The future has come, but everything is changing and everything is in transition. When Tencent was drawn into the traditional media array, today’s headlines are not far from history. The funny headlines, though low-key, seem to have taken the future into the bag. From the content provider to the channel provider, from the social attributes to the blockchain unlimited links, how do you imagine the future?
Talking about any kind of marketing change today is inseparable from the Internet. After all, this is an Internet age. The biggest impact of the Internet on marketing is that it changes the foundation of marketing—the role and status of customers in the entire product value chain. The foundation has changed and the whole building will naturally be different.
It is from such a point of view that we use the “Today’s headlines” and “fun headlines”, two successful winners of the Internet era, to compare and analyze, and try to outline the evolution of customers in the product value chain. Furthermore, it illustrates three important marketing changes in the Internet era: (1) the Internet allows consumers to have information rights and personalized services become standard; (2) the Internet allows consumers to have the right to disseminate and make customers become self-media; (3) The Internet allows consumers to have community rights and make customers a self-channel.
Today’s headline: Giving information power to readers
In the early days of the development of mobile Internet news information, Netease News, Sohu News, Tencent News occupied an absolute dominance. These three major online media can basically be said to be the Internet of paper media, and most of its content is from paper media. of. As a result, the three major Internet media have not shaken the status of traditional media, but have become the most useful supplement to traditional media.
Today’s headlines are very different.
Founded in 2012, today’s headlines have been leaping forward since its launch. Today, there are about 700 million registered users, and the daily active users are over 100 million. The latest valuation is as high as 50 billion US dollars. It has become a unicorn in the news and information industry.
There is data to prove that it was not long before it was established. Today’s headlines began to emerge and completely broke the three unique situations. By 2015, it became the second largest news information app, second only to Tencent.
What we are concerned about is: What is the reason for today’s headlines?
The rise of today’s headlines coincided with the wave of popularization of smartphones in China. Different from the traditional three major online media, the key to its success lies in its personalized recommendation. It can accurately analyze the user’s interest points based on the user’s social behavior, reading behavior, age, gender, occupation and other factors. Accurately achieve “more understanding of users than users.”
As a user’s evaluation: “The success of today’s headlines is that the content is updated quickly, the text is simple, easy to understand, there is no so-called expert talk, and there are so-called personal tags to actively recommend your favorite content.” And these It is difficult for traditional online media to do.
More importantly, today’s headlines have created a new system of incentive content production, which has become one of the largest self-media author platforms in China. At the end of 2015, today’s headline proposed a “Thousands of People” subsidy program, announcing at least 1,000 high-quality headlines to receive no less than 10,000 yuan in monthly income from the platform. In 2016 and 2017, it began to subsidize short videos. The current popular “vibrate” is the short video platform of today’s headlines.
Today’s headlines are obviously well prepared and extremely strategic. There is only one Goku question and answer. In the year, 5,000 well-known respondents are signed with 500 million yuan, and the remaining 5 billion yuan is used to send red packets to ordinary people. Another example is the “micro-headline” to give big V support, the goal is to create an account of 1000 million fans.
These practices are based on the Tencent public platform, which only receives annual inspection fees, and only the content police, without any input, and the ideals of high and low perspectives.
In a word, the mobile Internet gives today’s headline opportunities: first, it can serve customers one-to-one, so that customers can have a better experience; second, it can empower the media, so that customers can also become content. The creator, and thus get paid.
It is these two points that created the miracle of today’s headlines, but also made it surpass the traditional three major online media. The reason is very simple, the traditional three media based on PC computers, and today’s headlines based on smart phones, are not on one level.
Interesting headline: Let customers become self-channels (community rights)
It seems that there is no chance for the fun headline to be online in June 2016, because the content service has already been very competitive.
But the fact is that the headline has torn apart and become the content service provider after the headlines today. It surpasses the traditional three major online media. At the end of 2017, there were more than 70 million registered users and 10 million daily active users. In March 2018, the headline announced the completion of more than $200 million in financing, with a valuation of over $1.6 billion.
Now we have to ask, why is the fun headline successful?
First of all, the target customers of the interesting headlines are located in the third, fourth and fifth tier cities, which is the new Internet population that has been active in recent years. This part of people just came into contact with the Internet, but when they came up, they were mobile Internet. They have not seen Sina, Netease News, and have not seen today’s headlines, they want anecdotes and entertainment.
Of course, this is not the main reason for the success of the interesting headline. The most important thing is that the funny headline introduces the “micro-business mechanism”, which raises the user’s reading behavior to the platform value and rewards this value with monetary reward. Through the recruitment, through the task, through the activities, successfully created a special “money making system”, and used the subsidy in this “money making” behavior, creating a unique marketing mechanism.
The task reward mechanism of the fun headline incentive mechanism is mainly divided into daily tasks and novice tasks.
There are a total of ten tasks in the daily tasks. There are roughly two types of tasks: (1) Apprentice mechanism. Invite a friend to register and make it an apprentice. The gold coins created by the future apprentice will be automatically assigned to the inviter. (2) Encourage participation. For example, signing, reading, sharing, etc., can create gold coins.
The fun headline has a novice incentive mechanism designed to allow novices to participate in “money making” activities, thereby increasing customer engagement. There are six newbie tasks. For example, as soon as you register, the novice will automatically get 1 yuan of income (about 3,000 gold coins). Binding Alipay or Binding WeChat will reward 300 gold coins. Newcomers will read continuously and will reward them on average every day. 214 gold coins; novice answer, complete the survey of the basic understanding of the product, will reward about 100 gold coins.
The most successful part of the fun headline is the “acceptance system” created by the reference to micro-business. This set of reward mechanisms is designed like this:
First, after the completion of the apprenticeship, 3,500 gold coins will be awarded, but they will be distributed in 5 times. Each time, the apprentices need to meet the conditions for the apprentice to tribute 60 gold coins to the master. Secondly, the apprentice can receive the apprentices and receive 200 gold coins after the completion of the apprentices. Finally, after the completion of the apprenticeship, the apprentice can get 20 gold coins for every reading of a piece of information.
Based on the apprenticeship system, the fun headline set up a group of apprenticeship activities. After the apprentice is completed, the apprentice tribute to the master for 60 gold coins, and automatically enters the group created by the master. The disciple will also enter the group. According to the number of teams, the team size is divided into 12 levels, and the apprentices of each level team reward the unit price. From 3 yuan to 12 yuan. For example, I have created a team of 150 people, 120 of whom are directly apprentices, so I will receive a cash prize of 120 × 8 = 960 yuan after the end of the group. As of April 14, 2018, the highest reward for a single user was 88070.5 yuan.
From social to blockchain: customers finally become the real protagonists
Today’s headlines are the product of the information Internet era. Based on the mobile Internet-based dividend, today’s headlines for the first time based on personality to achieve content services, the first time to increase content production to the company’s competitiveness, and achieved success.
Interesting headlines are a good interpretation of the value of the Internet. Instead of treating the information itself as value, it treats reading behavior and social value as value, and redefines customer value through micro-commercial monetary rewards. It is hard to break the blood in the Red Sea, where content competes.
From today’s headlines to fun headlines, although they are all content providers, they are fundamentally different in the sense of the customer value chain. In today’s headlines, customers are still the object of service. At most, customers are self-medias that create content; but in the headlines, it is to make customers a channel. It is conceivable that for the self-media content incentive system pioneered by today’s headlines, once the fun headline is motivated by the “micro-commercialization” approach and the “creative team” of content is established, the era of today’s headlines is over.
More importantly, the emerging blockchain has shaken the infrastructure of the Internet, including the financial capitalization path. The blockchain incentive is the transaction value of the “micro-commercial” node like “fun headlines”. Once the process value of “reading” becomes part of the “mining” mechanism, we find that the word customer may have to be renewed. Defined.
From the origin of the concept itself, the customer is actually the concept of the industrial age. In the era of industrialization, consumers are the implementers of product value, that is, the standard of product value is the consumer pays the bill, which is the origin of the customer concept: there are two participants in the value chain, one is the value provider, such as Raw materials, production, channels; the other is the value of the realization of the customer.
Marketing is the product of channel independence. When companies generally outsource channels to independent third parties, people are more and more aware that there is a gap between value provision and value realization. This is the necessity of value transfer bridge. . The reason why value transmission is independent and plays an important role is this. Because companies and customers never think together, who will fill this gap? This is the value of the channel.
The value of the channel, of course, is the fundamental value of marketing. It shows that value is three separate components: the producer creates value, the channel assigns value, and the customer realizes value. So, when we talk about marketing change, we are actually discussing who is the leader among these three values and what is the role of each other.
Due to space limitations, we will not conduct in-depth discussions here, but we may wish to share the results of our thinking with you:
1. The emergence of today’s headlines is the transfer of information power from the manufacturer to the consumer under the mobile Internet. What is personalized service? It is the company that wants to put down the body, respect each consumer, and provide different content services according to their different needs.
2. The mobile Internet is the human Internet. People have obtained independent publishing rights based on social platforms. This is the reason why today’s headlines have to invest heavily in headlines and support them as content producers. At this point, today’s headlines are an epoch-making product. For the first time, it has raised the self-media as the main body of content creation, and invested heavily to support the media.
3. The revolutionary breakthrough of the fun headline is to raise consumers into consumers and use customers as a channel. You can compare, in terms of the cost of getting users, the fun headline is only a fraction of today’s headlines. More importantly, such breakthroughs will be “communityized”, thus increasing customer value from the use of products to channels and completely achieving “minorization”.
4. The next step for customer micro-commercialization is the blockchain. Once the transactions between individuals are decentralized, once the individual points rise to digital currency, any company on the blockchain is the de facto public company. As a public company, it is possible to bring the financing function that only the listed company has to the present, and to the company, what kind of pattern will this bring to the business? Please think about it.
