Platform ecology or vertical services Why is WeChat becoming more and more bloated?

Recently, WeChat has become a bit annoying. The speed of opening WeChat is getting slower and slower, and this "omnipotent tool" sometimes even "freezes". Ma Huateng said that the biggest change in Tencent in the past year is to "cultivate oneself and return to the essence", and return to the role of a "connector", that is, network communication tools like WeChat should not only "connect people" but also "connect services and machines" and so on.

So, has Tencent really “returned to basics”?

In my opinion, this is precisely the beginning of Tencent's "period of confusion" at this stage. A typical sign of this "period of confusion" is the sway in the positioning of its core products. Taking WeChat, Tencent's "universal artifact" in the mobile Internet field as an example, it is gradually moving away from the ultimate simplicity pursued by its original creator Zhang Xiaolong. From social networking, games to e-commerce, taxi-hailing, videos, etc., WeChat is carrying an increasingly heavy "profit" burden. Between WeChat as a "connector" and WeChat as a "money-making machine", Tencent's balance has been swaying and tilting, sometimes heavy, sometimes light, back and forth.

Media or e-commerce: WeChat’s growing pains

Tencent has been struggling over whether WeChat should continue to play its best media function, or go one step further and realize Ma Huateng's dream of revival - entering the e-commerce field and attacking Alibaba 's "Huanglongfu" in the mobile field.

Previously, some people analyzed that Tencent is good at product development but not good at product operation, which may be partly true. In the QQ era, Tencent also thought about carrying businesses such as Tenpay and Tencent Paipai on this cute penguin instant messaging tool, but in the end they all ended in failure. In addition to operational experience, the lack of corresponding application scenarios on traditional QQ tools is the most fundamental reason why such businesses cannot take root. For those users who are keen on video or text chats, or playing various small games on QQ, e-commerce is a "heavy weapon". It involves many offline links from product production, sales, inventory, logistics, services, etc. For a "light business" company like Tencent that excels in media and online games, the seeds of failure are buried at the source from the beginning.

In the blink of an eye, the mobile Internet has changed. Tencent has new weapons like WeChat, but the old dream of e-commerce is not over. Of course, this time Ma Huateng will not play the old tricks like Tenpay and Tencent Paipai. From WeChat payment to the alliance with JD.com, the former involves some business application scenarios that Tencent is familiar with, such as sending red envelopes, taking taxis, selling lottery tickets, and small-amount electronic payments, while the latter is to use the power of others to fight against the power of others. The enemy of the enemy is your best friend. These methods are new ways to realize the old dream. As for Weidian, forget it.

The division of so-called heavy business and light business may be a matter of opinion, because heavy and light are always relative, but a rough dividing line can still be found. Taking the media as an example, we can judge which media are "heavy media" and which are "light media" from at least two aspects: first, the cost. An episode of a TV series obviously has a much higher "production cost" than an article; second, the complexity or simplicity of the form of expression. On the Internet, this attribute can even be simplified to the memory size of the media content after digitization and the bandwidth cost involved in providing this service. For example, a movie is obviously much "heavier" than a song.

In addition to distinguishing the different attributes of media business and e-commerce business by importance, we can also think about it in a different way, why it is difficult for e-commerce business to grow directly on WeChat. We can even use the functions corresponding to the brain structure to distinguish these two types of business. The former can be called "right brain" business, and e-commerce is obviously a "left brain" business. It is well known that the media has never had any objective attributes. Everyone is always willing to believe in the content or preferences he likes. This is also an important reason why we can easily distinguish the left, center, right, conservative or radical styles in the media. In "social media" such as WeChat Moments, it is even more obvious. Usually, when we read the messages sent by a friend on WeChat Moments, it is not because the content he (she) sent is so "objective" and "fair", but because he (she) is your classmate, colleague or friend, or even the object of your secret love. The reason why you like to read it is because it just shows your "like" attitude; this is an emotional connection; but for "right brain" business such as online shopping, people will behave more rationally, objectively and realistically. For things like price-performance ratio, most people will compare prices from different stores. This is why Jack Ma prefers female buyers; this is the application of a more rational cognitive attitude.

Knowing this difference, perhaps we can understand more than half of it: why we immediately block people who simply sell small things in WeChat Moments; Alibaba's "Laiwang" is difficult to become popular even if Jack Ma strongly promotes it; why 90% of Facebook 's revenue comes from advertising rather than e-commerce; and why the e-commerce malls of portals such as Sohu and Sina all ended in failure. For Tencent, light businesses such as media and heavy businesses such as e-commerce are two different rivers that they have to step into at the same time.

JD.com Shopping has 30 million unique visitors on WeChat every day, but its order conversion rate is less than one in ten thousand. As for why the contribution of WeChat portal is so small in the latest financial report, the answer may be found in the brain structure of any ordinary person.

Platform ecology or vertical service: Why is WeChat becoming more and more bloated?

In addition to the difficulty in finding a balance between heavy business and light business (such as the micro-video launched by WeChat not long ago), WeChat is also wavering on whether to be a company characterized by platform ecology or to provide more vertical services in addition.

Taking the game business as an example, Tencent's latest third quarter financial report for 2014 shows that its core product, the game value-added business, has stagnated, with a month-on-month growth of only 2%. In addition to the decline in the growth of the PC segment game business, Tencent has implemented a more open platform strategy on the mobile side, but this strategy also faces challenges. For WeChat, it still attracts users with "light games" such as elimination and leisure games. For some "heavy games" such as "Dota Legend" created by its former Tencent team, it seems to be more willing but less capable. For heavy game players, the entrance of the mobile side is more centrifugal, diversified and fragmented, far less concentrated than the PC side. At this time, it will be quite difficult for WeChat to repeat the demographic dividend of hundreds of millions of users in the highly concentrated entrance of the QQ era. Whether to rely on independent development or a more open platform, the mobile game platform on WeChat will continue to be entangled.

Tencent wants to smoothly transfer the value of its media and gaming businesses from the QQ era to WeChat, but it wants much more than that. In fact, in the field of mobile Internet, Tencent's business model is undergoing new changes.

In terms of the proportion of advertising revenue to total revenue, Tencent's advertising revenue has been growing for four consecutive years from the third quarter of 2011 to the third quarter of 2014 (8%, 8.7%, 8.9%, and 12.3% respectively), with the largest growth in the past year. With the strengthening of Tencent's media functions brought by WeChat, Tencent's media business revenue will continue to grow strongly (advertising revenue in the third quarter of 2014 increased by 76% year-on-year, more than twice the speed of the game business (34%)).

In fact, this is exactly the "confusion" of WeChat products. In terms of its core value, WeChat is essentially a social media. From voice, text messages, videos to Moments, it has firmly controlled the market of social networking among acquaintances. However, in terms of its capital value, Tencent's platform dream is to enable it to carry more profitable businesses: from online games, lotteries, taxis, e-commerce to entertainment. In short, WeChat hopes to firmly control a person's food, clothing, housing, transportation, birth, aging, illness and death.

This "Spring and Autumn Dream" was implemented on WeChat, resulting in a distorted body: from Zhang Xiaolong's perspective, WeChat should be a simple and effective platform, with a variety of styles but a light body; but from Ma Huateng's perspective, WeChat should be a big tree full of profitable fruits, and each profitable business is heavy.

Judging from WeChat's existing product structure, the will of capital has completely surpassed the attributes of the product. The business on the WeChat platform is becoming increasingly "heavy", with more and more branches. From micro-videos, micro-stores, official accounts, and service accounts, the hope of reaping huge profits has almost bent the trunks. This is also the real reason why every ordinary user has found that the WeChat experience is getting slower and slower, and even the incidence of crashes is increasing.

For WeChat, it is imperative to reduce the burden. The presence of a product is like a person's lifestyle: it is easy to go from frugality to luxury, but it is difficult to go from luxury to frugality. Tencent has also noticed this problem. For example, the "WeChat Phone Book" released not long ago is a new APP, not directly attached to the WeChat tree. How to strike a balance between platform ecology and vertical services without repeating the successful experience of the PC era will be a key test for Ma Huateng and Tencent's senior management team.

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.