As the Spring Festival of the Year of the Dragon is getting closer and closer, the flavor of the New Year is getting stronger day by day. As the most important festival of the year for Chinese, the Spring Festival has long been endowed with many meanings, and the leisure time brought by the long holiday has always been a fragrant food in the eyes of Internet manufacturers. Since the Spring Festival WeChat payment in 2014 and CCTV Spring Festival Gala reached a cooperation, with 500 million yuan of WeChat red envelopes bound to 200 million bank cards, it can be called a "surprise attack" Alipay battle.
After that, giving out red envelopes during the Spring Festival has officially become the standard configuration of Internet manufacturers, after all, "there is nothing in the world that cannot be solved by a red envelope, if there is, then send a few more".
However, after experiencing the Internet industry ceding the position of sponsor of the Spring Festival Gala to liquor brands in 2023, when it comes to the Spring Festival in 2024, domestic Internet manufacturers seem to have taken a 180° turn towards Spring Festival marketing. During this year's Spring Festival, it seems that major Internet companies suddenly stopped giving out red envelopes.
JD.com, which has become the exclusive interactive cooperation platform for the 2024 Spring Festival Gala, only announced that it will give away 100 million penny prizes in the form of lottery interaction. But just two years ago, JD.com, which became the exclusive interactive partner of the Spring Festival Gala for the first time, issued 4 rounds of red envelopes from January 24 (the twenty-second day of the lunar month), and brought red envelopes and goods worth 1.5 billion yuan. In fact, looking at the major Internet manufacturers now, it seems that only Alipay is still continuing to "collect five blessings", inviting netizens to share 500 million yuan in red envelopes on Chinese New Year's Eve.
Nowadays, even though the apps of various Internet manufacturers have been replaced with festive red, the words "XX billion" are rarely seen on ICON. Red packets are a traditional custom of the Chinese, in the field of mobile payment, the successor WeChat Pay with the "WeChat red packet" in the Spring Festival of 2014 staged a "sneak attack on Pearl Harbor", counterattack the dominant Alipay, after this battle, red packets have become a "network folklore" like existence, "There is nothing in the world that a red packet cannot solve." If there is, then send a few more. ”
The direct reason why the big Internet companies suddenly stopped giving out red envelopes may be that the potential of the Spring Festival has been almost exhausted in the past 10 years. I don't know if you have noticed that giving red envelopes to users during the Spring Festival is almost the patent of large Internet manufacturers, and small and medium-sized manufacturers often do not participate. Of course not, after all, the traffic generated during the Spring Festival is extremely abundant, but there is also a unique mechanism for sending red envelopes, because it is associated with payment. If there is no payment channel, the red envelope received by the user is only a voucher rather than real money.
Whether it is Alipay, WeChat, Douyin, Kuaishou, or JD.com, the big factories that were keen on sending red envelopes in the past have a strong willingness to promote the maturity of the payment business and then cut into Internet finance. The payment business is obviously not something that every Internet manufacturer can do, and often only large factories that want to build a closed business loop have the motivation to buy a payment license, and small and medium-sized manufacturers that lack payment business if they send red envelopes to users during the Spring Festival, it is tantamount to making wedding dresses for friends and businessmen.
Of course, the fundamental reason why many large factories no longer "scatter coins" is that the efficiency ratio of giving red envelopes itself is too low. At present, the market environment of the Internet industry is winter, and it is difficult to meet the needs of manufacturers by reducing costs and increasing efficiency, opening up sources and reducing expenditures.
The essence of Internet manufacturers giving out red envelopes during the Spring Festival is marketing, but this kind of marketing is different from advertising on other platforms to convert users in the past, and it is to use the special time node of the Spring Festival to send the money originally given to advertisers directly to users.
Taking Baidu in 2019 as an example, Baidu, as a sponsor of the Spring Festival Gala, took out 1 billion yuan to send red envelopes at that time, and the mobile phone Baidu did gain hundreds of millions of new users. But only on the fifth day of the new year, the data released by QuestMobile showed that the retention rate of mobile phone Baidu was only 2%. Kuaishou and Douyin, which have become partners of the Spring Festival Gala in 2020 and 2021, have not escaped this fate. Kuaishou's DAU rose to 280 million during the Spring Festival in 2020 and then fell to 250 million, while Douyin's DAU rose to 580 million during the Spring Festival in 2021 and then fell back to 500 million.
Obviously, the play of money can play the greatest role in the incremental era, and now the Internet industry has long been in the stock era. According to the 52nd Statistical Report on China's Internet Development released by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) in August last year, as of June 2023, the number of Internet users in mainland China has reached 1.079 billion, an increase of 11.09 million from December 2022, and the Internet penetration rate has reached 76.4%, compared with 75.6% in the previous statistics.
What is the price that a poor new netizen needs to pay if he wants to cut off his beard among a bunch of manufacturers? The tactics of holding high and fighting high, burning money to change the market, are no longer in place in the current Internet industry, and the major manufacturers prefer to spend 10 yuan to do 50 yuan rather than 50 yuan to do 15 yuan things. Therefore, the distribution of red envelopes has changed from "benefiting but not costing" to "paying but not benefiting", which is why Internet manufacturers are more pragmatic during this year's Spring Festival, and almost all related activities are carried out by relying on existing businesses, which has become very similar to the Double 11 period.
Looking at the Spring Festival activities of Internet manufacturers this year, the common feature is that "if you want to take it, you must give it first", and basically give coupons for their businesses, and attract users through subsidies. And the subtext of this is that only by becoming my user can I enjoy the corresponding benefits, which is obviously a 180° turn from the previous logic.
Internet vendors can't wait to attract users during the Chinese New Year, and now they want to make a fortune directly on the Chinese New Year.