Tencent , Baidu , Alibaba , ByteDance and other Internet giants are shattering. On the one hand, the giants are facing a slowdown in growth; on the other hand, in order to achieve better operating performance, the giants have to reduce costs and increase efficiency, and continuously reduce operating costs, thus showing the other side of the giants to the outside world. They are not doing anything, they are not that scary.
According to Tech Planet, from January to August this year, there were more than 60 apps removed from the shelves of Internet giants such as Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, ByteDance, and JD.com, , among which some products with a user base of one million.
At the same time, the enthusiasm of giants to launch new apps is declining. Qimai data shows that in the past six months, there have been very few new apps launched by Internet giants such as Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, ByteDance, etc., and those still on the shelf include: NetEase Cloud Music social app MUS, Baidu's note-type app has medical notes, 360 record-opening app CUE, Douyin music app soda music, Evernote collection app collector, Evernote , and Meitu Xiuxiu photo app eggbo.
Internet giants are not only called "App factory", but also have the common name of "family bucket". The giants usually have as many as hundreds of App products. In the wave of short video and the second wave of mobile social fever, Tencent alone has frequently launched 10 products to compete with the market, and giants such as ByteDance, Baidu, and Alibaba dare to try popular fields.
However, in the face of the actual operating pressure, everything came to an abrupt end. The Internet giant, which has always been rich, also pressed the brake button. The app should be removed from the shelves. Even if it is an old brand for many years, the new app will not be released directly without particularly valuable. Everything is in line with net profit, and the giant finally no longer builds an App factory.
There have been many jokes about giants in China's Internet industry. For example, entrepreneurs are often asked by investors, "What do you do if the XX giant plagiarizes your product?", "The XX giant is also doing your product. What are your advantages?"
I encountered similar things at a certain Internet practitioner exchange meeting. An entrepreneur is unwilling to disclose his entrepreneurial project because he is afraid of being plagiarized by XX. A few years ago, the topic of product plagiarism in the Internet industry did appear frequently, and many giants were involved.
When giants are expanding everywhere with huge amounts of money, it is indeed difficult for startups to compete with them. Now that giants are slashing their hands and no longer keen on expansion, are there opportunities for entrepreneurs coming? Will they get better if the mountains that lie in front of entrepreneurs are gone?
App factory strategy failed
The reason why giants are keen on building App factories is that
1) The cost is low enough, and the giants have enough funds and manpower to support them in internal innovation.
2) The temptation to success. The success of Douyin and Pinduoduo has allowed giants to see the temptation brought by the success of App entrepreneurship. Developing multiple Apps at one time will bring huge benefits as long as one App can succeed.
3) Channel advantages. Baidu spent $1.9 billion to acquire 91 Wireless, Tencent has AppTrea, and Alibaba has acquired Wandoujia , with a third-party app store in hand, which seems to be not a problem to drive the app download volume.
Since 2015, has become a popular strategy in venture capital circle, namely, investment track, rather than investment company . Investors will find ways to invest in the first and second places in the entire industry, and then wait for the two parties to merge, or a certain first place will definitely lead, so that the investor will not fail at all. Behind the
App factory, this "track system", or "internal horse racing system", is actually practicing this "track system", and at the same time launches a number of products in a certain field, waiting for one of them to emerge.
However, in recent years, this type of "internal horse racing system" strategy has begun to fail.
On the one hand, success itself is scarce. The industry can only allow one or two products to succeed, and other products can only accompany you, and giants can't succeed everywhere.
Tencent , Baidu , Alibaba , ByteDance and other Internet giants are shattering. On the one hand, the giants are facing a slowdown in growth; on the other hand, in order to achieve better operating performance, the giants have to reduce costs and increase efficiency, and continuously reduce operating costs, thus showing the other side of the giants to the outside world. They are not doing anything, they are not that scary.
According to Tech Planet, from January to August this year, there were more than 60 apps removed from the shelves of Internet giants such as Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, ByteDance, and JD.com, , among which some products with a user base of one million.
At the same time, the enthusiasm of giants to launch new apps is declining. Qimai data shows that in the past six months, there have been very few new apps launched by Internet giants such as Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, ByteDance, etc., and those still on the shelf include: NetEase Cloud Music social app MUS, Baidu's note-type app has medical notes, 360 record-opening app CUE, Douyin music app soda music, Evernote collection app collector, Evernote , and Meitu Xiuxiu photo app eggbo.
Internet giants are not only called "App factory", but also have the common name of "family bucket". The giants usually have as many as hundreds of App products. In the wave of short video and the second wave of mobile social fever, Tencent alone has frequently launched 10 products to compete with the market, and giants such as ByteDance, Baidu, and Alibaba dare to try popular fields.
However, in the face of the actual operating pressure, everything came to an abrupt end. The Internet giant, which has always been rich, also pressed the brake button. The app should be removed from the shelves. Even if it is an old brand for many years, the new app will not be released directly without particularly valuable. Everything is in line with net profit, and the giant finally no longer builds an App factory.
There have been many jokes about giants in China's Internet industry. For example, entrepreneurs are often asked by investors, "What do you do if the XX giant plagiarizes your product?", "The XX giant is also doing your product. What are your advantages?"
I encountered similar things at a certain Internet practitioner exchange meeting. An entrepreneur is unwilling to disclose his entrepreneurial project because he is afraid of being plagiarized by XX. A few years ago, the topic of product plagiarism in the Internet industry did appear frequently, and many giants were involved.
When giants are expanding everywhere with huge amounts of money, it is indeed difficult for startups to compete with them. Now that giants are slashing their hands and no longer keen on expansion, are there opportunities for entrepreneurs coming? Will they get better if the mountains that lie in front of entrepreneurs are gone?
App factory strategy failed
The reason why giants are keen on building App factories is that
1) The cost is low enough, and the giants have enough funds and manpower to support them in internal innovation.
2) The temptation to success. The success of Douyin and Pinduoduo has allowed giants to see the temptation brought by the success of App entrepreneurship. Developing multiple Apps at one time will bring huge benefits as long as one App can succeed.
3) Channel advantages. Baidu spent $1.9 billion to acquire 91 Wireless, Tencent has AppTrea, and Alibaba has acquired Wandoujia , with a third-party app store in hand, which seems to be not a problem to drive the app download volume.
Since 2015, has become a popular strategy in venture capital circle, namely, investment track, rather than investment company . Investors will find ways to invest in the first and second places in the entire industry, and then wait for the two parties to merge, or a certain first place will definitely lead, so that the investor will not fail at all. Behind the
App factory, this "track system", or "internal horse racing system", is actually practicing this "track system", and at the same time launches a number of products in a certain field, waiting for one of them to emerge.
However, in recent years, this type of "internal horse racing system" strategy has begun to fail.
On the one hand, success itself is scarce. The industry can only allow one or two products to succeed, and other products can only accompany you, and giants can't succeed everywhere.
On the other hand, the enemy of the giant is actually itself. It not only needs to compete with multiple departments internally for resources, personnel and investment, but also lacks the courage to move forward with the early stages of entrepreneurship. It often causes unwillingness to invest, but also hopes that the product will become popular. In the end, the product can only be launched in a low-key manner and removed from the shelves.
The dimensionality reduction attack of giants on their own is also reflected in the implicit increase of the cost of new products. Giants such as Baidu, ByteDance, Tencent, and Alibaba have long become the largest advertisers in China. This means that in order for any company's products to drive downloads, in addition to the support of its own company's products (in most cases, there is no support because internal competition is very fierce), they also need to buy volume from other giants.
Therefore, in recent years, a very common phenomenon will be seen in the Internet industry, that is, several giants in are fighting for the blood, but secretly, advertising cooperation between each company continues. Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, and ByteDance will purchase traffic from other companies. This ultimately leads to an increase in the cost of the app, because everyone has to make money by advertising, and even products under the same company need to pay to the specific advertising party.
only has serious consequences, that is, the products under its own company are damaged. According to Guo Jing's Internet circle observation, a search engine platform even sold keyword advertisements for its well-known products to other companies. In news and information products, the products of "friendly merchants" often appear in feed streaming advertisements, and trampling on their own company's products.
giants seem to be a way out and opportunity when launching new products, but under the constraints of the industry and itself, they can only become a mirage.
is in line with "money"
The significant difference between Internet companies in the mobile era and Internet companies in the PC era is that the user scale is king. Even if you lose tens of billions of yuan a year, as long as you can quickly gain a huge number of users, the capital market is willing to pay for it. After entering 2022, the capital market's view on the Internet industry has undergone a complete change. Now, only who can create higher net profits can get higher valuations, and the user scale has become a thing of the past. Data from
CNNIC shows that the peak period of China's App industry was in 2018. As of December 2018, the number of APPs monitored in my country's domestic market was 4.52 million. However, by December 2021, there are only 2.52 million models left. Obviously, it is not only the Internet giants that are removing apps, but a large number of small and medium-sized developers are also removing apps. Of course, the decrease in the number of apps and the rise of mini programs are also related to the rise of mini programs. Giant apps such as WeChat, Baidu, , Alipay, and are all promoting mini programs. The launch of mini programs has made many small and medium-sized entrepreneurs choose to use mini programs as carriers instead of apps as carriers. Relatively speaking, the cost of apps is higher.
For entrepreneurs, it is definitely a good thing for giants to stop fighting with them to compete for the market, but the difficulty lies in the fact that no one is easy to do in the current Internet market. Compared with giants, entrepreneurs' advantages are that they have no way out, either they can be done or fail .
After the Internet has developed in China for more than 20 years, its background comes from China's huge scale of netizens. According to CNNIC data, as of June 2022, the number of Internet users in my country was 1.051 billion, and the Internet penetration rate reached 74.4%. With this background, it seems not difficult for entrepreneurs to find opportunities in this industry.
The second change in the Internet industry comes from user payment. Yahoo created by Jerry Yang and Philo opened the door to the Internet with a free model. Previously, the Internet mainly served a few companies, and the other party also had to pay. Yahoo's free model allowed more and more companies to see the opportunity of the Internet. Chinese Internet companies also took the Copy To China route at the beginning, that is, copying foreign models at home.
Before 2015, when it came to user payment, many people still regarded it as a "joke". No one believed that when the free model is popular, user payment will work. However, the user payment model has quietly planted the seeds in China. In July 2015, the online self-produced drama "Grave Robbers' Chronicles" of iQiyi was opened to full members for the first time. Unexpectedly, the paid people squeezed out iQiyi's servers (the cloud computing industry was just starting out at that time).After
, user payments in various fields began to explode. Digital music field: QQ music , Kuwo Music, NetEase Cloud Music; Knowledge payment field: Get, Fan Deng Reading; Video website field: iQiyi, Youku, Tencent Video, Bilibili ; e-commerce field: JD.com, Taobao, Pinduoduo.
With such a huge user scale, there are enough users willing to provide paid services for the Internet. Therefore, for entrepreneurs, they should directly follow "money", rather than spending money to exchange scale like the previous entrepreneurial methods. Most of the Internet companies that used to spend money to exchange for scale in the early days have now become cannon fodder in the industry. Even if some companies are still listed on US stock , their market value is still several discounts from the beginning.
In the past, entrepreneurs paid too much attention to the opportunities in the free market, but now the opportunity for payment has come, and entrepreneurs can use their skills.
faces the scale of 1.051 billion netizens, and prejudice always exists. Just like getting Zhihu , many people think they are cutting leeks, but not all 1.051 billion netizens think so.
Social Creation Prospectus shows that in 2021, there were 513,500 users and 1.574,500 users and 1.574,500 users in 2021. Zhihu's Q2 quarter financial report shows that in the second quarter, the average monthly paid members was 8.5 million, a year-on-year increase of 78.3%; paid member income was 271.2 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 75.1%.
The number of paid members of Tencent Video and iQiyi is stable at about 100 million respectively.
Tencent Music paid users in Q2 2022 was 82.7 million. In the first half of 2022, the number of people paid for online music services of NetEase Cloud Music was 37.613 million.
The current Internet industry is not that there is too little content, but too much, and good content needs to be deeply explored.
directly uses the payment model. Perhaps even giants are not used to this gameplay. Giants are used to making free, but instead seem unfamiliar with payment. Nowadays, who hasn’t spent money online yet?
After, user payments in various fields began to explode. Digital music field: QQ music , Kuwo Music, NetEase Cloud Music; Knowledge payment field: Get, Fan Deng Reading; Video website field: iQiyi, Youku, Tencent Video, Bilibili ; e-commerce field: JD.com, Taobao, Pinduoduo.
With such a huge user scale, there are enough users willing to provide paid services for the Internet. Therefore, for entrepreneurs, they should directly follow "money", rather than spending money to exchange scale like the previous entrepreneurial methods. Most of the Internet companies that used to spend money to exchange for scale in the early days have now become cannon fodder in the industry. Even if some companies are still listed on US stock , their market value is still several discounts from the beginning.
In the past, entrepreneurs paid too much attention to the opportunities in the free market, but now the opportunity for payment has come, and entrepreneurs can use their skills.
faces the scale of 1.051 billion netizens, and prejudice always exists. Just like getting Zhihu , many people think they are cutting leeks, but not all 1.051 billion netizens think so.
Social Creation Prospectus shows that in 2021, there were 513,500 users and 1.574,500 users and 1.574,500 users in 2021. Zhihu's Q2 quarter financial report shows that in the second quarter, the average monthly paid members was 8.5 million, a year-on-year increase of 78.3%; paid member income was 271.2 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 75.1%.
The number of paid members of Tencent Video and iQiyi is stable at about 100 million respectively.
Tencent Music paid users in Q2 2022 was 82.7 million. In the first half of 2022, the number of people paid for online music services of NetEase Cloud Music was 37.613 million.
The current Internet industry is not that there is too little content, but too much, and good content needs to be deeply explored.
directly uses the payment model. Perhaps even giants are not used to this gameplay. Giants are used to making free, but instead seem unfamiliar with payment. Nowadays, who hasn’t spent money online yet?
