Founded in 2001, the veteran military forum "Iron-Blooded Community" announced that it will be permanently closed, and the vast Internet can no longer tolerate pure interest communities.
On December 20, the official account of the Predator Community posted that the Predator Community will stop user posting and replying functions on December 20, 2021, and will be permanently closed from March 1, 2022. The new post of the iron-blooded community will permanently stay on December 20 this year, and the online military content community that has accompanied many military fans for 20 years will officially withdraw from the historical stage.
As a sports community, Tiger Poker is similar to the development process of the iron-blooded community. They were all founded in the PC Internet era, but after the baptism of the mobile Internet, the tiger punch that failed to go public twice is still insisting, and the iron-blooded community has announced that the platform has entered the final countdown. They are also interest communities, what is the root cause of the different fates of the two platforms?
Rushing to the iron blood and tiger pounce of e-commerce
In the Chinese Internet ecology, military content is a relatively special existence, and in 2000, the main military news reports in China mainly relied on large portals, such as the military sections in Sina and Sohu. Jiang Lei, who is a military fan himself, built his own military website "Virtual Military" out of his own interests and hobbies, and officially changed its name to Iron Blood Military Network in 2001, and the Iron Blood Community can be seen as the forum section of Iron Blood Network, which was born in 2002.
The rise of the iron-blooded community, in addition to the early creation and gathering of many domestic military fans, is also related to the layout of its e-commerce development. The initial operation of the Predator Network was more difficult, because the user's growth server often crashed, and finally it was in the form of military fan fundraising to raise enough funds to upgrade the server and broadband. According to the information officially released by the Predator Network, the cost of server upgrades in 2003 and 2004 came from the fundraising of netizens, that is, the first few years of the establishment of the Predator Network were not in a good state of development, and did not find a suitable profit model.
It was also in 2004, when netizens once again raised money for the iron blood network to upgrade the server, Cheng Hang founded the hoopCHINA basketball forum, the predecessor of Tiger Poker, in Chicago. However, it should be noted that Cheng Hang did not formally establish the company to operate Tiger Poker until 2007 (with an investment of $1 million from Morningside Capital), and it was also this year that Tiefen Found Its Own Profit Model and Bid Farewell to a Single Advertising Economy.
In 2007, Iron Blood tried to sell M65 military trench coats and was snapped up by military fans. Taking this as an opportunity, the iron-blooded community began to introduce more foreign military peripheral goods, and in 2008, it launched the B2C military shopping website "Iron-Blooded King's Character", which mainly engaged in military clothing and shoes and hats, known as "only selling genuine products".
In order to improve profits and strengthen supply chain control, Iron Blood Network founded its own military brand "Dragon's Tooth" in 2011 to compete with foreign brands of the same type. The iron-blooded network that developed military e-commerce gradually got on the right track, and was listed on the New Third Board in 2015, which was unique in the domestic military community, and the tiger in the same period hatched the future famous trend e-commerce platform "Poison".
As an interest community, iron blood and tiger pounce invariably focus on e-commerce, which is related to the economic cycle of the platform. On the one hand, interest peripheral products are relatively close to platform users, and users' demand for peripheral products is higher, which can promote the circular development of the platform economy, on the other hand, the spillover effect of e-commerce is conducive to the platform to break the circle and sell peripheral products to more interested consumers.
2015 and 2016, is the two years of vigorous development of domestic mobile e-commerce, many vertical shopping platforms either adjust the direction of development, embrace large e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and JD.com, or continue to deepen the vertical track, relying on various ways to break the circle to attract users, the platform's audience continues to expand. Regarding the reasons why the predatory community is moving towards suspension, the author believes that it is related to the rapid development of mobile e-commerce, large mobile e-commerce platforms have squeezed the living space of traditional niche e-commerce platforms, and another reason is also directly related to the fact that the predatory community has not grasped the development of mobile apps, missing the best outlet for platform breaking the circle.
In the official farewell post of the Iron-Blooded Community, there is such a sentence: "Unfortunately, in the boom of mobile Internet and Internet of Everything, we have not been able to keep up with the development of the times." ”
The iron blood is down, and the tiger is swooping up
In recent years, Tiger Punch has been working hard for the listing, although it has experienced two failures, but tiger punch market popularity and influence is constantly improving, some entertainment stars began to open tiger poker accounts, from time to time with JR (many tiger poker users self-proclaimed) nagging. On the other hand, from the perspective of the company's annual report, the iron blood network has been losing money in recent years, until this year's semi-annual report shows that the company turned a loss into a profit, perhaps in order to transform and avoid losses again, the iron blood network finally chose to close the iron blood community.
The different developments of Iron Blood and Tiger Punch have both subjective factors of platform transformation (traditional PC community to App) and realistic factors of the industry track, which specifically include a core and three subdivisions.
In terms of the core circle, the sports circle to which Tiger Po belongs is inherently higher and stronger than the iron-blooded military circle. The military circle is more niche and vertical than the sports circle, and the sports circle can develop more "pan", and different sports projects and different sports equipment can evolve into corresponding circles.
At the same time, the threshold for user participation in the sports circle is low, the sports fields that can be seen everywhere in the community and schools are the soil for the development of the sports circle, while the military circles mostly focus on the discussion level of history and new equipment. The audience problems in the inner circle and the difference in the transformation of the platform have brought different influences to the iron blood and tiger in breaking the circle and financing.
First, in terms of platform transformation. Open the official website of the iron blood community will find that the design of the website is more "retro", after clicking on the "mobile version" download page of the official website, the iPhone version does not know whether there is no update and maintenance, the introduction picture of the page has been stuck and cannot be loaded, and the corresponding App has not been searched when searching for "iron blood network" in the App Store.
Compared with the Iron Blood Network and the Iron Blood Community, Tiger Punch launched the "Tiger Punch Sports" app in 2012. At present, in the App Store's classification ranking, Tiger Poker ranks tenth in the free sports list, even if the current Tiger Poker is not as good as Zhihu or Douban in terms of popularity, but it is definitely not an unpopular or niche platform.
Second, at the level of platform breaking circles. The platform name and logo are the user's first impression of the platform, in 2012, when Amazon replaced the logo, the original ".com" suffix was removed, and only Amazon remained in the character element, which was also seen by the outside world as a signal that Amazon will become more diverse. In 2017, Tiger Poker changed the name of the mobile app, streamlining Tiger Poker Sports to Tiger Poker, letting users realize that sports are only part of Tiger Poker but not all of it.
In terms of business, after 2019, Tiger Punch has established many new content departments, such as digital, e-sports and film and television, and even developed the game business, Tiger Punch is stepping out of the basketball circle step by step, developing the platform into a comprehensive content forum. In order to keep up with the trend, the new terrier Tiger Flutter on the Internet will generally follow up quickly, for example, the recent topic of tax evasion, the official website account of Tiger Punch Football posted in the community "A figure to understand the amount of tax evasion and evasion in the entertainment industry, what is the level!" Through the combination of famous football figures and new internet terriers, the concepts of "Wei Coin", "Ice Coin" and "Cool Coin" are vividly illustrated.
In the development process of Iron Blood Network, it has also tried to develop new businesses such as games and animation/periodicals, but the new business performance has been tepid, and it is difficult to attract users from other fields to join. In essence, the iron-blooded community is also a community with military fans as the core, including novels, animation, games and e-commerce businesses with military elements, all around the military fans.
Third, at the level of financing and commercialization paths. The native circle will affect the upper and lower limits of the platform, the audience of sports peripheral products is wider, and can move closer to the trend direction, the birth of "poison" (obtained things) is related to the consumption potential of tiger poker quasi-males, "poison" is not only incubated by tiger poker, the early drainage and sneaker identification business development are supported by tiger poker. In addition to "poison", Tiger Punch has also incubated platforms such as "Identifying Goods" and "Manufacturing Goods", and built the so-called "Tiger Punch" enterprises.
A wider development track means that it is easier to be optimistic about investors. According to the information disclosed through enterprise investigation, the highest single investment obtained by Tiefen.com was 50.8776 million, and the investment institutions included Tongan Investment, 10,000 tons of assets and Dingxing Quantum, etc., while Hupu received 100 million yuan of C-round investment from Jinglin Investment in 2014, and then also received 240 million D-round investment from Guijin Bird, 618 million E-round investment of CICC and 1.26 billion yuan of Pre-IPO investment of ByteDance. Although the development of Tiger Punch has also taken many detours, its long-term value is still optimistic about many investors, in addition to the differentiated factors of platform development, the track determines that its lower limit is not too low.
Breaking the circle is still the road for interest communities?
Breaking the circle is a problem that every interest community platform will face, and on the whole, the difficulty of breaking the circle of different interest platforms is directly related to the social audience of the circle to which it belongs. In addition to the industry track, the main reason is that the iron blood network has not grasped the trend of the new era and missed the development trend of relying on the mobile Internet to break the circle.
The breaking of the circle of interest communities is related to the upper limit of the original track. The development process of B station from the two-dimensional community to the mainstream online video website can be seen as a process of continuous addition, and the addition of different contents such as Vlog, technology digital and film documentaries has made the B station more diversified, and the platform ceiling has broadened from the two-dimensional track to the online video track with multiple content.
Niche interest communities don't have to break the circle, but the development of head content platforms will take away the time of niche community users. Nowadays, the military channels of the headlines, as well as the layout of some long video platforms in the field of secondary dimensions, in the face of the downward compatibility of the head platform, breaking the circle is one of the few ways out for many interest communities.
It is worth noting that the broken circle of the platform has "thrust" and "resistance". The thrust includes some company executives and platform users, hoping that the platform can be seen by more people, and resistance means that with the influx of more users, the original community culture of the platform will be impacted, some users resist the broken circle of the platform, expecting the platform to continue to remain small and beautiful, Tiger Punch, Zhihu and Station B have encountered similar problems.
The premise of the sustainable development of the platform is survival, and appropriate circle breaking is the key to the continued survival of the platform. After the failure of Tiger Poker to go public again in 2021, it seems to have become "convergent" a lot and rethink the value of the platform. The author found that now that there are many fewer headline party posts in Tiger Poker, and the discussion of hot news and sports content has increased, perhaps Tiger Poker wants to find a balance between the niche and the public, as far as possible to ensure the characteristics of the platform, while looking for new ways to break the circle.
Speaking of the iron-blooded community, some netizens said that "oversized, flying, iron-blooded, the military forum that was popular at that time has disappeared or will disappear in the long river of the history of the Internet." Not only that, in the PC Internet era, the popular Tianya and Cat Flutter also have their own difficulties, the trend of the times rolls forward, many of the former web community forums gradually fade out of people's vision, the iron-blooded community is only one of them, and I hope that new and old military fans can find a new habitat in the mobile Internet world, the platform has changed but the interest has not changed.