Edit | Yu Bin
Produced by | Chaoqi Network "Yu see column"
Recently, according to relevant media reports, The anonymous social platform Soul, which has always wanted to make a name on the concept of metaversity, has encountered "sanctions" on the metaverse.
It can be seen from the platforms such as Qichacha that the status of several trademark applications related to the metacosm, such as "social metacosm" and "arbitrary door metacosm" applied for registration by Soul affiliated company Shanghai Youmen Technology Co., Ltd., has been changed to "rejection review", which makes THE SOUL, which has long been on the metacosm concept and shouted out the slogan of "building a young people's social metacosm", seem a bit embarrassing.
At present, although the metaverse is attacked by many people as a concept floating in the sky, objectively speaking, the industry field represented by games, social networking, etc. can barely be accepted to cut into the metaverse track. As one of the companies that have long proposed to be a meta-universe in China, Soul has indeed spared no effort to lean on the meta-universe company in recent years.
However, it is difficult to say what Soul has achieved in the metaverse field. More importantly, as the public's perception of the metacosm becomes more rational, the faster it grows, the more Soul may face more serious real-life survival problems.
Will building a vision of a younger generation's social metacosm will help Soul navigate the next phase of growth? Can it continue to gain recognition from young people in a complex social environment?
Soul grew stronger and more confused
Soul's growth in the field of anonymous social networking in recent years is inseparable from its differentiated positioning.
Compared with the well-known Momo, Tantan, etc., Soul launched in 2015 can be described as an outlier in the entire anonymous social field in the early stage of development, which creates an anonymous social "Eden" based on interests and hobbies in the name of soul social networking.
Soul's move has had a miraculous effect when other social platforms are strongly meeting user hormone needs and doing everything possible to promote it in disguise, although users can't use real photos as avatars, the platform only distributes content and matches social objects through interest maps, and the lack of nearby communication based on local positioning functions makes Soul unable to get attention in a broader user dimension, but at least it successfully harvested the first wave of seed users.
Regardless of appearance, regardless of region, based on the "soul" to communicate, Soul successfully reduced the cost of communication between strangers at the beginning, and then seized its own unique position when many people were tired of the hormone atmosphere filled by mainstream anonymous social platforms.
Of course, this is also doomed to Soul in the early stage of development is "small and beautiful", the early Soul users should have the same feeling, that is, the quality of users on the Soul platform is relatively high, and the content that everyone communicates and discusses is also very "normal".
In the first three years of its establishment, Soul did not get a wide range of attention, it only received million-yuan angel round financing when the APP was just launched, and there was no Internet bigwig behind the investment institutions.
Perhaps not satisfied with the status quo, by the end of 2018, Soul chose to embrace the "mainstream", introducing the nearby functions of the anonymous social platform that has long been "played bad" into the platform and launching the "love bell" function. With this change, Soul found the code for rapid development.
With the launch of "Love Bell", Soul's number of users has grown significantly, although at that time it was still not an order of magnitude away from the mainstream anonymous social platform, but this at least allowed capital to see Soul's imagination space.
As a result, well-known capital began to cut into Soul's new round of financing, and its valuation at the time of the B round of financing reached $1.5 billion in one fell swoop, becoming a new upstart in the anonymous social industry that should not be underestimated.
With style, capital, and grounded boldness, Soul has entered the fast lane of development. According to the prospectus data released by Soul in the first half of last year when it wanted to land on the US stock NASDAQ, as of March 2021, Soul's monthly active life exceeded 30 million, with an average daily active number of 9.1 million, and the year-on-year increase of the two data was as high as 109.0% and 94.4%, respectively. At the level of paid memberships, Soul's number of paid members had exceeded one million at that time.
At this point, no one will underestimate Soul, after leaning on Tencent's thighs and becoming a link in Tencent's social network, many people think that Soul's future is still promising, and it may write a period of its own glory in the anonymous social industry.
However, Soul's confusion was also exposed at this moment.
On the one hand, joining the mainstream of anonymous social local positioning dating function, although Soul has the hope of "the public", but also fundamentally changed The original intention of Soul from the beginning, a product named soul social, but gradually married and dating, "nearby people", will this "soul" still exist for a long time? The style and character of the platform that Soul has built is clearly facing a huge impact.
The most direct impact of this situation is that in the past, users used Soul to simply make friends based on hobbies, and now many users use Soul based on photos, the same city, the neighborhood, handsome men and beautiful women, which makes Soul and the tone of those anonymous social apps in the past more and more similar.
If Soul's story can only end up being the next Momo or Detective, then it certainly won't make it go very far.
On the other hand, under the influence of the big environment, Last year, Soul took the initiative to press the pause button on its own listing process, which cast a shadow on Soul's commercial future. During that time, all kinds of controversy surrounding Soul also appeared in the news from time to time, which made Soul, who had just embarked on the fast track of development, face more unknowns.
The dual challenges of operation and commercialization
Maybe this is the reason why Soul wants to grasp the new gimmick of the metaverse, the soul social network has been broken by itself, still called Soul, there are still many problems to be solved, it must set up a long-term ambition for itself, both to attract users for a long time, but also to obtain commercial imagination space.
It is worth noting that the metaverse is not as capable of helping Soul quickly obtain funds and users like other hot concepts in the Internet field in the past, it is currently more like a gimmick than the actual product, so for Soul, it still has to focus on more real problems.
We don't know how many users the metacosmonic concept will attract to Soul, but it's safe to say that solid operational challenges are in front of Soul. After becoming a social meta-universe platform for young people, how does it face the conflict between soul social and local, photo, marriage and love socialization, how to maintain a good community atmosphere, take into account user retention and attract new users?
This problem has become very urgent for Soul, the platform's weak user retention capabilities show that Soul is now unable to rely on the concept of metaverse to combine the part of the user it wants to attract, user fragmentation, content fragmentation on the platform is also more obvious, Soul will need to spend a lot of effort to solve this problem in the future.
If the operational problems can still be explored with time, the commercialization problem is even more urgent.
According to the prospectus data previously released by Soul, the company showed obvious problems of rapid expansion and greater losses, and the company relied on huge marketing investment to attract new users, but it also carried heavy loss questions, which tested whether Soul could hand over a satisfactory business model answer to the market.
It is reported that Soul's main sources of profit at present are membership payment, value-added services, advertising and e-commerce, which is also almost all mainstream social platforms will explore. Among them, the revenue of value-added services such as membership payment and platform virtual currency accounts for the vast majority of revenue, which shows that Soul has a certain imagination space in user attraction.
However, purely relying on social users to make money for themselves, this is not very reliable, in the future Soul still has to actively expand its own business moat, in order to prove that its business model is sustainable. Otherwise, once Soul's appeal to users declines, or if a new social platform stands out, it will be a disaster for Soul.
Soul's future is doomed to be difficult to understand, learning Momo, exploring, this side is equivalent to revolutionizing their own life, on the one hand, it is not accepted by the market; if you learn yourself and learn Douban, the commercialization problem will exist for a long time. Can Soul find a path of its own? The answer to this question can only be left to time.