Original title: "The good days of self-media making fast money have come to an end!" Who will be the first drowning in the tide |? New List Observation
Many self-media are still worried about how to increase fans and explore the way to monetization, and some self-media institutions that have grown up with early dividends have begun to feel that the era of barbaric growth and fast money may be over.
Now, even if the self-media business is getting bigger and bigger, and the revenue is getting higher and higher, the profit may not be able to maintain the same proportion of rapid growth.
What's the problem?
"A private picture"
The output value rises year by year, and the profit margin decreases year by year
At the "2017 New List Conference" on January 7, a guest exposed "a private picture" during his speech.
The company he founded has a total of more than 100 million fans on various accounts.
In the chart below, the red curve represents the group's output value from 2014 to 2016, and the blue curve represents the group's profit margin for the same period.
He asked: In the past three years, the output value has been rising and doubling upward every year, but the profit margin is declining, where has the cost gone? Then the self-answer: the unit cost increases, and it increases to the service.
He said: "We can't simply just pick up advertising, do content, to build a professional customer service team, to serve our party A; business is to do more expansion, resource team to dock upstream and downstream resources." [We] have to do not only do the content well, but also do a good job of service..."
The company's business model has now transitioned from simple graphics and text to a diversified model, covering graphics, video, books, e-commerce and film and television.
There was a co-founder of the self-media large number in the audience, and after listening to this speech, he sent a WeChat circle of friends: "His PPT is the most honest, and the content I say is also the most sincere when I hear it." It's about sharing experiences, and it's also about sharing anxiety. ”
This is a small case in the context of content iteration, and it is also a microcosm of some content entrepreneurs seeking transformation breakthroughs.
Cross-regional urban self-media alliance
It is intended to obtain higher commercial returns through grouping
In mid-March this year, four cities in the Yangtze River Delta, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing and Suzhou, announced an alliance, saying that it covered more than 10 million total users.
It is said that this is the first self-media alliance in China, which will form in-depth cooperation in daily push, offline activities, and new media users, and work together to provide the best quality eating, drinking and entertainment content for small partners in the Yangtze River Delta region.
The self-media of the alliance said that one of the important factors in forming the alliance is that "in the current chaotic environment of new media, marketing numbers are irresponsibly attracting attention and attracting customers by false reading."
The word used here is "customer", which is obviously not a reader or user in the general sense, which also shows that the self-media alliance behavior has a clear commercial appeal.
We can simply interpret it as: these self-media giants use the method of holding unity alliances, with the advantages of a large number of total users (fans), a wide area that can cover (radiate) areas, and the reputation and brand they have created, as a "selling point", so as to obtain more favor from brand owners and higher commercial returns.
In fact, this form of solidarity is not uncommon, and it has appeared in other parts of the country, but on a slightly different scale.
In addition, some self-media institutions with abundant capital and various resources are also stepping up the layout of the self-media matrix, or continuously extending the business line: from the beginning to provide only graphic type content, and later extended to video, knowledge payment, e-commerce, film and television /IP creation, and even turned to provide MCN services, build their own platform, and some extend the sense of touch to the upstream and downstream industries to control pricing power or form a commercial closed loop.
A big background behind these changes is that many self-media have personally felt that it is relatively difficult to build a "moat" for graphic content, and commercial monetization space is facing a ceiling (this point, from the past, the advertising share of graphic and print media is far less than that of television media).
Since the second half of 2016, some self-media agencies have personally felt that the money for advertising seems to be less easy to earn than before. Advertising is precisely the largest source of revenue for the vast majority of self-media.
In this process of transformation and upgrading, there are also some self-media that lack the ability to continuously produce high-quality content or think that they cannot break through the ceiling by their own strength, change hands and sell numbers, and cash out.
Advertisers declare war on "dark marketing."
Requires authoritative, professional, and trusted third-party verification
At 7:58 p.m. on September 27, 2016, the WeChat data interface was updated, and the public account brush reading tool was paralyzed, and the number of public account readings that were used to brushing fell off a cliff.
According to the monitoring of the new list at the time, 124 accounts, accounting for 1.42% of the 8744 head accounts, fell by more than 80% on September 28, 2016. Among them, a certain automobile large, the average number of single articles read in the week from September 19 to September 25, 2016 was 19995, and the average number of single articles read on September 28 was only 30, a decrease of 99.85%, which was staggering.
Whether in foreign countries or China, as well as public accounts or other self-media platforms, false brushing volume is actually a cancer that is difficult to eradicate in the industry. However, after the large-scale exposure of this "brush reading" in September last year, the biggest difference from the past is that advertisers have been "educated" as never before, and their digital advertising on platforms such as social media has become more cautious and smart, and the monitoring of the effectiveness of advertising has also been strengthened.
In February, Procter & Gamble, the world's largest advertiser, announced a readjustment of its digital marketing strategy to declare war on "dark marketing" amid more than $8 billion in advertising dollars a year in recent years and weak brand sales growth.
P&G's response includes imposing restrictions on digital marketing costs: adopting THERC ad viewability standards; the platform must support third-party verification; moving toward "transparent agency contracts" and partners must be recognized by TAG.
Simply put, P&G should do digital marketing with precise delivery and product effect, and no longer tolerate "fraudulent" digital advertising.
This move has caused a sensation in the industry, and it is also like an "education" for other brand owners and advertisers - although P&G's approach has not yet been fully rolled out, many companies have said they will follow its approach.
Generally speaking, it is unrealistic and difficult to let the domestic self-media "prove their innocence" and then gain the trust of advertisers, and an authoritative, professional and credible third-party organization is needed to do relevant verification and certification.
In this regard, as the only mobile full-platform content data service provider in China, the new list can provide relevant services for self-media and advertisers.
For example, the "New List Index" has become the value standard of China's mobile Internet content, which can be used to measure the communication value, brand value and investment value of self-media; "minute-level monitoring" can efficiently identify whether the reading volume of a certain self-media is suspected of being fraudulent; the new list advertising and marketing department can also provide a series of services that accurately connect brand advertisers and brand self-media...
E-commerce and knowledge payments look beautiful
Many self-media cannot bear the weight of capital and operation
Although advertising is still the first choice for content entrepreneurs to monetize their business, e-commerce and knowledge payment are also increasingly being tried.
However, according to the observation of Xu Danei, founder and CEO of the new list, if 10 advertising in the self-media, 3 can do e-commerce, while less than 1 can do knowledge payment.
One of the main reasons behind this is that the operation of e-commerce is very heavy, and it is necessary to solve problems such as selection, quality control, warehousing, logistics, customer service, after-sales service, etc., which makes many self-media afraid or fall into the pit; and knowledge payment not only requires knowledge providers to have professional capabilities and prestige in a certain field, but also requires them to be good at integrated marketing communication and attracting fans to pay for purchases, which is also a heavy operation.
Observing the current self-media ecosystem, we will find that some head self-media large/institutions have great advantages in advertising, e-commerce and knowledge payment due to early dividends and millions or even tens of millions of fans, but they are accelerating iterative upgrading and transformation breakthroughs.
This is because even if advertisers have not experienced "education" such as digital advertising brush data, even if self-media large/institutional enterprises rely on the first-mover advantage to achieve the head of the subdivision field, if they lack a real moat and do not have a unique competitive advantage that cannot be copied, they will face the growth bottleneck (that is, the ceiling) of commercial realization.
In some recent visits to the new list, we found that some of the self-media agencies/companies that have made a lot of money in previous years and have annual revenues of tens of millions of dollars are anxiously accelerating their transformation, and they would rather temporarily not make money on some projects or even burn millions of millions of dollars per year, but also complete the transformation and upgrading - closer to high-quality original content, closer to branding, closer to IP creation, in exchange for a bumper harvest of commercial realization after many years.
Rome was not built in a day, and Disney's entertainment empire was not built in a day. If there is no accurate positioning and direction of force, there is not enough capital support, lack of talent and other resources to match, lack of sufficient patience, self-media want to break out of a world in a diversified and unfamiliar field, it is not an easy task.
We have also observed that after the boom of the past few years, some companies or capital institutions that have never been involved in the content field have also successively entered the field of self-media - buying marketing numbers of those who have a large number of fans, and investing manpower and material resources to strengthen the production of original high-quality content, while trying to "bleach" these accounts, while trying to explore various ways to monetize.
The twists and turns and bitterness in it are probably only those in the authorities who can see the fire and know it well.
In the Japanese film "Belly Boomerang," a radio drama producer told his director, "We're doing disgusting stuff now in order to one day make a work that has a clear conscience." ”
Will China's self-media, which has experienced barbaric growth and is encountering a ceiling, also be such an iterative evolution trajectory?