Keep is obviously not grasping the outlet of online fitness.
Two years before the outbreak first erupted, home-quarantined fitness enthusiasts moved from the gym to Keep. According to Aurora big data statistics, the daily activity of this emerging online fitness app was less than 3 million in early January 2020, and by March 24, it had soared to more than 8.5 million.
The company's valuation is also rising – by the time Keep completed its $80 million Series E round of financing in mid-2020, it was already valued at $1 billion, ranking among the unicorns. Six months later, in January 2021, Keep's valuation doubled to $2 billion.
These highlight moments, which belonged to Keep, failed to be maintained. The daily life, which was once soaring, continued to decline in the following months.
According to data disclosed by Keep in the non-transactional roadshow in mid-2021, Keep's latest DAU was 6 million and MAU was 31 million, failing to catch up with the peak in March 2020.
Keep Daily Active Image Source/Aurora
On the one hand, because the "online fitness", a tepid blue ocean in the past, has been detected by users and capital, the fitness sections of content platforms such as B station and Xiaohongshu have begun to take shape; on the other hand, Keep, as the forerunner of the sea, has not been able to seize the wind outlet to further break the circle as the market expects.
"Self-discipline gives me freedom", this is the opening word written by Keep to users, and perhaps it is also the insistence of the production team itself. Keep, which once had a good hand, failed to allow users to maintain self-discipline on their own platforms, nor did they gain more freedom to maintain the market share they once had and create a broader free space for themselves.
The cold field of knowledge payment
AI Blue Media interviewed several of Keep's "lost users" and talked about their separation from Keep, most of them mentioned the epidemic and the changes in fitness content on various platforms after the epidemic.
At the beginning, when everyone mentioned online fitness, Keep was almost the first and only quality choice. But as the fitness program progresses, some users gradually find that there are more paid items on it.
At the same time, the fitness content on large platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Station B is growing at a high speed, and many high-quality content producers share fitness tutorials, experiences, knowledge and science on Xiaohongshu and B stations, and they are completely free.
This difference in content model is related to the stage of company development and platform size. Keep has been racing on the fitness track for many years and needs to seek commercialization to achieve a go-to-market with the run-through business model. Platforms such as Xiaohongshu and B Station, as new entrants in the field of fitness content, are naturally more inclined to invest resources to compete in the staking and supplement the content ecology.
But for those new "pan fitness" users, the comparison of content experience is very intuitive.
Also a fitness class, Keep has always maintained a style of "professional" and "concise", and after entering the class, there is nothing extra except action and beats.
Keep Fitness Classes Image Source/Keep
Some fitness courses with high playback on other platforms can not only be watched for free, but also interspersed with the disassembly of actions and the popularization of detailed fitness knowledge and skills in the teaching process.
B station up main @ Saturday Wild Zoey's fitness class Image source/B station
Although fitness is very tiring, compared with the "streamlined" and "hardcore" of keep courses, the course experience of these large platforms is undoubtedly richer and more "fun". Maybe Keep's mode is indeed more efficient, but the vastly different number of interactions and views also speaks for themselves — "pan-fitness" users prefer interesting classes to pure hardcore fitness moves.
With the increase of competitors in the market, in the production of sports content, Keep's friends to benchmark have become other more powerful comprehensive content distribution platforms.
Moreover, in the domestic Internet environment, the "knowledge payment" in the content field has actually been difficult to be verified by the market.
The concept of "knowledge payment" has fluctuated in evaluation in the early years. In the midst of the debate, the logic has been dismantled more thoroughly — selling anxiety through storytelling and kidnapping the user's nerves.
The whole process, set to the fitness content is not difficult: tell the user the harm of not fitness, the inner volume of the fitness group of people around them, anxiety will naturally come. But whether this anxiety can be translated into the need for users to be willing and continue to pay, I am afraid it is not so absolute.
By now, the outlet for paying for knowledge has long passed. Between buying and white prostitution, there is almost no need to hesitate, and users will definitely choose the side that is more cost-effective than Keep.
The commercial dilemma remains
The limited user base also makes the knowledge payment model with low conversion rate more difficult in Keep.
As a vertical content platform, Keep's user stickiness and ARPU value should be higher than other comprehensive content platforms. According to the data released by Keep last year, the status quo is not optimistic.
In the first quarter of 2021, Keep's user stickiness was about 19.4%, and Station B reached 28.55%, and Xiaohongshu, which also started from the vertical platform, was as high as 36.4%, almost twice that of Keep.
In terms of revenue, Keep's plate has not been able to grow.
According to market news, Keep's total revenue in 2019 is 600 million yuan, and the total revenue in 2020 is more than 1.1 billion, although there is a high growth rate, but such a volume, for the establishment of eight years of valuation, $2 billion industry unicorn enterprises, is not a pass - membership, value-added business, the main knowledge payment business model, Keep may not completely run through.
This is still the highest gross profit margin of all keep commercial projects, and the rest of the advertising, e-commerce, physical gyms and other projects need to have a large number of users in order to convert considerable economic benefits.
Since 2016, Keep has successively launched sports peripherals including sportswear, equipment, and health food in the e-commerce sector, and has also designed and sold a sports bracelet similar to the appearance and function of smart hardware manufacturers such as Xiaomi and Huawei.
Keep sports bracelet
However, the former track has long been very crowded, and the Keep that enters the game lacks genes and reputation compared with traditional sportswear and equipment brands; the latter has no comparative advantage in technological advancement and convenience compared with those mobile terminals and smart hardware manufacturers, and it is difficult to seize the market.
Keepland Gym, which is located in Beijing and Shanghai, is a physical store itself facing the problem of long cost recovery cycle. The characteristics of the fitness industry lead to a very low offline conversion rate of Internet users, and the operating logic is completely different from online, and it is difficult to maintain the operation by relying on the enthusiasm of fanatical fans or fitness enthusiasts alone. The intermittent epidemic closure has brought dividends to the Keep mobile terminal while also eliminating the small customer flow in physical stores. Keepland's store on Qingnian Road in Beijing was closed, and all stores in Shanghai were withdrawn.
Keepland Gym
Open keep, on a dark background, the phrase "self-discipline gives me freedom" stands out. Self-discipline is the consensus of bodybuilders. But if it is only simple and rude to put "self-discipline" on the Internet and give users to achieve platform recognition, it is not realistic.
If Keep wants to really break the circle and cover a wider range of user groups, it must start from the needs of users and sink and expand the content positioned in the professional dimension. Only by closing the ecological loop of content with cause and effect and story can Keep establish real business barriers and bring stable "fitness freedom".
(Source|.) AI Blue Media Collection Author | Yi)