Text/Cleverage Review/Li Ronghuan People’s travel cannot be separated from maps, especially when going to a strange place, it is absolutely impossible to have no map navigation. In the past, most of the maps used by people were paper or directly looking at roadside maps, which we

Text/Smart Young Student Review/Li Ronghuan

People’s travel is inseparable from maps, especially when going to a strange place, without map navigation is absolutely impossible. In the past, most of the maps used by people were paper or directly looking at roadside maps, which were inconvenient to use, but with the development of the Internet, various map navigation software ushered in a blowout development.

In the field of map navigation, there is no doubt that Gaode Map is the absolute overlord. Gaode Map was launched in 2011. After ten years of development, the number of registered users has exceeded 1 billion and the number of daily active users has exceeded 100 million.

When using Gaode Map, I believe many users have had this doubt: Gaode Map is free for users and does not need to be recharged. So what channel does this "navigation tool" make money?

Since there are doubts, there is a need to answer.

First of all, there is one thing that needs to be clarified. Gaide is not a charity company. Not charging users’ fees does not mean that they have no way to make money, because the normal operation of the company requires capital expenditures. If there is no income channel, it is impossible to operate for more than ten years and not go bankrupt.

In today's era of "traffic is king", as long as you have traffic, you will not lack opportunities to make money. Similar to Tencent QQ and WeChat, although Tencent does not charge the majority of users the "usage fees" of QQ and WeChat, can you say that Tencent is not making money? No, it makes a lot of money on QQ and WeChat, and Therefore, software like Gaode Map with a "billion-level" user base also has many channels for making money behind it.

First of all, advertising revenue. Like other APPs, advertising revenue is one of the important sources of revenue for Gaode Map. After all, Gaode Map has more than 100 million active users every day, so some well-known brands will also choose to cooperate with Gaode Map for mutual benefit and win-win results.

Open the Gaode Map, the first thing that catches your eye is the open-screen advertisement, which lasts about 5 seconds. In other words, when you click on the Gaode Map APP, you have been helping Gaode Map make money. Of course, you can also choose to close this 3-second open-screen advertisement; the second type is the pop-up advertisement in the APP. Compared with the open-screen advertisement, too many pop-up advertisements will affect the user experience, which is not conducive to the company's development.

In addition, bidding advertising is also a good income, which is the so-called merchant service fee. When you are not familiar with the surroundings of the city, or travel to a strange city, and you want to find a better supermarket, hotel or other store, in the Gaode Map APP, open the "Nearby" item in the menu below, which will recommend many nearby stores. Gaode Map will give you priority to displaying a good reputation, which can save a lot of time.

There is a market when there is demand. Obviously, every merchant hopes that his store can be displayed at the forefront. At this time, he needs to compete with other merchants and needs to give Gaode a "advertising fee". Gaode's money-making logic is exactly the same as Taobao's search bidding.

Secondly, Gaode Map has received generous returns in cooperation with major companies.

In the era of the booming development of the Internet and e-commerce, many APPs need to have positioning functions, such as Meituan takeaway, Ctrip Travel , Fliggy , etc. However, not every company can make maps like Gaode, providing positioning and navigation services to itself, and has no unnecessary thoughts to develop this business specifically. After all, it is not a strong point, so they must choose to cooperate with professional companies like Gaode. In other words, Gaode provides them with map data services and then charges a certain fee.

In addition, in addition to Internet-related companies that need to use map services, the automotive field also has a very large demand for map services. Each of us has taken a car, especially those who have cars at home know that the front end of the car has a map navigation service, which has almost become a standard configuration for cars and has gradually become one of the selling points of car companies. When consumers buy cars, they must choose navigation services, after all, it is more convenient.

Most of the car navigation services today use Gaode Map, which means that car manufacturers need to pay a certain authorization fee to Gaode Map. On average, the authorization fee for each car is not high, but China has a population of 1.4 billion, and the number of cars is large. Data shows that in 2021, the national car sales volume was 26.27 million, and the national motor vehicle ownership was as high as 395 million. For Gaode Map, this is a huge market!

As we all know, autonomous driving technology has become increasingly mature, and some mainstream manufacturers at home and abroad are speeding up their layout of autonomous driving cars. Gaode is starting to upgrade the service of "high-precision map". The so-called high-precision map is simply a high-precision map with more data dimensions and more accurate positioning. High-precision maps are still very far away for ordinary people, but they are an indispensable part of the field of autonomous driving, because autonomous driving requires more accurate maps, and then Gaode will usher in another development opportunity.

Although Gaode Map has many ways to make money, in general, the ability to make money is still relatively limited. It is reported that Gaode Map has always been in a loss state, but even so, Gaode Map is still in a good operating state. Why is this? This has to mention the financial backer behind it - Alibaba .

In May 2013, Alibaba spent US$290 million to invest in Gaode, becoming Gaode's largest shareholder; in February 2014, Alibaba spent another US$1.1 billion to achieve a wholly-owned acquisition of Gaode Map. So, why does Alibaba acquire Gaode, and why does Gaode also want to be acquired by Alibaba?

Many of Alibaba's business segments involve map services, including Taobao, Cainiao Station , etc. There are only two ways to go before Ali. Either you study map services yourself or acquire them. , which is obviously not short of money, choose the latter. After

After acquiring Gaode, Alibaba can better apply Gaode Map to the ecological chain to improve user experience, and Gaode Map will also bring traffic to Alibaba. For Gaode, joining Alibaba can help Gaode obtain a broader map and navigation market, improve its popularity and market competitiveness, which is a win-win situation.

Therefore, with Alibaba's support, Gaode is not afraid of losses, and a lot of the money from Gaode Map is also spent on surveying and mapping and data maintenance of hundreds of millions of roads across the country. These work consumes a lot of manpower, financial and material resources.

Although the return cycle of capital investment is very long, with the foundation in the early stage, Gaode Map is developing better and better. It can be foreseeable that Gaode Map will become one of the indispensable tools in our lives in the future.