Qutoutiao is about to close down self-media, and it relies on the audience to watch videos to become the three sinking platforms

Interesting headlines, I guess many people have forgotten about this platform. Now, it's the era of short videos. We turn on our phones and countless video apps are catching our eye. I believe that you who watch the video at this moment use different video platforms. And Qutoutiao, in this "video content" war, fell behind. Four years after the listing, Qutoutiao's stock price fell to "1 yuan share". Thinking back to that year, Qutoutiao was also ambitious. Tan Siliang, the founder of Qutoutiao, once said that Qutoutiao is determined to do a good job in content construction and will "fully empower content entrepreneurs". However, contrary to expectations, the content creation of Qutoutiao did not show a wonderful blowout.

Now, in order to save costs, Qutoutiao has no way to subsidize creators, and directly drives creators out of the platform in disguise. The data shows that since its listing in 2018, Qutoutiao has been losing money, and it is a huge loss. From 2018 to 2020, the net loss of Qutoutiao was 1.946 billion yuan, 2.689 billion yuan and 1.105 billion yuan respectively, and the loss in the first three quarters of 2021 reached 942 million yuan, and the cumulative loss was about 6.682 billion yuan.

Founder Tan Siliang attributed the poor performance to "the macro environment, the Internet advertising industry is under pressure." In addition, Qutoutiao also bears the risk of huge debts. Money is the root cause. With no money left, Qutoutiao could only decide to cut back on food and clothing. After giving up independent content creation, the next route chosen by Qutoutiao is to buy content directly on third-party content platforms. to support the normal operation of the platform, so that a large amount of money to the creator is saved. That is to say, from now on, Qutoutiao will become a "porter of video".

How did Qutoutiao get to this point? Once upon a time, Qutoutiao was one of the "sinking big three" juxtaposed with Pinduoduo and Kuaishou. The so-called "sinking market" means that these three APPS cover a wide enough range of users, focusing on small towns and the vast rural market. This is also the reason why Qutoutiao first attracted attention. At that time, in order to retain users, Qutoutiao came up with a "hyip model". Watch the news on the platform, check in, and you can directly get the corresponding cash rewards. This is absolutely attractive to the majority of sinking users. 2017 coincided with the rapid popularization of mobile Internet and smart phones, coupled with the stimulation of money, the explosive growth of Qutoutiao users. At that time, the capital market was also very optimistic about Qutoutiao. In September 2018, after receiving hundreds of millions of dollars of investment from giants such as Tencent and Xiaomi, Qutoutiao quickly went public. It set a record for the fastest listing of Chinese companies on nasdaq at that time.

However, after the listing, the good times of Qutoutiao came to an end. Just now we said that since the listing, Qutoutiao has begun to make huge losses. Qutoutiao is burning money on the one hand, but user data continues to decline. This kind of burning money is equivalent to hitting the water. You know, at this time, the competition of video platforms is white-hot. The so-called boat against the current, if you do not advance, you will retreat. Objectively, it is left behind. Why aren't users growing? Because, the reason why they have sunk users so fast in the early stage is not because there are many users who like to watch the news, but many people use this platform as a place to make money. The so-called "wool party" is called, and the fun headlines are used as wool. Therefore, once you stop sending money to users, user data will decline sharply. For these users, there are many platforms for watching videos. They don't even watch videos at all and don't care about current affairs news. Perhaps, it is a housewife in the countryside who uses Qutoutiao as a mobile phone software to subsidize the family. When the power of money is no longer sometimes, naturally a large number of users choose to uninstall for the first time. As of the third quarter of 2021, Qutoutiao's daily active data has declined for the sixth consecutive quarter from the previous quarter, and has fallen to the level of the fourth quarter of 2018 two years ago; the monthly active data has fallen back to the level of the third quarter of 2019.

Facts have proved that the user data that Qutoutiao wants in the early stage is problematic. They only see an increase in the number of users, but they don't care about the quality of users. Attracted a large number of non-target users. These people, although they let Qutoutiao go public for a while, felt good momentum. But as soon as the maintenance of the money is left, the user immediately turns around. Therefore, Qutoutiao lacks a good platform ecology and characteristic content, and has no core competitiveness. As the competition of video platforms enters a white-hot stage, the cost of customer acquisition has increased. Therefore, once the subsidy is reduced, the user will leave without mercy. For users, it is nothing more than switching platforms to watch videos, a matter of one second. Therefore, now Qutoutiao has entered a dilemma: controlling costs, active users will decline, revenue will be affected; increasing subsidies will exacerbate losses and insufficient cash flow. How to get it, is to lose money.

Of course, QuToutiao did not choose to lie flat. At first, I also wanted to improve the quality of my content so as to attract real target customers. Therefore, we will increase our efforts to introduce original authors, institutional media and other content creators. And give creators a good income distribution. At that time, short video platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou were also on the rise, and it was a bit too late to find supplementary creative content at this time. The drawbacks of Qutoutiao's single advertising monetization revenue model are more prominent. Qutoutiao also intends to develop diversified products, and has incubated products such as short video platforms "Ball Video" and "Fun Duo Pai", and live broadcast platforms "Fun Live", but in the end they all ended in failure to test the waters.

On the track of video creation, Qutoutiao was ruthlessly pulled down. The Internet is like this, the Matthew effect is obvious, the head of the giant enterprises, occupying the vast majority of the market. The rest, only a little soup. That's why in the early days of Internet companies, they all frantically spent money to occupy the track. This is because, as long as the market is monopolized, there will be a lot of opportunities to make money in the future. So we see that when there is a market in many emerging fields, those giants throw money at any cost. Whether it is a taxi or a takeaway, there has been such a period of time.

And qu headlines, unfortunately, there is no chance. It is also unclear whether the capital market will be willing to provide support. Now, Qutoutiao has to consider transformation. However, how to turn in the end depends on how the decision-making level of Qutoutiao makes decisions.

The story of Qutoutiao is just one of many video platforms. The big wave of sand and sand, the entrepreneurial market, is destined to be the majority under the elimination. In the next step, how to maintain users on video platforms has become a new proposition. Now the platform is fiercely competitive, and basically the users have absorbed almost the same. At this time, it is not who has more users, but who can maintain the users. Including long video platforms, many video platforms HAVE REPEATEDLY INCREASED PRICES, to put it bluntly, they are not afraid of losing customers. Many netizens said: "'Chasing dramas' is getting more and more expensive!" "But this price increase is actually understandable, as long as you can provide users with good enough video content."

To say this, we have to mention the precedent of the United States. The American Netflix Company is a video platform that has broken through in the past few years and has swept the world. It relies on high-quality content output. Before they shoot a TV series, they will use big data to calculate which subject audience likes the most, and then use big data to calculate which director and actor are the best match. This is the emergence of an original TV series of Netflix, "House of Cards". How popular is this TV series? The TV series about the political struggle in the White House was praised by then-US President Barack Obama, who said on the Internet that he was also chasing the drama. Therefore, content is king never outdated. You can raise the price, to give users good enough content. If the user feels that it is not worth it, it is detrimental to the reputation of the platform. However, from the perspective of long video competition, our major platforms this year have also produced their own blockbusters. It can be said that the competition is still in a state of flux.

To put it bluntly, if every video platform, in order to maintain users, is desperate to produce good content, it will benefit our audience.

Some experts believe that the video industry is a talent-intensive industry, and film and television creative talents are one of the important factors restricting the development of the industry. The premise of discovering good content is to discover interesting people. There are many short video platforms, which are running to the countryside to discover all kinds of content that is worth watching. For example, our unknown small tunes, the production of some kind of craft that is rare in our city, these are the majority of users like to watch.

There is an old saying that the world is not short of beauty, but lacks the eyes to find it. This is especially suitable for short video platforms. In addition, there is now a clear trend, that is, knowledge videos will become the outlet. The most representative figure is Fan Deng. His income is more than that of many other anchors who are more popular than him. In the future, knowledge videos may become the choice of more users. I'm sure you'll watch videos more or less every day. Whether it is a TV series with long videos or funny passages with short videos, few of us can do it without watching videos. This is the age of video. I don't know, what trends do you think video platforms will tend to in the future? Leave a message and let's discuss it together.