November 17, 2021, is still an ordinary day, and two things in the information I have seen are worth playing.
First, Gome Holdings announced the "Notice on the Punishment of Employee Code of Conduct", which caused heated discussion; second, Tencent's content open platform announced that it would terminate the "Dawn Plan" and apologize to the creators.
Two unrelated things, which seem to be incompatible, reflect the same thing: two companies that have had a successful past and are still successful are beginning to fail to keep up with the rhythm of the times, and they are beginning to grow old.
Let's start with Gome's briefing. Lying flat and touching fish is a hot word on the Internet for young people in the past year, according to Gome regulations, the office area is forbidden to engage in unrelated things, such as: playing computer games, chatting on the Internet, listening to music, etc. Gome headquarters has improved statistics and inspection of non-working traffic information, and the most "non-working traffic information" is concentrated in Tencent Video, Douyin, iQiyi, Youku Tudou, Kuaishou, NetEase Cloud Music, Kugou Music, Mango TV, Weibo and "Entertainment Information", and even Taobao, Pinduoduo and JD.com.
Is there a "buyout" of working hours in the absolute sense between the company and the employees, should the company explicitly prohibit some private "entertainment" of employees, and does Gome's statistics infringe on employee privacy? These issues are all to be discussed, but it is clear that a company like Gome, which has transformed traditional retail to the Internet, should not list "rivals" such as Taobao, Pinduoduo and JD.com as "unrelated to work" as "unrelated to work" . Not to mention that Gome should learn from Taobao how to do e-commerce, at least Pinduoduo and JD.com are also shareholders and strategic partners of Gome.
I don't believe that a company that doesn't let Taobao do a good job of e-commerce.
In my opinion, the real problem exposed by Gome's circular may not be that Gome is unwilling to learn like Taobao, Pinduoduo and JD.com, but the real problem of Gome may be the aging of the company's employee structure. After reading these so-called "unrelated to work" traffic statistics, my question is, is there no employee of Gome to Bilibili to watch video screens? No employees on Slou, no employees reading little red books? These are the popular communities of the Internet where young people gather nowadays, and there is no young people in the Big Gome Group?
Let's look at Tencent's "Dawn Plan".
Tencent's wind evaluation in young people is not good, especially in Station B and Zhihu. This is related to the large public opinion environment, in addition to the public's vigilance against internet giants, there are also many reasons for Tencent itself. The "Dawn Plan" is the second time that Tencent has been ridiculed by young people in Station B and Zhihu, and the last time was the "backwater war" triggered by the re-signing agreement between Reading Group and creators.
From the "non-work traffic" statistics of Gome employees, it can be seen that the traffic consumed by Douyin and Tencent Video is similar. Douyin is a short video, Tencent video is a long video, Douyin's short video content is shorter, can insert more ads, it can be inferred that Douyin is far behind Tencent in terms of user scale and income. It is understandable that Tencent launched the "Dawn Plan" to spend money to leverage more creators, after all, Tencent has money and platforms.
What the "Dawn Plan" reflects is the lag in Tencent's content front, the rigidity in management and organization, and tencent after casting the sword into a plough, and has lost its organizational ability and even willingness to fight again.
"Dawn Plan" reminds me of Tencent Microvision, All in Microvision when Tencent was also handed over to the agency company, and then it was also, layer by layer, and finally became a quick money for content creation. Many of my friends around me did several handling numbers in 2018, and in half a year, they made hundreds of thousands of dollars, of course, there is still a gap compared with Tencent's per capita annual salary of 830,000.
A company that makes money by content with content as its core business is keen on "finding agents" in the construction of content ecology, which is a symptom of the company's aging and the performance of losing combat effectiveness.
Tencent may feel aggrieved. This kind of sports-style content creation support plan is ultimately that the money is spent, but it does not really precipitate the value, and there is no creator who says that you are good, and as for the MCN of the intermediate agent, they will not say that you are good, after all, their money is "cheated on" and earned, which is disgraceful.
If from the perspective of the identity of the creator, I welcome Tencent's attitude of spending thousands of dollars, but will anyone complain, "Only to see the new people laughing, not to see the old people crying"? Can Tencent consider giving higher subsidies to creators who originally settled in to incentivize people who have already contributed to Tencent's ecology? Or is It that Tencent has done enough work in the distribution chain at the beginning of the decision-making, eliminating the MCN of the agent from eating alone, and eliminating the "internal and external cooperation" and "deception" of the agency company and employees?
The investment of the "Dawn Plan" is only tens of millions, and the departments involved are only a very small "content open platform" under the PCG, which is also a small witch compared with Tencent's hundreds of billions of revenue and huge architecture. This also shows once again that the content is indeed not valuable. Content is not valuable, it is a common phenomenon of the entire Internet, and it can also be said to be a "dilemma". Tencent, ByteDance, Baidu, Zhihu, almost all large and small platforms, in fact, do not pay attention to content, Internet companies are more willing to believe that "channel is king". When large companies are running blindfolded and running wildly in the illusory future of the "meta-universe", in fact, they may wish to consider that the solid investment of real money and silver, the meticulous operation of real guns and bullets, may really have the opportunity to repair the foundation more strongly. In fact, allowing the creators of ecological participants to make money is also in line with the spirit of "common prosperity" and "science and technology for good".
As mentioned above, the content is not valuable. The complaint is too loud to prevent intestinal breakage.