Qitoutiao, a company that has achieved the ultimate "toVC" model, has been listed in 2 years and 3 months.
Its fall once again proves that toVC is unsustainable.
Entrepreneurs should not VC, but to users.
Reporter | Han Xiyan Luo Chongyang
Edit | Yo you
"It is not surprising that Qutoutiao has stopped the service, because in my impression, it has been out of the world for a long time." A self-media content entrepreneur told Pencil that the team has not maintained the platform's account for more than a year, and before the suspension, many of the content read only single digits.
Recently, it was reported that Qutoutiao will stop the service and maintenance of the self-media creation platform on June 30, 2022. There is Sogou self-media before , but Qutoutiao will not be the last stop serving content platform.
"I saw him build a tall building, I saw him entertain guests, I saw his building collapse." At the peak, Qutoutiao achieved 62.2 million monthly active users in two years, and its revenue also increased from 58 million annually to more than 700 million in half a year. When it went public in September 2018, it set a record for the fastest listing of Chinese companies on Nasdaq at that time, and its market value once reached US$5.852 billion (about RMB 37.7 billion).
However, with the addition of competitors and the rapid rise of short videos, Qutoutiao, which rarely innovates, has gradually fallen behind, the data plummeted, the stock price has been sluggish for a long time, and has become a "one-yuan stock" with a market value of only more than 40 million US dollars.
An industry entrepreneur told Pencil Road that Qutoutiao is a company that has achieved the ultimate "to VC" model. "It makes user data by spending money to buy users (watch news), and then resell traffic (will give advertisers) to increase revenue, reaching the Nasdaq listing standards in the shortest time. But in fact, users are not watching news, and advertisers' delivery effect cannot be sustained."
Today's Qutoutiao company is still there, but this brand is about to move towards history. , as the free reading product of All in Team All in, can it bring them back to their peak?
- 01 -
"Short-for-short" Qutoutiao
Qutoutiao, which has disappeared for a long time, finally remembered that it was a bubble, but it was not good news once it appeared.
Recently, Qutoutiao announced that it will stop the service and maintenance of the self-media creation platform on June 30, 2022, and will download the content upload portal on April 21, and the content that has been published will still calculate the income based on exposure.
"Our Qutoutiao account has not been updated for more than a year, because for a period of time, the number of readings was only single digits, and the income was 0." A self-media content entrepreneur told Pencil that "It is not surprising that Qutoutiao will be suspended at all, because in my impression, it has been out of the world for a long time."
's glory when he first appeared in the world was about to reflect the current decline. With content aggregation and recommendation distribution, Qutoutiao quickly grew stronger. In September 2018, two years after it went online, the company landed on Nasdaq, becoming the "first stock in mobile content aggregation", setting a record for the fastest listing of Chinese companies on Nasdaq at that time. This record was not broken by Luckin Coffee until 2019. On the first day of listing, Qutoutiao's stock price doubled and its market value reached US$4.59 billion. Qutoutiao was also known as the "three giants in the sinking market" together with Pinduoduo and Kuaishou at that time.
According to the promotional routine of "entrepreneurship stories", the founder Tan Siliang said that the original intention of creating Qutoutiao was actually to do something for the information conditions in his hometown. Because he found that information in rural areas is relatively closed, in addition to family matters, the sources of information that people can access are traditional television and radio.Under such an environment, he determined Qutoutiao's entrepreneurial direction: to target people in third-tier and below cities, it is an attractive and easy-to-get-friendly Internet content information platform. Since its birth, Tan Siliang and his team have not put too much people, money and material resources into market promotion and marketing, but have actually supplemented the users. Qutoutiao had a "gold coin model" when it was first established. In order to be more attractive, Qutoutiao's team also designed a "game + mission" gameplay.
Fate is wonderful. In the year when Qutoutiao was born and developed rapidly, mobile Internet and smartphones in rural China were also rapidly becoming popular. The popularity of has also given some startup companies in the sinking market opportunities, and Pinduoduo and Kuaishou have also exploded during this period. Massive amount of information, novel content and videos from the outside world have quickly flowed into the perspective of rural China, and the number of users has shown explosive growth.
In addition to the explosive growth of users, Qutoutiao's large subsidies have also attracted more high-quality creators. Many high-quality creators have stable income on Qutoutiao every day. It is not only a content platform, but also a "part-time platform".
At that time, Qutoutiao had a great prospect. In 2018, the cumulative installed capacity of Apps reached 181 million, with 62.2 million monthly active users, and the user login rate was as high as 95%. The explosion of user increments of
proves that the sinking market is an overlooked huge potential market, and has also attracted the attention of the Internet venture capital circle. In 2018, Qutoutiao received hundreds of millions of dollars in investment from giants and investment institutions such as Tencent , Xiaomi , and then listed on the Nasdaq in the United States. After its listing, Qutoutiao also obtained a US$5.171 billion investment in Alibaba html through targeted share issuance.
But the times are changing rapidly, and the media industry is also constantly developing with people's preferences. Qutoutiao's rapid development has also allowed similar information platforms to extend their hands to the sinking market. In September 2018, Toutiao quickly launched Toutiao's fast version, and also launched the gold-earning model.
At the same time, short videos are developing rapidly, and the popularity of short videos such as Douyin , Kuaishou, Xigua Video and other short videos have successfully dominated users' Internet time . This also changed users' habit of getting information from pictures and texts to short videos. The rapid switching of the Internet made Qutoutiao, which originally mastered the password of the sinking market, completely frustrated.
QuToutiao's latest financial report shows that in the third quarter of 2021, net revenue was 965.5 million yuan, down 14.6% from 1.130 billion yuan in the same period of 2020, and the net loss has expanded from 269.4 million yuan in the same period of 2020 to 583.6 million yuan. As of April 22, Qutoutiao's market value has dropped from its original nearly US$6 billion to only US$44.24 million, with its market value shrinking by more than 99%, and it has also become a "1 yuan stock".
- 02 -
m read, changed to the skin's Qutoutiao?
After Qutoutiao itself showed a downturn, its management, especially founder and chairman Tan Siliang, began to actively look for the second growth curve.
data shows that from mid-2018 to early 2019, Qutoutiao incubated and launched a number of innovative applications, including the online literature platform "Midou", the video platform "Qiuqiu Video", "Quduopai", and the live broadcast platform "Qu Live" and so on. These methods of promoting new products are like the "horse racing mode" of Internet manufacturers. Whichever comes out of data first, the focus will be on supporting that one. The final result is that, except for MiDu, most of the others are lukewarm, and some have even stopped the offline line.
Qutoutiao really has high hopes for the MiDu project.
In May 2018, MiDu was officially launched. The project was first led by former CEO Li Lei, but now it is led by Yang Ji. Yang Ji has worked in Facebook and Uber successively. After returning to China, Yang Ji joined Guazi Used Car as the person in charge of growth. In April 2019, he joined Qutoutiao and was responsible for the growth team of MiDu, a free reading platform under Qutoutiao.
m read did not disappoint the management's expectations and handed over a pretty good report card. According to Qtoutiao 's third quarter financial report for 2021, MiDu Novels html has continued to grow after 5 days of active users exceeding 10 million, showing a steady development trend.
An industry insider analyzed to Pencil Channel that the main reason why MiDu can open up the situation is that the management team has translated and reused the "QuToutiao model" into MiDu's development.
In the past, Qutoutiao captured a large number of users in the sinking market in a short period of time with the "reading news and making money". This time, MiDu attracts more users through free reading, a proven successful model, and hopes to quickly gain a foothold in the field of online literature. Although the data of
is good, judging from the current user experience, everyone's satisfaction with MiDu is not very high. In a certain application market, MiDu's comprehensive score is only 1.8 points (total score of 5 points), and the user's comments are even more heartbreaking, "The question cannot be found at all. If you raise 1 yuan, you have to read a 100-minute book." "It is a nature that is like Pinduoduo, and you will never collect fragments." "Many advertisements consume traffic without clicking, and I found that they actually used 20G traffic after a day."
From the perspective of business model, as another form of Qutoutiao reprint, MiDu's monetization method continues the old path of Qutoutiao, and mainly chooses advertising monetization. In addition, compared with the monetization methods such as advertising, IP adaptation, paid reading in the online literature industry in the past, MiDu has also opened up a link of "short drama IP incubation".
In September 2020, MiDu reached a cooperation with Kuaishou to jointly develop short drama IP. MiDu provides Kuaishou with short drama content adapted from popular novels, while Kuaishou Small Theater was the first to broadcast exclusively and provides traffic support. As of the third quarter of 2021, MiDu Short Drama has produced nearly 50 short dramas with a total viewing volume of nearly 5.5 billion.
Some analysts believe that the imagination space of MiDu IP development lies in that MiDu is not only the creator of micro-short dramas, but also the supplier of IP. Through the content form of micro-short dramas, MiDu is misplaced to develop IPs, accelerate the speed of potential IPs to attract fans, break the Matthew effect of traditional online IP adaptation, and give mid-level works and authors more opportunities to emerge. Although the score of
is good, the "last hope for the whole village" of MiDu is not easy to live. In comparison, domestic paid reading platforms have become stable, while the competition in the free reading world is becoming increasingly wild. On the one hand, the free reading platform is updated and new products are on the market very fast. Except for some unknown small team products, Tomato Novels and Qimao Novels are all behind Baidu and Byte's resources and traffic; on the other hand, users of free reading do not have a strong sense of belonging and stickiness to the platform itself. They often go where there is good content, and do not care which product to use to read the content.
Questmobile data shows that at the end of 2020, among the top 100 MAU scales in the online reading app industry, Tomato Novel ranked first with 61.62 million, and Qimao Free Novel ranks second with 54.34 million, surpassing mainstream platforms such as Huawei Reading, Zhangyue , and QQ Reading . MiDu, Lian Shang, etc., which previously led the lead, still has not yet entered the top 10.
In fact, whether MiDu’s so-called “short drama IP incubation” or free reading, it is ultimately a business about traffic. Even if is a micro-short drama with good data, the competitive barrier is not high and it is easy to copy. At present, "Midou + Kuaishou" still cannot beat the combination of "Tomato + Douyin" and " Baidu + Qimao".
If you want to support Qutoutiao's future or return to the peak, it is obviously not enough to rely on Mi Reading alone.
