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Although Qutoutiao has created an industry precedent of "watching information to make money", the replicability of this set of gameplay is too strong, and there are almost no technical barriers.
Author 丨 Pastoral
Edit 丨 nuts
Cover source 丨 network
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The first share of mobile content aggregation has chosen to lie flat.
On April 21, the Qutoutiao self-media platform released a letter from the site, saying that "Qutoutiao is based on long-term content planning and will stop the service and maintenance of the self-media creation platform on June 30, 2022." ”
At present, Qutoutiao has uploaded content offline, and self-media authors can no longer update articles and videos on the Qutoutiao platform.
As a content platform, after losing the self-media author, how to ensure the stable supply of platform content, according to the relevant person in charge of Qutoutiao, Qutoutiao has signed cooperation agreements with Baidu and other third-party content platforms, or will continue to provide services to users through the company's recommendation technology in the future, combined with third-party platform content.
In the past, the first mobile content aggregation stock listed in the United States has now chosen to say goodbye to content creators, and behind the lying flat of Qutoutiao, it actually reflects the polarized development pattern of the content information platform in the past two years.
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"The Four Kings of the Sinking Market"
Qutoutiao first broke into the public eye, with the fierce user growth, Qutoutiao, which was officially launched in June 2016, achieved a cumulative installed capacity of 181 million APP in two years, 62.2 million monthly active users, and a user login rate of up to 95%.
At that time, Qutoutiao became one of the hottest apps in third- and fifth-tier cities, and together with Kuaishou, Pinduoduo, and WaterDrop Chip at that time, it was crowned by the media as the title of "Four Kings of the Sinking Market".
Why Qutoutiao can fire so fast, this has to mention its own viral fission development model, at that time, some people even compared Qutoutiao's user growth model to "Pinduoduo + today's headlines".
The platform provides users with content of interest through recommendation algorithms, and users can earn by reading articles or watching videos, which makes Qutoutiao's user stickiness much higher than other content platforms.
This point is extremely accurate to grasp the characteristics of the sinking market users love the wool, so that Qutoutiao avoids direct competition with other content platforms and completes the race outside the big city.
Due to the large and accurate user group, the monetization channel of Qutoutiao has also opened, and advertisers such as second-class e-commerce and online loans have come to the door, so that Qutoutiao's advertising revenue has also continued to rise.
Compared with other content platforms in the market at that time that were still struggling to explore a profit model, the rapid growth of Qutoutiao became one of the few bright colors in the industry, which was extremely obvious in its revenue.
In 2016, Qutoutiao's revenue was only 58 million yuan, soared to 517 million yuan in 2017, and by 2018, Qutoutiao had already earned 717.8 million yuan in the first six months.
The rapid development trend has also rapidly matured the road of capitalization, and Qutoutiao went to the United States in September 2018, setting a record for the fastest successful listing of Chinese Internet companies.
After landing on the capital market, investors also showed great enthusiasm for Qutoutiao, the first day of listing experienced a rare five circuit breakers, in the case of the issue price of $7, the first day of closing, Qutoutiao's stock price has soared 128.14%, to $15.97, the market value of up to $4.59 billion.
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Listing is the pinnacle
Although the ferocious growth has made Qutoutiao one of the most concerned Internet companies in China in the past two years, for Qutoutiao, it has a bit of a "listing is the peak" flavor.
From the perspective of stock prices, as of the close of the US stock market on April 22, Qutoutiao's stock price was $1.36, and the total market value was only a pitiful $41.2 million.
Compared with the close of the first day of listing, the market value of Qutoutiao today is only one percent of that time.
Why Qutoutiao fell so fast can actually be interpreted from the three dimensions of single development model, short video impact, and backward content ecology.
The first is the user growth model of Qutoutiao, although it has created an industry precedent of "watching information to make money", but the replicability of this set of gameplay is too strong, and there are almost no technical barriers.
In recent years, including today's headlines, mobile phone Baidu and other content service platforms have launched a speed version of the application, the same set up "look at the information to make money" gameplay, compared to the fun headlines, these large platforms are more rich in content, brand endorsement is also stronger, almost formed a dimensionality reduction blow to fun headlines.
According to the February 2021 information flow APP data released by Analysys Qianfan, Baidu Express Edition has exceeded 51 million monthly active users, and today's headline speed edition has exceeded 46 million, while Qutoutiao is only 7.89 million.
Secondly, the rise of short videos in the past two years, the popularity of vibrato and kuaishou has taken away most of the mobile traffic, and there is also a speed version of the "brush video to make money" gameplay, which further squeezes the growth space of Qutoutiao.
In fact, Qutoutiao itself also realized that short videos will have a huge impact on the information platforms that focus on text content, so they launched two products in the first two years, "Quduopai" and "Old Iron Video", trying to cut into the short video battlefield.
However, Qutoutiao, like Tencent, which invests in itself, does not seem to be good at short video products, and these two short video APPS have not been able to gain a foothold in the market in the end.
Finally, in the platform content ecology, on the early Qutoutiao APP, because the platform content is mostly uploaded by self-media authors, in order to win higher traffic, it is filled with more vulgar and edge-skimming content, and Qutoutiao has repeatedly been named and criticized by the mainstream media because of this.
Some high-quality content creators are currently mostly signing contracts with other content platforms in the form of exclusive or debut, which also makes Qutoutiao's own platform content more scarce and its attractiveness to users continues to decrease.
In fact, not only Qutoutiao, some information platforms that imitate the Qutoutiao model are also facing the same problems, such as Huitoutiao, Oriental Toutiao, etc., although there have been brief highlight moments, but now it is difficult to find.
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Other platforms may follow suit
The domestic pan-information platform content war can be traced back to 2016, in those years, the platform while spending money to advertise to attract new users, while giving subsidies and traffic sharing to attract creators, BAT three giants all participated in the war, created a number of platform-level innovative products, and has been running so far.
In 2018, Qutoutiao shouted out the slogan of "the initial fast lane of content entrepreneurs", announced that it would increase the proportion of creators, and decided to sign nearly a thousand content producers to provide them with a guaranteed income of up to 30,000 yuan per month.
Spiral Jun learned from a senior self-media creator that the creator income given by Qutoutiao at that time was indeed very attractive, and even once higher than the two major head platforms of Toutiao and Baidu, in addition to the basic advertising share, there are content list rewards every week and every month, and in the first half of 2019, the average monthly income can be obtained nearly 10,000 yuan on the Qutoutiao platform.
But this kind of good situation for content creators is not long, and the author is now in Qutoutiao, and his income in the past year is only a few hundred yuan.
For Qutoutiao this time to stop the service and maintenance of the self-media creation platform, Spiral Jun interviewed a number of self-media authors, most people are not surprised, because the current traffic of the entire information platform is more concentrated, the Matthew effect is obvious, and the situation of the self-media platform at the end itself is more difficult.
Before Qutoutiao, Sogou's content open platform Sogou also stopped operating and serving in September last year.