Headline number, Baijia number, Penguin number, UC number ... Why are Internet companies betting on "content"?

A week ago, Zhihu, the Q&A platform, completed the A round of financing 1 billion USD, and officially entered the ranks of unicorns. Xin Xu, the founder and president of the lead investor Today Capital, did not accept media interviews, but chose to write his own answers on the Zhihu. She said that the whole investment was "decision-making quickly" because from the perspective of industry trends, "the spring of content has just begun"; From the company's point of view, Zhihu has been doing it for six years, and the content is "The moat is deep".

Most importantly, "the current traffic portal is content", Xin Xu said. Zhihu's value, or "imagination", is also here.

Maybe it can help you understand Xin Xu's words from another angle.

A * * * 127 people replied, "What do you think of Zhihu's completion of the D round of financing? In Xin Xu, Jeffrey of Tencent Investment Department, Yang Dong, Senior Partner of Safran Fund, and Hua Wang, Founding Partner of innovation works, ranked "downstairs". After these answers are quoted and edited by reporters and analysts, they will become different text contents and appear in news clients and WeChat friends circle. This is how these contents flow in the Internet world.

20 16 all internet companies that build content platforms are based on the logic that where users consume content, the traffic is there, and where the traffic is, the money is there. In the end, the competition becomes a competition for users' time-whether you spend a few limited hours every day watching Zhihu, visiting Taobao or watching a movie on a video website, it is very important for all Internet companies.

Today's headlines have only achieved one thing in four years: let 66 million people spend an average of 76 minutes watching news and videos every day. Now it is a company with a valuation of 60 billion, which makes Tencent and Baidu "very nervous".

Even the smartest minds in charge of these Internet giants have never imagined that today's headlines can affect the entire media and even Internet companies' views on content in such a rapid and subversive way. In the words of Zhang Yiming, the founder of today's headline: "The whole industry has been brought to the road of intelligent algorithm distribution by us."

In the past year, Internet giants have started all kinds of "numbers", from Baidu and UC to Penguin and JD.COM. Their models are similar: establishing a content platform to attract content producers to settle in, matching user interests and content through algorithms, and realizing commercial realization through accurate advertising.

Tool applications that once emphasized that users are "used up" also want to catch users by content under the general trend that mobile Internet traffic dividends are exhausted. Cheetah spent $57 million to acquire News Republic, a French company with several news content copyrights, and launched live broadcast and game applications in the United States. The UC browser was renamed as "UC", which should be a "new media platform" with the help of the content system of Ali Entertainment. Even Tencent's QQ browser has begun to distribute push content. When search engines no longer become the "portal" of the mobile era, Baidu also tries to attract more traffic by using content outside the search box. In just a few months, the "Baijiahao" business has established a team of hundreds of people.

Under the radical content strategy of internet companies, problems have also been exposed. Both manufacturers and advertisers are puzzled by the new rules of the game. They need better education and treatment. This problem needs to be solved after the horse race. Everyone wants to seize the "mobile digital gold" of content, but don't forget that it may be very valuable or very hot.

Fu Sheng's Anxiety and Change

In August last year, Fu Sheng held a small media communication meeting at Beijing Cheetah Mobile Headquarters.

As the share price plummeted when the last quarter's earnings report was released three months ago, it once fell below the issue price. Reporters generally believe that this is a "vaccination" before the release of the second quarter earnings report. Such meetings often end in an unpleasant way. Fu once again explained the value of tools and traffic, and the voice of questioning that cheetahs can't make money in media reports will still be the mainstream.

However, the meeting went well, and Fu Sheng did not continue to emphasize the value of tools as before. In fact, in the whole speech and media questions, the word "tool" only appeared 18 times, while the word "content" appeared 58 times.

He first admitted the problems encountered by cheetahs: our overall traffic problem is not big, and our liquidity has declined. Due to the decline in mobile advertising growth brought by Facebook, the most dependent partner of Cheetah overseas, the overall growth has dropped from 100% to 20%.

Fu Sheng wants to convey a new message to the media: the way to realize advertising traffic by tool attributes is really unreliable in the long run. However, the tool itself is of strategic significance. Cheetahs reach users through tools and extend the time through content, so that users can get what they want faster, faster and more accurately, which is the next thing.

In short, Cheetah will transform from a tool company to a company that "connects global content". Or in a more official way: tools are the entrance, content is the core, and big data is the highland.

Behind the change is Fu Sheng's anxiety. In the past three years, Cheetah has accumulated 600 million active users in overseas markets, but the business of selling traffic advertisements is getting worse and worse. At the same time, the business of "content" is booming.

The content mentioned here includes not only pictures and texts in the traditional sense, but also rich media forms such as video, music and live broadcast. The crazy growth of Yingke and today's headlines in the past year has made Fu Sheng see the opportunity.

Press Republic

He spent $57 million to acquire a French company, News Republic, whose core asset is the copyright authorization of thousands of news organizations around the world. After getting these "contents", cheetahs recommend different articles to different users through machine algorithms, which sounds like the overseas version of "Today's Headlines". Previously, Cheetah launched Live.me in the United States, signed a star anchor on Youtube, and started an overseas version of "Yingke".

With the huge number of users of Cheetah Cleanup Master and the overseas promotion experience in recent years, the first step of these new applications after the launch (revision) went smoothly.

According to App Annie's data of last year 10, Live.me became the best-selling social category in Google App Store in the United States that month, and ranked in the top five in Apple App Store in the United States. News Republic also ranked third in the download list of American news magazines in June last year at 5438+ 10.

"Why do we attach so much importance to content products? Because brand advertising is very effective. It will be very difficult for you to do it with a tool today. " Fu Sheng said at the media sharing meeting.

There is also a UC browser that has the same idea as Fu Sheng. Two weeks after Fu Sheng met with the media, UC Browser, which just celebrated 12 birthday, officially announced its new strategy. "UC Browser" was renamed as "UC" and upgraded from a traditional browser tool product to a "big data new media platform".

After removing the "browser" label that has been used for 12 years, it is also the embarrassment of UC as a positioning tool. "Your pure tool browser has no brand tonality, and then emphasizes fast and saves traffic. Now it is no longer possible to impress users. " Zhou Mo, general manager of UC business market of Ali Culture Group, told Tencent Technology.

Also released an independent information application called "UC Headline". "In the past 12 years, UC has been doing things that connect people and information. In the past, we looked for information. Now is the era of content explosion, and you help users find valuable information in fragmented time. " Zhou Mo believes that there is no contradiction in UC's content. At the same time, he also said that information flow can attract brand advertisements more than site traffic advertisements, and can also achieve accurate advertising.

"A large number of content and industries are undergoing a very important change, from people looking for content to content looking for people." In April last year, Yu Yongfu, president of Alibaba's mobile business group, concluded at the launch conference of Alibaba's new ecological strategy for information services at the Global Mobile Internet Conference.

He Xiaopeng, president of UC, Ali Mobile Group, mentioned the other side of the market: the app store began to decline, which only brought new activation to the head application. For UC with more than 400 million active users, with the slowdown of smartphone sales, it has gradually touched the "ceiling" of user increment.

The traffic dividend is gradually disappearing. Both Fu Sheng and Yu Yongfu seem to announce to us that the future of tool applications may not get better. The transformation is imminent, and the content platform has become a new bet direction.

20 million official WeChat accounts and today's headlines.

Internet companies' interest in making content has greatly increased, starting from the summer of four years ago.

20 12 August, a news application named "Today's Headlines" was launched. The developer Zhang Yiming gave the company a futuristic name-ByteDance. The science student hopes to use "beating bytes"-a machine algorithm to decide what news everyone watches.

In the same month, WeChat launched its own content public platform. Enterprises, institutional media and even individuals can set up an official WeChat account to make and publish what they want to publish-an article, a picture or a video. Through the subscription and sharing of WeChat users, these contents can appear and flow in the timeline of friends circle.

In the next four years, these two products have subverted the way people consume content from the production end and the distribution end respectively. Their success brought two fashionable concepts-"self-media" and "personalized recommendation", which provided the direction and soil for the "content craze" of Internet companies.

Before today's headlines and WeChat official accounts appeared, portals such as Sina and Tencent had turned the "squares" in newspapers and magazines into hyperlinks. The rise of Weibo has produced countless "official Weibo", and people's consumption of news has changed from offline browsing to online browsing, and then transferred to mobile phones with the launch of their own applications. But the decision-making power of content production and distribution is still in the hands of a few people.

Editors and reporters of magazines and newspapers decide what to write, and websites and micro-editors decide when, where and how to show these contents to readers. No matter whether you are facing 100 or 100 million readers, everyone consumes the same content.

Zhang Yiming believes that there is a huge information asymmetry. Everyone's age, growing environment, social class and personal interests will lead to different news content that everyone is interested in and wants to watch. It is supposed to push different news for everyone, and what he cares about most is his "headline".

Tagging articles with machines, tracking users' reading behaviors and habits, and then matching with algorithms. No one expected that finding and filling the user demand of "watching the news", which sounds extremely simple, would become a billion-dollar business.

According to the latest data released by Today's Headline, the number of active users of Today's Headline has exceeded 666 million, and people spend more than 1 hour (76 minutes) on it every day, which has surpassed news clients such as Sina and Sohu. The company's latest valuation is as high as 60 billion, nearly twice the market value of Sina and one-seventh that of Baidu.

If today's headlines give readers the right to decide what to watch, then what WeChat official account does is to put the pen directly in the hands of every ordinary person. Its appearance has a greater impact on the original media content ecology.

Wu Xiaobo, a financial writer, said that in the process of writing a column for more than ten years, he became very anxious in the last few years. Because he received fewer and fewer letters from readers, he didn't know who the readers were and what they were thinking. It seems that the article has nothing to do with itself from the moment it is sent from the mailbox.

So three years ago, he stopped all columns and started the "Wu Xiaobo Channel" on the official WeChat account. He said his original intention was simple: to find his readers.

We don't know whether the 2.2 million subscribers of Wu Xiaobo Channel include all his former readers. But what is certain is that when he stood on the stage of the program at the end of 20 16 and talked about "celebrity economy on the internet" and "knowledge realization" as a successful entrepreneur, his voice lost with the decline of paper media reappeared with the official account of WeChat.

Four days later, 890 Company, the main operator of Wu Xiaobo Channel, announced the completion of Series A financing of 65.438+0.6 billion yuan, with a valuation of 2 billion yuan. This valuation even exceeds the "Luo Ji thinking". A month ago, it completed the B round of financing with a valuation of 65.438+32 billion yuan, and Luo Zhenyu was also the one who urged Wu Xiaobo to open WeChat official account two and a half years ago.

From the commercial point of view, Wu Xiaobo and Luo Zhenyu are undoubtedly the winners in this "self-media" tide. Their business routes are also very similar: by providing content with strong personal labels (including text, voice and video) to build brands and gather fans. Then sell these fans more things-maybe a hardcover business book or a bottle of plum wine.

Compared with these, what the public platform provides to those individuals with writing ability is more attractive: a platform for establishing social relations, sharing and realizing mechanisms. "No matter how small an individual is, he has his own brand." More and more people are beginning to understand the meaning of this slogan and the business opportunities behind it.

By the end of 20 15, the number of official WeChat accounts had exceeded100000. A large number of media people and advertising practitioners separated from the original institutions to operate their own official WeChat accounts. The right to speak in the media, which was originally in the hands of a few organizations, has been broken, and the rules of content production have been broken. Content is produced and consumed in an unprecedented amount and speed, and then spread through social networks into 6.5438+ million+.

What the media brings is the great richness and diversification of content production, which just gives the opportunity to show the difference between today's headlines and portal content. In 20 13, today's headline launched the "Today's headline media platform", which was later the "headline number".

"Headlines" do things similar to WeChat official accounts, inviting media, institutions and self-media to settle in and produce high-quality content. The difference is that today's headline machine algorithm can "help you find people who are interested in you" and make accurate push. For example, if you are a professional military writer, your articles are more likely to be pushed to those who read a lot of military news in the headlines.

"WeChat official account" has spawned more content producers than before, and "headline number" provides a ready-made and verified commercial realization model.

In the past year, Internet companies launched various numbers: UC, JD.COM, Baijia and Netease, which almost copied the headline number model. Inviting organizations and self-media open accounts to produce content, then personalized recommendation to users through algorithms, and finally commercialization through accurate advertising.

The whole market looks very lively.

Baidu's lateness and self-confidence

Baidu announced that it will spend 654.38+00 billion yuan to encourage content creators.

Fu Sheng called the transition from PC to mobile a transition from "forefinger era" to "thumb era", and the biggest change of this transition is that search is becoming less and less important.

In the PC era, search is the core mode for users to obtain content. Whoever occupies search will occupy the most important traffic portal. This is why Baidu is so strong that 360 and Tencent want to do search. In the mobile era, the way people get content has changed from active keyword search to passive acceptance of accurate recommendation, which has also contributed to the rise of today's headlines.

Many people, including Fu Sheng, believe that the model represented by today's headlines is a kind of "new search". Therefore, in the growth process of today's headlines, Baidu is undoubtedly the one with the most sense of crisis.

Once, Baidu was the one closest to today's headlines.

At the 20 1 1 Baidu World Congress, Li Yanhong announced a major revision of Baidu's homepage. The core of this revision is to put more things outside the original single search box.

For example, "URL navigation" will directly display the websites frequently visited by users under the search box by recording the user's web browsing data; "Real-time Hotspot Search Billboard" will directly show what people are searching for according to real-time search data. When the user logs in, the homepage will also directly display the Baidu user personal center.

These changes all point to the same direction: Baidu's homepage is changed from "one thousand people" to "one thousand people", and users can find the information they want more conveniently and efficiently through active display and intelligent recommendation. In the words of Li Yanhong, it is "one person, one world". These are the rudiments of the concepts of "machine distribution" and "personalized recommendation".

"In fact, everyone is doing the same thing now, which is how to make content distribution more efficient." Xu, general manager of Baidu Baijiahao, told Tencent Technology. He joined Baidu in 2005 and was in charge of Baidu's public relations and marketing business before taking over Baijiahao business in June this year.

Before joining Baidu, Xu was a reporter of Southern Newspaper Group and was sent to Iraq as a war correspondent in 2003. He said, unexpectedly 12 years later, he came back after a big circle and started from scratch.

Although there is no need to worry about being hit by shells, this newly established new business is no easier than fighting. In April this year, Baidu CEO Li Yanhong said that he would personally pay attention to the construction of Baidu's content ecology. In a sense, Baidu has become the "hacksaw ridge" of this content campaign, and it is a highland that must be won.

Baidu did give Xu a lot of "green lights". For example, in the case of freezing the recruitment of social organizations for three years, 100 companies were allowed to recruit talents freely inside and outside, and a team of more than 100 people was formed in less than three months. Among them, technicians account for more than 50%.

Maybe the online time is too short. When it comes to data, Xu always chooses to ignore or use the vague term "rapid growth". He even thinks that paying too much attention to these data is a wrong way of thinking, although he admits that he sometimes compromises with the general evaluation system of this industry.

"Now there is a misunderstanding. Everyone is watching the traffic, watching the users, and watching the realization. These are all platform-level things. In fact, the core is the technical model, that is, whether your user portrait and content label are accurate enough. " Xu told Tencent Technology.

Xu believes that the competition among companies is still in a very primary stage. Although Baidu entered relatively late, its technological advantages can help Baidu recover its disadvantages and even catch up with all its competitors.

As a search engine company, it has always been Baidu's most important job to reprocess, label and establish an index database through word cutting and word segmentation technology. This has also become the biggest confidence of Baidu to be a hundred brands.

"The same user's portrait of him, from the label dimension, there may be dozens of portals, hundreds of Weibo, and thousands of search engines." Xu Jiye said, "The clearer the granularity, the clearer your understanding of users, and the better you can recommend content."

Xu believes that the importance of Baijiahao to Baidu is also reflected in that it makes up for a disadvantage of Baidu on the mobile side. In the PC era, all content exists through "hyperlinks", and Baidu can completely crawl through reptiles. On the mobile side, the content is scattered in various applications, and you can't easily get it through traditional search methods.

At present, the most important display place of Baijiahao is the area below Baidu search box of mobile phone. Xu said that it is not convenient to disclose specific traffic data, only saying that it is "much bigger than we thought".

Moat and foam

Luo Beibei, the founder of the official WeChat account "Serious Gossip", has received many invitations from content platforms in the past two years, but in the end they only chose two of them: Today's headlines and Daily Express.

Although she has been a "tuba" with millions of fans, she still doesn't want to focus too much on things other than content. So far, she is not sure why she recommended an article, and she doesn't want to know about those complicated platform advertising sharing schemes.

"Without a clear return mechanism, I won't settle in. Many platforms are not prepared to pay the author seriously. " Luo Beibei told Tencent Technology. She refused to disclose the exact amount of platform advertising to us.

Don't understand the recommendation mechanism, low reading is the most confusing thing when many media talk to us about these content platforms. Take "serious gossip" for example. An article entitled "Gigi Lai listed her brother's company, and she is actively moving towards sunshine no matter how hard life is" has an official account of 65438+ million on WeChat, but among the headline numbers with 865438+ million fans, the reading volume is only 64 1.

A car self-media person who did not want to be named told Tencent Technology that he had zero reading of several articles on multiple platforms, which made him speechless. Even if you read tens of thousands of articles, the final advertising share is "very small". Another official WeChat account with more than 200,000 fans said from the media that the operation of two "numbers" just stopped last month because "the reading volume is really pitiful".

"When the platform pulls you, it will always say that if there is one more platform, the income will be one more point. But he didn't tell you that this income may be tens or hundreds of dollars per month. " The person in charge of the above-mentioned film and television industry from the media told Tencent Technology.

Even those self-media people who keep multi-platform updates almost only copy one content to each platform, which on the other hand leads to the homogenization of platform content. We seem to be back to the question of "chicken and eggs".

Vulgar content and title party are another widely questioned issue on the content platform. Especially when interviewed by Caijing reporter in Zhang Yiming, he said that technology should be neutral and the platform should not carry values.

Xu believes that it is "irresponsible" to say that technology does not need values. "For example, if a child comes to ask you what you want to eat, and you have no values, you give him what he wants. What he wants to eat most must be sugar, and then keep giving him sugar."

He believes that Baidu will mainly push two things to readers, one is the best quality content you are interested in. The other kind is some interesting news in the life circle that you will never contact, such as some sub-cultural phenomena. Behind this, we need to add the editor's values and thinking to the algorithm, so that the machine can serve the editor's thinking. However, in the process of using multiple smart distribution applications, the difference between content and recommendation is not significant enough.

Advertisers expressed their concerns from another angle. A brand that has made a six-month online plan for today's headlines is worried that such a long period will not always bring enough new users to it. "It will always be seen by the same people in the future." This is an unavoidable problem for all such platforms.

A senior executive of a large advertising company told us that we would be cautious about these intelligent distribution platforms when making a launch plan for our customers. "Some quotations are very high, and the advertising effect of some platforms is not as good as they say, or even much worse." He said.

Advertisers have shown greater interest in information flow advertisements and video advertisements, and many platforms, including today's headlines, are increasing their investment in these two types of advertisements.

Video, especially short video, is considered as the "next vent". In the past year, the total financing of various short video-related entrepreneurial projects exceeded 5 billion.

Short video is also a new track for these distribution platforms to compete next. Zhao Tian, Senior Vice President of Headline Today, revealed at the press conference of the new list of 20 17 on June 7, 2006 that the average daily broadcast volume of headline video information today exceeded1200 million, an increase of 605% over last year, far higher than the increase of 87% in graphics and text.

This year, today's headlines announced that 654.38 billion yuan will be used to subsidize short video producers. Xu also said that starting from this year, Baijiahao will soon make big moves on short videos.

It is worth noting that short videos are more expensive than pictures and words. How to sell more advertisements and bring more real income to creators instead of relying on subsidies may be a more urgent problem to be solved.