select, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to find value in a pile of dregs.

The free model is a widely used model on the Internet. However, the free model is a gameplay that is born under the prerequisite that users have unlimited time. When users begin to pay attention to content quality and time cost, free will no longer be an effective means to attract users.

The famous economist Friedman summarized his life's work in one sentence - "There is no free lunch in the world", and called the rest of the economic principles "details". Applying the "lunch theory" to today's free Internet model is also applicable. "You eat this lunch (content) for free, but what you give up is your cost. This is the reason why various economic schools have always emphasized that time also has a cost.

Creating value for users will become the theme in the second half of mobile Internet

In the second half of the mobile Internet, the rules of the game will once again shift from free to inclusive. The rule of using price to reflect value will be revived. After users have had enough of the painful experience of digging for food from the dregs in recent years, the Internet is ready to welcome the return of high-quality paid content.

In the second half, the focus of Internet companies will once again shift from launching free content to attract users to creating core value for users. The story of wild growth is over, and the market will still prove that only companies that carefully build products for users, solve practical problems for users, and save time costs for users have real profitability and can achieve healthy and sustainable development.

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.