Don’t blow not black
Wen 丨 Fang Hao
one
In 2005, Wu xinhong shut down the social networking site 520.com, which he had been doing for two years, and sought help from CAI Wensheng, a native of Quanzhou and the eldest brother of the domain name circle. Wu Xinhong 24 years old, CAI Wensheng than he round, the latter early through the domain name transaction to win the first bucket of gold in life. More importantly, at this time of CAI Wensheng has passed the domain name and webmaster these two circles, the initial establishment of their own flow rivers and lakes.
Rivers and lakes are the sum total of interest groups. When Mr. CAI first launched the China Webmaster conference in Xiamen in 2005, Mr. Lei and Mr. Zhou sat side by side, and Mr. CAI’s name was already on the shareholder lists of high-profile projects like Internet Express, 58.com and Eddonkey.
After Wu Xinhong joins, CAI Wensheng gives his first task is to do a search toolbar, namely later YOK super search. No matter how trivial the toolbar is, it is also an Internet product, which needs traffic in the first place. Where does the traffic come from? Huang yimeng’s electric donkey waited on. A lot of young young meat after 90 May know fast broadcast, few know electric donkey, because this is an 80 years old driver’s youth memories. In the world of Chinese Internet, the person who translates Traffic into Traffic is really a god.
The method of YOK traffic acquisition is the bundle: each download by the user through the bundle will be accompanied by the YOK installation package. In its first year, YOK has made tens of millions of dollars in advertising from the search giant, mostly in labor. Clearly, this is a business of lying down and making money.
Push new products in large flow platform, this is Wu Xinhong under CAI Wensheng’s first lesson. Mr. CAI later sold 265 to Google, but Google left the operation to Mr. CAI. The next two years wu Xinhong around 265 made nearly 30 new sites, basic difficult to reproduce YOK’s majestic wind. Is Shizuka not coquettish enough, or has Chubby tiger become more selective?
Neither. Lake rules have not changed, change is the flow platform. Around 2008, traffic on China’s PC Internet became increasingly concentrated, and all of it began to point to one animal: Tencent’s QQ. Wu xinhong found that many of the post-85 and post-90 generation like to send strange emojis and symbols when chatting on QQ. Why not make a text product that focuses on young people? In this way, in three days, Mars was online; Within a year, the number of users exceeded 40 million. This is China in 2007!
Later Wu Xinhong summarized the success of Mars, one of the reasons is: most users are through QQ chat know Mars, its spread of fission effect is very significant. Do flow products, first of all to choose the right flow platform, beautiful picture show show is also born in this way.
Mars text is explosive, but in essence it is just an input method plug, there is no flow stock, but no cash. Wu Xinhong asked CAI Wensheng how to do, CAI pointed out two ways: file compression and pictures. Wu xinhong did not hesitate to choose the picture. First of all, although decompression software was still in great market demand at that time, but compared with picture software, its product display space is much smaller, so the commercial imagination space is far less than the latter; More important is, the Wu Xinhong that learns art and plays photography one’s previous experience has natural good impression to the picture.
When Meitu Launched in October 2008, It already had more than 50 million users. The earliest users of Meitu came from The company, because the user groups of Meitu and Meitu naturally overlap. Two months later, Meitu topped 20 million users.
The iPhone had just been born, the mobile Internet was a few years away, and traffic was still on the PC. For CAI Wensheng, Wu Xinhong such an old gun son, of course, know not to hang on a tree in Mars. Where is the traffic the most ferocious? Is a download site that has been ignored by many people.
At that time, huajun, Sky and other well-known software download sites had a version upgrade recommendation area, that is, only the new version of the software can be recommended here. What many people don’t know is that this section is the most heavily trafficized part of the site, because users only like to download new software. This forced Wu Xinhong to update the version of Meitu xiu xiu almost every week, so as to ensure that Meitu will always be in the recommendation area. Traffic is everywhere, the key is your willingness to dig for it.
By the time the mobile Internet came, Meitu had already built a user base, and the only thing left was to overtake, become No.1 in this field, and build a huge product matrix. And all this flow starting point, from meitu xiu xiu – 90 after the United States girls do not know the flow of dad.
Ii.
In October 2010, Wu xinhong welcomed a new brother: Xiong Jun. The longyan native has just received angel investment from CAI Wensheng and Innovation Works to make a mobile phone assistant. As the rest of the story goes, Synsync, founded by Xiong jun, was eventually acquired by a Taiwan-listed company. As an entrepreneur, Xiong jun has had his successes, but also his regrets.
The regret came from his previous experience. Mr. Xiong, who was still working for a Taiwanese-owned company, bought his first iPhone in 2007 but found it impossible to copy functions such as photos and memos to the computer. In order to solve these problems, he wrote several small programs in his spare time, and began uploading them to Weifeng in October. Eventually, he gathered the functions of these tools together and developed a tool called iPhone PC Suite.
Within two months, the tool had amassed 200,000 users. Mr. Xiong was soon approached by someone who claimed to be a secretary to the board of a Hong Kong-listed company, offering to buy iPhone PC Suite for 100,000 yuan and inviting Mr. Xiong to join the company. Within three months of joining the company, Mr. Xiong had developed a new product based on the iPhone PC Suite.
By the second half of 2009, this product had become the first in the industry. At this time, the contradiction between the team and the company was intensified. Finally, Xiong Jun left the company. Then a vice president named Hu Zemin took over the team, and four years later, he sold the product to Baidu for $1.9 billion. Yes, the product is assistant 91, and the company that bought the iPhone PC Suite is Netdragon, a Fuzhou-based gaming company founded by Liu Dejian, and hu Zemin is one of his classmates in the United States.
In 1999, Determined to do a big business in artificial intelligence, Liu Dejian returned to China to start his own business. After his dream came true, he turned his business direction into helping people build websites. Two years later, as online gaming took off in China, Mr. Liu quickly created a client game called ‘Ghost Ranger,’ for which a point-and-click card seller paid 3 million renminbi. Mr. Liu’s first bonanza came quickly.
Even faster, online games helped the Chinese Internet usher in the first wind, chaos, traffic costs are constantly pushed up. Under the tuyere, Liu Dejian launched another industry media called 17173. The traffic revenue that companies get from Internet cafe players is transferred to Liu Dejian’s 17173. In 2003, 17173 was sold to Sohu for $20.5 million. That year CAI wensheng just began to study 123, ready to launch his own 265.
Netdragon launched a massive online game called “Demonic Domain” in 2006 and became Liu dejian’s cash cow, which continued until the sale of 91 and generated tens of millions of yuan a month.
From 17173 to 1991, from PC Internet to mobile Internet, Liu Dejian and Wang Long have been adhering to the same style of work: focus on the big, not the small. The outside world sees the success of 17173 and The Domain, but not the number of projects that support a public company. Of course, 17173 was one of the projects that came from behind the scenes to the front, as was later Assistant 91.
Assistant 91 is actually a “traffic mother ship”, around it, there are android Market, Panda Books, Panda, desktop 91 call show, 91 open platform, 91 mobile entertainment portal and so on. At the right time to find the flow of highland, and then cast a net everywhere, the formation of flow matrix, grassroots CAI Wensheng will, returned Liu Dejian will also.
The matrix is built. The key is where is the mothership flow? In 2011, when the iPhone began to reach the mass market in China, there was a crucial link between Apple and the consumer terminal: resellers. The assistant caught them in the first place.
At that time, 91 was nominally for users, but all the functional improvements were around dealers. At first a few dealers were able to make money with the 91 software, but by the time all dealers were using 91, they weren’t making any money. At this moment consumer lets agency to help install software again, they often can say very impatiently: you go home with 91 mobile phone assistant ok. 91 found the tipping point of the original flow.
In 2009, Netdragon tried to sell 91 Assistant separately, but the buyer offered to buy it as a package, but Netdragon did not agree. At the time, Mr. Liu said, Netdragon was like Innovation Works. How could Innovation Works possibly package up a project and sell it? After Baidu acquired 91, the more than 200 projects incubated by Netdragon were soon reduced to more than 10. With the mother ship gone, we must streamline our forces.
3
In 2013, when Baidu acquired 91, toutiao was valued at less than $500 million by another Longyan man. In other words, the $1.9 billion purchase price at the time would have bought almost five headlines.
So, people are surprised that today’s toutiao is valued at more than 20 billion dollars, surprised that today’s toutiao is doing everything.
Recently, toutiao’s decision to scoop up a big V from Zhihu has been widely circulated on wechat moments, which once again arouses the question: what on earth is Toutiao going to do? In just six months, Toutiao has made numerous enemies: in the field of information distribution, Toutiao vs. Baidu; Content creation: Toutiao VS wechat; Q&a, headlines VS Zhihu; Social, headlines VS Twitter; Short video field: Volcano small video + Douyin watermelon video VS Quick hand + second shot……
If Tencent’s enemies were mostly start-ups, Toutiao’s enemies are almost all giants. Is Zhang Yiming belligerent? Of course not. But because the flow of rivers and lakes is a road of no return: either be killed, or eat raw opponents.
At the end of 2011, Zhang left his position as CEO of 999 And began preparing byteDance. Bytedance is the registered company of Today’s Tiaotiao in the Ministry of Industry and Commerce. The company’s first product is not Toutiao, nor the connotation of jokes, but a joke product called Funny Jiong Pictures.
Zhang yiming’s logic is to quickly develop a product, quickly verify the market, all in if there is a sign of a popular style, and quickly push other products if there is no possibility. Fujian fellow CAI Wensheng and Wu Xinhong is such a beautiful picture show big family, and Zhang Yiming’s second product content is also so born.
The first version of Toutiao was launched three months later, in August 2012. At this point, the number of users of the content of the segment rose gratifyingly, and there was little competition. Toutiao, on the other hand, has a race track packed with giants: Sohu, netease, Sina, Baidu, Tencent… It is said that some time Zhang Yiming also talked to one of the giants of the acquisition, but they did not look at today’s headlines.
The critical moment, the connotation of the paragraph set a great success. As the user base overlaps so much, toutiao’s initial downloads are almost entirely content stories. At this time, another huge bonus is that Chinese mobile Internet users ushered in a huge wave of replacement, pre-installed to become a lot of start-up companies to overtake. At first, the giants looked down on pre-installation, thinking that their brands were big enough that handset manufacturers would choose them automatically.
But everything is business. The startups will offer low prices to the handset makers, who will be happy to make money. If you do not pay, you can exchange traffic with the manufacturer, that is, the startup company pushes the manufacturer’s APP in its own APP. Early toutiao, pre-installed from this channel to obtain a considerable number of users. Essentially, it’s the same number of ways as 91.
This is not the first time Zhang yiming has cast a net everywhere to find the popular money and trade traffic for traffic. In the two years of doing 99 Rooms, Zhang Yiming made no less than five products around this vertical real estate search engine, including palm renting, palm buying, etc., and harvested 1.5 million users at most. Like later many up very quickly, down and very fast similar mode, 99 room dry but chain home, Zhang Yiming flow method does not work.
It was only after today’s headlines that Zhang yiming found his mother ship. By this point, the joke had become a frigate, and the earlier joke was abandoned (it was discontinued in 2014). But a mother ship can’t just need a frigate, so here comes the video, wukong Quiz, celebrity certification… It didn’t make Bytedance, but it made headlines today. Who knows which crops sell for money?
boss
Half way through 2017, the Chinese Internet is dominated by two People from Fujian province. See recently Zhang Yiming every day headlines, Wang Xing will not be unfamiliar, because he is another leading role.
‘I don’t understand what Meituan is doing,’ Mr. Ma said. ‘It’s dangerous to blindly diversify without making a profit,’ Mr. Liang said. Similarly, Li Yanhong, Ma Huateng, Cao Guowei can also listen to Zhang Yiming. Horizontal expansion is the strongest sound of Wang Xing and Zhang Yiming in 2017. Two startups, valued at over $20 billion at the same time, are like wild animals swooping into a small village, raiding homes and houses. China’s Internet transition from BAT to AT, we thought that jiangshan permanent, did not think the 38th line had an accident.
When Zhang yiming left Fanfu in 2009, both he and Wang Xing were in a bad mood. Two longyan villagers, traveling north and starting a business, met in a windy mouth called social media, just ready to do a big job, the website was suddenly blocked. This kind of loss, no less than that young man from Xiamen was transferred to Ningde work. But Zhang also gained something: Wang’s “multitasking ability.”
In 2008, When Zhang Yiming was invited by Wang Xing to be in charge of technology in Fanfu, he was also working on several other websites such as Hainei. This was wang Xing’s “bundled development” again after the school was sold. Many people regard the school’s rise in 2005 as the first year of Wang Xing’s entry into China’s Internet. In fact, before that, he and Wang Huiwen had already built dozens of websites, basically changing places with one shot.
Later, zhang yiming was asked if he had changed jobs too often after graduation. Zhang Yiming said, I did not change the route (information recommendation), two did not change the state of work, even if the work is entrepreneurial mentality. In fact, this reply can also be applied to Wang Xing: In the seven years of entrepreneurial experience before 2010, Wang Xing never left the social track. As for entrepreneurial status, that has become a way of life.
Starting from Meituan, Wang Xing switched to O2O. This year is another seven years. From the earliest group purchase, to the later take-out, and then to the cinema, hotel, travel…… Wang xing seems to be in “multitasking mode” again. To put it bluntly, the flow of group buying is directed to takeout, the flow of takeout is directed to cinema, the flow of cinema is directed to hotel, the flow of hotel is directed to travel, repeated cycle. The cycle will crush the track, it will eat into other people’s traffic.
Zhang Yiming see in the eye, remember in the heart, but brave head of head also want to do so. Are Fujianese inherently aggressive? Of course not. Whether Toutiao or Meituan, the evolution into today’s situation, the most fundamental reason or the Internet traffic monopoly caused.
What was the most controversial period in Tencent’s 20-year history, when it made the most enemies? It was 2008 to 2010. Investors ask entrepreneurs, “What if Tencent also do you do?” It was born in that time. That was a period of time before the PC Internet came to dusk and the mobile Internet began, and the BAT pattern was already formed.
Tencent, in particular, has the most valuable traffic in China because it has the largest social network in the country. But this time PC traffic began to go down the trend, that is, the user incremental market is shrinking, we began to turn back to grab the stock market, who has a big site, who has stronger bargaining power, also can get more stock users at a lower cost. So Tencent at that time was hated, not only because of moral issues, but also because of the deep competition in the market. Live Lei Feng send warmth that is the welfare of the planned economy.
In fact, Meituan and Toutiao are a bit like Tencent in those days: the flow dividend of mobile Internet has come to an end, and the increment of users can be counted on one’s fingers, so they need to turn their guns to the existing market. However, unlike Tencent in those days, the mobile Internet has brought giants a larger incremental market after 2010, while today’s Meituan and toutiao will not see such a historic draught in the short term.
How to do? Change the core task of traffic from pulling new traffic to increasing daily activity. Meituan has more and more portals and more features in the headlines. On the surface, it is borderless diversification, but in fact, it can reach today’s stage without the mother ship: Meituan first relies on group buying and then on takeout, while Toutiao is qualified to expand its boundaries only by solving the mining of original traffic and accumulation of core traffic at the best time by relying on information. If you are hungry, you can’t learn, so can zhihu.
China’s Internet drama is just beginning, thanks to Hu Jianren.