In the past few days of the Spring Festival holiday, many single young people have gained more than one wave of single care.
On social media, some UP owners have posted "anti-marriage provocation guidelines." Of course, there is still a lot of banter in this, and if you really want to practice it yourself, I am afraid that you need supreme courage.
When parents are anxious about their children's aversion to face-to-face blind dates and seem to have no intention of marriage, the other side of reality is that new "love transactions" such as 8-minute dating, single blind boxes, and script killings are emerging in the market.
All of this is sending a signal: contemporary young people are not "single addicts". Find out their demands, there is actually a lot of business that can be done.
Aim for the "off-order" bullseye
8 minute dating, have you ever heard of it?
In bars, restaurants and other occasions, a group of strange men and women sit at separate tables. With a bell ringing every 8 minutes, they stood up in unison to change seats, looking for new conversation partners.
After 85, Xiao Fan has participated several times. He is a programmer in Shanghai. Because of the usual busy work and the relatively single circle of life, it is not easy to contact more of the opposite sex. In his opinion, compared to the traditional blind date model, 8 minutes of dating is obviously more efficient, and dozens of opposite sexes can be met in one afternoon.
"If you're not interested in someone, you can end the conversation in 8 minutes. If both parties are still unsatisfied, they can exchange contact information when they stand up to facilitate future contact. "It's also a hassle-free dating activity. Traditional meetings are time-consuming and costly, and boys often need to pay the bills and plan activities, compared to 8-minute dating, which is much easier.
In fast-paced first- and second-tier cities, such a dating method is favored by many people. Shanghai youth dating platform Jiaoda Red Lady started from this business, and now the development has gradually matured, and there are special sessions for specific groups of people every week.
"The largest number of participants reached more than 120 people. A table of four people, changed 30 rounds, lasted more than 4 hours. The staff told reporters that in the 8-minute date, the number of men and women and the balance of gender are particularly important. In order to ensure the sense of experience, they will screen users, such as opening a special session for the post-90s. In addition, a 1:1 balance between men and women is guaranteed.
The efficient blind date mode also brings corresponding troubles. First of all, from the environment, due to the limited space, it is easy to be disturbed by the surrounding sounds. Due to the simplicity of the overall process and the mechanical repetition of similar content, the communication is somewhat "cold".
"On a traditional blind date, the first things you won't say, the questions you ask, such as after-tax annual salary, housing situation, etc., will be mentioned in the limited time of 8 minutes of dating, and everyone will get used to it." 」 Xiao Fan also said a problem, because the whole scene is an open space, most men and women will stare at people with high appearance and better conditions, so that they lack interest in chatting with others, and even start playing mobile phones.
On an 8-minute date, different people must have different feelings. In any case, such a running volume and extremely low time cost have formed a relatively stable customer base in today's market.
If you're not used to two or three hours of wheel wars, you might as well try them out at a convenience store.
When everything can be blinded, finding objects is no exception.
In Shanghai's Huangpu district, there is a convenience store that has been singled out. In the small space, there is a lattice wall. Young men and women only need to write their names, birthdays, places of residence, their own characteristics, mate selection requirements, contact information, etc. on the sticky notes and stuff them into the bottle. Subsequently, the birthday, height and ideal type are concisely described on the bottle, and then the bottle is placed in 365 squares corresponding to the one corresponding to his birthday, and you can wait for the person to contact.
Such a novel business model has attracted many young people to punch cards, and their footprints have spread throughout Shanghai, Changsha, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Chongqing, Jinan and other places.
Some people come with the desire to get off the list, and go to the store for 7 consecutive days to pair, hoping to find like-minded lovers on their own. There are also many people who come with curiosity. Xiao Guang, a post-90s girl, once went there, and after glancing around, she felt some lack of interest. "Off-order convenience stores are a kind of intermediary, and the form is more interesting than the more straightforward offline blind date." However, due to the limited information available to convenience stores, it is not easy to achieve matching. ”
Derivation of "Off Order +"
If the first two are more purposeful, then there is a group of people who are not obsessed with finding objects immediately, but through participating in social activities such as script killing and talk shows, they can not only please themselves, get a novel life experience, but also have the opportunity to meet like-minded people.
Previously, I could always see such a story on the Internet: I took a friend to participate in the script killing, and the result was that the friend and the person in the same game looked at each other and achieved a good relationship. Due to its own social attributes, script killing has become a carrier for off-order. Some merchants aimed at this point, specially grouping scripts to kill off a single game.
I participated once before the Spring Festival. "Overall, though, the experience wasn't great."
Mainly the ratio of men to women. According to the script information given by the merchant, the configuration is 4 men and 3 women. When she was pulled into the group before the game, she found that this game became 2 men and 5 women. "It feels like a basin of cold water, and the merchants have not been informed in advance of the change in the ratio of men to women."
From the perspective of experience, the script to kill the single game requires the store to invest more energy, not only to ensure the level of the host with the book, but also to spend more attention on the number control, script content, and player interaction based on the basic element of the single game.
"At the moment, it's not a money-making business." Some dating platform stores bluntly said that in addition to the traditional blind date, the main purpose of opening up the script is to enrich the business and play its own brand.
In addition to offline social networking, Gen Z also often actively networks and interacts with various social media. They pay more attention to personalized display, and have a great enthusiasm for "who I am" and "who I want to be" to seek the ideal "persona".
On the Soul APP, which focuses on "finding a soul mate", we can see the developer's grasp of the psychology of young people. Compared with the appearance and conditions, the platform focuses more on the user's interest map.
Here, you can label yourself with a variety of personal labels, such as "can't go out without headphones" and "occasionally rub a mahjong" on your interests; "retired drum ten players" in personal characteristics, "theoretical master practice waste materials", "smell coriander on the spot". Test online, the system will also score the individual's extroversion and rationality. Click on the "Soul Match" option, and the system will automatically recommend users with high interest matching, usually more than 95% matching.
"I prefer to use a matching platform like Soul to offline 'blind selection'. I like to watch Miyazaki's animated movies, but also like to play the glory of the king, these interests I note in the personal label, through the platform matching, found a lot of chat friends with the same topic, will also play games online. Xiao Bei from Guizhou said.
Ah Yun, who settled in Beijing, even found "comrades-in-arms" on the platform: "I have the dream of becoming an actor, and I have also worked as a group actor before, this road is really difficult to walk." However, on the platform to match the same group performance of the small partner, everyone chat together to share experience, feel not alone at all. ”
However, some users pointed out that due to the zero threshold of the APP itself, the platform that originally focused on soul communication seems to have a little bit of a taste. "At the beginning, when there were not many users, everyone would talk about the wind and snow moon. Now the base is getting bigger and bigger, and many people are purposeful when they chat, and there are even married people in it. ”
"Energy" and hidden worries
The reason why single formats are rich is still relying on the vast market behind them.
According to media reports, as early as 2018, the mainland's single adult population reached 240 million. The growth of single people has made all kinds of single formats become popular, including "off-order business".
Taking the popular online matching platform as an example, the Soul APP, which was launched in 2016, was developed by Shanghai Youmen Technology Co., Ltd. and carried out 5 rounds of financing in just 5 years. The most recent funding round was about half a year ago, led by the country's leading game company "Mihayou", and the transaction amount reached $169 million. The investors also include two domestic and foreign first-line investment institutions and Tencent Investment, which to some extent shows the market's recognition of this business model.
As a zero-threshold social app, Soul has developed its own set of profit models. For example, the most frequently used "soul pairing" by users has a limited number of free times a day, and more than it needs to be paid; if the other party is too "sought-after", it needs to be paid to chat with TA; the same city and positioning to find people have also become a channel for monetization.
According to public information, Soul APP's operating income in 2019 was about 70.7 million yuan, and by 2020, it has surged to 498 million yuan. The number of daily active users in 2021 has reached nearly 10 million.
Such an online matching platform has now become a red sea. The reporter inquired about the "Sky Eye Check" and found that the soul APP has more than 100 competitors. Not to be outdone, late entrants have also developed matching platforms with more segmented needs for specific customer groups.
For example, the Summer APP launched in 2017 is a dating platform developed for college students, and user registration needs to provide real academic certificates, and uses a unique "answer to the question dating" model to match users. That is to say, one party asks the question and the other answers the question, so as to achieve two-way filtering and screening.
"I met a lot of interesting people, such as high-difficult math problems, or all English and french. I suspect that the other person may be looking for someone who has a common hobby or a common learning background. "User Kobayashi told reporters that compared with large platforms that only rely on interest matching, the subdivision dating platform is more targeted, at least in terms of academic qualifications and life background." Of course, if the threshold of conditions is too clear, it may limit more possibilities. ”
From the perspective of users, the endless single formats have also greatly enriched their personal lives, and they have more recognition of personal value in the process of making friends. Xiaolin, who lives in Shanghai, often "organizes the game" through the online platform, and gathers a group of like-minded friends to play script killing or cycling every weekend. According to the "Exploring Social Report: Online Social Insights for Single Women in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen", which is analyzed by the Tantan Big Data Research Institute and conducted academic guidance by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, nearly 60% of women have increased their self-confidence because they are recognized in using online dating platforms.
Although the market size is very large, it is not an easy task to establish a stable business realization model.
Information asymmetry and opacity are still the biggest difficulties. In particular, the information of online platforms is mixed, and the reliability and authenticity of dating information need to be further reviewed and supervised, so as to reduce the fraudulent behavior of playing the guise of "love".
Compared with online dating software, script killing and off-order convenience stores currently have their advantages in information transparency and operational standardization. However, the advantages also bring disadvantages, limited by offline venues, these formats are difficult to sit on a large number of users like online dating software, so they can only focus on high-quality services for commercial monetization.
Although offline platforms such as off-order convenience stores have not yet appeared as "leading brands" and mature and perfect business models, the trend of online and offline integration has emerged, such as some merchants developing online procedures for off-order convenience stores. The same operation, enter the basic personal information, divided into ordinary blind box and conditional blind box, the latter has more age filtering function, 5.01 yuan can be taken away.
Offline stores are also trying to further extend the traffic advantage, such as setting up social groups, pulling people who come to convenience stores into the group, and on this basis, they plan to launch script killing and other activities to achieve multi-mode business monetization.
It is foreseeable that the channels for delisting will become more and more abundant. Of course, no matter how the form changes, for men and women in the city, the most important thing is that sincerity is relative to sincerity and sincerity.