Source: Visual China
Author | Zhou Junzi
Edit | Jan Pudding
Produced by | Prism Tencent Xiaoman Studio
Editor's Note
At noon in June 2019, 30-year-old Li Ergou suddenly received a call from a venture capitalist, who said that he was very interested in the project he was starting and wanted to talk. That same evening, the investor flew from Beijing to Shenzhen and signed an investment agreement with him.
At that time, it was just one month since he resigned from BAT and started a business. Having had a blind date experience in a large factory, he coincidentally began to be a "red bride" in the company's internal forum, and the demand was beyond his imagination: every day he had to sort out and match hundreds of blind date information in his spare time, and he was busy until three or four o'clock in the morning to sleep.
After four or five months of this, he realized he should be doing it full-time. As a result, Li Ergou set up a "single youth self-help platform", positioned to help employees of Internet factories, finance, universities and other institutions in the first-tier cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen find objects. By the beginning of 2022, the platform has more than 3 million registered users.
It sounds like a smooth entrepreneurial story, but the party Li Ergou does not think so. Although the market space is large, the industry is not optimistic. "It's not a good track in terms of price/performance." This is the biggest feeling he has felt in two years.
Since the establishment of Century Jiayuan in 2003, China's Internet dating industry has gone through nearly 20 years of development. However, the head platform is still mired in the quagmire of "listing - delisting - merger - loss", and the industry reputation is getting worse and worse: labels such as sales-style brainwashing, marriage trust, and false information are still stubborn.
This also gives the opportunity for new small platforms to rise. In recent years, blind date public accounts or mini programs such as the "single youth self-help platform" positioned as a certain circle (such as 985 universities and Internet factories) have begun to emerge. They abandon the asset-heavy offline model, filter out a large number of users through strict review, enrich the form of blind date with the way of "young people know more about young people", etc., and eat off a part of the blind date market.
But even so, as emerging entrepreneurs like Li Ergou, they have also expressed their concerns about this industry. The reason is that as an intermediary industry, blind dates match people, and human nature is the most complex, can not be standardized, and the difficulty of matching people and things is not an order of magnitude, which is destined not to be a good business.
In addition, the user life cycle of the dating platform is very short. "If your platform is very easy to use, and the user quickly drops off the order, then he is gone; if your platform is very difficult to use and the user does not like it, then he is also gone." Whether the platform is good or bad, the result is that the user is gone. Li Er Dog smiled bitterly.
Nearly 50% of blind dates registration information is untrue
The last time the dating website received public attention was in December 2021, when the surging news reporter went undercover Century Jiayuan, and issued three investigative reports in a row, exposing the existence of five major problems in its offline stores, such as personal privacy information "naked running" and red brides as a toy fisher, which made Century Jiayuan urgently issue a statement to apologize.
This is not the first time that the head platform has fallen into a crisis of public opinion. As early as 2017, the "Su Xiangmao Incident" in which programmers were forced to commit suicide by their wives in the century of good blind dates, so that the outside world's trust in the marriage platform fell to the freezing point. Affected by this, Baihe's stock price fell by 50% at one point during the session, and its market value lost more than 1.6 billion yuan in one day.
The lack of strict information review, and even the existence of fraudulent situations such as marriage trust, is one of the long-standing problems of dating websites. As a low-frequency or even one-time service, the platform needs to continuously attract new users to maintain normal operation, which also means that the platform does not have enough motivation to strictly review user registration information to filter out a group of potential users.
Li Ergou told the author that they currently adopt a strong real-name system, users need to certify the "three certificates" (ID card, degree certificate and work card) to register on their platform, of which 80% of the new users will reject this certification and be filtered out, so the registration threshold is very high.
In September 2021, the Jiangsu Provincial Consumer Rights and Interests Protection Commission (hereinafter referred to as the "Consumer Protection Commission") released a "Survey Report on the Service Status of The Marriage and Dating Platform" (hereinafter referred to as the "Survey Report") after investigating and experiencing five head platforms, including Century Jiayuan and Zhen'ai.com, and the survey results showed that nearly 50% of consumers had a general impression of the online dating platform, and 45.1% of consumers filled in the information when registering on the online dating platform was not completely true. When registering on the website, none of the five platforms carried out mandatory certification audits of the main information such as the identity certificate and property status of the members.
The "Investigation Report" also shows that no matter what kind of member the consumer recharges into the online website, the platform still has not conducted any review of the member information, and any other party information seen by the consumer may be false or forged, and "the platform has neither fulfilled the obligation of review nor fulfilled the obligation of reminder and care".
In addition, as "Prism" mentioned in "Spend 5,000 yuan, just to meet a "high-quality man", the current situation of "more women and fewer men" in the blind date market in big cities makes the proportion of girls paying higher on the blind date platform, and even some dating institutions only charge girls. Correspondingly, due to the scarcity of "high-quality men", some platforms will use "marriage trust" to consume the membership rights of girls calculated by the number of blind dates.
After 85, Shanghai white-collar worker Su Cong (pseudonym) paid nearly 20,000 yuan in membership fees at a local blind date agency, and finally successfully got off the bill after 3 years of blind date. But to her surprise, even after marrying the blind date, the dating agency still called her husband several times and hoped that he would continue the blind date.
Users feel expensive, the platform feels loss
Although the Internet blind date platform is under the banner of online blind date, its main revenue model is offline one-on-one VIP service, and the corresponding offline stores bloom at multiple points. Sales-style brainwashing, expensive prices, and difficulty in refunding fees have also become the most criticized points in the blind date industry.
According to prism, the current high-end member price of the head dating platform generally starts at 20,000 yuan, and users spend an average of 4,000-5,000 yuan to see a blind date. Some users have calculated an account, and the boy who has the conditions of his male colleagues around him needs to spend at least 60,000 yuan to meet him at the blind date agency.
According to the data of the aforementioned "Survey Report", after the successful registration of the online dating platform, 65% of consumers have received sales calls and text messages from the platform, 51.2% of consumers have been lured to offline stores, and online websites have actually become the drainage tools of the platform's offline physical stores. Consumers purchased charged services in physical stores accounted for 36.3% of the total amount of charged services within 15,000 yuan, 24.2% of the 15,000-30,000 yuan, and 0.6% of consumers spent more than 100,000 yuan in offline stores.
Shenzhen white-collar worker Wang Yan (pseudonym) finally purchased a "marriage insurance" service of 18,800 yuan after selling a phone brainwash. She told the author that when she signed the contract, she found that the service in the sales mouth became only half a year until marriage, and the weekly high-quality men's recommendation became recommended by the number of times, and the recommended blind date object was completely unrelated to "high quality".
Li Ergou told the author that the positioning of the "single youth self-help platform" is self-help and self-help, that is, it hopes to break the current offline asset-heavy model of the blind date market and really use the Internet to reduce operating costs, so most of their business and revenue come from online, but there are also a small number of users who still hope to have 1-to-1 offline services because they are too busy or inconvenient to make friends publicly.
He calculated an account to the author: the charging standard of their offline VIP service is 13999 yuan to match 4 blind dates, an average of 3500 yuan to kiss once, users feel expensive. However, as a platform party, a red bride can only serve 5-6 people at the same time, and each person successfully arranges 2 blind dates per month on average, creating revenue of 30,000-36,000 yuan.
And their requirements for the red bride must be a bachelor's degree or above, a month's salary cost is more than 20,000 yuan, remove the cost of store rent and other costs, offline business can only barely maintain breakeven.
"The pay-per-view model makes users very cautious before meeting, the platform recommends 50 candidates, users may not necessarily meet one, and everyone who meets offline needs to meet and screen one by one, and the sunk cost is very high." He said.
Traditional Internet dating platforms rely heavily on offline stores, but they are also easily affected by various disputes over offline business. In order to avoid taking this old road, Li Ergou launched a model of "pay-per-use, no reason to refund the number of unconsumed" on the platform, and wanted to try to walk out of a new way to do offline business under the premise of ensuring user experience and product reputation, "but at present, this attempt is not very successful in the business model." Li Er Dog said frankly.
Century's best friends are still losing money
As a veteran Internet dating platform, Century Jiayuan was founded in 2003, and has been established successively by Zhen'ai Network (2004), Lily Network (2005), and Youyuan Network (2007). In 2011, Century Jiayuan was listed on the NASDAQ in the United States, becoming the "first stock of Marriage and Love in China", but just 5 years later, it announced privatization and delisting, and its net profit for the year was 25 million yuan, less than half of the high point in 2013.
Century Jiayuan's net profit and growth over the years, data source: wind Wande
After the delisting, Century Jiayuan accepted the merger offer of Baihe Network, becoming a rare business case of the second largest merger industry in the industry. However, after the merger, Lily Jiayuan Group still failed to save the decline in profitability. According to the financial report data, the net profit of Baihe Network in 2013-2016 was continuously lost, and it was not until 2017 that Baihe Network and Century Jiayuan were combined to achieve a net profit of 64.99 million yuan, turning a loss into a profit for the first time.
However, this state did not last long, in 2018, Baihe Network continued to lose 82.48 million yuan, in the first half of 2019 lost 65.7 million yuan, and applied for delisting from the New Third Board at the end of the same year, on the grounds that it was to focus on the company's long-term development strategy and improve operational efficiency, saving unnecessary administrative and other listing-related costs and expenses.
Lily Jiayuan's net profit over the years Data source: wind Wande
The listing of the other two established platforms is even more bumpy: Zhen'ai.com sold to Asian investment firm Taimeng Investment Group in 2017 after the backdoor failure of Deao General Aviation; Youyuan Online was terminated by the CSRC in 2018 after the second impact of the IPO, and has not been followed since.
As mentioned by Baihe.com in its 2019 semi-annual report, the characteristics of the online dating industry determine that online business has always faced several challenges: the target user base is small, the user acquisition cost is high, and the service cycle of a single user is short. In terms of acquiring new users, in addition to competition in the industry, marriage websites are also facing the impact of new social platforms such as WeChat, Weibo, QQ space, Momo, YY, etc., and the cost of user acquisition has increased, resulting in a shrinking space for profit growth in the online business of dating.
The profit model of the traditional Internet dating platform means that it is destined to become a sales-oriented company. Taking The 2019 financial report of Baihe Network as an example, its sales staff increased from 1512 at the beginning of the period to 1787 at the end of the period, accounting for 51% from 49%, of which 65% had a college degree or below.
On the recruitment website, a sales consultant position without experience and college education can be as high as 15,000 yuan to 20,000 yuan.
According to the analysis of the Head Leopard Research Institute, the users of the Internet dating platform are more likely to consume one-time, and it is difficult for users to return to the platform after finding the desired object, and the user stickiness is low. This means that the user life cycle of the Internet dating platform is shorter, and the degree of iterative update is faster, so that its profit model is narrower. The user stickiness of the Internet dating platform is weak, which affects the promotion of derivative industry services in the industry to a certain extent, and the development of the industry's profit model is blocked, resulting in a slowdown in the development process of the industry.
How the 200 million "single dog" business is doing
Although the industry pioneers have not stepped out of a bright road, the huge market demand still makes latecomers follow.
According to enterprise investigation data, as of Qixi in 2021, there are 21,000 marriage-related enterprises in China, and the number of registrations in 2020 will reach more than 3,700, an increase of more than 3 times compared with the data of ten years ago. Among them, there were 3874 newly registered enterprises in 2018, and the number of registered enterprises in 2019 reached 4521, an increase of 16.7% year-on-year.
Feng Yanjiao, partner of CIC Insight Consulting, told the author that in the context of the current growth of the single population and the change of the dating habits of a new generation of consumers, Internet dating is undoubtedly releasing market potential. But at the same time, it is also a very competitive track, and new players in the market are constantly emerging in various segments, many of which are short-lived.
In her view, in this track, how to break the circle to attract more traffic, while constantly innovating and retaining users with a better dating experience, are two problems that both old players and new entrants need to constantly explore and overcome.
Lin Yi (pseudonym), a Shenzhen girl in 1991, finally chose a mini program dating platform to become her paid member after visiting a circle of traditional Internet dating agencies. In her view, in addition to the higher quality of users of the more accurate Mini Program platform, the red bride of these Mini Program dating platforms is not only a business, but also a business implementation person, with higher control over customers and projects; the pure Internet customer acquisition method makes the platform's demand for business weaker, and it will not be pushed, PUA users, draw big cakes, and have a better experience.
In addition, for the post-90s and post-00s, the pure "blind date" method is a bit earthy, they prefer blind date activities with stronger social attributes, such as some Mini Program platforms have their own forums, in which users can develop interests, eat melons, cooperate and other group organizations. "Even the girls will add friends to each other, which is more interesting and the user stickiness is stronger." Lin Yi said.
For entrepreneurs like Li Ergou, operating costs are his primary consideration. Including him, as well as Moon, one of the founders of "Mommr", who is positioned as a target for the Kochi group, told the author that they are not currently spending a penny on operation and promotion, and users rely on word of mouth, which is also the premise that they can maintain profitability and operation.
In the moon's view, the traditional Internet dating giants due to the large number of users, so the personnel is relatively mixed, user layering is not enough, resulting in high user screening costs, which also gives small platforms the opportunity. In addition to targeting users as alumni of 985 universities and overseas top universities, they are also more diverse in form, such as regularly holding experiential offline activities such as K songs, script killing, archery, and live blind dates through video numbers, which will be more popular with young people.
Although there are more and more entrants around, Li Ergou is not worried about the problem of market competition. In his view, the current monthly active users of the head platform are only more than 1 million, compared with China's hundreds of millions of single population, it is still a dime. According to data from the Ministry of Civil Affairs, the single adult population on the mainland reached 240 million in 2018. Therefore, he believes that the top priority is how to increase the user's payment rate, after all, "a user's recharge amount in a year on the dating platform may not even be comparable to a garbage game."
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