data fraud has become an open lie, and "the emperor's new clothes" is being staged throughout the Internet industry. The actions of and Tencent are like the person who shouted "The emperor has no clothes". As the most important content production platform, this may cause a series of shocks in the industry.
by Chen Lu, Qing Shenglan
Before the National Day, WeChat became popular again due to the collapse of the "public account brushing tool". The
order brushing tool was scrapped due to adjustments to the WeChat backend interface. Most of those affected were marketing accounts, but there were also some international brands. After the revelations, some public accounts named deleted articles published on that day, chose not to update them, or posted articles to defend themselves.
With WeChat’s “anti-counterfeiting” sword, accidental injuries may be inevitable, but it is also true that some public accounts are swimming naked. This is very embarrassing. I guess when I used objective reading data to negotiate money with advertisers, I must have practiced my acting skills.
WeChat’s traffic surge, what did the foreign media say?
From August 9, when the New York Times published a popular science video about WeChat, to September 5, when Tencent claimed the top spot in Asia in terms of market capitalization, Tencent products have become an important indicator for foreign media to observe the development of China’s Internet. WeChat’s crackdown also attracted the attention of some outside media.
Hong Kong's "South China Morning Post" published an article on the 30th focusing on the interests behind the WeChat public account brushing up, and quoted Tencent's official response, saying that "fake glory" is shameful, and data falsification has also greatly harmed those who respect the rules of the game.
Tencent cracks down on WeChat public accounts that falsely report reading numbers
Campaign Asia-Pacific, an authoritative magazine reporting on the media, marketing and advertising industries in the Asia-Pacific region, analyzed on the 30th that as a closed platform, WeChat has no role in influence marketing and KOL ( Key opinion leaders (key opinion leaders, usually an indispensable element in the marketing ranks) have always been considered more reliable in management than Weibo . This exposure has also made this judgment of the outside world questionable.
Official WeChat KOLs and self-media influencers were exposed for fake sales, and the US company TripAdvisor was implicated.
Old advertising website AdAge published an article last September to discuss the issue of data fraud on the WeChat platform, because at that time WeChat fake shops on Taobao, Suppliers and agents abound, and volume fraud has become an industry.
Zombie fans are quietly eyeing WeChat
The article analyzes that WeChat has a number of users that make the world’s Internet companies jealous, and has always been cautious about advertising. Compared with Weibo marketing accounts that have high requirements for the number of fans, the WeChat ecosystem is relatively closed. Only the operator and WeChat officials know how many fans a public account has. A few years ago, after WeChat disclosed the number of reads and likes for articles, some people worried about the problem of data fraud. However, at that time, with the more open Weibo for comparison, this problem seemed less serious.
Technode is also one of the earliest media to pay attention to the issue of false data on WeChat. After WeChat announced in July 2014 that it would disclose article reading counts and add a like function, technode wrote a long article analyzing the causes and impact of WeChat’s “new policy.”
WeChat fake data, should we worry?
However, although advertisers have a basis for advertising, within less than 3 days after the numbers were released, a seller on a certain website launched a "number brushing" service.
is really a universal treasure.
data bubble, there are many foreign companies too!
Facebook video data calculation error
According to the "Wall Street Journal" report on September 22, a few weeks ago, Facebook published a post in its "Advertiser Help Center" revealing that the average time its users watched videos was artificially inflated. The reason is that the company only counts views of videos longer than 3 seconds, and excludes views of videos less than 3 seconds long. The number brought by the old
indicator may be more than 50% falsely high. According to estimates by Publicis Media (Publicis Media, France's largest advertising and communication group), incorrect calculation methods may lead to an inflated increase in average video viewing time of 60% to 80%.The overvalued data of
may have caused marketers to make wrong judgments in buying video advertising traffic from Facebook in the past two years, and may also have affected their investment decisions, such as the proportion of funds and advertising on various video platforms. In addition, media companies and publishers will also be affected because they receive inaccurate data when it comes to statistics on video content on social networks. There are many people who use this information to decide what content to publish.
"Click Farm" on social media
The Associated Press published an article in early 2014 entitled "Social media clicks are a big business", saying that the phenomenon of crazy data consumption is prevalent in almost all social media Media websites, including Facebook, Twitter, GoogleYoutube, LinkedIn, etc.
Most of these "click farms" are located overseas. The suppliers will hire a large number of low-wage workers to repeatedly click the "like" button, browse videos or retweet related links. They also support forging user information or controlling the accounts of real users without their knowledge. Complete online reading, likes, forwarding, sharing, following and other actions.
Italian security researcher Andrea Stroppa and blogger Carla De Micheli estimated in 2013 that selling fake Twitter followers could bring in profit margins of US$40 million to US$360 million, and that Facebook could bring in US$200 million in revenue annually.
Many Internet companies have dedicated teams to monitor and regularly clean up accounts that engage in volume fraud. At that time, of Facebook's 1.18 billion active users, 14.1 million were fake accounts. In order to identify real users, the team had an ongoing "cat-and-mouse game" with fake accounts; at the end of 2013, YouTube reviewers discovered some music After the video views were obviously exaggerated, more than one billion videos were cleared. The providers of these videos also spread to music industry giants such as Sony Music, Universal Music, and VEVO of Google .
In today's Internet industry, whether it is content producers, advertisers, platforms, or ordinary users, there seems to be an excessive trust and obsession with numbers. Looking at the financial reports of major Internet companies, no one is talking about the number of users, activity and page views. Because in the face of the profit-making nature of investment or attracting advertisers, the data appears more objective and convincing, and the simple and crude presentation method ends the other party's previous doubts about the company's capabilities.
However, at a time when "data brushing" has become an unspoken rule for the development of the Internet industry, this trend obviously still has a lot to think about.
Today, the mobile Internet has brought more opportunities for advertising marketing, and "data" has also become the key to Internet marketing.
Why is Tencent’s “anti-counterfeiting” campaign so eye-catching?
As can be seen from the above cases, foreign social networks and websites also have "traffic brushing" for profit purposes, but only when they impact large companies like Facebook will they attract attention. Different from foreign countries, most of those affected this time are "small for-profit institutions" such as self-media and marketing accounts. For a long time, in the face of the common phenomenon of brushing traffic, the platform has always turned a blind eye. This time, WeChat has adopted a "strong man cuts off his wrist" attitude to clean up the portal, which has caused widespread discussion for the following reasons. :
First, currently WeChat public account is still an irreplaceable content entrepreneurship and marketing platform. Since WeChat launched the public account function, a large number of self-media companies have used the first wave of dividends to win a large number of fans and gradually monetize their traffic. So far, no social networks at home or abroad have similar functions.
Secondly, the data is not public, and reading volume and click-through rate are the only intuitive evaluation criteria. The closed ecosystem is the biggest feature of WeChat. The friend circle and chat functions protect privacy, allowing users to handle interpersonal relationships on social networks relatively easily. However, the closed data of official accounts has caused trouble for advertisers. Since there is no access to other data such as the number of real fans, retweets, and advertising traffic, the number of reads and likes has become the only intuitive reference standard for advertising. As a platform, WeChat does not provide a data analysis platform for advertisers that interface with self-media.At present, there are only a few platforms on the market that can provide comprehensive data reference in this regard, and the basic functions of these platforms are also based on the analysis of the "number of reads" and "number of likes" of images and texts. False data can still be used in these The three-party platform is full of fish and fish.
Third, data fraud is common, and "the emperor's new clothes" are being staged throughout the Internet industry. Such farce seems to be more exaggerated in China than abroad. In China, in addition to the fact that the number of WeChat article views can increase from 800 to 100,000+, the falsely high number of live broadcast viewers and Weibo fans has also become an open lie. There are also platforms that help content producers improve data and create platforms The illusion of prosperity. The "scammers" who swipe data and the "idiots" who place ads are in harmony. Under the bubble of false prosperity, the real data seems to be ashamed of itself. At this moment, Tencent's actions were like the first person to shout "The emperor has no clothes". As the most important content production platform, this may cause a series of shocks in the industry.
Fourth, the purpose of Tencent’s move has aroused many speculations. Most platforms have always turned a blind eye to data falsification by content producers. The problem of falsifying public account reading numbers has not just emerged. Why would Tencent choose to "false data" at this time? "Clean the portal"? Some people in the industry believe that data fraud has affected the WeChat ecosystem, and Tencent's move is a "self-purification". Some people also believe that with the launch of a series of content platforms designed for self-media such as Baidu Baijia Account and Zhihu Institutional Account, the monopoly of WeChat public accounts may be shaken. For strategic considerations, Tencent must Data falsification will be rectified.
Whether compared with external Facebook or Twitter, or compared with domestic Weibo, WeChat’s own advertising function is single. It is still unclear whether Tencent’s move is intended to change WeChat’s C2C-based advertising model. In any case, foreign content platforms such as Facebook and YouTube have rectified data fraud. From their experience, we can see that maintaining a good ecological environment and maintaining the "positive cycle" of C2C advertising transactions on content platforms is the long-term solution.
Tencent’s crackdown on WeChat’s “increased reading volume” problem is actually a warning to content entrepreneurs. It is not easy to monetize content, and it is even harder to create a hit worth 100,000+. Monetizing traffic is the fastest way, but it’s not the only way. Creating IP-level products and conducting offline physical transactions can also bring in a certain amount of income. From the perspective of advertising investors, the decision on which public account to place ads on is not a matter of looking at the number of readings. The number of readings does not represent the conversion rate of advertising. Accurate advertising decisions require more comprehensive considerations. At the same time, this incident may bring more opportunities to third-party platforms. In addition to real reading volume and likes, diversified and more accurate public account evaluation models may be favored.
content entrepreneurship will eventually usher in the moment when the big waves hit the sand, and by then, all that will be disillusioned will be bubbles.
reference link:
1, "Has Facebook exaggerated the average video viewing time by 80% in the past two years? The advertising company said it cannot tolerate it》
2、http://36kr.com/p/5053459.html
3、http://www.thembj.org/2014/12/the-power-of-false-pretense/
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