Author: Ren Shangkun
Source: Business People (ID: biz-leaders)
In the speeding Internet circle, the Himalaya unicorn company has been gone for nearly a decade. It climbed to the top of the industry early. But founder Yu Jianjun may not have expected that the company's listing road will be so bumpy and long.
Since 2018, the news that Himalaya will land on the capital market has been frequently reported, which has been officially denied. In May 2021, Himalaya attempted to list on the New York Stock Exchange, but was unsuccessful. In September of the same year, it resubmitted its IPO application on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, but due to more than six months, the prospectus documents not long ago showed that it was invalid. Recently, Himalaya updated its prospectus and lined up in front of hong Kong stocks, with a valuation of more than 25 billion yuan.
In the past few years, Yu Jianjun has become a regular guest of the sharing meeting, and he does not hesitate to tell his entrepreneurial experience of repeated defeats. Although the entire online audio industry has not been profitable, Yu Jianjun is not worried. At that time, Himalayas had not yet found a clear profit model, but since the launch of the advertising system, monthly advertising revenue has reached the level of tens of millions. This gave him confidence and light.
In an interview in 2017, Yu Jianjun outlined his own vision: the online audio industry will introduce a fan economy, expand revenue by tipping fan anchors, and pay for content. He believes that the loss time will not be too long, "the bandwidth and copyright costs of the network audio industry are very low, it is not difficult to achieve profitability, and it is currently necessary to make the entire industry ecology bigger and stronger, rather than rushing to make a profit." ”
Himalaya was not short of money at that time, and behind it stood a luxurious circle of investors, including domestic Internet giants and international investment banks. Seven or eight rounds of financing injected ammunition into it. However, just after the impact on the New York Stock Exchange, Himalaya ushered in a large-scale withdrawal of investors, including Xiaomi vice president Hong Feng, all 12 directors withdrew, leaving CEO Yu Jianjun alone.
Although Himalaya tells a good growth story, with monthly active users increasing from 140 million in 2019 to 267 million, it is still slow to see profits. As of the end of 2021, Himalaya had a total loss of 15.541 billion yuan, liabilities of 19.916 billion yuan, and cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash remaining of 559 million yuan on the books. Previously, at the end of 2020, the figure was 1.152 billion.
There was not much time left for Yu Jianjun.
Compared with the previous two years, Yu Jianjun has rarely made public appearances. As the industry's leading online audio platform, Himalaya once stepped on the outlet of "content entrepreneurship" and "knowledge payment". That was also the period when Yu Jianjun was most surrounded by spotlights. Among the apps with knowledge payment as the main monetization model, Himalaya once ranked first.
But Himalayas did not seize this wave of dividends and seize the capital market. Some media have asked Yu Jianjun's views on this, and his answer is slightly understated, "Everyone's demand for content is unchanged, but the situation that may meet the demand is constantly changing, and what form consumers are more willing to accept and pay is essentially an exploration process." I don't think it's a so-called low, it's actually a state in evolution. ”
Until now, Himalaya's main revenue channel is still subscriptions, with annual revenue of nearly 3 billion yuan, accounting for 51.1%, followed by advertising and live broadcasting, accounting for 25.4% and 17.1% respectively.
For many years, Yu Jianjun has likened Himalaya to "audio Taobao", and anchors can put their own boutique paid content on Himalaya to sell and distribute, and then the platform can get benefits and value from it.
It's a complete traffic business, and the grip of traffic is the content, and the content needs to be a good enough creator. Creators also need to derive revenue and individual value from traffic. In order to retain users and creators, Himalaya burns 80% of its revenue every year to advertise, buy copyright and share content.
But the lifeblood of the traffic business also lies in traffic. Once a strong competitor enters, the business is threatened. Yu Jianjun once said that Himalaya will focus on two directions, one is heavy vertical, with high-value IP or human precipitation to form its own barriers; the other is social stickiness, so that the platform and the role are related.
After all, ideas are ideas, often some distance away from reality. Himalaya's social attributes are not strong, and the user's autonomy and interactivity are not high. Compared with Xiaohongshu, Douyin, and NetEase Cloud, it is much more obviously inferior.
Yu Jianjun also talked about the social mechanism of the product, that is, to meet the needs of users to show off and benefit, so that the social chain rolls up, "The key here lies in the understanding of the scene and the needs, the content and the platform grafting, as long as the content is good, it can bring tens of millions of levels of income; another problem is how to prevent BAT, especially the T, the hardware is afraid of Xiaomi, and the Internet is afraid of Tencent."
At that time, Tencent launched Penguin FM. Yu Jianjun felt that "in fact, it is not so terrible."
But he still underestimated the potential and pace of expansion of the giants. First, Tencent Music launched the "Listen to Books" section, and then Tencent launched Cool Me Listening and Lazy Listening. Today, Tencent also has WeChat reading. In the entire long audio track, Toutiao has Tomato Listening, Station B has a two-dimensional audio community cat ear FM, as well as boutique niche products, Tiya, which focuses on social audio, and a small universe of podcast platforms that are highly sought after by young people in first-tier cities.
Analysys Qianfan data shows that although the number of active people in Himalaya is still far superior to its opponents, a red flag is that its month-on-month growth rate is declining, while the number of users of audio products under Tencent and Toutiao is growing rapidly.
Giants, money, traffic.
As early as 2018, Zhang Yongchang, vice president of Himalaya, told the outside world about the industry dilemma, "The overall monthly active users are about 200 million, And Himalaya is 150 million, even if we are 100%, it is still not big enough." In recent years, even if Himalaya's wallet has gone from drum to flat, it is still beating ads and doing promotions to grab users.
In the prospectus risk item, Himalaya said that if competitors offer more attractive compensation packages to attract our popular content creators, the cost of retaining such content creators will increase.
Now, the situation of the entire industry is more and more deviating from Yu Jianjun's original expectations.
The pressure on copyright costs was far greater than he thought.
In 2021, there will be more than 1,000 Disputes involving the right of communication of information networks in the Himalayas. Over the past few years, many writers have publicly accused him of Himalayan abuses. One of the most dramatic things is that in 2017, Himalaya took Pocket Story to court for infringing the copyright to his work "The Last Elephant", demanding that the latter take down the work and pay 50,000 yuan in damages. It turns out that the above audio works were originally commissioned by Pocket Story. In terms of the duration of the authorization, the "defendant" owned the work a year earlier than the Himalayas.
Industry-wide competition is intensifying. The importance that countries attached to copyright protection was deepening. The cost of original works is also rising dramatically.
In the early stage of financing, Yu Jianjun said that capital's attitude towards the network audio industry is polarized: investors who are network audio users themselves will very much agree with the industry; other investors who do not know much about the audio industry are more likely to one-sidedly compare network audio with the network video industry, thinking that the loss may be greater.
But at the moment, the Himalayas and Youaites do have a lot of similarities.
The model of relying on external content supply and burning money to buy copyright to attract traffic is difficult to sustain, and once it reaches a certain stage, it will encounter bottlenecks. In the past two years, Himalaya has continuously launched programs such as sound training camps and cultivating high-quality anchors. The platform began to migrate in the direction of self-made content, which is both pioneering and self-preservation.
In The Chinese business world, at least from a public perspective, Yu Jianjun's name is not very loud. He is a serial entrepreneur, when he was studying at Xi'an Jiaotong University, he began to turn over entrepreneurial projects, and he did not go to a day's shift after leaving school, and he once earned tens of millions of dollars a year, and he also lost all of them overnight. The pits he had stepped on in the past had enhanced his business acumen.
For Yu Jianjun, the Himalayas are a shift in consciousness and perspective. He's made the mistake that a lot of startup teams make: starting from what he's good at. Before him, Himalayas believed that his advantage was panoramic technology, and he wanted to create a virtual world called "the world there" on the Internet like God created the world, which was all-encompassing, and he would project the user's character avatar into the virtual world and implant audio, video, social networking, and games. In the end, the tragic result made him understand that the products that really survived on the Internet were all grown from the bottom up, and users gave them what they needed.
That's why, when he later told the Himalayan story, he kept telling entrepreneurs that there were three things to consider before starting a business: Whose problem to solve? What problem is solved? What are typical usage scenarios? Yu Jianjun decided to do Himalaya in the summer of 2012, when the mobile Internet was rising, and he intuitively believed that audio could reach scenes that the media could not reach in the past, such as driving, crowding buses and subways, running, housework, etc.
Perennial entrepreneurial experience let Yu Jianjun know that he is not safe enough, he commented that he has a wide range of knowledge, the operation of technology products involved in everything, but not enough focus, it is difficult to in the Internet, a winner-take-all territory, the product to the extreme. It takes his partner to do the work. Yu Jianjun believes that he has thick skin, is optimistic by nature, and does not easily lose confidence, so he does the work of financing and finding people.
But for him and his partner, the Himalayas are now facing a scorching war.
It is difficult to say how much real value the corporate organization cannot generate profits.
But there are two pieces of data that may be worth noting –
According to Ai Media Consulting, the scale of China's online audio market will reach 22 billion yuan in 2021, an increase of 67.9% year-on-year. According to China Insight Consulting data, online audio subscriptions have increased from 500 million yuan in 2016 to 9.1 billion yuan in 2021.
The willingness of users to pay for online audio is increasing year by year.
Specific to Himalayas, the average monthly active paying users on mobile increased from 5.1 million in 2019 to 14.9 million in 2021, and the average monthly active paid membership on mobile increased from 4.3 million in 2019 to 14.4 million in 2021.
Another statistic is that the average Pay-per-view listening service for each paying user in Himalaya increased from 46.3 yuan in 2019 to 104.5 yuan. In 2021, the listening time of daily active users will also increase to 144 minutes.
Currently, the secondary market is not friendly to audio startups. Lychee FM, which was the first to land on the U.S. stock market, has plunged nearly 90% in the past year and has lost money for five consecutive years. The "Luo Ji Thinking", which was blessed by Luo Zhenyu and other celebrities, was still not smooth after turning to the ChiNext board. On April 1, the Shenzhen Stock Exchange information showed that its IPO status was changed to "suspended".
A Himalayan listing is imminent. Investors and creators need returns. Content costs money.
Good content requires more money.
reference:
Zhou Xin: "With more than 200 million users in 3 years, how does Himalaya FM disrupt audio?" New Economy 100 People, 2016.03.07.
*Title image purchased from Visual China