Wen 丨 Xu Junhao
After the Lantern Festival, the traditional Spring Festival is over, and the popularity of the 2023 Spring Festival long holiday tourism market has come to an end.
The policy shift at the end of 2022 has led to the recovery of China's tourism market, which has been dormant for three years, and the New Year's Day of 2023 will push the tourism enthusiasm higher, and the Spring Festival will reach its peak. According to data from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the number of domestic tourism trips during the Spring Festival holiday in 2023 was 308 million, a year-on-year increase of 23.1%, recovering to 88.6% of the same period in 2019; Domestic tourism revenue was 375.843 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 30%, recovering to 73.1% of the same period in 2019.
From February 6, 2023, Hong Kong, Macao and outbound travel have also begun to resume, and the report cards handed over by major online travel platforms throughout the Spring Festival are quite eye-catching. Ctrip released the "2023 Spring Festival Tourism Summary Report", during the Spring Festival, its travel orders increased by 4 times year-on-year, cross-border air ticket orders increased by 4 times, and outbound travel orders increased by 640%. According to the "2023 Spring Festival Holiday Travel Consumption Data Report" released by Tongcheng, the number of orders for air tickets, train tickets, bus tickets and other tickets during this period exceeded the same period in 2019; According to Fliggy's public data, the number of long-term travel orders in China during the Spring Festival increased by more than 5 times year-on-year.
In the midst of applause, the data given by the travel strategy community hornet's nest is not so "hard". In addition to the popularity of "long-distance travel" increasing by more than 285% year-on-year and Mafengwo's North Star Raiders "instant strategy" consulting volume increased by 120% month-on-month in the past week, the report gives mostly content such as search popularity, crowd portraits, and keyword analysis. This data does not directly reflect the volume of orders and the size of users.
Restrictions on population mobility have far-reaching implications for vertical content communities like Mafengwo: creators lack material, and community UGC (user-generated content) production is reduced; The reality has reduced the travel frequency of ordinary users, users' attention to relevant content has declined, and community activity has dropped significantly. And these are difficult to quickly return to the status quo after the policy is liberalized.
Taking Mafengwo's daily signature content "Bee Head Travels" as an example, the 31 Bee Head Travels in January 2019 all traveled in 2018 and January 2019, but one-third of the travel dates in the same period of 2023 were before 2022, and many outbound trips were in 2019, which was less timely; In January 2019, each article averaged 96,000 views and 590 comments, but in January 2023, the two figures were only 23,000 and 83 respectively.
The growth and profitability of the community is not a castle in the air, and the commercial development must be based on content abundance and active users. Although Mafengwo is the leading player in the domestic travel strategy community, it is in the cracks of the entire travel industry: it needs to get a piece of the pie from OTA platforms such as Ctrip and Tongcheng, and it has to face the increasingly fierce impact of content platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Douyin, and deal with its own development problems. The industry is getting warmer, and the hornet's nest at this moment is still far from truly coming out of winter.
01The content foundation is loose
In the platform content system, "bee head" used to be the top-level design of hornet's nest quality and traffic.
According to Heike Finance, the editor of Mafengwo will select articles from a group of UGC travelogues, communicate with the author in advance, obtain permission and materials, and then schedule and put the travelogue on the bee's head. The column is updated at 0 o'clock every day, and will be displayed in the header image banner position of the homepage of the Mafengwo website, the APP opening screen and the recommended position of the first screen.
APP opening advertising space is often worth a lot, and the hornet's nest leaves it to the bee head, which shows its emphasis on high-quality content. The content moat of the platform is precisely from the head of the bee. These travelogues have many unique experiences, high photography level and comprehensive and meticulous strategy texts, such as 24 days of cycling in Tibet, 4,000 kilometers of self-driving through Ali, 555 days around China to explore food, Fujian 4 cities of food and drink, etc.
Compared with similar communities such as Qyer.com, the bee head graphics and texts are indeed of excellent quality. Taking the 2022 Beijing Cityscape Guide as an example, a three-star essence travelogue introducing Beijing's spring blossom viewing locations on Qyer.com is mainly composed of more than 10 location introductions and viewing tips, and the composition and color grading in the travelogue are relatively ordinary. A bee head article with a similar theme connects nearly 50 places in Beijing with 24 solar terms, with more than 18,000 texts and more than 300 high-quality pictures.
The hornet's nest site also has a dedicated "bee head club". As of the publication of this article on February 9, 2023, the page shows that there are only 1999 "bee firsts" on the site. This scarcity is also the reason why Bee Shou has become the highest honor for creators on the site. However, the latest display of the club's exclusive activities is still in Yangzhou in 2018, and there is no special entrance to the club in the APP.
Since the launch of the predecessor "Travel Guide" platform in 2006, Mafengwo has aggregated more than 100 million users with content, and established the community tonality of in-depth tourism through operation methods such as bee head. However, with the commercialization development and strategy adjustment of the platform, the importance and influence of bee head gradually declined, and while new users increased, many old users chose to leave dissatisfied with the new atmosphere.
This can be confirmed by the attitude of different users to the two incidents of Mafengwo.
In October 2018, "The hornet's nest with a valuation of 17.5 billion is actually a ghost town composed of zombies and water armies?" The article was widely disseminated, and the discussion of things was boiling. Ordinary users are indignant about Mafengwo's use of robots to crawl reviews from Dianping and Ctrip, but many senior users are unimpressed. The latter believes that reviews are not the core content of the hornet's nest, and water injection is only to beautify the data, and does not affect its content value.
A year later, the Bee First Travels incident was the opposite. On July 29, 2019, a travelogue introducing Shunde food appeared on the head of the bee, which caused dissatisfaction among a large number of senior users because of its content quality problems such as flowing accounts, simple pictures, and style like note stitching. A large number of bee masters left messages below the travelogue, saying that such a mediocre travelogue can be on the head of the bee, and the lot of time and energy they spend on the travelogue is meaningless. Ordinary users are mostly unable to understand this content cleanliness and have no interest in this dispute. The incident ended with the official deletion of the travelogue.
An intractable rift has been created between deep creators who pursue quality and platforms that are gradually becoming popular, exacerbated by the hornet's nest series of operations. As far as the current layout of the Mafengwo APP is concerned, the information flow notes have become the main body, and the bee head travel notes are in vain. Xiao Ni, a bee leader with more than 10,000 fans, told Heike Finance that she has been on the bee head a total of 6 times, the most recent time was in January 2023, but the single account increased by less than 200 followers. She said that fewer and fewer people now read the bee head, and feel that writing travelogues is not as good as running Little Red Book.
Short videos and graphic notes are the trend of today's content, but this does not mean that long graphics and text are worthless. Even if the platform weakens its inherent advantages to meet the trend, it will be difficult to compete with platforms such as Xiaohongshu, and it may lose its original users. Judging from the departure of a group of senior users, Mafengwo's move is quite a bit of Handan's toddler.
02The difficulty of commercial monetization
What makes Mafengwo anxious is not only the content itself, but also the closed loop of monetization that it has not been able to fully open during the content boom.
There are two common ways to monetize content on domestic Internet platforms: advertising or participating in transactions. The former needless to say, the latter is involved in OTA (online travel) transactions including airline tickets, hotels and travel products because of its presence in the travel track. The logical and reasonable way is that the platform influences users' consumption decisions and promotes the sales of related products through content production scenarios. The hornet's nest also works here. After promoting the commercialization process, Mafengwo GMV (total merchandise trading volume) reached nearly 10 billion yuan in 2017. In an interview with Phoenix Technology in April 2018, Lv Gang, co-founder of Mafengwo, mentioned that half of its platform revenue came from advertising and the other half from OTA transactions such as machine wine.
But OTA trading is anything but easy.
Hornet's nest has not released exact transaction data in recent years, but it is not difficult to get a rough idea of its survival. According to data from Huajing Industry Research Institute, Ctrip ranked first in China's online travel market in 2021, accounting for 36.3%; followed by Meituan Travel, accounting for 20.6%; After that, Tongcheng, Qunar and Fliggy ranked third, fourth and fifth with 14.8%, 13.9% and 7.3% of the market respectively; Platforms, including Mafengwo, are classified as "other" with a combined market share of just 7.1%.
The travel industry chain is complex, and the test is OTA players' control over the supply chain. On this track, the player's first-mover advantage and scale effect are significant. Taking Ctrip, which went live in October 1999, for example, Ctrip's usual path to expand its supply chain is through acquisitions and strategic investments. Taking hotels as an example, Ctrip has invested in hotel groups such as BTG, Huazhu and Kaiyuan, and in 2018 also established Licheng Hotel Group, and its voice in this field can be imagined.
When searching for hotels on Mafengwo, users will find that the official channel "Mafengwo Preferred" is arranged in order with bookings from other channels such as Ctrip, eLong, Booking.com, and Youyu Reservation, but the top-ranked Mafengwo Preferred has no obvious advantage over other channels, and even some are tens or even hundreds of yuan more expensive in price.
Mafengwo's OTA service has also been criticized. At the beginning of 2020, due to the impact of the new crown epidemic, a large number of air tickets and hotels needed to be refunded and changed, and the refund cycle of various service providers was extended. Most service providers delayed up to 2 months, but Mafengwo also suffered complaints from users in December of the same year, and did not refund users for February tickets even though the airline had agreed to free refunds. And there is more than one such complaint.
The development of OTAs is not smooth, and Mafengwo's advertising revenue is obviously constrained by traffic. According to data from Analysys, in the list of MAU (monthly active) TOP10 in the field of comprehensive travel booking in the third quarter of 2022, Mafengwo ranked fifth with 10.948 million, and the top four were Ctrip (114 million), Qunar (67.631 million), Fliggy (26.211 million) and Tongcheng (11.353 million).
Supply chain and traffic are unable to compete with OTA platforms, objective travel restrictions have reduced users' demand for in-depth content, and Mafengwo can only find another way.
At the end of 2020, Mafengwo launched the "North Star Raiders", which integrates and disassembles UGC travelogues into systematic and structured strategies in order to improve the efficiency of user information screening. Officially, Polaris Raiders has served 180 million travelers in one year of its launch. But the essence of this official strategy is still free content, and there is no new profit point at present.
The play project "Please get on the bus on the weekend", which was officially launched in July 2021, is another attempt by Mafengwo. All kinds of activities under the project are initiated by the manager, reviewed and released by the platform, and users can register freely. Compared with long-distance travel, local tours and peripheral tours are more in line with the needs of users in special periods and have higher frequency, so Mafengwo hopes to build weekend play scenes to attract users. Within half a year of the launch of the project, nearly 100 activities were held on the platform, with themes such as shop exploration, paddle boarding, diving, frisbee, script killing, reading club, etc.
According to the WeChat mini program "Fun Planet", which Mafengwo has launched for this purpose, 200,000 people have participated in related activities. Some users have repurchased 8 times in half a year, the users who paid the most have invested more than 10,000 yuan, and 33% of the users who participated in the activity are newly registered users. According to Heike Finance's observation, the unit price of weekend activities on Fun Planet from the evening of February 10 to February 12, 2023 ranges from 80-400 yuan, and each session has more than 4-10 people, but more than half of the activities are not full.
This obviously does not solve all the monetization problems of the hornet's nest. It can be seen that most of the owners of weekend activities are third parties outside the platform, including merchants, and the platform cannot guarantee the quality of the event and the user experience; There is no standardized process for different topics and types of activities, making it difficult to scale; The event is based only in the Beijing area, and the commission and development space are limited.
03
Where the pattern is going
Compared to integrated OTA platforms, the UGC community is notoriously difficult to monetize. Mafengwo is no exception, and international travel giant TripAdvisor is not immune.
Founded in February 2000, TripAdvisor is equivalent to the combination of domestic Dianping and Mafengwo, and its MAU has now exceeded 400 million. TripAdvisor has a complete community operation and point incentive system, users can review hotels, restaurants, attractions and other travel elements, or recommend food and drink in the form of travel notes.
Once favored by investors, TripAdvisor was listed on the NASDAQ in December 2011, and its market capitalization soared from $3.37 billion on its first day of listing in June 2014 to an all-to-date high of $15.1 billion. At the time, Priceline (later renamed Booking), the world's largest online travel company, was worth only $31.5 billion, although its latest market value has reached $96.5 billion.
The commercialization of TripAdvisor followed the same path of advertising and OTA, but the subsequent growth rate of advertising revenue gradually slowed down, and the transformation to a hotel booking platform was not successful. Feeling pressured, TripAdvisor launched a new business, Tripadvisor Plus, to sell members to solve the problem of high platform traffic but difficult monetization. This membership is priced at $99 per year and offers hotel discounts, room upgrades and more.
The business has been growing for more than two years and has not fundamentally changed TripAdvisor's position. According to the financial report, TripAdvisor's total revenue in the first three quarters of 2022 was $1.138 billion, a year-on-year increase of 72.16%, but its net profit fell to $22 million from $119 million in the same period of 2021. The change in stock price is more intuitive, and TripAdvisor's current market cap is only $3.398 billion.
Neither the size of users nor the volume of content can match TripAdvisor's short and long hornet's nest, and the situation will probably only get worse.
It must be mentioned here that in the years since the corporatization began in March 2010, the hornet's nest has been quite favored by capital. To be precise, since October 2011, Mafengwo has completed a total of five rounds of financing, with investors including Today Capital, Qiming Venture Capital, Hillhouse Capital, Temasek and other well-known institutions, with a cumulative amount of about 2.8 billion yuan. The latest round of financing took place nearly four years ago in May 2019, led by Tencent, followed by Transatlantic Capital Group and Yuantai Evergreen Fund, with an amount of US$250 million and a post-investment valuation of US$2 billion. However, as far as the current situation is concerned, it is difficult for Mafengwo to be listed in the short term, and even if it is listed, it is difficult to be optimistic.
The environment and operation strategy have made Mafengwo gradually lose its deep content advantage, and fragmented content such as notes cannot be compared with platforms such as Xiaohongshu - comprehensive platform content is more diverse, user scale and user stickiness make it more capable of creating trends, such as the popularity of frisbee sports. Pendant communities like Mafengwo can only follow suit.
Xiaohongshu is already promoting cultural tourism business. Although Xiaohongshu has not yet given a specific path, the magnitude of users and the ability to plant grass make it quite imaginative. In contrast, many users abandoned the hornet's nest and turned to Xiaohongshu, and the aforementioned bee leader Xiaoni is a typical example. Mu Qing, another bee leader, had a similar attitude. Mu Qing told Heike Finance that after becoming a full-time photographer in the first two years, he mainly worked on platforms such as Weibo and Xiaohongshu, and no longer operated a hornet's nest, because the hornet's nest could hardly bring revenue.
Short video platforms are also attacking with huge traffic. Taking Douyin as an example, Douyin has been connected to the travel business since July 2020, and since then it has not only launched projects such as travel lists launched in cooperation with OTA platforms such as Tongcheng and Fliggy, but also continued to explore the field through tentacles such as the embedded mini program "Mangosteen Travel". Whether traditional OTAs can be replaced aside, more and more users have accepted travel planting on platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou, and then go to OTA platforms such as Ctrip to book tickets and travel, and the presence of strategy communities such as Mafengwo has further declined.
In the past 3 years, the special environment has caused many platforms to cultivate content, but the horse's nest has no bright spots due to the limitations of the track, and the direction of progress is not clear. At the end of December 2022, Chen Gang, founder of Mafengwo, said in an interview with Shell Finance, a subsidiary of the Beijing News, that the impact on the tourism industry in the past three years was unprecedented, most of the company's business was in a state of stagnation, and the pragmatic goal for the market recovery in 2023 was that the overall revenue could recover to two-thirds of 2019.
This cautious attitude reflects the company's development. For comparison, in January 2023, Liang Jianzhang, chairman of the board of directors of Ctrip Group, said in an interview with CCTV's "Dialogue" that Ctrip had achieved tourism consumption of hundreds of billions of yuan before the epidemic, and hoped to do better in 2023 than before the epidemic, reaching 1 trillion yuan.
The content community is developing OTAs, and OTA platforms are increasing the amount of content. Ctrip has said that it will build a content ecosystem through different means such as travel photography, live broadcasting, reviews, and KOLs, while Fliggy plans to cultivate 3,000 travel industry experts. How the losing hornet's nest will gain a foothold is a big question of its survival.