Image source @ Visual China
Text | Moldy
In 2015, LeTV was at the peak of its development, with a market value of more than 100 billion yuan, becoming the fifth Internet company with a market value of more than 100 billion yuan after "BATJ".
At that time, the spirited LeTV CEO Jia Boss seemed to want to revolutionize the life of the APP, and when promoting LeTV's new products, he posted on Weibo: "Apple has led the interactive experience between people and devices through app. But users rush to switch between applications, life is cut off by isolated APPS, can this island experience only be solved through independent APP? ”
Boss Jia wants to break the information island and the fragmented APP interaction problem through the new system UI. However, as an important carrier of the development of the mobile Internet, APP is still the mainstream of the industry today, even if it is a WeChat/Alipay mini program, it has not been able to revolutionize the life of app.
On the other hand, the attribute of APP "absorbing all things" is also revolutionizing the lives of many traditional industries.
On April 27, the domestic veteran IT publication Computerworld issued a notice saying, "From April 27, 2022, the company will stop work and business, and all employees will be arranged to wait for work." In fact, as early as the middle of last year, Computerworld announced that it would stop publishing paper publications and turn to its own APP and major new media content platforms, but it is worth noting that Computerworld has disappeared only paper, and its brand will continue to serve.
The current encounter of "Computerworld" is a true portrayal of the development of many print media, either still stubbornly insisting, or breaking its arm to survive and actively transforming, or announcing the suspension of publication, waving goodbye to readers and their past, and officially becoming a part of history.
01 Disappearing paper newspapers
Founded in 1980, Computerworld was an important channel for many people to understand computer hardware and software technology in the era when computers were not yet widespread. I believe that many readers are because they accidentally watched "Computer World" in middle and high school, which opened the door to a new world and finally embarked on the road of pan-IT industry.
At that time, it was as popular as Computerworld itself, including China Computer News, Computer News and Computer Business, which had many loyal readers.
Because of the high quality of content and the large market demand, many IT publications have been favored by brands. Computerworld is no exception, with many advertising pages in a newspaper, making the whole newspaper thick. One of the more interesting sayings is that after a copy of "Computerworld" is bought and read and sold as scrap, the money obtained is the same as the money bought, which is equivalent to reading a newspaper for free.
In the face of a large number of advertising pages in the newspaper, readers were also very disgusted, but considering the scarcity of IT journal books in the domestic market at that time, they did not have a choice. Similarly, at the content level, many IT newspapers have the problem of declining content quality in the middle and late stages of development, but some readers must first solve the problem of "whether there is one", so they can only choose passive acceptance.
Subsequently, under the impact of the PC Internet and mobile Internet, the market positioning of many paper newspapers and periodicals, including IT content, became more and more embarrassing.
On the one hand, in the channel influence and information dissemination media, the development and popularization of the Internet has impacted the traditional paper journal channels, readers can more easily obtain richer content; on the other hand, in the media discourse, the popularity of the mobile Internet has led to the development of self-media, everyone may become KOL and KOC, the limited attention of readers every day and the industry discourse power of traditional paper media are dispersed.
The influence of many old paper IT content media has been gradually diluted in the big wave of PC/mobile Internet development, and some media with slower transformation can only be reduced to the background board of the era of new media development.
According to incomplete statistics, in the past year alone, a number of newspapers and magazines have published news of suspension or suspension, including many well-known local newspapers in the city. Upstream News reported that at least eight newspapers or magazines, including Guiyang Evening News, Yibin Evening News, Hebei Science and Technology News and Luoyang Business Daily, issued announcements of suspension or suspension of publication at the end of last year, and no longer launched paper editions of newspapers.
At this moment, what is in front of the traditional print media is nothing more than choosing to conform to the development trend of the times, opening accounts on major new media content platforms, and serving readers in another form.
02 Who is the winner?
The public's access to new information, like the context of consumption development, has gone through the era of material scarcity (lack of periodicals), at this stage people mostly read what to read to meet basic material/spiritual needs.
When it comes to the brand and experiential development model of consumer development, people's information acquisition has also experienced the development of portals and content aggregation apps. The difference is that the former focuses on the collection and label classification of information, so that users can see more information on a page, while the latter brings intelligent algorithms and multi-dimensional interaction capabilities (expressions and text comments, etc.) on the basis of the original, improving the distribution effect of content and user browsing experience.
In the end, the upgrade of technology does not directly determine the quality of content, but more inclusive technology allows readers to easily access a variety of information, while also promoting the increase in content supply.
Taking online literature as an example, the 2021 Research Report on the Development of Chinese Online Literature points out that the compound growth rate of realistic works from 2016 to 2021 exceeds 30% in five years. Not only that, but the daily production of self-media on major content information platforms is innumerable, before it was to find content to watch, and now it is themselves or AI to help us find the content we want to read in the vast content library.
Driven by new technologies, the media industry's question about who is the winner has to be looked at at at two levels.
First, at the level of content output. As mentioned above, the vigorous development of self-media will compress the space of traditional media to a certain extent, but the main impact is the local traditional media and various types of journals of a non-public nature, and some of the head self-media with first-mover advantages will undoubtedly be the winners.
As some netizens said: "The content sent by some accounts is not necessarily of much quality, but the account started earlier and ate the dividends of the times, accumulating a large number of followers." ”
Second, from the reader's point of view, the amount of content supply has soared but the quality is uneven, most of the non-public media are similar to private enterprises, with obvious profit-seeking, chasing hot spots, gimmicks are mostly to win market attention, increasing the cost of readers to identify new information.
Third, the content distribution mode of intelligent algorithms, on the one hand, makes many users fall into the information cocoon, on the other hand, some self-media will guess what content or keywords are more likely to get machine recommendations, boosting the emergence of various title party articles.
Readers caught in the wave of technological developments, ostensibly winners, may eventually turn into the losing side.
03 Epilogue
For a wide range of readers, good content is fundamental. It is lamentable that the most read articles in the recent articles of the "Computerworld" public account are the proclamations about "the withdrawal of print media and embrace the future", while the reading volume of other tweets ranges from hundreds to a thousand.
Another veteran IT print media "Computer Newspaper" has better public account data, but still inferior to the mainstream self-media accounts of the same type, and its new list index is 711 at the time of this article, ranking 100th in the new list technology category.
Perhaps for many transformed traditional print media, embracing new media is not an easy task. Not only is it one beat or even a few beats slower than new media in terms of account operation thinking, but also to find explosive points while ensuring the quality of content, and strive to attract the attention of more readers on the Internet.