Image source@Visual China
Text: New Media Science and Technology Review
Recently, major mainstream media have reported that Huawei has suspended its cooperation with China's three major automotive portals (Knowing Chedi, BitAuto.com, and Autohome).
According to the Financial Associated Press, a source close to Huawei revealed that this move is because the original cooperation agreement between Hongmeng Zhixing and some platform member stores has expired, and the business cooperation of member stores will be suspended until the new business negotiation is agreed, and other cooperation businesses are still carried out normally.
Generally speaking, the price of media platform cooperation does change from year to year, and it is not uncommon for brands and distributors to negotiate prices with the platform. But the problem is that Huawei, as a leading car company, should have negotiated the cooperation agreement between the two parties as early as possible, and even if it was not negotiated, it would not be completely withdrawn from the website immediately.
Therefore, Huawei's suspension of cooperation with the three major automotive portals at this time is inevitably reminiscent of Yu Chengdong's anger about understanding the "winter test" of the car emperor. Liangzi has been settled, can there be good cooperation between new energy vehicle companies and traditional automobile portals?
Who is the "authority" on automotive testing?
At the beginning of December, the automotive portal "Know Che Di" released a series of videos called "2023 Know Che Di Winter Test", which tested the pure electric range of a number of hybrid models.
Among the 19 models tested, the Yangwang U8 topped the list with an achievement rate of 85.1%, while the M7 extended range version ranked last with a completion rate of 31.60%. In terms of overall rankings, BYD's four models all ranked first, while many models of Wenjie, Geely and Great Wall ranked lower.
For such test results, many car companies said they did not accept it, and Yu Chengdong, chairman of Huawei's intelligent vehicle solution BU, directly angered in the circle of friends that this was a "test of pit people".
Immediately afterwards, Great Wall Motor's official blog and Geely's senior vice president Yang Xueliang also questioned the test, and Yang Xueliang bluntly said that such a test was "unscientific, not rigorous, and the conclusions were not convincing".
As a non-professional media, it is difficult to judge whether the results of this "winter test" are rigorous, but sorting out the doubts of all parties mainly focuses on the test preparation stage.
For example, the official Weibo of Wenjie Automobile said that the test vehicle carried out air conditioning and heating and opened and closed doors and windows more than ten times before the official test, which greatly increased the energy consumption of air conditioning and led to a rapid decline in electricity. In addition, before the start of testing, the vehicle had only 74.0% battery and was equipped with four 60kg sandbags.
Subsequently, the car emperor responded, saying that the test standards treat all models equally, and the second public "winter test" was opened a few days later. However, in terms of test results, there is still a big gap between the two "winter tests" results, such as the difference of nearly 40 kilometers in the range of the two tests of the U8.
Of course, different test conditions and test environments may bring completely different test results. For this reason, when unofficial organizations release test results, they need to consider not only whether the test standards are uniform, but also how credible the test results are.
On the one hand, since the self-media is not an official organization, this means that no one can supervise its testing standards and test quality, and whether there are problems such as test results being driven by interests is a complete "vacuum area".
On the other hand, even if the test results are fair and open, the self-media is not an official organization after all, but a third-party commercial platform, and the head platform relies on its own influence to "test" and thus influence consumers' purchase decisions, which is not fair enough.
Therefore, there are many car companies at the end of the "winter test" list that have jumped out to question the platform, but then again, not only understand the car emperor, but also the car vertical portals such as Yiche.com and Autohome can have today's influence, in fact, it is still given by car companies.
Car portals manipulating traffic?
Among the three major automobile portals, BitAuto and Autohome are old rivals who love and kill each other. The two were established only 4 years apart, and the founders of the two platforms also chose to leave their businesses, with Li Bin, the founder of BitAuto.com, who created NIO, and Li Xiang, the founder of Autohome, who created the ideal.
As the pioneers of the "new forces", NIO and Li have been fighting each other, and similarly, BitAuto and Autohome have been constantly adjusting their models and competing for traffic in the past 20 years of development.
The earlier establishment of Bitcar was the first to position itself as an advertising company for Internet marketing services, helping merchants to place automobile-related advertisements, while Autohome, a later entrant, focused on content from the beginning, attracting advertising and monetizing through the content collection and editing of automobiles.
With the continuous development of the Internet market, the two major platforms have gradually realized that relying solely on content to achieve realization, this business model will eventually usher in a bottleneck, only to the pre-sale, sale, after-sale chain penetration and development, the platform can better grasp the industry's right to speak, so the two platforms began to intervene in the transaction link in 2014.
In 2016, BitAuto received investment from Baidu, Tencent, and JD.com, while Ping An Group also began to take a controlling stake in Autohome in the same year, and after joining forces with Capital, the two platforms were able to further develop in the fields of content, trading, and finance.
For example, in 2021, BitAuto opened up the Tencent ecosystem and was able to appear in scenarios such as WeChat Jiugongge and Video Account, while Auto Self-driving began to extend its business to the fields of trading, finance and car owner services with the help of Ping An's financial advantages.
In 2017, Knowing Chedi was spun off from Toutiao, backed by Toutiao's strong algorithm and financial strength, Knowing Chedi not only has traffic advantages, but also directly enters the offline automobile trading market. It can be seen that although the establishment of Chedi is shorter, from the day of its birth, it has been a strong opponent enough to compete with Yiche.com and Autohome.
Bitauto.com, Autohome, and Chedi are backed by different capitals, and also have similar origins and relationships with the automobile market. Therefore, although the car portals do not manufacture or sell cars, they are closely related to the interests of car manufacturers and car dealers.
As a content platform, the car portal has mastered the traffic and algorithms, and through years of continuous content output, the car portal has long occupied the minds of consumers. Just like Ctrip and Qunar are the first choice for air tickets, and Taobao and JD.com are the first choice for shopping, consumers will also prefer vertical car portals if they want to know about car information.
As a traffic entrance, the automobile portal has already opened up the entire sales link of "data-content-diversion-sales-finance". The portal attracts users to browse through the content, and when the user is willing to buy a car, it is directly connected to the relevant dealership through the website, which is a common service in the Internet era.
As a part of the capital, there is also a huge amount of user data behind the three major portals. For example, Autohome, which is backed by Ping An Group, has more than 150 million registered users on the Ping An Auto Insurance app "Ping An Good Car Owner".
Autohome has estimated that at least 60%~70% of the users who buy new energy vehicles are additional purchasers and replacement users, and car insurance users are very accurate potential customers, and this part of the customer source will be directly diverted through online.
According to the "2023 H1 China Mobile Internet Traffic Semi-annual Report" released by iResearch, Autohome occupies the first place in the automotive information industry with a scale of more than 57 million users, while the gap between the scale of BitAuto and Chedi is not large, and the combined market share of the three major portals is close to 85%.
No matter how consumers choose, there is a high probability that they will not be able to bypass the "content wall" built by these three platforms, but their strong position in the market has gradually caused more dissatisfaction among car manufacturers and dealers.
In 2018, Autohome was boycotted by many second-hand car dealers and removed from the shelves because it was going to adjust to a billing model based on leads. Some dealers said that Autohome used to charge a daily fee, but after adjusting the consumption model, the cost of car dealers will rise sharply to 10 times.
In 2023, the three major platforms have adjusted the annual fee for dealer membership, with the increase of 44% for Autohome, 39% for BitAuto, and 93% for Chedi. To this end, the automobile chambers of commerce in many places call on member units to suspend the renewal of contracts with various automobile platform operators, and wait for the chambers of commerce to negotiate a suitable price.
New energy vehicle companies are reluctant to bow their heads for traffic
Considering the large amount of car consumption, consumers are often more inclined to listen to the opinions of professional platforms, in this context, not any social platform or big V can mention the value of the car portal, because of this, the car portal can firmly control the content, traffic, and even after-car consumption of the automotive industry.
Some industry insiders have commented that this is caused by the "food chain" of the automotive industry, and the portal network has mastered the core traffic channel of automobile sales, and car companies must strike a balance in the process of cooperation, and blocking the portal channel is equivalent to blocking themselves.
In the final analysis, the relationship between car companies and portals depends on the word "traffic". However, with the rise of new energy vehicles, they have gradually become the best at "getting traffic" of the new generation of car companies.
For example, when car companies fell into the "winter test" public relations crisis, many car companies chose to directly post a reply, and the official WeChat account of Wenjie even dismantled the test process in detail and left it to consumers to judge.
For the cruising range that consumers care about the most, Li Bin of Weilai directly started a 14-hour self-driving live broadcast from Shanghai to Xiamen, in order to verify that the 150-degree semi-solid-state battery pack developed by NIO has a range of 1,000 kilometers.
In the past countless new car releases and public relations incidents, the heads of car companies, official platforms, and legal departments have all left their own traffic and responded by themselves.
In addition to online traffic, most of the new energy vehicle companies have their own channels, and will also establish private domain traffic pools by participating in exhibitions, setting up exhibitions in shopping malls, and co-dealers, etc., and their dependence on traditional automotive portals is not as high as imagined.
This phenomenon is also reflected in the operating performance of the automobile portal, taking Autohome as an example, its lead service revenue fell from 3.275 billion yuan in 2019 to 2.988 billion yuan in 2021, and only rose slightly to 3.057 billion yuan in 2022.
With the emergence of more and more media channels, the influence of automotive portals has begun to decline, and Huawei's suspension of cooperation with the three major portals may also become a fuse affecting the entire automotive media industry pattern.
Times have changed, and if new energy car companies can communicate directly with consumers without middlemen, there will naturally be no price difference. Although Huawei may not completely end its cooperation with the three major portals, this "small dispute" may promote the portals to adopt a more open and fair evaluation method, and will also lead to reflection on the credibility of self-media, so that the entire automotive industry will move towards a healthier and more sustainable development.