Works of the research group of new eyes large companies
The author | Ye Jing
Edited | Sang Mingqiang
Not long ago, the QQ mobile version of the internal test "Super QQ Show", Tencent once again fell into the sub-universe.
Regarding QQ's action, we still know what the market will react to, but the "micro-innovation + functional redundancy" play method that QQ has been pursuing has not made more users pay. In 2016, QQ's MAU (monthly active) was surpassed by WeChat for the first time, and since then the gap between the two has become wider and wider, and four years later, QQ, monthly active has stagnated at the level of 600 million 10 years ago, and in the product introduction of Tencent's official website, QQ has also lost its former glory.
The first 10 years of QQ, probably from a chat software to a personalized social platform evolution; after entering the era of smart machines, due to the more centralized design of touch-based interactive functions, QQ began to support video chat, voice chat, peer-to-peer power-off files, network hard disks, remote control, custom settings, etc. Stealing dishes, talking, grabbing parking spaces has also been popular.
Since the PC Internet to the mobile Internet, Ma Huateng talked about the large number of mobile terminals, a new platform based on communication and social networking is about to come out, he has repeatedly alluded to seize the opportunity, regarding WeChat as a spear in his hand, "even if it is directly competitive with his own QQ, he will not hesitate."
As the only social software in China spanning 2G to 5G, QQ has accompanied the youth of the post-80s and post-90s, using "Happy in Communication" as a slogan qq for 7 years, and also with the early users entering the workplace have shifted WeChat, for QQ, it has lost, not only the people who communicate. Under Tencent's internal horse racing mechanism, QQ seems to have become a victim of the mobile Internet era, slowly changing from "only" to "one".
From PC to phone
Tang joined Tencent in 2005, when social networks had carved a hole in the Internet world.
Strictly speaking, the early QQ space is a by-product of QQ, as the user's personal homepage system, it has a number of functions such as dressups, photo albums, music boxes, message boards, logs and so on. The positioning of QQ space is "a platform for displaying oneself and interacting with others", which is different from the newly popular blog in form, and the explosion of the product makes the underlying architecture of the traditional server unable to withstand the large number of UGC production, and the system almost collapses.
Tang Daosheng was in danger.
He injected the "data management method" learned abroad into the operation of the QQ space, through more detailed monitoring, the data was sorted into memory; the performance bottleneck was analyzed, and a programmer was arranged on each interface. He also and his colleague Yao Xing in the architecture department developed a new set of underlying data preservation methods, so that qq space can withstand the test of high concurrency. At the same time, the commercialization of the privileged service system of yellow diamond, green diamond and red diamond member has promoted the diversified layout of SNS business to a certain extent.
In 2006, the number of registered users of QQ space exceeded 50 million. The following year, Tencent's Internet value-added business revenue exceeded 2.5 billion yuan, and before the birth of WeChat, the QQ member value-added business under Wu Xiaoguang and Tang Daosheng was once Tencent's largest source of income. Until 2010, the wave of mobile Internet struck, and the main time of users began to shift to the mobile phone, when QQ's base camp was still gathered on the PC side.
Since QQ was led by Tencent's wireless business system at that time, their respective assessment indicators were different, and the problem of unclear ownership of QQ hindered its development to a certain extent, and Tencent also acquiesced to the strategic concession of QQ.
In 2012, after the 518 reform, Tencent set up a business group, and the PC and mobile phone versions of QQ, QQ space, QQ music and other products were included in the SNG social network business group, and the transfer from the PC Internet to the mobile Internet and the establishment of an open ecology were placed on the strategic high ground. The following year, the mobile phone QQ 4.0 version was launched, which was the first major version after the mobile phone QQ department and the PC QQ department merged into the social network business group, although nearly 100 function points were optimized, but due to the cancellation of the display function of the online offline status, it once caused strong dissatisfaction among users.
QQ wants to strengthen the functional cognition of "communication at any time", but obviously, users have not accepted it as much as they do with WeChat.
According to Tencent's internal monitoring data at the time, 75% of netizens used QQ through the mobile Internet, and 1.5 million people moved from the PC to the mobile phone every day. Tang Daosheng said that the competition in the second half is more likely to subvert the PC Internet by the mobile Internet. "If QQ does not change itself and adapts to the characteristics of 'anytime, anywhere', it will be abandoned by users." Since then, Tang Daosheng has also determined the differentiated positioning between QQ and WeChat: office users on the PC side and young users on the mobile side.
Based on this positioning, SNG has incubated a series of vertical functional modules and APP around QQ's young users. In 2014, the first Internet Conference, Tang Daosheng proposed a development concept based on mobile Internet technology and connecting everything, QQ used social scenes to connect people, including acquaintance social, stranger social, QQ reading, QQ group and interest tribe, etc.; launched Tencent Classroom, intending to build an online education product covering the web, client, and mobile.
If the connected life scene solves the actual needs of people, then connecting the hardware will bring more imagination space to the user. In this move, Tencent further launched the QQ IoT brand that accesses smart hardware through mobile phone QQ, envisioning giving each hardware device a QQ number, using QQ's transmission channel and related capabilities to connect, communicate and interact with devices, software and services.
In Tang Daosheng's vision, QQ will become a part of the future intelligent era of users of all ages.
"Young! young!! young!!! ”
Ma Huateng initially believed that QQ users should be young people under the age of 30, and with the defeat of opponents such as MSN and the absorption of their users, QQ gradually developed in the direction of users of all ages. But the good times are not long, WeChat turned out to be a clear diversion of the entire Internet users, under the product attributes of strong connection, young people turning to WeChat is an unavoidable socialization process, at this time the QQ user group positioning has changed again.
In other words, the development of QQ did not undertake the needs of people of all ages as Tang Daosheng envisioned, and what was worse was that the timely transformation of the positioning of the young people did not stop the decline in QQ core data.
For Gen Z, the social needs of the younger generation have spawned a series of composite "content + community" platforms. Stranger social play represented by Momo and Soul is novel and emerging in an endless stream. In 2011, when Tang Yan founded Momo, the original intention was to "want to restore the best part of the open social network of QQ in the early years", the most open function in QQ is the drifting bottle, random matching CP, etc. At the beginning, this unknown is still full of freshness, but as people's requirements for social networking are more similar, these features are gradually forgotten.
After such blockbusters as QQ Show and QQ Space, QQ has not launched another phenomenon-level product. How to attract the next generation of young people and retain the elderly has become an urgent problem for QQ to solve. Based on the strategic context of youthfulness, QQ has formulated two major ways of playing entertainment social and scenario-based communication in 2016.
Yin Yu (the person in charge of qq platform) interprets the entertainment social play as follows: on the one hand, the layout of film and television, animation, games, literature and other fields; on the other hand, through QQ including groups, live broadcasts, QQ viewing points and other functions, be a good social amplifier; in addition, as many superimposed functions as possible, chat bubbles, skin replacement, avatar pendants, for users under the age of twenty, how to spend how to come.
This was also considered by Liu Xiankai (manager of the value-added product department) at that time.
That is, how to direct QQ traffic to those vertical businesses, and connect users together to form a specific conversion path. After playing a certain mobile game through a QQ account, you can also find the QQ group, interest tribe and the same humanities of the mobile game. QQ wants to infiltrate the online life of young people in an all-round way, become a container full of various functions, and provide a "data lake" for young users.
In 2016, QQ's personalization team for the first time to conduct a public beta of the centimeter show, this appeared in the chat box and personal page of the villain image, and the same as the QQ show that year, users can draw card capsules for the centimeter villain to customize the image, dress, interact with friends in the chat version of the action, in the mall to charge money to buy special skins, a deep user told the new eyes, "At first I felt novel, the time was long, I had to wait for the centimeter villain to finish typing, and it was very troublesome to be fancy." ”
In the second quarter of the same year, the number of MONTHly active users of QQ climbed to an all-time high of 899 million, and then the shock fell downwards, falling by more than a third. In other words, the emergence of such a young function as cm xiu did not maintain a high degree of popularity, but dissuaded a group of "elderly users", coupled with the lower and lower threshold of instant messaging, the rise of collaborative office software such as DingTalk and Feishu has worn out the last demand for 80 and 90 pairs of PC QQ office uses that grew up with QQ and entered the workplace.
When we review QQ's actions in recent years, most of the updates are still focused on micro-innovations in existing tools, such as modifying positions, adding topics, aesthetic upgrades, functional iterations, etc., with too many product implants, like using functional redundancy to ensure innovation.
According to the incomplete statistics of New Eyes, following the online interest tribe and the Star Shadow Alliance, which focuses on star fan interaction, Tencent and mobile QQ jointly launched new products including QQ animation, penguin e-sports, QQ highlights, vertical classification including games, two-dimensional animation, stars, extreme sports, fashion beauty, black technology, etc. It can be said that SNG has tried almost all the entertainment-related innovation opportunities on the market, made and unfinished, and there are too many to count.
QQ's next stop
In the 930 reform in 2018, when Tang Daosheng was transferred to the regulatorY CSCG, he wanted to continue to shine on QQ, but Tencent's general office preferred him to focus on the TOB business; Yin Yu, who was responsible for QQ platform affairs at the same time, the core task after that was information flow; Liang Zhu, who had incubated the national K song, became the fifth generation of QQ.
When Liang Zhu talked about the decline in QQ data, he once admitted the objective fact that QQ users transferred to WeChat, "Now the industry is competing for young people, such as the new Internet crowd, QQ will grab this part, found that the hot space werewolf kill, then move this kind of low threshold casual game mode to QQ." On the other hand, QQ is still continuing the layout of "rejuvenation + entertainment".
In 2020, QQ launched "Small World", a product that focuses on video information flow in QQ, in an attempt to keep the QQ user plate stable in terms of customer retention, but most users are not optimistic, because the video streaming track is quite hot, and the status of jitter is difficult to shake, not to mention that there are WeChat video numbers, micro-vision and other short video products, and it is more difficult for the small world to be a catfish.
As a continuation of the 930 reform, in April last year, Tencent's internal PCG was adjusted again, and the head of PCG was Yao Xiaoguang, president of IEG Tianmei Studio Group, who was in charge of QQ. Considering that it is cross-group and responsible for two products at the same time, this is the first time in Tencent. Some people believe that from the current situation, the biggest value of QQ's future use scenarios seems to be related to games.
When Weibo is hot, QQ adds the entrance of Tencent Weibo; when the relationship chain is not as good as the community, QQ has an interest tribe, along the way; the meta-universe is hot, QQ launched a super QQ show, all the time, QQ always seems to play a role of a follower, but it is difficult to rival.
Coupled with the awkward position between acquaintance social networking (WeChat) and stranger social networking, the huge system makes people feel that this software is too bulky. Some people say that the relationship chain of more than 20 years is somewhat difficult for users to give up, but it cannot support this giant ship by relying on feelings alone, and as for the fundamental innovation mission, it has been handed over to the new person in charge.