Information Services 2021: "Content is King" will never be outdated

Editor's Note: How is the information services industry doing today? The development of diversified media has impacted the current information industry to a certain extent, but at present, consulting services are still one of the effective modules of the Internet industry. It is worth noting that the quality of content is still a strong support for the subsequent development of the consulting services industry.

QuestMobile disclosed a set of data in the "Apocalypse of China's Mobile Internet Development": as of September 2021, the total number of Internet users in China reached 1.167 billion, an increase of only 14 million year-on-year.

Such a situation does not seem to be surprising, after experiencing multiple rounds of penetration such as live broadcasts, short videos, and sinking markets, the Internet has dug out almost all the new traffic, and the increase of 14 million is already a good result. After all, after excluding the age group below primary school students, the scale of domestic netizens has exceeded the age-appropriate population, and the complete drying up of traffic dividends has long been an established fact.

How to find incremental opportunities in the stock era can be said to be a universal topic suitable for all walks of life, QuestMobile turned its attention to information services, and the results exceeded many people's expectations:

As a representative product of the algorithm genre, today's headlines still lead the market in the scale of monthly active users, but the user time has been lower than the level at the end of 2019; Tencent News, which is backed by the traffic giant, has a weak growth in user scale and user stickiness, and even in early 2021, there was a terrible negative growth; on the contrary, NetEase News and Sina News have handed over a report card of high-speed growth.

Behind the seemingly unusual phenomenon, there is precisely the underlying law of the information industry, reflecting the survival philosophy of natural selection in the stock era.

I. Re-understanding "Content is King"

In the current Internet context, information services are not a tempting track.

The rapid rise of short video platforms has directly impacted the inherent user habits of information services. According to QuestMobile's research data, 70% of users have become accustomed to obtaining social and entertainment information through short video platforms, especially young users under the age of 30, and their dependence on short video platforms is getting higher and higher.

Changes in user behavior have further affected the posture of content producers, and even major current political information media have successively entered the short video platform. Douyin's current political information KOLs, which have more than 100,000 monthly active users, have increased by more than 2 times in the past year, and the growth of the Kuaishou platform has also nearly doubled, and the user penetration rate of the two has exceeded 85%.

The data performance of today's headlines and Tencent News is undoubtedly a regular format of information services, and the transfer of user habits is an indisputable fact to some extent. But why in the same external environment, NetEase News, Sina News and other players ran out of the upward curve of counter-trend growth?

To find the answer to the question, the comparison of the timeline is an indispensable step, and it is NetEase News that is obvious in the ups and downs. The growth inflection point of NetEase News appeared in September 2020, when monthly active users turned from negative to positive, and the follow-up maintained a growth rate of about 20% for a long time, and the monthly active growth rate in July 2021 even reached 30.1%.

Corresponding to the layout of NetEase Media, an orderly strategic innovation is in progress. For example, in July 2020, the new content brand "NetEase Cultural Creation" was officially released, and an IP matrix composed of more than 20 head content such as NetEase Dada, Inspur Studio, TanxinSha, Alpaca Sansan, Slot Value, Hardcore Kanban, Human World, netEase Digital Reading, etc., continued to go out of the circle in the industry with high-quality content; for example, NetEase News's content innovation on the information side created a high-exposure activity platform and innovative content such as NetEase Future Conference, Future Open Class, and "NetEase News Knowledge Highway".

The same example is Sina News, the monthly active growth rate in 2020 has remained above 20% for a long time, even if the growth rate in 2021 begins to slow down, the user's stay time is still growing, which is also related to the synergistic resonance of innovative content and Weibo topics.

It may be possible to conclude that the contrarian growth of platforms such as NetEase News is still "content", even in the era of serious excess overload of content, content is like a tidal wave to every corner of the world; even if the channels and algorithms almost cover up the light of content, the discussion of algorithms has been higher than the content itself, but high-quality content is still the hard truth to attract users and expand influence, and the logic of "content is king" has never become obsolete.

Second, the content business needs a "soul"

All business is inseparable from production and consumption, and the information services industry is no exception.

The business model of the information platform can be roughly divided into two types: one is the traffic business of information content + algorithm recommendation + advertising monetization, content and algorithm are for traffic services; the other is the content ecology + algorithm optimization + traffic operation of the content business, the purpose of the algorithm and operation is to expand the influence of content.

If you delve further, the consumption demand of content can also be subdivided into three categories: the first is consumption logic, so that users have a certain sense of coolness or gain after reading the content; the second type is learning logic, that is, the simplification of complex knowledge systems to help users solve a problem; the third type is motivation logic, so that users have a strong motivation for a certain behavior after reading a content.

Whether it is a traffic business or a content business, in fact, in the design of the business model, it more or less draws on three kinds of consumer demand, and derives new revenue channels such as knowledge payment and live streaming with goods, which is regarded by the outside world as an example of information services constantly raising the ceiling of the industry.

However, another thorny problem that needs to be solved is that the life cycle of most content is very short, especially time-sensitive information content, and only extremely long half-life and strong vitality content can continue to form an impact. This is also the essential difference between the traffic business and the content business, the former focusing on fast food-style instant stimulation content, and the latter tending to have depth and vitality of content.

When the traffic dividend is uninterrupted, the feasibility of the traffic business is beyond doubt, although the life cycle of the content is too short to form a considerable user stickiness, but there is always new traffic entering. In the era of saturated stocks, once the content with a long life cycle is missing, the once-tried and unsuccessful order will collapse with a high probability.

A typical example is NetEase Cultural Creation. The content production system composed of a number of original studios has helped NetEase Cultural Creation build a multi-circle and multi-category content IP matrix, and extend the content tentacles to youth social interaction, emotional insight, youth culture, new business and new consumption, film and television copyright, knowledge science, urban culture and other fields, so that NetEase News is far ahead of similar products in terms of user stickiness indicators.

According to the thinking paradigm of traffic business, operating a content brand to produce content is not a choice to maximize profits, and the right direction should be to focus on algorithm recommendation and advertising monetization, and earn the difference like "two landlords". But from the standpoint of the content business, those with value output or deep self-expression of deep content are the cornerstones to ensure long-term vitality.

The explanation that can be given is that content brands want to cross the time cycle and output thoughtful, attitude, and valuable content can be said to be almost the only way. At the same time, it is also necessary to consider the different needs of different user groups and cover as many target groups as possible in a diversified way.

Third, only "differentiation" can survive

The times continue to evolve and progress, and the information industry has never had a "safe harbor".

From the oldest portal, to the mobile transformation under the popularity of smartphones, to the wave of decentralization caused by algorithms and self-media, the evolution and innovation of information services have not stopped for a moment. Especially in the past decade or so, new production tools have emerged, constantly spawning new ways of producing and consuming content. Even if the current market pattern of information services is almost rigid, the undercurrent has never stopped.

Just like the impact of short videos on the information industry, compared with the traditional plot of "replacing and subverting", what is being staged is the cross-border integration of the two:

Portal-origin platforms such as NetEase News and Tencent News have already introduced algorithm recommendation into content distribution, and have continuously strengthened the proportion of short videos, live broadcasts and other content in the past two years, and encouraged creators to output high-quality short video content through topic operation and traffic support;

The short video platform represented by Douyin and Kuaishou is competing with the information platform for creators on the one hand, and is also trying to make up for the shortcomings of short videos in expression. For example, under some content entries related to popular science, Douyin has added graphic and text links that are convenient for users to read further;

Today's headlines, Baidu and other information flow platforms are also seeking changes, all on the basis of the graphic creation platform, open up their own short videos, live broadcasts and other creative tools, also in order to adapt to the survival rules of the stock era, trying to keep more and more user time on the platform...

Under such an industry trend, all information platforms will be integrated and diversified, and users will re-choose the appropriate channels according to their own needs. Large and small information platforms, in order to survive in the era of uncertainty, the "content differentiation advantage" is a necessary moat.

The reason for emphasizing such a detail stems from "a pair of invisible hands". In addition to the users who vote with their feet, there are also brands that vote with real money and silver.

As QuestMobile deliberately emphasized in the "report": "The marketing strategy of consumer brands has shifted from heavy purchase of traffic to deep cultivation of brand cultural symbols", and the disappearance of traffic dividends has led to higher traffic costs, forcing brands to deepen cultural symbols through product design, LOGO design, joint activities, cross-border marketing and other deep cultural symbols, attracting the spiritual identity of target customers, rather than blindly betting on traffic and exposure.

For information platforms, building trust with content and users mainly relies on two things, one is personality and interaction, and the other is attitude. In fact, it also explains the deep meaning of NetEase Media to amplify original content, use content and young people to generate emotional links, improve user loyalty and quality, not only to create differentiated advantages, but also to cater to the transformation of brand marketing.

In short, the evolution trajectory of information services is accidental, but quality content is an eternal need, and "differentiation advantage" is an eternal survival skill.

Fourth, write at the end

For more than 20 years, "traffic, user growth, and monetization" have been hot words often hung on the lips of entrepreneurs or industry practitioners, and an infinite game of continuous evolution of "traffic to monetization" has been staged.

If "traffic" is taken as the origin and "realization" is regarded as the end point, the path between the two is not only a straight line. Maybe in the days before the traffic saturation, we only need to think about the efficiency of the connection between the two points, but when the traffic exhaustion is irreversible, the connection between the two points needs to think about resilience, sustainability and more factors, which will determine the final direction of the market.

The information industry is undoubtedly the best window for insight into the Internet industry, and most of the products that appeared in the same period as the portal are drowned in the smoke and dust of history, and the information service is timeless, stepping on the beat of the times again and again.

#专栏作家 #

Alter, WeChat public account: Alter Chat IT (ID: spnews), everyone is a product manager columnist, Internet observer. Focus on mobile Internet, intelligent hardware, e-commerce and other technology fields. Independent self-media people, walking on the road of entrepreneurship.

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