The fourth one is, Himalaya.
Himalaya is one of the largest online audio platforms in China, and in December last year it organized a "123 Knowledge Carnival", focusing on paid audio. According to the data released to the media, the day to realize 50.88 million of water flow - although this figure looks really a little that, haha. But ten million level of water flow should not be false. Himalaya now has a lot of paid audio programs, I once wondered whether to go up to get a reading section.
Three
Since the beginning of the year, 36 Krypton launched a paid column, the first batch invited to the year the Internet's number one IT blogger keso. when keso wrote "why I now began to come out of the sale as well as this public number will be updated" article, Tencent seems to be a bit unable to sit still.
According to the disclosure of the public number i dark horse, Ma Huateng in the keso circle of friends at the bottom of the message: should wait for the WeChat public number paid subscription ah. keso then feedback you this test is too long, Ma Huateng immediately said: we strive to speed up.
Last year in August, began to rumor WeChat to test paid subscription, small half a year later, it seems that Tencent really have to go out. Ma Huateng personally asked about the product, the history of Tencent's progress will not be slow, and now should be the same.
This may be a judgment on the size of this market.
The business is too small for Tencent to be interested in.
Some Tencent slightly high-level friends joked in casual conversation, but the business is not billion, is not on the president's office meeting. The company's business is not a business that will be able to meet the president's office.
Four
My judgment of the market for content charges "blowout" is based on estimates of market psychology.
In "Is Intellectual E-Commerce a Good Thing or Not," I mentioned that Democracy and Law, a magazine, in January '85, had a circulation of 2.6 million.
In '85, essentially the early days of reform and opening up, there were already some people getting rich -- such as the so-called million-dollar households in the countryside (to put it mildly, these three words were first used and popularized in a Xinhua News Agency report in April '80) -- and there were even more rushing into the pursuit of wealth. In society, talking about making money is no longer a matter of shame.
But at the same time, college students are still the pride of the sky (the college entrance examination was resumed only in 77 years), the general level of education of the people in society is not high, the largest 70 years later are still in school, the 60 years later is aware of the education gap in their youth, the whole society, the matter of seeking a little bit of knowledge is not offensive, and even a little bit of a tendency to be over-ambitious.
However, it is also important to see that, at that time in 1985, it was more common to say that it was better to build an atomic bomb than to sell tea eggs or to take a scalpel than to take a barber's knife. Although people have a desire to learn, but may not be serious to go to school have any high expectations. The phrase "knowledge changes destiny" did not take off.
People, at that time, may not have needed knowledge, but they definitely needed content and were willing to pay for it.
I already did the math yesterday, and 26 cents for a magazine was a small percentage of the monthly income back then, when it was generally no more than a hundred. If I remember correctly, popsicles were four cents a pop back then, I think, and ice cream was only eight cents.
The mid-to-late '80s and '90s produced a number of million-circulation magazines that basically relied on circulation as revenue, not much in the way of ads, and standardly relied on charging for content to make a living.
For example, Zhiyin, famously spoken of by Phoenix, was founded in 1985. The Reader, which was targeted by U.S. Reader's Digest and threatened to sue and later had to change its name, was even earlier, founded in 1981.
Five
My father left a comment at the bottom of my article, arguing that the people who were working on Democracy and Law at the time didn't have the word "business" in their heads at all.
I agree with this. But that's part of the motivation. We still have to look at the results.
It's not surprising that magazines emerged in a time when it was really content (there was a voracious desire to ingest spiritual food such as skills and law techniques, or inspirational and chicken soup) over knowledge (the patience for systematic reading was wooden).
The 80's was by no means a quiet time, it was a restless time.
The floodgates opened and billions of people rushed toward wealth.
Six
The good times for magazines weren't over when the Internet arrived.
In 2005, China's Internet population topped 100 million, but the Reader still managed to close in on 10 million copies in a given month that year, but what was probably its finest hour ushered in a recession immediately after.
The deepening of the Internet has led to more and more people becoming netizens and, as a result, getting free content. The demand is still there, but why pay when there's free?
Even the post-70s and even the post-60s, who have been reading newspapers and magazines since they were young, are slowly beginning to abandon the paper media and take the plunge into the Internet audience.
Content charges, and thus began to decline.
But the need for content has not disappeared. Content producers, they need an opportunity to be king again.
Seven
In 2011, a very famous blogger in the tech world, Ruan Yifeng, did a test.
He put a payment button at the bottom of each of his blog posts, which started out at 0.99 yuan or $0.99 -- users read and watched to give -- and then went up to 9.9 yuan when he realized that the fees required by the domestic payment system made 0.99 completely unrealistic.
A year after the test, in May 2012, he wrote this:
From May last year to May this year, I a *** wrote 88 blogs,*** counted 1079 payments received, of which $ 255.97, RMB 4106.04 yuan.
After that, he wrote:
Is this number too much? For each of my blogs, the number of readers averages close to 20,000 people. Based on the stats above, it can be extrapolated that roughly 12 of those people would be willing to pay me." The "conversion rate" (the rate at which visitors convert to consumers) is less than 0.1%, while the normal conversion rate for e-commerce sites is roughly 2% to 5%. Woohoo, the struggles of paid reading are evident.
I think such a low conversion rate indicates that paid reading is not feasible at this stage. But, on the other hand, we must also see that there are people willing to pay even with all the disadvantages. If the transaction costs are lower, the payment process is more convenient, and you can get real benefits after paying, I think paid reading is feasible. Provided, of course, that your content is useful to the reader.
It should be noted that Ruan Yifeng is a technical blog, that is, the blog often discusses technical skills, and even some tutorials on the use of technical programs, skills-based content is very obvious, I personally think that also deserve the word "knowledge".
Ruan Yifeng mentioned three conditions for paid reading, and I'll list them again:
Lower transaction costs, a more convenient payment process, and real benefits after paying.
The first two are largely solved by today's mobile Internet and its payment systems.
WeChat Appreciation, for example.
Eight
Honestly, today's universities in China are really different from what they were twenty years ago.
94-95, was my last year at that third-rate university in Anhui, I still remember the classes were full, and the foreign teacher who taught the classes was particularly serious, if I didn't show up, he would have asked where the person went. It wasn't until the first half of '95, my last semester of my four years of college, that my school curriculum was really reduced.
In 2007, my second year of teaching at Jiaotong University, one of the top universities in China, the faculty began to discuss the reform of the teaching program, the main goal of the reform was to adjust the curriculum so that the courses that needed to be taught were addressed as much as possible in the first and second years, and the third-year courses were already scarce, and the fourth year could be described as a long internship year.
The education of real systematic knowledge, at least in terms of time, has been compressed from four years to two (this may be a relation of the liberal arts). There are certainly objective reasons why universities do this. The difficulty of finding employment, or the fact that the earlier the social experience may be the better for entering society, are important reasons for such an arrangement.
Society runs at an "accelerated pace", which makes it, again, very impatient.
Taking things slowly is not an option.
In some segments of the Internet, you will see that there are examples of half a year to win or lose.
nine
I used to be less optimistic about the knowledge of e-commerce for one reason, this is a continuous process of emptying themselves, there will be a day, your paid users are raised by you have a certain connotation of a certain eye, you empty yourself, how to continue?
Until two days ago, I suddenly figured out a truth.
This reasoning is written in the article "This is an accelerated era, but there is a fatal problem here".
Supply and demand may not be what I previously thought they were.
That chasm, in a general sense, is actually getting bigger, not smaller.
Because there are too many people that are using the door as an entire room.
Ten
Summary:
1, today's social soil, the very obvious coexistence of fear and greed, determines that there is in fact a strong demand for content;
2, the paid tools themselves dramatically improved, pay a few dozens of dollars may not even be able to use it for a second;
3, accelerated era, the chasm between the demand and the supply side will become bigger, the Paid content providers will have to survive.
But, and here's a but,
I firmly believe that the entire Internet is still dominated by free content.
But this does not exclude, relative to 2016, 2017, will usher in the knowledge of e-commerce or paid content, the blowout.