Will 2015 be the year when WeChat reaches its peak and then declines?

Yesterday morning, various media outlets were reporting on the news of WeChat Moments ads. In the afternoon, I saw people responding frantically to WeChat’s own ads in Moments. Compared to the criticism of Weibo ads, people are much more accepting of Moments ads. But no matter how accepting it is, seeing this always makes people wonder: Will 2015 Moments ads be the turning point for WeChat’s decline?

Products are always the products of the times. When the time comes, landline phones and feature phones will naturally exit the stage of history, no matter how glorious they once were. So if we want to think about whether WeChat will decline, the first thing we should think about is not the strength of WeChat itself but the characteristics of our era.

In an era of scarce cognitive surplus

One day, when I was chatting with two beautiful girls, Xiaoxin and Xiaobing, from the Disruptive Innovation Study Society, I found Xiaoxin holding a book and looked at the title curiously. It was Clay Shirky’s "Cognitive Surplus", with the subtitle: The Power of Free Time. Then Xiaoxin told me that this was a book recommended by Ma Huateng, which aroused my curiosity. So I spent a few days reading the book. After reading it, I found that this book may have been right before, but at the moment its basic position is wrong. We do not have a lot of cognitive surplus, but are experiencing an era of scarce surplus.

If we take 2007, when Steve Jobs released the first generation of iPhone, as the first year of mobile Internet, then mobile Internet has been around for 8 years. In these 8 years, WeChat, Weibo, mobile games, news clients, reading, investment, notepads, videos, etc. have swarmed out and frantically occupied the not-so-big screen of mobile phones. As a result, every user's free time has been taken up. Everyone has formed his own mode of spending free time. Some people read fantasy novels on Qidian, some watch videos, some play games, and some chat... These things are really interesting and deeply attracted them.

This means that the free time that was once unconsciously distributed has been mined out like a gold mine. This is an era of surplus scarcity. When working, people are like being tied to gears and need to face endless efficiency improvements; when they are free, they spend their remaining time in the virtual world according to a set pattern.

In such an era of scarce surplus, the rise of any new time consumption model will inevitably lead to the weakening of the existing hegemon. In the case of WeChat, the rise of any new SNS will lead to the weakening of WeChat, because they are in the same field, so the degree of mutual compatibility is very poor.

If this logic is correct, then the next question is whether there will be many new, non-universal SNS emerging? The answer is yes, and this starts with the characteristics of SNS.

The short-lived gene of SNS

I have previously written an article titled “The Short-lived Gene of SNS”, which summarizes the internal and external causes of the short-lived nature of SNS.

The most critical internal cause is people’s aesthetic fatigue.

Many people may still remember that in the movie "Cell Phone", after Fei Mo was caught cheating, he kept complaining for a long time, which made people feel aesthetic fatigue. Some people may not like it, but aesthetic fatigue is indeed a part of human nature. People need stability and peace of mind, but they always want to find new stimulation, although this new stimulation often does not have long-term value.

This is a very contradictory thing. The parts that calm people's hearts, such as family, friendship, and ideals, often cannot support the development of SNS. The new stimulation parts can make SNS develop rapidly, but they are often not enough to support its long-term survival, such as: excess hormones. In the commercial arena, everyone wants to succeed quickly, so most of the time people rely on the latter when creating products, which is actually equivalent to injecting short-lived genes into SNS products.

Think about ourselves. When we first come into contact with products like WeChat, we are always very enthusiastic, then we just play with them for fun, and then we just ignore them.

There are two external factors that lead to the short life of SNS: one is that SNS must be the top entrance; the other is that the barrier to entry into SNS is low and there are infinite entry points.

The top-level entrance makes everyone salivate, and the low entry barrier and multiple entry points mean that as long as there is an idea that meets people's psychological expectations, whether it is fishing, reading, anonymous complaints, excess hormones or building connections, it is possible to achieve a career. The combination of aesthetic fatigue, top-level entrance, low entry barrier and multiple entry points is equivalent to that on the one hand, people cannot like one SNS for a long time, and on the other hand, there are constantly other products tempting you. As a result, SNS is born with a short-lived gene. Therefore, there will definitely be new, non-universal SNSs rising in the future, although it is difficult for us to clearly determine what they are in advance.

Why is advertising considered a turning point from success to failure?

The scarcity of surplus and the short-lived nature of SNS provide sufficient external conditions for the replacement of SNS, but this can only infer that WeChat as a product is not long-lasting, and it cannot be said that 2015, when ads appeared on Moments, was the turning point. In order to clarify this point, we need to further analyze the inherent characteristics of SNS.

We can divide the life cycle of all SNS into four stages:

Start-up stage: At this stage, the SNS usually represents a trend and is a new thing. Anyone who does not use it is considered a loser.

Growth stage: During this stage, the novelty of the app begins to attract widespread attention, and the number of users begins to increase rapidly.

Mature stage: At this stage, user growth becomes very slow, which means that everyone who might like your style has already come, and the rest are not very interested. For example, Douban is in this stage after it has attracted all the literary youths.

Decline: At this stage, people start to find it boring and use it less. This is usually the opportunity for a new SNS to rise.

WeChat has reached 600 million users in the four years from its launch in 2011 to 2014, and the user growth rate has gradually slowed down, which shows that as a product it has entered the mature stage. In the growth stage, Tencent is on the offensive because of its good expectations for the future, and only needs to consider the experience, but in the mature stage of the product, the developer and operator of the product must consider how to monetize the product, and monetizing the product is usually in conflict with maintaining user stickiness.

At this time, Tencent actually has two different choices: one is to insist on experience first and crack down on everything that generally reduces the user experience; the other is to make a compromise, which means that the demand for monetization begins to dominate. Once the demand for monetization begins to dominate, there will be more things in the future than just Moments ads.

In fact, micro-business, soft-text marketing and this time's WeChat Moments advertising are essentially the same thing. They will obviously harm WeChat Moments. The only difference is whether the beneficiary is Tencent.

In this way, things are clearer: on the one hand, non-universal SNS will continue to rise and take up the time that users allocate to WeChat; on the other hand, WeChat itself has entered a mature stage, and the demand for monetization has gradually become dominant. This is why it is said that the advertisements on Moments in 2015 may be the fundamental reason for the turning point of WeChat's rise and fall. Of course, for such a huge application, even if it declines, it will be a long process, and it will not fall suddenly.

Conclusion

WeChat's platform nature makes it a very complex product, in which its two major attributes, IM and SNS, are seamlessly superimposed together. However, I believe that it is impossible to separate IM and SNS from WeChat. The decline of any of these two attributes will lead to the decline of WeChat, so the above article does not distinguish between them.

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.