Momo has been unable to get rid of the question of gray production for ten years.
Recently, a netizen posted on the social platform that "Momo is suspected of marriage and dating fraud". The party claimed that he had paid 2900 yuan in the "moon old live broadcast room" within one hour, and after refusing to continue to brush gifts, he was blocked by the old man and the female guest.
In fact, such incidents are not uncommon on the Momo platform. In the so-called "blind date live room", kaimai is one price, video is one price, and exchanging contact information is another price. One ring is followed by one, waiting for the user to enter the circle. The business of live blind date, which is clearly marked with a price, the initiative is always in the hands of the platform and the live broadcaster.
What is more noteworthy is Momo's new law of making money. Although it started with stranger social networking, Momo's core profit point today is the live broadcast business. According to the third quarter of 2021 financial report, live streaming services contributed 58% of the group's revenue. Under the profit engine with live broadcasting as the core, the Group achieved revenue of 3.76 billion yuan in Q3 last year, of which Momo App contributed 600 million yuan in net profit.
However, in recent years, Momo's live broadcast business has gradually shown fatigue. Just like "blind date live broadcast", the superficial "sexy" business of live broadcasting has never been able to get rid of moral controversy, coupled with the unreliable phenomenon on the platform, so that users gradually lose interest in "Momo". Moreover, in the face of competitive pressure from short videos, Momo's live broadcast revenue is still facing revenue growth pressure.
In an increasingly strict network supervision environment, Momo finally needs to get rid of gray production. But if you want to find new business outside the label of stranger social and live broadcasting, where is Momo's new growth point? How do you convince capital markets of their new story? Momo hasn't given an answer yet.
Momo ten years, it is difficult to escape the gray production
"I went on a blind date on Momo and was cheated out of 2900 yuan an hour!" Then he was blocked by the female guest. ”
Recently, a netizen posted on the social platform that Momo was suspected of marriage and dating fraud. The netizen said that he entered a "moon old room" through Momo news in December, and met the female guest after repeated invitations to go on a blind date. During this period, Elder Yue repeatedly asked him to brush gifts for female guests. At the beginning, it was a gift of tens of yuan, and then gradually increased to a few hundred yuan, more than a thousand yuan. After brushing the gift of 1300, when the elder asked him to continue to brush, the netizen refused, and then he was blocked by the elder and the female guest, and the gift was not returned, the total amount was more than 2900 yuan.
In response to this matter, Momo quickly responded, the official said that the dating live broadcast room is only to provide a platform for social icebreaking between users, and the anchor's personal commitment to successfully make friends and induce gifts is a violation of the law, and the platform will resolutely crack down on and punish. At present, the platform has permanently banned the relevant anchors.
In fact, such incidents on Momo are not unique. Enter "Momo was deceived" on the web page, and more than 13,000 related search results are displayed. On the complaint platform, Momo also has tens of thousands of complaints.
A complainant who suffered the same experience as the above users said that entering a dating room in the Momo software, similar to a blind date, the host will induce users to consume gifts step by step.
There is also a user who claims to have spent 4281 yuan to brush gifts, saying that the host and guests have been letting the gifts brush, unlocking various relationships, using the introduction of objects as an excuse, the guests are also inducing consumption, and even WeChat openly wants gifts. The host encountered during the blind date did not tell how much money was needed for the success of the blind date in advance, but repeatedly used various excuses to induce male guests to recharge. "If you don't even have a gift, you're not sincere enough."
In user complaints, such cases are numerous, and the live broadcast of blind dates has also become another gray production on the Momo platform after the phenomena of micro-business, gambling drainage, and wine trust.
An Internet practitioner told Pencil Road that many red brides and female guests are in the same group, to put it bluntly, they all work to make money, they work two hours a day, proportionally divided, and each month has KPIs. "In fact, this is all some old model, harvesting leek money together, as for what role the platform plays in it, you have to understand it yourself."
An industry insider familiar with the market told Pencil Road that in Momo's live broadcast mode, usually the official draw is 50%, and the rest is the anchor and OW (room/channel owner) points.
This makes it so that in the relevant live broadcast chain, the anchor needs to induce users to spend money as much as possible, so in the so-called "blind date" live broadcast room, the opening of the wheat is a price, the video is a price, and the exchange of contact information is another price. One ring is followed by one, waiting for the user to enter the circle. The business of live blind date, which is clearly marked with a price, the initiative is always in the hands of the platform and the live broadcaster.
Strangers who rely on live blood transfusions socialize
Last month, some media reported that Momo, which has been renamed "Zhiwen Group", officially launched the secondary listing plan of Hong Kong stocks, and for this news, Zhiwen Group said that it would not comment.
Whether the rumors are true or not is not yet known, but many people are not optimistic about the prospects of Momo's secondary listing.
On the one hand, Momo's parent company's performance in the US stock market is not ideal. After June 2018, Momo's stock price, which was listed on the NASDAQ exchange, fell from a peak of $48.766 until it broke below the issue price and bottomed out again. As of press time, Momo's share price is $7.30, with a total market capitalization of $1.438 billion.
Regarding the stock price, Momo CEO Wang Li once gave an explanation in an interview with the media, "Because we can't find the benchmark in the United States, we are actually very much at a loss." "I feel like we're undervalued, but others may feel overvalued."
On the other hand, Momo has other problems that need to be solved. Since Momo was launched in 2011, it has been ten years and is a veteran social app in China. But now this "stranger social" giant, the profitability of the past two years is not optimistic.
According to the financial report of The Third Quarter of 2021, its quarterly revenue and net profit showed a downward trend, achieving revenue of 3.76 billion yuan, down 0.2% year-on-year; net profit of 400 million yuan, down 11.7% year-on-year. Among them, Momo App's net profit was 611.1 million yuan (about $94.8 million); Tantan's net loss was 179.0 million yuan (about $27.8 million).
The net profit of Zhiwen Group is only supported by Momo App. Although it started with "stranger social", Momo's profit point is not here.
According to Ai Media Consulting data, since 2015, the scale of Chinese stranger social users has continued to rise, and the scale of Chinese stranger social users will reach 649 million in 2020, but the annual growth rate will gradually slow down, and it is expected that 700-800 million user scale will be the ceiling of the stranger social industry. But the shortcomings of stranger social networking are also more obvious - the revenue channels of this track are not clear.
According to the financial report, there are five sources of revenue for The Best Text Group, but there are two main sources of income: one is value-added services, including virtual gift service revenue and membership subscription service revenue; the other is the live broadcast service (tipping commission), and live broadcast is also the basic disk of the Sincere Paper Group.
According to the financial report, in the third quarter of 2021, the live broadcast service contributed 58% of the group's revenue, achieving revenue of 2.167 billion yuan, but a decrease of 8.8% year-on-year, continuing the negative growth of live broadcasting since 2020.
From not being optimistic when it was listed in 2014, to finding a profit model in 2018 because of stepping on the live broadcast of the show, the market value soared to tens of billions of DOLLARs, Momo can also be regarded as experiencing big ups and downs. But now suffering from "live broadcast dependence" Momo, has encountered a bottleneck in development, according to Sullivan report, the dividend of live broadcasting has reached the top, and since 2019, the market size of domestic live broadcasting has begun to shrink.
Previously, Momo relied on cutting into live broadcasting to obtain a piece of cash cattle business, thus establishing a stable source of revenue. However, under the pressure of live broadcast competition, Momo faces the competition of super apps such as Douyin and Kuaishou, and has no obvious advantages over other App businesses. For example, Huatai Securities pointed out that Momo's pillar business is live broadcasting today, but "Momo's live broadcast business is still in the stage of transformation". In the face of competitive pressure from short videos, Momo's live broadcast revenue is still facing revenue growth pressure.
The more headache is that the superficially "sexy" business of live broadcasting has never been able to get rid of moral controversy, coupled with the increase in unreliability on the platform, and the controversy is increasing. It also makes users gradually lose interest in Momo.
The third quarter of 2021 also shows that the company's paying users have declined for 4 consecutive quarters. In the third quarter of 2020, the total number of paid users reached 13.1 million after weighting, including 4.1 million visiting paying users. By the third quarter of 2021, the two figures were 12.2 million and 2.9 million, respectively.
Some users are abandoning Momo.
Where is Momo's new growth point?
Of course, Momo is also seeking change and has made a lot of attempts in the past few years.
The first is a big acquisition. At the beginning of 2018, Momo chose to acquire Tantan. The deep reason behind it is that at that time, Tantan complemented Momo in terms of user gender and age.
In the early days of Momo's acquisition of Tantan, it did bring a good response. However, now that the positioning and product model of Tantan are converging with Momo, the proportion of male and female users has begun to be unbalanced, and it is also lacking competitiveness in the face of products such as Soul. At the same time, it is worth noting that the financial report shows that the number of paying users who have experienced rapid growth is decreasing.
The second is the introduction of a large number of new products. In 2019, Momo has released dozens of pan-social pan-entertainment apps such as ZAO, He is him, Hertz, cue, Ha you, and Voo, and has also launched two platforms that focus on marriage and dating with photos as the medium of "MEET" and "pair" and "hand in hand". However, apart from ZAO's overnight explosion and removal from shelves a few days later, the rest of the products did not make much splash.
Again, actively going to sea. In the past few years, Momo has made at least four stranger social apps that go to sea. In 2012, Momo launched an overseas version of "MO" a year after its launch; in 2014, Momo took the opportunity of listing to launch "Blupe"; in 2019, Momo launched "Olaa" based on LBS (that is, geographical location) for the Southeast Asian market. It was reported that last year, Momo launched the game social APP "Vago" and the soul social product "Soulchill" for the Middle East market.
But most of these products are on a trajectory where the product is born and then fails.
In addition to the social track, Momo's current main businesses are Momo Pictures and Kubote Culture, covering entertainment fields such as film and television, music and so on. However, in the view of many analysts, the entertainment film and television industry itself has a small cake, and the competition is fierce, the risk is high, and it is uncontrollable, and it is difficult to really bring stable revenue to Momo. In the field of pan-social and short video, there are also super head players.
In addition, from the name change, we can also see Momo's determination to try to get rid of the single impression of Momo from the outside world. For example, the current CEO Wang Li said in an internal letter, "The company's new Chinese and English names express our good wishes for the integration of technology and culture in the future, technology will drive culture, and culture will carry technology, they are mutually causal, and we rely on each other." ”
In terms of specific direction, Wang Li also mentioned in an interview with the media, "(Momo) The original boundary is social. If I want to do it, I will find a way to expand the boundaries, not stick to social, I hope that the positioning of our company, the future is not only focused on pan-social, pan-entertainment, but focus on the longer-term development, to think about where the boundaries of the business are. ”
All in all, even though the Group has been carrying out reforms since the beginning of last year, it has not yet seen much success.
"If you want to break the label of stranger social networking to find new business, where is Momo's new growth point? How do you convince capital markets of their new story? An industry insider told Pencil Road that this is a problem that Momo urgently needs to solve, and everything is empty talk before a convincing answer is given.