GoPro's dilemma: competitors' pressure and slow content monetization

In 2004, based on his own interests and hobbies, Nicholas Woodman created a product that can be said to have changed the world today - the GoPro series of sports cameras. In the following 10 years, GoPro caught its competitors off guard in the extreme sports camera market and gradually took over the vast majority of the market share.

According to GoPro's Q4 2014 financial report, as of December 30, 2014, GoPro's global market share reached 94%, with sales of 2.4 million units in a single quarter and revenue of US$630 million. However, while it is raging against its competitors and growing rapidly, its extreme sports positioning is also limiting GoPro's further growth.

In the Q4 financial report released in 2015, GoPro's revenue dropped from US$630 million to US$430 million, a year-on-year decrease of 31%. Subsequently, the stock price fell to US$12.48, compared with the peak of US$64.74. It is reported that GoPro's market value has evaporated by 80%.

Lack of product differentiation and diversification

The lack of product differentiation is one of the biggest obstacles to GoPro's growth.

Despite providing consumers with a new perspective, over the past decade, GoPro has launched four generations of products on the market, with too little differentiation between the multiple series. This problem is most evident in the GoPro Hero 4 generation.

As a relatively durable consumer product, the lack of product differentiation directly makes consumers lose the motivation to change equipment. This embarrassing situation is also forcing GoPro to discontinue some entry-level products. It is understood that many products in the Hero+ series will be cancelled in the future.

In addition to the small differentiation between hardware, GoPro is also facing the embarrassment of a "new business shortage". Betting on the extreme sports camera market means a lack of story material in the capital market. GoPro needs to get rid of this curse and develop drones, remote cameras and other wearable similar products in addition to the mature extreme sports camera product line, and gradually move towards diversification.

The application field is too single

GoPro is rooted in the consumer market and is well recognized by loyal users, but its application scenarios outside the consumer electronics market are relatively narrow.

In fact , in addition to extreme sports, many fields and professions, including architecture, medicine, police, aerospace , etc., have a strong demand for digital content recording. The police body camera is a typical example. The once hotly debated Google Glass has relevant ideas and explorations in its application in the above fields .

In terms of special shooting needs, GoPro cannot even provide the most basic bullet time shooting kit, and requires consumers to use 3D printing equipment to make it. In this regard, GoPro has room for experimentation, and third-party users have also explored many new available scenarios, such as shooting movies, VR virtual reality content, etc.

In fact, GoPro has indeed tried live video streaming, such as the GoPro Hero Cast live streaming kit launched before, and the TV live streaming cooperation with Vislink. Unfortunately, there are not many attempts in this regard. One of the few cases is the GoPro wireless image transmission live broadcast used by CCTV during the 2015 military parade.

What is more embarrassing is that CCTV later stated in a private message that some GoPro devices encountered the embarrassment of crashing during the live broadcast.

Competitors attack from both sides

It took GoPro 10 years to pry open the door to the extreme sports market segment in the camera market that had been nurtured for hundreds of years, and quickly attracted a siege from traditional camera manufacturers.

So far, there are nearly hundreds of consumer-grade sports camera products on the market, a considerable number of which come from traditional manufacturers. Sony and Nikon have entered the market one after another, and Polaroid has also begun to quietly enter. Similar manufacturers include Panasonic, Garmin, JVC, etc. The more well-known ones include Sony's HDR series. These products are not inferior to GoPro in performance.

In addition to the latecomer efforts of traditional manufacturers, emerging manufacturers have also begun to make efforts in this regard. The Xiaoyi sports camera under the Xiaomi ecological chain is also very popular. Compared with the above products, the biggest feature of new brands represented by Xiaoyi sports cameras is high cost performance. The large price difference directly cuts off GoPro's path to cultivating entry-level users.

In terms of cost-effectiveness, the pressure faced by GoPro is not only reflected in the product hardware itself, but also comes from peripheral products. In contrast, some copycat products can provide the same or similar functions, but the price difference of dozens of times becomes a natural advantage.

The hardware market was forced to retreat, and the profits of the peripheral accessories market were also cut off, which directly limited the growth of GoPro's continued profitability.

The potential of content ecology remains to be developed

Compared with traditional hardware companies, GoPro is also trying to transform into a content platform. Nicholas Woodman once publicly stated in an interview, "We are a content company."

As a content company, GoPro, in addition to using its own new media platform to distribute large amounts of UGC content, is also teaming up with Red Bull and even exclusively sponsoring some extreme sports events, promoting the production of GoPro-based video content as a sponsor. However, the content has not allowed the company to achieve significant commercial results.

So far, the launch of the GoPro Lisense platform has become one of GoPro's few attempts at content commercialization. Based on this platform, third parties can directly obtain the right to use video content uploaded by certified users by paying, and GoPro can obtain revenue sharing in this way.

Regarding GoPro's UGC content business model, Quantifind CEO David Karnsted believes that "advertisers have a huge demand for high-quality video content, and the success of the image trading platform proves the feasibility of the UGC content platform transaction."

GoPro has painted a blueprint for users to earn revenue by producing content. However, to truly convert content into revenue, the support of tool-based products is still needed, which is precisely what the general public is not good at, and this is where GoPro has not done well enough.

For GoPro, what it needs to do now is to continuously improve the richness and ease of use of GoPro Studio's functions, giving users the opportunity to shoot high-quality content, as well as the opportunity to produce high-quality content through convenient tools, and then use the content platform to realize revenue conversion.

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.