Author/ Author of "Finance and Economics World" Weekly Zhou Xiangyue He Chang
Editor/ Dong Yuqing
A rectification message put Douban in the spotlight again.
On the afternoon of March 15, 2022, the Cyberspace Administration of China reported that in response to the current serious network chaos in Douban, the State Internet Information Office instructed the Beijing Municipal Internet Information Office to send a work supervision team to The Douban network to supervise rectification.
This is not the first time Douban has been informed. According to previous disclosures, in 2021, Douban was punished 20 times by the relevant departments, and was fined 500,000 yuan for many times, with a total of 9 million yuan in fines. In addition, it was also removed by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology once because of the collection of user information beyond the scope, and because there was a "water army" in Douban to brush points and control evaluations, Douban was also named by the media once.
Born in 2005, Douban was originally founded to provide a platform for people to read, watch movies and listen to music, which makes Douban have the largest library of books and videos in China, which is still one of its key barriers to this day.
But this barrier is insignificant compared to the changes that have changed most Internet companies in the past decade or so. Whether it is today's headlines, Weibo, or Zhihu, B station, are trying to cross the cycle of the Internet, Douban seems to have become a company that stands still.
Not really. Many people may not remember that around 2012 was the golden period of Douban, when it had 100 million PV (page views), and Douban, which had traffic and capital in hand, launched 13 independent apps such as Douban Reading, Douban FM, and Douban Movie, but this later became one of the most failed decisions in the history of Douban.
(Source: Visual China)
In February 2016, Douban made a rare public voice and released the brand film "Our Spiritual Corner" for the first time, which greatly awakened people's memories of Douban - a decentralized, semi-open community ecology, a gathering place for literary and artistic youth. In the next few years, the user data of the Douban "group" grew rapidly, and the spiritual corner of this literary and artistic youth unconsciously became the birthplace of entertainment gossip, information hotspots and many youth culture topics.
"Group" has become another important business of Douban, but it has also brought a lot of trouble to Douban. Douban had to deal with the constant erosion of the community ecology. In 2021, Douban said that in response to the work requirements of the Central Cyberspace Administration to control the chaos of the "rice circle", Douban has carried out many special actions to control the chaos of the "rice circle" since May 2021, and has achieved certain results.
Douban official statistics on November 26, it deleted more than 70,000 illegal and bad information, banned 273 illegal accounts. The main position of cultural and entertainment content, the Douban Goose group after unsealing, also set up 5 "Clear Action" related multiple choice questions, and the team members need to answer all correctly in order to continue to operate in the group.
On the cusp of the storm, Caijing Tianxia Weekly has contacted Douban related staff many times, once in early December 2021, when Douban was facing the situation of being removed from the shelves of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the other party said that after conducting strict tests, it confirmed the problem and would "seriously rectify it". The other time was at the end of 2021, because the other party was preparing the annual douban annual list project with the strength of the department, and had no choice but to miss the opportunity for in-depth communication again.
In fact, Douban has rarely spoken out to the outside world in recent years.
The largest gathering place for literary and artistic youth
The name Douban comes from a hutong near Chaoyangmen in Beijing, Douban Hutong.
In the winter of 2004, a young man in his 30s would leave the alley on time every day at noon, grab a painted Apple laptop and walk for ten minutes, enter a Starbucks outside Beijing's Chaoyang Gate, order a cup of coffee, and knock on the code for half a day without anyone around.
The man's name was Yang Bo, and he was the founder of Douban. However, everyone still prefers to call him "Abei" (Yang Bo's screen name on Douban).
Douban will come to this situation today, and its founder has an inseparable relationship.
Abei is a bit of a legend and a literary youth style on the body. Since childhood, this small-town youth born in Hanzhong, Shaanxi Province, is a typical "other person's child" - at the age of 16, he won the first prize in the national physics competition for middle school students, and was guaranteed to enter the physics department of Tsinghua University in the same year; at the age of 20, he studied in the United States and studied for a doctorate in the physics department of the University of California, San Diego; and his first job after graduation was as a consultant scientist at IBM.
But when he was obsessed with "100,000 Whys" since childhood, Ah Bei, who dreamed of becoming a scientist, really became a scientist, but found that this profession was far less "exciting" than imagined, so he turned to the literary and artistic youth route. In those years, Ah Bei traveled, listened to music, watched exhibitions, read a lot of Zen books, and even had the idea of monasticism at one time, had a crazy interest in anthropology, "wanted to transfer to this major to read a doctorate", and also became fascinated with computers, and made up small programs from time to time.
In 2000, when Ah Bei was 31 years old, he suddenly found that his job at IBM was too stable, "with his eyes closed, he could imagine his position, salary and benefits in a few decades." He was really unwilling, so he sold the car and furniture, resigned and returned to China, first joined the entrepreneurial team of the supply chain management company Fast-paced and Easy-to-be, served as the CTO, and then left again after four years, deciding to do what he liked from scratch.
At the beginning, he wanted to make a self-service tourism website, and the name was taken, which was called "Donkey Sect". Friends listened to it but felt that the user crowd was too narrow, and the project was abandoned. But Abei soon found a more suitable direction than travel — books and movies. He wanted to start a website that would bring together a group of people who loved reading and movies like him, so that they could share and communicate their feelings through the site, and "find more good things" through like-minded people.
So, on March 6, 2005, after several months of typing code in Starbucks with a computer, a website named after the Douban Alley where he lived, Douban, was finally launched, and the slogan of the website was established as "turnip greens, each has its own love.".
In the original design, Douban only had a reading section and group functions, and then with the continuous expansion of the influence of the "Love to Watch Movies" group, the film section was launched in May of this year, and Douban Music was also successfully launched in July. At this point, the early Douban officially took shape. Here, any user can add their own book audio and video entries, and then score, comment, freely express and exchange likes and dislikes and opinions about a work, and quickly find people who are like-minded with them.
Therefore, Douban soon attracted the most literary and artistic people on the whole network, became the largest gathering place for literary and artistic youth, and was once called "the spiritual corner of literary and artistic youth".
According to the data, by March 2006, the first anniversary of Douban's launch, its registered users had exceeded 110,000, with 4,000 groups, of which 90% were groups with less than 50 people. It was also at this time that Ah Bei, the commander of the light rod, ushered in his first official employee, Hong Qiangning. He was also the 212th user of Douban and later became the chief architect of Douban.
In June of the same year, Douban obtained its first round of financing, the $2 million A round of financing from Lianchuang Ceyuan, and began to operate in a corporate manner. In the following years, Douban has successively launched a number of plates such as Douban Tongcheng and Douban Square, but it has been very restrained in the scale of the company, and the number of employees was only 5 when it was online for 2 years, and the number of employees increased a lot in the third year, but it was only about 25 people, and it reached 40 people in the fourth year.
Equally restrained is Douban's attitude towards commercialization. In the early days, the main source of income for Douban was actually the revenue share with websites such as Dangdang.com and Excellence. Douban provides a "price comparison" function, linking users with purchase intentions to websites such as Dangdang and Excellence, and whenever a user completes a single consumption, Douban can get a 10% return.
This is one of the business practices that Ah Bei believes is in line with "user value". Adhering to the principle that "the ideal is that there is no contradiction between business value and user value", Ah Bei actually does not resist business, but has always hoped to find a way to make money elegantly enough.
Douban insiders later revealed that Abei was very cautious in the early days of Douban receiving advertisements, because "it is not compatible with the temperament of Douban" a reason vetoed many advertisers who came to the door, until they encountered Converse, which was "consistent with the tone" of Douban, and only took the first advertisement. Douban's advertising rules are set to: the daily opening screen only opens 1/4 of the traffic to advertising, and at the same time, a product advertisement can only be seen by the user once a day.
In those years, although Douban did not make much money, and even until 2012, the external statement was "close to profitability", but it established a good reputation and influence, and a large number of excellent content creators also appeared here. Film critics such as Tao Tao Lin, Europa, Magasa, and Bo Bonnie all started here, and KOLs such as Hecaitou and Mimon, who later became famous on the Internet, also occupied a place in Douban. Douban netizen "Dahlia" wrote a post about a girl's experience from falling out of love to getting out of psychological haze, "Novel, or Guide", which was adapted into a script and made into a box office dark horse movie "Thirty-Three Days of Lost Love".
Under the leadership of the literary and artistic youth Ah Bei, Douban has gone in the direction he desired, and more and more young people have gathered here to establish connections with books and videos, and contribute to the highest quality UGC content in the Internet Chinese. At its peak, the average daily PV of Douban reached 160 million around 2012, and its volume was once close to Weibo.
How did Douban get to where it is today?
Any UGC platform, in the process of moving from niche to public, seems to be difficult to escape the problem of community environmental degradation.
Douban is naturally difficult to make an exception. In order to avoid this problem, in 2009, when the user scale entered the level of tens of millions, Douban experienced a fierce "route dispute". Whether it is with the help of the SNS boom that swept the world at that time and the extremely high activity of the Douban group, operation first, opening up more user groups, or continuing to adhere to the traditional model of book and video, algorithm-based, is the choice that Douban must make.
However, the final result is that Douban did not choose two roads, but cleverly bypassed this problem through splitting.
In a post titled "Douban Metamorphosis" published in early February 2010, Abei admitted that Douban has been worried about the possible interference of the highly active community with the content of the book audio-visual service, "such as interpersonal conflicts in the community affecting the content of comments and articles, affecting tens of millions of non-community users." To this end, Douban decided to make a difficult but necessary decision - restructuring.
After the reorganization, the Douban community will be aggregated into a main site to maintain the retention rate of users through the dynamic update of information flow of social friends; the three major sections of books, movies and music will be independently placed on three sub-stations (channels) built separately and operated as commercial products. These four products will also be operated by different teams accordingly.
Through the split, Ah Bei seems to have found a correct path, so that the books, audios, and groups have achieved peaceful coexistence, and also allowed the literary and artistic youth and the melon-eating masses to continue to stay here together without affecting each other.
After 2010, the mobile Internet tide flocked to the end, Abei is this "decentralized" model to the extreme, directly in the process of moving Douban from the PC and Web to the mobile phone, the independent functions such as Douban FM, Douban Reading, Douban Movie, Douban Group and so on on the web page are all split into separate vertical APP, at most, there are even 13 products coexisting in the app store.
In order to make the businesses that were spun off better develop, Douban, which has always been cautious about the introduction of capital, also introduced nearly $10 million worth of B round financing and 50 million US dollars of C round financing at the end of 2009 and September 2011. Among the financing purposes announced to the public, the former is classified as "mainly invested in team building", and the latter is planned to be "used to improve the operation level of each independent product of Douban and the expansion and promotion of Douban itself".
But the truth is that so many apps have not caught fire. The product line that is constantly being stretched and the Apps that are blooming everywhere not only do not help Douban to attract more users, but instead separate the users who were originally gathered together, and the platform advantages that were originally very user sticky also disappeared in an instant. And a lot of vertical, refined APP at the same time, but also let Douban often lose sight of one or the other, it is difficult to focus on the force, can only watch NetEase Cloud Music, Cat's Eye, Momo and other latecomers eat away their territory little by little.
From 2013 to 2014, a large number of Douban employees left, and it took two or three years to quickly increase from less than 100 people to more than 500 people, and soon shrank to only more than 300 people.
Under pressure, Ah Bei had to publicly admit at the 2014 annual meeting that his wrong decision made Douban miss the best opportunity for the 3-year mobile wave. In August of the same year, an integrated version of the APP called "Douban" finally arrived late.
Douban, which has always been Buddhist, has also begun to become more active. According to the "Late Post" report, in 2014, Douban for the first time had a clear activity goal, to work for a number. In 2016, Douban made the first brand promotional film "Our Spiritual Corner" in the 11 years since its establishment, and began to advertise heavily.
However, Douban seems to be more and more "confused" in the ferocious tide of mobile Internet, and can no longer find the original "smooth sailing".
In 2017, in an internal letter of mid-year business adjustment, Abei said that Douban has entered a pragmatic stage, demand and channel logic support users, revenue and cost considerations support business, "these two simple and simple things are the foundation of Internet companies", to emphasize that Douban wants to make a profit should learn to open source and reduce expenditure.
The specific idea is also very clear, the "user line" to the App user growth acceleration as the stage goal, to strive to broaden Weibo, WeChat and other external channels, "revenue line" is the establishment of revenue as the goal of the content division, "market" related business department, brand advertising, effect advertising, etc. together constitute a large business team. And businesses that have not improved or lost money for a long time, such as one-shot one, Douban things, one-moment and same-city ticketing transactions, will be closed.
It was also at this time that the pace of commercialization of Douban began to accelerate. Prior to this, Douban had actually tried online seat selection, paid audio, Douban things, etc. to seek commercial monetization, but it did not cause too much waves.
Since 2017, Douban has successively added functions such as Douban Market and Douban Bookstore for users to choose books and products such as Douban peripherals, trying to accelerate commercialization. In November 2021, it obtained the registration and approval of the live broadcast application system and officially stepped into the live broadcast industry, saying that "at this stage, it will mainly cooperate with the publisher to broadcast live".
But for now, the commercialization of Douban has still not formed a scale. In fact, at the beginning of 2021, when the Douban product team was interviewed by the media, it also said that as of that time, Douban was still dominated by the revenue brought by advertising and marketing traffic.
What's worse is that in the past few years when Douban has "risen to catch up", the community ecological problems that have tried to be bypassed by splitting have come to a more and more intense point.
The deformed rice circle culture and the flood of water troops extended from the "group" all the way to the traditional "book video" business module. On December 1, 2021, the TV series "Wind Rises Luoyang", which was scheduled to start at 8 p.m., was delayed to 9 o'clock due to technical reasons, but within an hour of this unaired, Douban emerged a large number of ratings, and the scores showed a one-star and five-star polarization. At the same time, because there are stars stationed in Douban, Douban has also begun to popular the wind of raising numbers, which is actually the atmosphere of the rice circle. Fans will first establish a new account on Douban and rate and comment on various books and movies to avoid Douban's water army judgment mechanism. Raise a good number, and then brush high scores and praise for idols' works.
From the perspective of Douban itself, because the interest can not be stipulated by a unified standard, Douban has actually delegated its power from the beginning of its establishment, and the administrator of each group is voluntarily served by Douban users, who have the right to decide on the joining and dismissal of group members, as well as the deletion and refinement of posts.
When Douban is still a "niche", most users can still exchange views in a friendly and harmonious manner, and relying on user autonomy can basically maintain the stability of the community environment. With the popularization, more and more users with different interests and different backgrounds come in, which will inevitably require the platform to intervene more in community governance.
However, Douban missed the best time to intervene and failed to establish corresponding supporting management measures at the first time when Douban changed from a niche to the public.
After a few years, douban, which has a larger and larger user volume and an increasingly complex community environment, is far from being comparable to that year in terms of management. Whether it is content moderators or related algorithm technology, more investment is inevitably needed to cultivate and improve it.
However, Douban is no longer the original "rich and idle" Douban, there is no new financing dynamics in those years, Douban, which has always been considered to be very restrained in commercialization, also needs to emphasize "open source and throttling" and "accelerated commercialization".
In fact, the number of employees in Douban is indeed not much. According to the company's introduction on the pulse of the workplace social platform, the total number of Douban employees is between 100 and 500 people, far lower than the Number of Employees more than 2,000 Zhihu, the Little Red Book of more than 3,000 people, and the B station that has reached 8646 employees in 2020.
(Source: Screenshot of Douban web version)
Douban's main business moat
For Douban, Shuying audio is not only the starting point of its content community, but also a solid barrier for this "slow company" to gather a group of high-sticky users in the era of rapid development and change of mobile Internet.
On various social platforms, including Douban, every three to five users will ask: "Chinese internet range, is there anything good to use in addition to Douban' book and video recording App?" The answer was surprisingly unanimous—"No." ”
Bao Simiao is an uncompromising book and audio user, she has long been accustomed to finding a movie or a translation of the score on Douban, and is also keen to record her viewing and reading experience word by word.
Like Bao Simiao, in the 15 years since she registered Douban, book video and audio has always been Zhao Yunfang's favorite feature, which is also the origin of her becoming a Douban user. For a long time, it is not that she has not tried to use other platforms, but when she saw a series of high movie ratings on the cat's eye, ticket sales and even the video platform, she honestly returned to Douban. "Can you imagine that 'Four Seas' is all over 9 points? The accuracy of the ratings of these platforms is not at all as good as Douban, that is, watching a fun, and there is no comparable to Douban in the book part. ”
In the daily recording and communication of users, their interaction with Douban books and videos not only forms a positive cycle of content production, but also gradually increases the gold content of Douban scores.
Taking the movie rating as an example, Abei mentioned in the diary written in 2015 that the Douban program will convert the rating from one star to five stars into a specific score value, divided by the total number of people scoring, that is, the final Douban score is obtained - it is always in motion, excluding some "abnormal scoring" behaviors such as brushing high scores and brushing low scores, and each person involved in the rating is equivalent to the "public jury", practicing the main idea and principle of Douban "trying to restore the average view of the ordinary movie-going public on a movie".
Based on the fairness and reference of the above, the Douban score naturally attracts much attention, and some popular film and television works will even appear on Weibo hot search due to the opening of points. Chen Qin, chief economist of Pulse Data, said at the 2015 Shanghai Film Festival that for movies released on weekends, for every point of Douban score, a movie theater can earn 350,000 yuan more at the box office.
In Ji Yi's view, "in terms of book and audio-visual business, Douban still has a moat." Ji Yi's bean age is 12 years, which is almost half her age. The Douban App is set under the main screen of her mobile phone, which is "as important as the telephone and WeChat infrastructure", with an average daily stay of more than 2 hours.
In addition to the book video, Ji Yi is also a heavy user of the group. She has received a lot of practical life posts from the "Douban Emma Garden" group, and has also received quite a lot of positive replies for releasing celebrity gossip analysis, and the group has brought her not only the happiness of "eating melon", but also the sense of accomplishment of being recognized.
Abei once summed up that the community operation principle of Douban is - "We do not operate, and what we usually do in the sense of operation is expressed by means of product means." "But now, to make this product better, it has to face up to the importance of operations again."
To some extent, Douban has similarities with Tieba and even Tiger Punch, but the development trajectory is completely different. Tieba gathered a group of users with the same interests, and also provided value to users in a decentralized way, but gradually declined after Baidu missed the mobile Internet outlet. As for Tiger Poker, its target users are concentrated on men, and they care about competitive sports rather than entertainment gossip.
Because of this, although there are not a few competitors of Douban, none of them can replace them. According to Analysys Qianfan data, the average number of monthly active users of Douban App in 2021 is about 12 million, and the average number of daily active users is about 3 million. If you want to return to the mainstream camp, Douban obviously has a lot of homework to do.
Users also seem to be willing to give Douban time. Ji Yi occasionally sees discussion posts in the group about the ranking of Douban App downloads, and basically each statistic is away from 300. Whenever this happens, there are always users who shout with their arms up: "We want to post more and fight for Abei!" For the commercialization of Douban' slightly "screwed", the user's attitude is actually relatively inclusive. Ji Yi found that the number of advertising implants in Douban has increased significantly recently, and at first she was resistant, and finally calmly accepted. "If you brush so many advertisements in the Weibo information stream, it will be very irritable, as for Douban, there is it." There are not a few users who spend money for the surrounding areas, but in addition to the Douban movie calendar, Ji Yi feels that the practicality of other products is relatively poor. "I wanted to buy it, but none of it was my favorite." Users have shown great tolerance, and the remaining questions will be left to Douban itself to answer.
(Bao Simiao, Zhao Yunfang, Ji Yi, and Tian Di are pseudonyms.) ）
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