Zheng Dan, a reporter of this newspaper, reported from Beijing
Luo Zhenyu
On March 31, 2022, the IPO status of thinking creation on the official website of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange was updated to "suspended", which means that "Luo Ji Thinking", which has been tossing and turning for a year and a half for listing, has once again encountered obstacles.
The reason given by the Shenzhen Stock Exchange is that Beijing Thinking Creation Information Technology Co., Ltd. needs to submit additional submissions because the financial information recorded in the IPO application documents has expired, and in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Rules for the Review of the Issuance and Listing of Shares on the Growth Enterprise Market of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, its issuance and listing review has been suspended.
The creation of thinking is the main body of operation of "Luo Ji Thinking". This is the third time that The Creator of Thought has been suspended from listing. Previously, on April 1 and September 30, 2021, the Shenzhen Stock Exchange suspended its issuance and listing review for the same reasons, and resumed after the financial information was updated.
On September 25, 2020, Thinking Creation officially submitted a prospectus to the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, and intends to be listed on the Gem After the issuance, now 18 months have passed, during which Time Thinking Creation has accepted 3 inquiries and handed over 6 prospectuses.
Can it be listed in the future? This problem is an unknown for the entire knowledge paid track.
Businessman Luo Fat's road to fame
Tianyancha shows that Thinking Creator was founded by Luo Zhenyu in 2014, a self-media brand, including WeChat public subscription account, knowledge talk show video and audio, membership system, micro mall, Baidu Tieba and WeChat group and other specific interactive forms, mainly serving the post-80s and post-90s.
At present, Luo Zhenyu holds a total of 41.67% of the equity of the company and is the actual controller of the company. In addition, the shareholder who holds 5.2% of the shares of Thinking Creation, Creator, is also blessed by Liu Chuanzhi (9% of the capital contribution), Yu Minhong (4.5% of the capital), Li Shanyou (4.5% of the capital contribution) and other industry leaders.
Regarding the founder "Luo Fat" Luo Zhenyu, the most well-known is the "Luo Ji Thinking" that began broadcasting in 2012, Luo Zhenyu, as the producer and keynote speaker, accumulated and broadcast 205 episodes in the form of long video talk shows, and clicked and played more than 1 billion times on YouTube, Youku, Himalayas and other platforms.
Later, he opened and operated the WeChat public account of the same name," "Luo Ji Thinking", and pushed a 60-second voice of Luo Zhenyu himself at more than 6 o'clock every morning.
The "video + audio" model has an immediate impact at a time when the Internet is developing rapidly. "Luo Fat" quickly became popular, forming a powerful personal IP.
At the end of 2015, Luo Zhenyu launched the paid subscription content platform "Get", extending his tentacles to various fields covering the Internet, culture, entrepreneurship, business, psychology, the workplace and other fields, and began to try and explore the business model of "knowledge payment", upgrading from a simple bookseller to a "knowledge service operator".
On the track of knowledge service, Luo Zhenyu has been soaring all the way, what is he selling?
The answer is general education, the goal of which is to provide the educated with knowledge and values that prevail among different groups of people in a modern pluralistic society.
In the official words of the Creation of Thought, it is: "Let everyone get power from knowledge, with the help of new technologies such as artificial intelligence and mobile Internet, the scarce high-quality educational resources will be universal, so that learners can obtain good educational services with low learning costs and convenient learning methods." Committed to building a "lifelong university without walls."
"Luo Zhenyu's lectures do not stop in one field, but involve various fields. He grasped the point - everyone has their own knowledge blind spots, as long as poking the user's knowledge blind spots has an effect. Internet analyst Zhang Shule told reporters.
Therefore, there is no shortage of listeners who have reflected that Luo Ji's thinking method is novel, but it is not practical, and it is selling anxiety.
The prospectus shows that before 2014, the lifelong education industry is mainly based on skills training, such as IT skills training, etc. With the increase in the demand for general education learning by adult groups and the investment of social capital in the general education industry, more and more enterprises carry out general education business, and the scale of the general education industry has risen rapidly after 2015.
Luo Zhenyu looked at the timing, starting from March 2017, the program of "Luo Ji Thinking" changed from video form to audio, from weekly broadcast to small daily broadcast, and fully transferred to the "Get" APP, all other audio and video platforms are no longer updated, fully invested in knowledge payment, and at the same time advertised for the "Get-things" APP on major platforms.
Luo Fat invited a large number of famous artists to enter the "Get Things" lecture, the cost of the user to complete a course ranged from 9.9 yuan to 365 yuan, the cost of a single course was usually less than 3 yuan, and combined with publishing and university cooperation, the fire was full of fire.
The total number of subscribers to the "Xue Zhaofeng's Peking University Economics Class" exceeded 200,000, setting a record in the industry, and its published "Xue Zhaofeng Economic Lecture Notes" has sold more than 1 million copies one year after its release. In addition, after thinking creation and East China Normal University reached a credit recognition cooperation, the school's students can also be exempted from credits and tuition fees when they learn designated courses in the "Get" APP.
The future of the knowledge paid track is unpredictable
Before Luo Zhenyu said that he wanted to go public, Wu Xiaobo, who was on the same track, had already encountered obstacles in listing.
As a well-known domestic financial writer, Wu Xiaobo has authored a series of works such as "The Great Defeat" and "Agitation", and has been a business journalist for 13 years, and in 2014, he opened the financial self-media "Wu Xiaobo Channel" on WeChat, iQiyi and other content platforms, focusing on pan-financial knowledge content output, and also has his own strong personal IP.
In March 2019, All Access Education (300359.SZ), an A-share listed company, announced that it intends to purchase 96% of Wu Xiaobo's Bajiuling equity for 1.5 billion yuan. However, less than 1 hour after the disclosure of the plan, I received an inquiry letter from the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, one of the key points mentioned was that Bajiuling mainly relied on Wu Xiaobo's personal IP to attract user traffic in the early days, and whether this restructuring was suspected of Wu Xiaobo's "personal IP securitization".
Although all-access education replied that Ba Jiuling was already downplaying Wu Xiaobo's personal attributes, the name of Wu Xiaobo's channel tended to be more symbolic, diluting it to the point that even if Wu Xiaobo did not participate in Ba Jiuling's business, it had no impact. And said that although "Wu Xiaobo Channel" has marketing functions, it is different from ordinary "marketing numbers".
However, the restructuring ended in failure due to various factors. Half a year later, All Access Education voluntarily announced its termination.
In September 2020, Bajiuling, who failed to list on the road, hit the capital market for the second time and announced that it may be an independent IPO. On February 26, 2021, the Zhejiang Regulatory Bureau of the China Securities Regulatory Commission issued an announcement that Bajiuling has completed the third phase of IPO listing counseling.
In the entire field of knowledge payment, Fan Deng, Luo Zhenyu, Wu Xiaobo and Li Shanyou are recognized as the "Four Heavenly Kings".
In 2013, Fan Deng founded the Fan Deng Book Club, and consumers listened to Fan Deng's interpretation of books through annual passes. According to Fan Deng's interview with the Daily Economic News, Fan Deng's revenue in 2020 is about 1 billion yuan, and it has achieved nearly 1 times the growth during the epidemic.
Li Shanyou, the founder of Ku6.com, founded the China Innovators Learning Club in early 2014, which was later renamed chaos learning club. The Chaos University APP, an online learning platform launched in 2017, mainly invites global famous teachers to provide cognitive upgrades for innovative entrepreneurs through online and offline teaching.
All in all, the four kings have a significant feature, that is, the platform relies too much on personal IP.
In the past, Luo Zhenyu also distracted users' attention from themselves by inviting famous teachers to give lectures, and diluted the platform's dependence on personal IP. The "Wu Xiaobo Channel" APP was also renamed "890 New Business". In addition, in order to reduce its dependence on Ma Hongman, One9 Media reduced the frequency of Ma Hongman's hosting, signed a non-competition agreement with Ma Hongman, operated by the Group and verified the intellectual property rights of Ma Hongman's social media accounts and video/audio programs in the name of non-Ma Hongman.
However, in Zhang Shule's view, because of the success of personal IP, it is difficult to remove the label of IP, and the future of such knowledge payment platforms is also foreseeable.
"The content creation platform is listed and lacks the extensibility of development because its ceiling is visible. Whether it is Zhihu or Ba Jiuling, in fact, it is doing self-media, the monetization space is relatively poor, their monetization channels are very single, mainly selling courses and selling books, which is equivalent to the nature of tips. Zhang Shule said.
Zhang Shule further explained that the risk of this knowledge payment platform is that there is no real moat. "Their output belongs to the secondary processing of knowledge, not completely original content, more is to digest the things of the predecessors and teach them to users, which is more replaceable."
"Luo Zhenyu's narration is very novel, he does output different things according to books, but the essence is also book reviews, that is, comments are more interesting, good-looking, and good-listening. There will also be a problem, through short audio, short video, a few minutes a day, depth is not enough. Zhang Shule believes that some people have spent a lifetime studying the book "Dream of the Red Chamber", not to mention digesting a science in a few days, and general talk often lacks depth.
"In modern times, everyone is becoming more and more rational, this kind of knowledge payment is equivalent to an online education crash course, and it is basically impossible to use ten lessons online to talk about an economics project, and it is basically impossible to talk about "Milk Coke Economics". When everyone's enthusiasm for this fast food cooled, the bubble myth burst. Zhang Shule said.
(Editor: Meng Qingwei Proofreader: Yan Jingning)