From the beginning to the present, Baidu Nuomi, Tencent Kandian, QQ Video, Penguin Esports, Feixin and other platforms have announced their suspension of operations one after another. Every time, people shouted "The memories of a generation are over."
In the development process of the Internet industry, users' needs have been changing. Once any platform or website lags behind the process of the times and cannot meet the needs of users, it is natural to be eliminated. These apps from major manufacturers such as Tencent, , Baidu, , and mobile cannot escape the wheel of the times.
Recently, another website was exposed to be suspended, which has sparked heated discussions online. This website is called Tianya Community . It is one of the earliest BBS Chinese communities (forum categories) in China, carrying the memories of early domestic netizens. On November 22, many netizens discovered that Tianya Community could not post, thinking that Tianya Community would stop operating.
Fortunately, it is just a rumor that Tianya Community has stopped operating. Today, Xiao Lei personally tested it and the posting function has returned to normal. Xiao Lei also posted to discuss the future of Tianya Community with netizens. They were pessimistic about this and believed that Tianya Community has reached its end. Judging from the current situation where Tianya Community has accumulated more than 139 million yuan in execution, if investors cannot be found, it may be really not far from bankruptcy.
Source: Tianya Community Screenshot
In the domestic Internet industry, Tianya Community can be regarded as a milestone. Young netizens may not have a deep understanding of it, but the popularity and status of Tianya Forum at the time was not inferior to the popular SNS community (blog category).
Maybe you have not used Tianya Community, but you must have heard jokes circulating from Tianya Community, or people and works that have made famous by Tianya Community.
23 years of history, the rise and fall of Tianya Community
Tianya Community was established in 1999 and belongs to the first batch of BBS forums in China. Young netizens may be a little unfamiliar with the Tianya community. After all, the BBS community had already shown a trend of decline before 2010, but the Tianya community in the past witnessed the rise of the first batch of Internet celebrities in China.
Once the Tianya Forum, countless internet celebrities rose here
At the peak of the day, the number of registered users in Tianya community exceeded 130 million. Sister Furong, one of the first generation of internet celebrities, made her fortune in Tianya community. Today's popular novels such as "Ghost Blows Out the Light" and "Things in the Ming Dynasty" were also made famous by Tianya community.
Source: mockup shell
In that era, the Tianya community was not only very popular, but also many great masters were outrageous. Countless students from Tsinghua University and Peking University debated fiercely online. However, when it comes to the sector with the greatest influence in Tianya Community, it is undoubtedly the "Lotus Porn Talk", which is the largest birthplace of China's urban strange talks. Baidu Tieba can only rank second.
Lotus Porn Stories were originally a section for netizens to compile ghost stories, but these stories spread through ten thousand and hundreds of stories, and gradually changed their taste. What happened around my friends, friends, and are still circulating today. In that era when the Internet was not popular, Tianya Community networked a large number of talents and created its own glory.
It's a pity that the times are progressing, and Tianya Community was eventually eliminated by users in order to fail to keep up with the pace of the times.
Tianya, which cannot find the direction of development, and it is only a matter of time to be eliminated
Tianya forum has declined. There are two reasons for this. The first is the decline in content quality and user experience. Moderators of all sections of BBS community are all obligatory and the official does not provide any salary. In the early days, moderators were more conscientious, but after changing several generations of moderators, moderators who lacked official support were unwilling to work hard in vain, so they neglected to manage posts in the sector, resulting in a large number of posts with no actual content rampant.
The recommendation mechanism of Tianya Community is already relatively old, and the recommendation of posts depends mainly on the release time rather than the quality. After the moderator neglected management, a large number of posts were flooded with the living space of high-quality posts.
plus the page design of Tianya Community is too old, similar to the PPT that Chinese people call "The Underworld Forum", so the viewing experience is even worse. Of course, as netizens said at the beginning, it may be that Tianya Forum really has no money and is unable to modify the UI style of the web pages and apps.
This brings up the second problem of Tianya Community. does not master the secret of traffic monetization. Today everyone knows that traffic is money, but how to monetize traffic is the question that platforms and bloggers need to think about. Especially after the birth of the WeChat official account in 2012, countless companies and bloggers gathered popularity and made a fortune through the official account.
It’s not that Tianya Community does not want to monetize traffic, but the characteristics of the BBS community are already doomed, and monetization of traffic is definitely a difficult problem.
Tianya Community is uncomfortable, Tieba and Zhihu are not easy to beat
Tianya Community, Zhihu, Tieba, Weibo, operation and maintenance require a lot of costs. Therefore, the platform must find the direction of profit, and the easiest and most effective solution to achieve profitability is "fan circle". But this is the weakness of the BBS community.
The so-called "fan circle" is nothing more than a certain feature of an individual user (blogger), which attracts other users to pay attention to the user. Then the blogger can cooperate with the platform and enterprises to promote certain products, and both the platform and the blogger can make profits. The community that is most suitable for the fan circle operation model should be SNS. The best example is Weibo. Countless celebrities and companies have official Weibo. Celebrities are already extremely popular and can easily attract users' attention.
Source: Weibo screenshot
BBS community is called a "forum". Everyone can post and communicate freely. The content of the post is higher than that of the poster, and it is difficult to highlight individuals and realize fan circle. Even Zhihu, the BBS community that is the least likes BBS, is still difficult to escape this phenomenon.
In fact, BBS also has its own monetization solution, but the efficiency is not high enough. BBS' monetization plan is mainly membership system and advertising. The membership system is no different from other platforms. It can block advertisements and have some privileges.
As for advertising, there are two main situations in the BBS community. The first is that advertisers place them on the platform. The opening of such ads can be blocked. Although daily use has some impact, it is not critical, not to mention that there are no advertisements for any app today. The second type is that users publish advertisements, some of which will cooperate with the platform. The platform increases the exposure of advertising posts through frequent homepage push. When Xiao Lei uses a certain forum app, he often receives promotional posts of unknown novels.
Image source: pixabay
It would be fine if advertisers are willing to cooperate with the platform, but the freedom of the BBS community has made many advertisers unwilling to cooperate with the platform. Instead, they choose to cover other people's old posts through the behavior of the navy constantly posting and replying, and can mislead the system's hot post review mechanism to push advertising posts to the homepage. There are too many advertisements for
, and users may be lost due to the decline in experience, and the platform has since entered a vicious cycle. After all, the BBS community's profit model is too backward and has reached a point where it has to be changed.
Zhihu's 2021 financial report shows that its annual revenue was 2.959 billion yuan, increased by 118.9% year-on-year, and its net loss was 1.299 billion yuan, and increased by 150.95% year-on-year. Weibo, which adopts the SNS model, had revenue of US$2.26 billion and net profit of US$428 million in 2021.
Fortunately, Zhihu and Tieba are large in size, and the number of active people is still large. The unknown Tianya Forum has been executed for more than 139 million yuan in total, and it is no exaggeration to say that it is on the verge of bankruptcy. The more serious problem is that today of Tianya Community is likely to be tomorrow of BBS communities such as Tieba and Zhihu. The future of the
BBS community will change the imminent
SNS model with its efficient monetization solution has become the best template in the minds of enterprises. But from the perspective of netizens, we need a platform without user thresholds and equal communication among everyone, and only the BBS community can provide it.
If the SNS community is a group of big guys wearing formal clothes to report, then BBS is just a group of people, Ge You, lying on a casual chat. On platforms such as Hupu , Tieba, Tianya Community, etc., the authority of big Vs has been greatly reduced, so some people can express their opinions and opinions without any scruples. The transformation direction of
BBS, when differentiation and quality are the core
Faced with difficult situations, BBS community platforms are all seeking ways of change, such as Hupu, the direction of transformation is differentiation, with sports as the theme. When it comes to Hupu, many people will naturally associate it with the NBA. Zhihu's transformation direction is to "marriage" with e-commerce, and the platform has many story-based shopping guide articles.
is obvious. Zhihu and Hupu both focus on differentiation and attract users through high-quality content. There are many discussions on the transformation direction of BBS community on the Internet. In summary, most netizens believe that the BBS community should actively recruit high-quality content teams and establish incentive systems to improve the overall quality of platform content.
After attracting enough users, the platform can try to add advertising, including but not limited to e-commerce, App promotion, etc.
It should be noted that the platform must still adhere to the original intention of the BBS community and the spirit of mobile Internet , lower the access system, and provide users with enough freedom. You can see from the decrease in answering questions on B station and the cancellation of recommendation rules by Zhihu. The higher the platform threshold, the smaller the number of users will be. Perhaps it can ensure that the quality of the content will not be lowered. However, only high-quality content and without enough user base, the BBS community will be difficult to grow.
Cover image source: mockup shell
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