Wen 丨 Financial Story Club, author 丨 Deng Xiaoxuan, editor 丨 Chen Jiying
After the end of the graduate school, He Ying and her boyfriend established a relationship, "The boyfriend I picked up in Soul", which is the opening statement when she introduces her boyfriend to others.
"He is the 985 of Beijing, I am an ordinary second book in Shanxi, originally we had nothing to do with each other." But on Soul, we met, I appreciate his intelligence, he thinks I am versatile, these months of chatting, unexpectedly feel that the three views are very compatible, just like the old friends who have known each other for a long time", talking about the acquaintance of the two, He Ying has light in his eyes.
Although stranger socialization has been criticized since its inception, it has to be said that it meets the needs of contemporary young people to amplify the radius of social distance to contact more people and use the interactive tools provided by the platform for in-depth communication.
According to data from the Mob Research Institute, in the birth group from 1995 to 2010, 56.4% of users prefer strangers to socialize compared with masked and utilitarian acquaintance social circles, and the needs and pain points are real.
However, having a demand does not mean that this is a good track, "Soul is a dating app after all, after determining a relationship with a boyfriend, we both unloaded Soul and wanted to give each other a sense of security", not only Soul, this is also the collective dilemma faced by strangers socially. The couple of choice met on the stranger social platform, and then went around and returned to WeChat. WeChat has become a destination and harvester for stranger social platforms.
At the same time, "by-products" such as high involution, malicious reporting, fraud, privacy leakage, and gender imbalance are also stubborn diseases that are difficult to eradicate by strangers.
In the contradictory business model, where is the social outlet for strangers?
The platform is ever-changing, and Momo is the only one
"In the stranger dating app, there are very few little sisters, and even fewer young sisters", this is the argument that often appears in tiger poker, zhihu and little red books.
But this is not the case, this view only applies to Momo App, Tan and Soul's portraits are relatively young and more gender-balanced.
From the perspective of gender, Momo's male users account for up to 75%, but in Soul and Tantan, the proportion of female users is quite large, and the proportion of female users is 47.4% and 42.2% respectively.
The gender composition of Momo users is mainly male, similar to that of Tinder overseas. According to Statista data, in March 2021, men accounted for 75.8% of Tinder's monthly active users in the US market, and only 24.2% of women.
From the perspective of age composition, the users of the three APP are concentrated under the age of 35, that is, they are all for students, newcomers who have just entered the workplace, and unmarried young people of the right age who face the pressure of marriage and love.
Further divided, most of the young people are concentrated in Momo and Detective, on average, 1 out of every 3 users who play Detective and Soul is a young person under the age of 24, while in Momo, this proportion is much smaller, only 16%.
The majority of male groups and the age of users do not affect Momo's dominance in the slightest.
On the stranger social track, different founders, growth paths, and the growth core injected into the enterprise are completely different.
Momo was born in August 2011, the background of the establishment is very simple, on the occasion of the Asian Games, founder Tang Yan chatted with colleagues in the hotel, he found that there was a beautiful girl not far away who wanted to talk, but did not have the courage, so Momo appeared.
In the same month, Momo completed a round of financing of 2.5 million yuan angel + Pre-A, and in September 2011, momo's iOS version was launched for one month, and the number of users reached 100,000.
Tang Yan and its team are radical, its products have undergone countless changes and revisions, the version from 1.0 to today's 9.1.10, the main functions from viewing strangers around, to live chat and goods, and even to do film and television, the product line is more and more complex and huge.
At the same time, at the beginning of Momo's birth, it was the embryonic stage of the Internet, during this period, Momo could enjoy the dividends of Weibo, at that time, any product that could trigger spread on Weibo could achieve rapid growth.
At that time, Momo was widely spread on Weibo because of the nickname of "About P Artifact".
Product radical + Weibo dividend + unique positioning, so that Momo users grew rapidly, in September 2014, that is, three years after its establishment, the monthly active users have reached 60.2 million; monthly active from 60 million to 100 million, Momo spent 4 years, to May 2018, Momo's monthly active exceeded 100 million.
But Momo is a product designed from a male perspective, and on Momo, female users frequently receive harassment problems and are quickly beaten by female users.
Learning the lessons of Momo, Tantan was born, which is aimed at the foreign stranger social application Tinder, which can quickly select and match the social functions of the favorite object by paddling left and right, and only by liking each other can we chat, and take more care of the feelings of female users.
For male users, Tantan set the number of daily "likes", and if you want to increase the number of times, you must open a membership, raise the threshold for dating, reduce the enthusiasm of some male users, on the other hand, it also expands the source of revenue.
Coupled with the relatively conservative team of the exploration team, "the stranger social market is a plate of 30-50 million daily life, I want to eat this crowd thoroughly, and then it is not too late to do more extensive commercialization", which is the view that Wang Yu, the founder of the exploration, has publicly expressed many times.
However, as a latecomer, The Detective did not catch up later, failed to break through the revenue dilemma, and was acquired by Momo in 2018; The Probe Moon Life has always been only a fraction of Momo. In the second quarter of 2021, the number of monthly active people in the probe was only about 17 million, less than 5% of its published registrations.
Although the user groups of Tantan and Momo are different, the same thing about the two is that they put their appearance in the first place.
But in fact, not everyone is white and rich and handsome, what about ordinary people? Based on this scene, Soul was born.
In 2016, in the context of the decline of stranger social trends, Soul did the opposite, without uploading real photos, promoting interest exchange through data matching, meeting strangers through square dynamics, and allowing interesting souls to meet.
Clearly positioned, Soul grew rapidly, and between the second and third quarters of 2020, Soul's daily life began to surpass the probe.
Perhaps even if the good-looking skin bag is the same, it is more extensive than the interesting soul audience of one of the thousands, even if the size of Soul users exceeds the probe, it is still difficult to look at Momo's back - in March 2021, Soul's monthly active users were 33.2 million, only one-third of Momo's position, and Momo's position as king was difficult to shake.
Interest to bring down the value, Momo midlife crisis
Although Momo is the only one, its growth has encountered a bottleneck.
On November 30, 2021, Momo, which was renamed Zhiwen Group, released its financial report for the third quarter of 2021 ended September 30, showing total net revenue of RMB3,759 million (US$583 million), down 0.2% from RMB3,767 million in the same period last year.
This is the seventh consecutive quarter of the company's single-quarter operating income decline year-on-year. Since Q1 2020, Zhiwen Group has fallen into the spell of negative revenue growth.
Not only that, the number of Momo's users has also shown a downward trend.
In the third quarter of 2021, the total number of paid users of Momo's live broadcasting services and value-added services was 12.2 million (excluding repeat users), compared with 13.1 million in the third quarter of 2020.
Tantan, which is regarded as Momo's second growth curve, has seen four consecutive quarters of decline in paying users, with only 2.9 million paying users in September 2021, which was 4.1 million in September 2020.
But will this negative growth be accidental? Will it be the magnitude of the revenue of the Zhiwen Group and the ceiling of stranger social networking, making it difficult for revenue to continue to rise?
The answer may be no, for two reasons.
First, the ceiling of stranger social networking is far from reaching, and the data provided by Ai Media Consulting shows that the user scale of Stranger Social networking in China in 2020 is 649 million.
In September 2021, Momo's number of monthly active users (MAUs) was 115.5 million, far from reaching the ceiling, while september 2020 was 113.6 million, or the September 2021 MAU decreased compared to last year.
Second, compared with Tinder, an overseas stranger social software that is also the main face value, in 2020, Tinder's parent company Match Group revenue was 2.391 billion US dollars, of which Tinder contributed more than half of the revenue, which was 1.4 billion US dollars, equivalent to 8.82 billion yuan, an increase of 18% over 2019.
The decline in this series of core data shows that Momo is going through a difficult stage:
On the one hand, survey data shows that compared with appearance and stature, a new generation of young people pay attention to common interests and hobbies.
In the Mob Research Institute's survey of online social interest tendencies of birth groups from 1995 to 2010, more than 40% of respondents preferred to seek strangers with common interests and hobbies, and the proportion of strangers looking for appearance and body for appetite was only 14.8%.
This trend gives Soul the opportunity to woo users like crazy.
Soul's prospectus shows that its average MAU for 2019/2020 was 11.5 million and 20.8 million, respectively, with a growth rate of 80.7%; by March 2021, its average MAU increased to 33.2 million, an increase of 59.6% over 2020.
Soul did not disclose the revenue of each quarter, we compared its disclosed revenue with the Sincere Text Group, Soul's revenue in 2020 increased by 601.% compared with 2019, and the revenue in the first quarter of 2021 increased by 260.61% compared with the first quarter of 2020, but the Sincere Group showed negative growth in both time periods.
Relying solely on appearance, the operation is weak, and under the strong attack of the opponent, Momo seems to be unable to pull and retain young people.
On the other hand, live broadcasting has suffered a continuous decline in the ability to absorb money, and Momo is facing the problem of the decline of paying users.
There are five sources of revenue for The Best Text Group, but there are two main sources of revenue: one is value-added services, including virtual gift service revenue and membership subscription service revenue; the other is the live broadcast service, which is the basic disk of the Sincere Text Group.
In Q3 2021, live streaming services contributed 58% of the Group's revenue and achieved revenue of 2.167 billion yuan, but decreased by 8.8% year-on-year, continuing the negative growth of live broadcasting since 2020.
The dividend of live broadcasting has reached the top, and since 2019, the market size of domestic live broadcasting has begun to shrink.
In the live broadcast of the show, people are the content itself, the tool attribute of live broadcasting is the strongest, the platform is difficult to retain people, and the anchors who live broadcast on Momo are also slowly jumping to other short video and live broadcast platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou, resulting in a double difficult situation of "it is difficult to retain the anchor + it is difficult to retain users".
Even though the Group has embarked on reforms since the beginning of this year, it has not yet borne fruit.
Make a wedding dress for acquaintance social platforms, and the inner volume is serious
Momo's problem is not an isolated case, but a microcosm, the entire stranger social platform, fraud PUA, the same industry volume, malicious reporting, making wedding dresses for acquaintance social platforms, etc., seems to be in danger.
The first is scams, which are a side problem with stranger social platforms.
If you go to check the fraud case, you will find that the stranger dating software is one of the most important fishing ponds, handsome and beautiful people, gentle and thoughtful, may just be a gentle trap of the fraud party, under the guise of love, greatly improving the accuracy of fraud; and anonymous news release sources, but also increase the difficulty of supervision.
In the northern Myanmar fraud case detected by the Public Security Bureau of Yushan County, Jiangxi Province, there is such a modus operandi: the fraud suspect disguises himself as a successful man on the stranger dating software such as Momo, Tantan, soul, etc., to find women over the age of 35, "fish" to the target user, add the victim to his WeChat, QQ, and then attract them to the gambling software to carry out the next round of fraud operations.
The starting point of the stranger dating software is to find true love, but the mixed users may just look at your money bag, so that when the stranger dating software is publicized, many people's ideas are "will not be full of fraud", one affects the ceiling of stranger social software, and the other becomes a difficult problem for dating Apps, which is easy to become the object of rectification.
The second is that the industry is highly involuted, and the threshold for stranger social software is low. Soul's listing journey, the reason for pulling down the brakes, is rumored to be due to its malicious reporting of friends, which led to the latter's lawsuit during the listing period.
Stranger social software entry threshold is low, the user's conversion threshold is also low, users can switch between different social software at will, user stickiness is low, this is a red sea of competition.
In the case of users with a limit, in order to seize market share, "if the front can not be done, then the competitors will be removed."
According to Soul's IPO plan, it was supposed to be listed on the NASDAQ on June 24, 2021, but at noon on June 23, Soul issued a notice that "Soul suspended the US stock IPO process".
The reason for the suspension of listing may be due to a dispute between Soul and rival Uki.
Uki is also an interest social app, and Soul is a direct competitor, the two are similar in many functions, although Uki is not as large as Soul in terms of user volume, but the style is similar.
Beginning in 2019, Soul's former employees began to spread harmful and illegal information on Uki's app and set up bureaus to make malicious reports, resulting in Uki being taken down for three months, and the company's growth nearly stagnated.
After the incident, the former employees involved in the incident were quickly fired, but the Uki team believed that the act was not an individual employee act, but was secretly authorized by Soul executives; on April 21, on the eve of Soul's listing, Uki continued to sue Soul for "other unfair competition disputes", with the intention of sniping Soul's listing, and finally got what he wanted.
In the cracks of giants, long-tailed stranger social software, the gap in survival is not wide.
Third, the stranger social software for acquaintances to make a wedding dress for the social platform, is difficult to get rid of the fate.
For social products, in the three elements of user relationship chain, user number and brand, the number of users and brands can rely on the company's operation, but the user relationship chain is spontaneously accumulated by users, and the long-term precipitated user relationship chain can effectively increase the migration cost of users and build a company moat.
Therefore, the link that is most likely to form a strong barrier lies in the user relationship chain, but strangers naturally do not have this relationship chain in social interaction.
First of all, stranger social networking is one of the vertical subdivisions of social products, and its opposite is the acquaintance social network represented by WeChat.
Users establish connections through the platform, form effective interaction, and then develop mature human relationships, when a pair of relationships from strange to familiar, and transfer platform, stranger communication platform completes its mission. This is also a prisoner's dilemma that is difficult for stranger social platforms to get rid of - if the user dating match is high, the user loss rate is accelerated, and the user dating matching degree is low, which indicates that its dating function is inefficient, and it will also lead to the loss of user disappointment.
Just as He Ying uninstalled The Soul software after finding the other half of her choice and turned to WeChat for in-depth communication, when the user's social relationship was reached, there was a user loss phenomenon.
WeChat is only 8 months earlier than the birth of Momo, but the inclusiveness of acquaintance socialization and the precipitation of the relationship chain have made WeChat far ahead since its inception, with the number of per capita uses, per capita use time, per capita use days, etc. Far ahead, step by step into the hinterland of other players, becoming a social overlord in one fell swoop.
The flowing stranger social network, the iron WeChat platform, and Momo user batch loss, WeChat users are still growing upwards, at present, WeChat cumulative merger monthly active users are approaching 1.3 billion.
Secondly, the user relationship chain on the stranger social platform is weak, and most users pay attention to privacy when using the product, and are unwilling to import the current acquaintance relationship.
So, we can see that what platforms have been doing is providing richer features and mechanisms to enhance the user experience and keep user relationships on the platform.
In addition to the "past" live broadcast, the recent hot meta-universe concept has also been regarded by stranger social platforms as a "breakthrough way" different from acquaintance social networking.
For example, Che Bin, vice president and product leader of Soul, claimed, "Building a social metacosm for young people is our core strategy." In 3-5 years, Soul will go in this direction. ”
The idea of stranger social networking in the metaverse is that each user can create an exclusive virtual image, with the assistance of computers, wearable devices, mobile phones, etc., to achieve virtual real interaction such as communication, exhibition viewing, experience, etc., and strengthen the connection between people, compared with the acquaintance social platform, it seems to be more metaverse genes and social cognition.
However, for now, Soul's above concept is mostly on paper - in the capital market, the metacosm may be a good concept that can incite leeks to follow the trend and raise valuations, but whether stranger social products can earn real money from the "metacosm" to continue to maintain the upward trend of users and revenues is probably the real test.
Note: He Ying is a pseudonym.