Wen | Zhang Shule (Columnist of People's Daily And People's Post and Telegraph, Observer of Internet and Game Industry)
Do you still spend money on the century to "choose concubines"?
Old Xu, you want a wife!
In the media investigation, the sales of red brides have become the dominant player in the marriage business.
In the cubicle room of the VIP service center of Century Jiayuan, Red Niang tries to become the user's "confidant".
How to cultivate "confidants"?
By viewing the user's private information, it is convenient to do "character stimulation" and achieve precision marketing.
In order to complete the performance, on the one hand, the red bride packages the familiarity and understanding of the user, on the other hand, it will also package itself, the title, education and qualifications are common, in addition, "dang trust" is an important work content, the red bride should take customer resources in other marriage platforms or offline blind dates, and attract them to the store.
At the same time, on the black cat complaint platform, the number of complaints of Century Jiayuan reached 4088, and the number of complaints of Zhen'ai Network reached 2028, and most of the complaints were inducing consumption, false publicity, refusal to refund, etc. In this way, the problems existing in the marriage website are not formed in the short term.
The Consumer Protection Commission of Jiangsu Province also interviewed marriage websites such as Century Jiayuan and Zhen'ai.com, pointing out that the platform has problems such as unclear refund rules, non-fulfillment of publicity commitments, and ineffective review of member information, which seriously infringes on the legitimate rights and interests of consumers such as the right to know, the right to fair trade and the right to information security.
Recently, the surging news has issued three investigative reports in a row, disclosing that the marriage platform Century Jiayuan has set up false personalities in the first line store of the red bride, and the members' personal privacy information is "naked" in the background.
According to the above report, candidates only need to go through half a month of training to obtain the permission to call user information from the background, and can see many private contents including browsing history, chat history and personal preferences.
In this regard, Meng Qian, a reporter from China News Weekly, had an exchange with Shule, and poor Dao thought:
For Century Jiayuan, its own loopholes in management and the overly wide permissions released for the red bride are too wide.
At present, red bride one-to-one service is the main part of its revenue, accounting for 40% of its revenue in 2015.
This makes it more dependent on the red bride and has wider authority.
The essence of the problem is actually that Century Jiayuan, as a veteran marriage platform, under the impact of new social platforms, especially stranger social networking, is overly anxious in order to solve revenue problems and innovate experiences, resulting in a series of management problems.
At the same time, such problems also occur on the old platform, which also shows that there have always been hidden dangers in the standardization of its platform, and it is too indifferent to the protection of user privacy.
In the past, there have also been cases of marriage fraud and financial fraud through such platforms, and this time it is only a concentrated outbreak of stubborn diseases.
The online dating market has experienced a highlight moment, and then fell into a downturn, and now the thunderstorm, behind this is to show that the logic of this business is heading for self-collapse.
What does it take to get a hand in hand with an online relationship?
Its own interpretation is algorithm.
However, in essence, it is a "concubine" with information asymmetry conditions under the membership mechanism.
The degree of online matching, in a sense, is the degree of "money in place".
The logic of consumption is similar to the pleasure of smoking a blind box.
Therefore, its business logic lacks the value of ultimately achieving practical results, which also makes its aura gradually dissipate.
In particular, the matchmaking power of marriage and love websites is doubtful in the minds of users, which in itself has caused the overall loss of word of mouth of such platforms.
This model is actually the online front desk, offline dating of marriage and love O2O.
The real value is that it can jump out of the user's social barriers, there is a certain chance of encounter in the long-tail "needs" of marriage and love, and the development potential still exists, but the actual efficiency may not be able to exceed the simple rudeness of stranger social interaction.
It is also based on this value that at the beginning of this century, marriage websites such as Century Jiayuan, Lily Network and Zhen'ai Network were born one after another, making users realize that they can pay for blind dates through blind date websites.
But it is precisely because this value has not fully demonstrated the effect, in 2011, after the listing of Century Jiayuan in the United States, due to the poor performance of the capital market, the stock price was depressed, and it was privatized and delisted after merging with Baihe.com 5 years later.
According to the last financial report before The Century Jiayuan and Baihe Network, it generated a total of 714 million yuan in revenue and a net profit of 51.4 million yuan in 2015, while the Q3 financial report of Zhiwen Group (Momo) showed that Momo's single quarterly net income was 3.759 billion yuan and net profit was 403 million yuan. In terms of the number of users, the average number of monthly active users of Jiayuan as of the end of 2015 was about 5.3 million, and Momo was 116 million.
At present, its explorable space may be a vertical type of marriage stranger social networking (live broadcast, short video, graphic text or online and offline linkage board game game), through the user's own display and online interaction, to complete the "original accumulation" of marriage and love, to promote the marriage and love hand-in-hand rate.
However, this model does not necessarily require the red bride anchor to create a noisy scene of entertaining people and fooling themselves in the form of similar marriage and love variety shows, and it should be more point-to-point.
At the same time, as users iterate (into Generation Z), the old way is gradually failing.
The simple matching of user data of Century Jiayuan to achieve the algorithm of "door-to-door pair" is theoretically feasible.
But in fact, the user's subconscious has more of its own algorithms and exclusions, or the potential mental cognition of "if it is free, both can be thrown". These are three-dimensional humanity that simply a few introductions, needs, and tables cannot present.
Therefore, online dating is essentially to play an interactive property, rather than moving the past marriage and love agency online to simply charge.
In addition, the new generation of young people with marriage and love needs, their ideas and needs are indeed more diverse than their parents, the service is more difficult, the higher the degree of social freedom required for marriage and love, and more experience scenarios (it is not easy to say "play") are needed to break the game.
In other words, in the past, the way of outlining the target marriage partner with fixed conditions was too flat, and more means were needed to achieve a three-dimensional portrait of marriage and love big data, in order to seek accurate matching and effective hand-in-hand under time and cost savings.
From the perspective of being, small and beautiful marriage and love services will usher in opportunities.
According to CCTV financial reports, data from the Ministry of Civil Affairs shows that In 2018, China's single adult population exceeded 200 million. The relevant report predicts that the size of China's marriage and social market will reach 7.24 billion yuan in 2021.
There is still a lot of room in the market, and the opportunity is coming.
In the small and beautiful marriage and love service, similar to the personal experience of the past offline marriage agency, it is supported, and through various scenario-based marriage and love activities to promote more diversified interactions of groups in need, and often such scene settings will be matched around the interests, occupations and more characteristics of specific user groups.
Although it seems inefficient, time-consuming and laborious, under the "double blindness" of conditional access, the success rate is not low.