Autohome, Chedi, and Yiche.com's "Three Kingdoms Era" are involved in the wars

Author 丨 Liu Zhigang

Source 丨 Internet jianghu

In the past two years, new energy vehicle companies have run wild in the capital market, Tesla's market value has exceeded one trillion US dollars, Weilai's market value is 47.5 billion US dollars, the ideal market value is more than 30 billion, and Xiaopeng's market value is approaching 40 billion US dollars...

Half seawater and half flame. The new energy track is in full swing, while the pressure on traditional car manufacturers is increasing.

Since 2018, the pressure of the continuous decline in the domestic fuel vehicle market has continued to be transmitted to the manufacturers, which has also intensified the competition between traditional car companies. Such competition is not only reflected in the product side, but also on the marketing side.

From the overwhelming advertising of BAIC Jihu to the heat caused by Dongfeng Citroen employees to the line car critic No. 38, it seems that it is not difficult for the outside world to see the manufacturer's hunger for marketing.

In fact, the domestic auto market is becoming more mature, and consumers are becoming more and more aware of cars, which means that third-party media platforms also need to be iteratively adjusted. In addition, traffic competition between platforms has further intensified, and internal volumes have become more and more intense. How to find growth in the stock market is a problem that every company needs to think about. As a result, we see that not only manufacturers are seeking changes, but third-party automotive media platforms are also seeking changes.

Traffic Logic Iteration of Automotive Media Platforms: From "Soft Car Reviews" to "Hard Content"

If you are a car enthusiast who often pays attention to car information, then it must not be difficult to find that whether it is a car home, a car emperor or an easy car, in terms of content themes, everyone is gradually highlighting the "long test" content.

For example, in the past year, in the auto home, senior editors have conducted long-term tests on models with high market attention and given in-depth experience reports; in terms of understanding the car emperor, the playback volume of some half-year and one-year long-test videos has increased objectively and received more attention from more audiences; the easy car side is more direct, and has launched a long-term evaluation of "true 100,000 kilometers long test".

As the "Wei Shu Wu" in the automotive media platform industry, behind the convergence of the content of the three companies actually reflects a common dilemma encountered by automotive media: when the user's attention is getting shorter and shorter, people's immunity to "advertorial" car reviews is getting higher and higher, next, how does the platform get more valuable traffic?

The answer given by each platform is "long theme" and "hard content".

A series of car dismantling, long testing, car critics explain more and more aspects of automotive technology, and the content is becoming more and more "hard".

The result of the "hard" content is that the production cost of the content is higher, and correspondingly, the authority and professionalism of the content have been greatly improved compared with the past. This is actually in line with the changes in the taste of C-end consumers for content in recent years: compared with the past, people now know more about cars and want to see higher quality content.

The Internet jianghu believes that the changes on the consumer side have further triggered the iteration of the distribution logic of the automotive information platform.

In the traffic increment phase, almost all content platforms are doing "attention distribution". Typical such as Weibo, with entertainment, star topics, to distribute attention, some deep content platforms such as Zhihu, after breaking the circle is also doing attention distribution. Automotive media platforms are no exception.

The distribution of attention affects consumer goods with a relatively short decision-making chain, so bloggers begin to bring goods, mainly retail goods. Commodities with higher unit prices, such as mobile phones and automobiles, are typical long-term consumption decision-making chain goods, which not only need attention distribution, but also trust distribution.

So we can see that some of the more famous digital evaluations in the PC era are actually declining, but like Xiaobai Evaluation, He Classmates and other latecomers to catch up. The core reason is that the latter's experience of the product is deeper, longer, and more able to feedback the real information.

In fact, compared to mobile phone reviews, car reviews face a much more complex audience environment.

On the one hand, although the domestic market is gradually maturing, not all car purchase decisions are so rational, that is, the attention distribution of the platform is essential. On the other hand, car consumption is a typical long decision cycle, and trust distribution is more critical for the platform.

For the matter of trust distribution, the understanding of different platforms may also be different.

For example, as a senior domestic auto media platform, the professionalism and authority of Autohome are widely recognized, and the platform has a large number of senior evaluation editors, and the platform distributes trust to the C-end through these authoritative editors with strong personal IP characteristics.

The e-car side may want to emphasize professionalism to consolidate the foundation of trust distribution. For example, in the aforementioned "true 100,000 kilometers" long test, Yiche has formulated a set of rigorous and detailed test standards based on standards such as the "General Principles of Automotive Road Test Methods" and combined with the real car use scenarios of consumers under big data.

On the one hand, the information flow push based on the algorithm allows the car emperor to not lack users and traffic, at the same time, through a large amount of investment in original content, build a relatively high-quality content foundation, and then further tap the traffic value.

This is actually very "headline system" flavor. According to the information of Tianyancha, today's headlines are shareholders and promoters of the company to which Chedi belongs.

In fact, no matter how it is iterated, the automotive media platform is always inseparable from the cycle of "content-advertising-transaction-content". In the end, each platform is actually fighting for content output and value to the automotive industry chain.

In other words, for the industry, the media itself does not produce value, the value of the media is actually to transmit value, how to maximize the utility of this value transmission? Digitization can be a viable path.

The information platform has evolved again, looking for the value anchor of "digital service provider"

Internet business has confirmed that the growth of any pure traffic model content platform is a bottleneck, and the traffic platform must be integrated with the physical industry to have more growth value. For example, beauty retail has achieved Little Red Book, and live streaming has achieved Kuaishou Douyin.

For the automotive industry, an objective problem is that it is difficult for the platform model to continue to grow under pure attention trafficking.

The logic is easy to understand, the value of the media is actually the value of traffic, when the traffic growth disappears, the traffic dividend disappears, the model that relies on traffic profitability is doomed to be eliminated. In other words, if it is simply to provide manufacturers with potential sales leads, the growth of automotive information platforms may soon hit the ceiling.

So, how to continue to grow for the car emperors? The answer may lie in a deeper evolution of platform commerce.

In Internet business, the shallow platform is a traffic-based platform, which connects the user's attention, and the deep-level platform is the industrial capacity "middle platform" linking the productivity factors, supply and demand, and data. Taobao is a typical industrial capability "middle office", behind which are tens of millions of small and medium-sized factories and enterprises behind the retail industry.

From this point of view, for the automotive media platform, more important than selling traffic, may be to play the platform's own linking ability.

On the one hand, in the traditional automobile production and sales circulation model, the distance between the automobile manufacturer and the user is naturally cut off by the dealer, which leads to a problem, for the products sold, it is difficult for the automobile manufacturers to obtain real user feedback on a large scale.

In Internet terms, there is no large-scale product feedback data, how to do follow-up product iteration and optimization?

This is also why some Internet-based consumer products can always achieve a stable improvement in the 2.0 version than the 1.0 version, and the iterative upgrade of a certain model is an unknown exploration for the car manufacturer, so that the previous generation of some brand models has a hot reputation, and the monthly sales crown, while after the replacement, it is stagnant.

On the other hand, the platform is a channel, not only to do distribution, but also to do links.

For automotive media platforms, the future value ceiling lies not only in undertaking the online marketing needs of the industry, but also in empowering the circulation end and the industrial end through reverse data distribution, thereby improving the efficiency of the entire automotive industry.

In other words, the future of the automotive media platform may be a "digital service provider", and its value anchor is not the traffic pool in a short period of time, but the breadth and depth of the landing industry.

On the one hand, the higher the link efficiency of the platform itself, the better the effect of empowering the industry. This requires that the platform has enough digital capabilities and big data accumulation to generate value in the product iteration of automobile circulation, sales and even production.

On the other hand, platforms need to gradually change from "resource-driven" to "technology-driven" in the past.

As the growth of the consumer Internet stalls, the growth of the resource-driven platform economy is difficult to support any longer, and it will eventually enter a dissipative structure: the total growth is certain, the costs are increasing, and the resources will always be exhausted. In contrast, "technology-driven" can bring new growth, as long as it can really empower the industrial end, reduce costs and increase efficiency for dealers and OEMs, the platform will naturally have new room for growth.

In fact, already players are aware of this. Previously, Autohome had proposed to use big data accumulation to help OEMs increase sales through digital marketing, and also with the platform to empower manufacturers to operate, in addition, Autohome also proposed a "digital" dealership program, which seems to want to become a digital enabler of ToB in the automotive industry.

In addition to the auto home, Easy Car and Understand Car Emperor are also trying to do digitalization, and everyone hopes to help auto manufacturers further improve retention and transformation through intelligent technology and smart marketing.

Judging from the reaction of the outside world, after a period of observation, the capital market also seems to have given positive feedback.

According to Tencent Securities, 13 institutions have made predictions for the target price of Autohome (ATHM), with a target average price of $43.83, of which the lowest target price is $35.04 and the highest price is $66.08. Currently, Autohome has a market capitalization of $4.057 billion.

The feedback from the capital market seems to verify the correctness of the digital road to a certain extent. In fact, this is also in line with the trend of the development of the automotive industry and the Internet industry in the next decade:

Under the wave of digitalization, new Internet technologies represented by big data and AI are being deeply integrated into the automotive industry.

What kind of chemical reaction will occur in such a fusion in the future is still unknown. Nowadays, the track has been set up, the digital starting gun has been fired, and how the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" of the future automotive media platform digitalization will be staged is worth continuing to observe.