Any fast-growing and highly respected company will inevitably kick a certain iron plate, and community and social is the one Byte Jumping kicked.
As of November 2020, ByteDive has laid out 11 tracks including games, artificial intelligence, enterprise services, education and training, healthcare, etc. It is expected to reach 239 billion yuan in revenue in the whole year of 2020, becoming an undoubted behemoth. However, despite the continuous expansion of the byte jumping boundary, it has never been able to penetrate into the community and social field.
“For the social and community thing, all the head flow platforms will always have a desire.” Wu Hao, an investor who has long been concerned about the content industry, said in an interview with the alphabetical list (ID: wujicaijing) that whether it is new products or iterations of old products, ByteDance has been emphasizing the weight of “people” in recent years, but the result is always unsatisfactory.
An anonymous senior product manager said in an interview with the interface that the biggest problem with ByteDance is that it has a large traffic pool with multiple high-frequency product matrices, but there is no single channel that can circle users and interact with them. “The product matrix itself is not centralized, the same intersection of massive active, byte jumping lack of products that can achieve cross-application interaction in the matrix, to make up for the lack of traffic ecology, sharing, fission, social is one of the viable solutions.”
Whether it’s the community atmosphere or social attributes, it’s essentially the “circle” that the byte system lacks.
Zhang Yiming, Headlines Today
Zhang Yiming, founder of Byte Jump
The founder of YouTube, Steve Chen, once said, “From day one, we’ve been committed to building a community of video services.”
According to the Tencent Technology article “ShakeYin Insider: The Birth of a Time Melting Pot,” ShakeYin was initially set up to be a music short-video community, but as it ran wild, since mid-2018, ShakeYin’s positioning has shifted from a content community to a business system, with the ensuing loss of the “circle” of the daimler.
However, judging from Jitterbug’s 600 million DAUs, the lack of this “circle” has not slowed down Jitterbug’s development, despite the anxiety it brings to Byte Jump. For Jitterbug, a large circle without boundaries is obviously more valuable than a small circle with a strong community atmosphere.
“When the byte system has enough revenue and the volume is made big enough, the anxiety brought by social disillusionment is certainly not as strong as in previous years.” Wu Hao believes that compared with previous years, the huge revenue scale makes the point of strengthening social attributes more down the list of ByteDance’s strategic priorities.
At the beginning of 2020, Jitterbit’s strategy department set three priority directions:social, e-commerce, and going abroad. Due to the Tik Tok incident, Jitterbug put the focus on the first two. A top executive of a head investment institution that has invested in more than a dozen social products told the alphabetical list that the priority of social is significantly lower according to the project landing situation.
“At the beginning of 2020, Jitterbug’s strategy department found us, and because we have invested more in social, they wanted to have a chat with us and some of the social startups we have invested in that are doing quite well.” The above-mentioned executives revealed that the topics discussed at that time were unlimited, including “whether China has a story of story”, “social direction to do strangers or acquaintances”, “do voice or do video” etc. For various reasons, these projects did not take shape.
“Jitterbug side submitted the question, but then the matter did not continue because of the epidemic.” According to the senior management’s observation, Jitterbug has landed similar cooperation with head to head, Huaying Capital and other fund organizations in FMCG and live e-commerce. “Maybe it’s because they don’t think social is that important anymore.”
Senior product manager Judge said that when Jitterbug developed into a 600 million DAU national-level product, it is difficult to maintain a unique community atmosphere, its user portrait has become all Internet users, so it is bound to be a blurred face, “the higher the product compatibility, the more blurred the face, your user base is so large that it is already difficult to have an abstract label. “
However, Jitterbug does not need it, does not mean that other products within the byte system do not need it. The methodology of great power out of miracles does not always work. The failure of products such as Wukong Q&A, Duo Flash and Feiliao is, to some extent, the result of the lack of community atmosphere and social attributes in Byte Jump’s product genes.
In 2016, Taobao proposed to transform into a super consumer media, strengthening content, community and localization, and recently revamped Taobao’s home page and launched a centralized content platform, which is a deepening of the goal of developing content and community, in order to stimulate the activity of stock users, improve user stickiness and attract more new users to Taobao. The short video platform Racer, which is also making a push for live e-commerce with Jitterbug, has always pressed Jitterbug on live e-commerce because its community attributes make the tension between e-commerce and content dissolve.
In the context of content ecological competition has become the main theme of the times, even if Jitterbug’s pursuit of social and community attributes is no longer fierce, if this aspect of the gene continues to lack, byte jumping will also face product success rate of torture, after all, once called the “APP factory” byte jumping has not appeared for a long time to dominate the top.
A
An employee of ByteDive told the alphabetical list that projects die almost every day within ByteDive, and the difference between the dead projects is that some are quiet and some are spectacular. And in Byte Jump’s version of disillusionment, Wukong Q&A counts as the latter.
Today’s headlines launched a Q&A community in 2016, targeting Zhihu, and in 2017 the community changed its name to “Wukong Q&A”, launched an independent app and invested heavily in competing with Zhihu for large V users, spending more than 10 million yuan a month on sign-ups. The company once expected to extend its traffic and algorithmic distribution advantages to the community, claiming that it would invest 1 billion yuan in Wukong Q&A in 2018, of which 500 million yuan would be used to sign up respondents.
After the news of Wukong Q&A signing up over 300 Zhihu V in one breath was exposed, Zhihu co-founder Zhang Liang said, “He thinks there are just 300 writing people in China?” Zhang Yiming responded, “I think Zhihu founder Zhang Liang is a bit arrogant towards his own platform authors.”
Image
In November 2017, according to data released by an executive at Today’s Headline, Wukong Q&A reached more than 100 million users, generating more than 30,000 questions and 200,000 answers per day, and QuestMobile reported that in October 2017, Wukong Q&A had a MAU of 1.21 million, which was somewhat different from Zhihu’s 13.51 million MAU, but already close to Baidu Encyclopedia’s 1.59 million.
However, the apparent prosperity did not last long. questMobile data shows that from April to July 2018, Wukong Q&A MAU declined, with only 679,000 MAUs in July. In that month, Wukong Q&A was merged into Micro Headlines, more than 100 team members were transferred, and its marketing director Liu Chen left.
Chen Rui, chairman of B station, mentioned in an interview that in order to make users like the community atmosphere of B station, he mentioned two criteria internally, one is worthy of users’ respect, and the other is to stand the test of time. For any community, the second criterion is more intuitive.
In Zhihu has 500,000 fans of a financial V Zhang Feng said that both the community atmosphere, or the quality of content, it takes time to cultivate, headlines believe in vigorous miracle logic in the cultivation of community atmosphere is difficult to see results, “whether it is the algorithm, the center, or money to smash can not solve the problem of time, seed users continue to contribute excellent content needs time.
The community is a business of people and content, producing content through people, and then connecting more target users with specific content. In this process, the community atmosphere plays an access and screening role.
“Users decide what content to show, even if bytes are heavily signed to elite responders, they can’t sway the user’s mind.” Zhang Feng told the alphabetical list, at that time the prevailing problem on Wukong Q&A is:What stocks to buy to make money, there are tens of thousands of dollars want to start a business what to do …… good questions are too scarce, so much so that there are large V registered trumpet self-questioning. “Although you (bytes) give me money, but I have to answer such low-quality questions for this money?”
Zhihu founder Zhou Yuan once said that the growth of each field needs time, there is no need to plan something strategically and logically, “the world is not so much good to pick the fruit”, stretching the time will naturally have a variety of results.
Obviously, Zhang Yiming does not have much time to pick fruits for Wukong Q&A, but his pursuit of the circle never stops.
B
January 15, 2019, a day known as the zodiacal day by Wang Xin, the founder of Crypto, on which Wang Xin, Luo Yonghao and Zhang Yiming teamed up to release social products and cut into Tencent’s hinterland. Of course, byte internal resource support, high-level stand, as well as relying on the background of Jitterbug, so more flash become the whole Internet expectation is very high product.
Doshen added more than 1 million users within 24 hours of hitting the shelves. This growth rate exceeds many headline products. But the retention rate is not optimistic, personal push big data related report shows that the next day retention rate after the release of many flash is 34.34%, 7 days retention is only 16.34%.
“At that time, people expected that Doshen would become the ‘Weixin’ within Byte, and if it was taken as an upgraded version of Jitterbit’s private message, then at least there was still the basic plate of Jitterbit.” Wu Hao analyzed, “but Jitterbug and the outside world have overestimated the importance of the ‘private letter’ thing among Jitterbug users – users don’t need to turn the relationship on Jitterbug into a deep relationship.”
The word once again started the usual method of playing, to open the game of burning money. 2019 Chinese New Year period, multi-flash take out a total of 100 million cash bonuses, to encourage users to send with the video. Under the heavy money, the download volume and DAU of Duo Flash have grown significantly, becoming the second most active product in the headline system after Today’s Headlines. However, the retention rate was still a pain point for Dodiao, and the data fell off a cliff after the Spring Festival, with iOS downloads falling from 460,000 to less than 100,000.
The lesson of multi-flash did not let bytes stop the exploration of the social field, still in the growth period of bytes need infrastructure to fight Tencent. “The headline has always had the heart to do social, social is a more underlying infrastructure than all the products of the headline now, if there is no social, it will always be subject to Tencent.” Wang Tianfan, managing director of Bertelsmann Asia Investment Fund, said in an interview with Interface.
In May of that year, FeiChat, a highly replicated version of WeChat, was launched. According to the data of Seven Wheat, when FeiLiao’s Android terminal was first launched, the average daily download volume was once as high as 90,000, but in June, the average daily download volume dropped to less than 20,000. Until now, the real-time ranking of App Store downloads, Dosun is outside the top 1000 in the total application list; FeiLiao is not even ranked in the total application list.
“In today’s social field, it is impossible to rely on the platform traffic advantage and try to succeed by copying another giant’s product.” One investor said.
To this day, the versions of these two software (Duo Flash and Feiliao) are still updated, but their status within Byte is long gone. Wu Hao said, “Today, the status of Feishu is much higher than these two products, just like Nail relieved Ali’s social anxiety, Feishu relieved Byte’s social anxiety to a certain extent.”
Wu Hao believes that another reason why Byte Jump is no longer obsessed with social and community attributes is that Tencent has conducted a very aggressive and strong defense in the entire content segment, resulting in a low cost performance of bytes to strengthen the community atmosphere, “ROI (return on investment) is not cost-effective, and there is no need to do it.”
C
“Community atmosphere is certainly important for any content creation platform, it is an important indicator of user stickiness, whether it is the user’s perception of the product, or the creator’s and user’s sense of involvement, all can be reflected through the community atmosphere.” Magistrate analyzed. However, he also stressed that with the volume of Jitterbug and today’s headlines, what needs to be done is to do a good job with the product and serve the vast majority of producers, without being responsible for retaining individual feelings.
Now, watermelon video has taken over the baton of creating a community atmosphere in Byte Jump.
Late point article “ordinary people Chen Rui: defend B station” has made a hypothesis: if let byte jumping do B station, what will be the scenario?
It may turn into a big subsidy plan for up owners, make the home page of the information flow more addictive, and then insert ads to sell; from the beginning if only a sum of money, between smashing a mass content and a group of secondary users like niche content, he may not hesitate to choose the former.
Watermelon video used to play basically matches this assumption. A former head of content community operations after joining the watermelon, the biggest feeling is: byte is actually not a content company from the beginning, “we are workers on the assembly line, playing a role similar to the human dry cell. This is not the way a content company does things at all, but bytes succeeded in this way, so what’s the reason to reject this way?”
Watermelon Video
Previously, watermelon video was considered a product of competitive logic, and the large water-flooding approach to user growth led to its lack of cultural and community attributes, as well as its failure to form its own creative ecology. Wu Hao believes that before the users of watermelon video is ambiguous, this year watermelon video became aggressive, also shouted their own slogan, in order to clarify the object of service, but also to prove their role within the byte.
Several content creators who updated at the same time in watermelon and B station said, compared with B station, watermelon traffic is not low, but in the interaction, comment feedback is obviously much worse. Chen Yuetian, a partner at Cenhai Capital, said that sending content on two platforms with an obvious gap in community atmosphere can be clearly perceived by authors, which will eventually lead to the platform with good community atmosphere becoming the main position and other platforms becoming auxiliary distribution platforms. And for the content platform, quality creators will always be the core asset.
But the judge believes that the algorithm may also be able to compensate to a certain extent for the deficiencies of the community attributes of watermelon video. “Accurate distribution matches content to more appropriate people, and the interaction of content in this case will only get better, not worse.”
The only law of Internet competition is that, in line with the law will grow, not in line with the decline, vigorous sometimes can be a miracle, sometimes not. Wukong Q&A, flash, fly chat and other products poured into the resources, vigorously invested, and eventually fell into the abandoned, the essence behind the byte of the existing segment in the community is still lacking fire, traffic advantage + algorithm advantage for the creation of community and social products on the help is not as good as imagined.
Jitterbug’s huge daily activity and revenue gives Zhang Yiming the strength to stop being anxious about the community, but there is still room for optimization of Byte Jump’s product genes.
Wu Hao and Zhang Feng are pseudonyms.
Reference:
The Disillusioned Version of ByteDive, Deep Burn
The Birth of the Time Melting Pot, Tencent Technology
Today’s Headlines: Fighting Back from Social”, Interface
Recreating the “Little Broken Station” – The Loss and Rebirth of B Station’s Community Atmosphere”, Tencent Research Institute
Rediscovering Community, China Entrepreneur Magazine
Don’t Deify Byte Jump”, Weixi Zhibei
The Common Man Chen Rui: Defending B Station”, LatePost
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