Tencent Biography 1998-2016: Evolution of Chinese Internet Companies
Chapter 10 Space: A Social Model Different from Facebook
Chapter 10 Space: A Social Model Different from Facebook
China's success - thanks in part to Tencent's success - suggests that "virtual goods" may well represent a huge business opportunity.
—Mary Meek (Female Analyst at Morgan Stanley)
Qzone was an accident. We broke into the era of social networks by chance and formed our own style.
——Liu Chiping
"A large QQ show"
Tang Daosheng, a Hong Kong native, joined Tencent at the end of September 2005. At that time, he could not speak a word of Mandarin.When he first moved back to Hong Kong from the United States, he took a bus back and forth every day, and it took three hours on the road. There were many changes in his life.Tang Daosheng graduated from the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Michigan. Later, he studied for graduate studies at Stanford University and worked at Oracle Corporation, specializing in database and enterprise management applications. He was also familiar with communication network and mail system technologies.
Invited by Lau Chiping, Tang Daosheng joined Tencent, and he was assigned to the Architecture Department. "The first two months were mainly for getting familiar with QQ's technical architecture and learning Mandarin through the pinyin input method."
At the end of the year, Wu Xiaoguang, the senior vice president in charge of Internet value-added business, suddenly broke into his office and said to him, "Dowson, there is a project in the Internet business department, and now we are in a lot of trouble. Please go and help."
It is Qzone that is in trouble.The Architecture Department has sent two groups of people to reinforce, but they all returned without success.Tang Daosheng was immediately transferred to the Internet business department as the technical director of Qzone.
QQ Zone is an attempt by Wu Xiaoguang's department to deal with new changes. It is just a department-level product. No one expected that Tencent would make a bloody breakthrough from here.
Throughout 2005, when Tencent and MSN were fighting for instant messaging clients, another more drastic transformation took place in the Internet world at this time, and a monster called a social network was born. , it will attack from the bottom up and penetrate the world controlled by giants.
In China, blogs were the first product with a social nature accepted by netizens. In June 2003, a female netizen named "Mu Zimei" published an online sex log on China Blog Network, which aroused the discussion of the "blogging phenomenon" in the whole society. Since then, every netizen has become a creator of content, and the Internet has entered the A generation of grassroots carnival.
At the end of 2003 and the beginning of 2004, My Space and Facebook were successively born in the United States. The former quickly detonated the popularity, and the latter replaced it after 2007.In Asia, South Korea's Cyworld (CYworld) designed a "mini nest" online personal space as early as 2001. Two years later, with the trend of blogging and making friends, Cyworld became the Korean Largest online community.
In December 2004, under the leadership of the Strategic Development Department, the Internet value-added department began to set up a project, and the team was quickly established. Xu Liang was the general manager, and Lin Songtao, who was the product manager of QQ at the time, was transferred to lead the product development work. When discussing new product directions, everyone is faced with a choice.
According to Xu Liang’s recollection: “The two models that were discussed at the time were blog and cywo. We didn’t notice Facebook.” Blogs are too media-oriented, and almost none of the participants had any experience in this aspect. Experience, in contrast, the Cywo model is no stranger.
"Actually, we can make a large QQ show." A technician shouted.
His views were echoed by all.However, during the planning process, Lin Songtao and the product team gradually discovered that the enhanced version of the QQ show is far from enough.First of all, even if users show themselves, they must be based on the basis of social networking. QQ Show naturally grows on the QQ platform, and Qzone needs to create its own community atmosphere and interactive methods.Secondly, the way of showing should also keep pace with the times. It can’t be as simple as selecting pictures, but requires users to have more in-depth participation and content contribution.Finally, in order to get users to pay for these decorative value-added services, it is necessary to cultivate the sense of belonging of users and make users really feel that this is their home, so the team decided to position QQ Zone as a "platform for self-expression and interaction with others." ", embarked on a different path from blogs and cywo.com.
Qzone’s data performance at the beginning was unexpectedly good, with rapid growth in users, high activity levels, and even revenue exceeding expectations, but problems soon appeared.
The early Qzone products that were developed were more like a multi-functional personal homepage system, with more than 10 functions such as skin change, log, photo album, message board, music box, interaction, personal file, etc. Technically, this is a Relatively large web projects.However, for Xu Liang's team who only worked on client-side products, they did not expect the complexity of operations.When the number of users increases to 60 people online at the same time, the system will not be able to run.Although it seems that QZone is a collection of some web pages, users have different usage habits. A large number of user-generated content (UGC) has been generated, especially the number of photo uploads has increased exponentially. The original underlying design did not take such pressure into consideration, so , the speed becomes very slow.
After Tang Daosheng joined the project team, he first revised the process of technical research. "The previous practice was to treat the head for the headache and the foot for the foot, where to hit and where to change, but what I use in my work in the United States is the data-based management method, which is to think about problems systematically and arrange all the details. , and then follow the rhythm and solve it in a refined manner, only in this way can the 'invisible problem' be discovered."
Under the leadership of Tang Daosheng, Qzone entered a stage of rapid iteration: in April 2006, Qzone released version 4, which completed a comprehensive architecture and performance optimization; in June, released version 3.0, launching a full-screen mode; in July, the space log A new version of the text editor was released, supporting animation, audio and other multimedia content; in September, the information center and circle of friends were launched.Although the definition of SNS products in the industry was not very clear at that time, QZone already had a lot of interactive functions between friends. The yellow stars next to the avatar will flash, guiding friends to view and comment.In fact, this is the rudiment of the "friend dynamics" that is necessary for every SNS product later, and it is even earlier than Facebook's launch of the News Feed function.
Also in September, Zheng Zhihao, who was in charge of the MSN Spaces business in Microsoft China, was also recruited by Wu Xiaoguang to Tencent to assist Tang Daosheng in promoting the development and layout of the SNS business. The number of registered users of Qzone exceeded 9 million in the third quarter, the number of monthly active users was approximately 5000 million, and the number of daily visitors exceeded 2300 million.
Yellow Diamond and Advanced Membership System
The success of Qzone was beyond the expectations of Tencent’s decision-makers. In interviews with me later, everyone from Ma Huateng, Zhang Zhidong to Liu Chiping mentioned this point repeatedly.
In 2005, when the wave of socialization became increasingly hot, China's three major news portals all chose the blog mode, among which Sina was the most active and made the greatest achievements.By the middle of 2006, the number of monthly active users of Sina Blog had exceeded 2000 million, completely replacing portal channels as a new user entrance.However, the inherent flaws in the business model made it impossible to realize the accumulated value of all users, which made the three major portals go astray in social transformation and directly led to the end of the portal era.
Just as Google surpassed Yahoo not because of its user base, but mainly because of the application of the keyword advertising model, Tencent’s sudden emergence by relying on QZone, in essence, is determined by the innovation of the profit model.Tang Dao concluded after his birthday: "After the release of version 2006 in 4.0, Qzone was still defined as a QQ blog zone, but in terms of form, it actually already has the foundation of an SNS community."
When Qzone gradually became a strategic product, Wu Xiaoguang and Tang Daosheng began to consider another question: "How can Qzone achieve profitability?"
After much deliberation, they made a choice between the advertising model and the membership model.
In May 2006, Qzone launched the "Yellow Diamond Nobility" service, which is the second "Diamond" system after the QQ show "Red Diamond".The monthly fee of Yellow Diamond is also 5 yuan, and buyers can enjoy more than 10 privileges, including personalized space skin, flower and vine growth acceleration, photo photo stickers, personalized domain name, video log, dynamic photo album, etc. Its operating logic is similar to that of "Red Diamond" "same.
In 2007, although Tencent's wireless value-added business came out of the slump, it could only maintain a low level of growth, while its online game business was still struggling to find its way.Under such a situation, the sudden development of Qzone will undoubtedly make Tencent very excited.
In the 2007 financial report, there is such a description: "The main achievement of the Group in 2007 is to develop QQ Zone into a very important social network platform, with 1.05 million active users at the end of the year...QQ members benefit from bundled Strong organic growth has been achieved through the strategy (adding functions to subscribers and giving them privileges to increase their loyalty)." In this year, Tencent's Internet value-added business revenue reached 25.14 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 37.7%.
The Internet value-added business led by Wu Xiaoguang, including QQ membership, yellow diamond, red diamond and green diamond four monthly subscription services, has achieved rapid development in the following years, and its revenue has continued to grow. It was once the largest source of income for Tencent.The four monthly subscription business teams are in different product departments. Each team has its own exploration in product functions and operations. Each team wants to become the monthly subscription business with the best performance and the highest income. At the same time, there is also a friendly atmosphere for mutual learning. Copy successful experiences.
In September of the same year, Tencent fully upgraded the QQ membership service, launched the "QQ membership growth system", and designed the concept of "QQ membership growth value", which strengthened the willingness of membership users to continue paying, and brought the best quality and loyal users Precipitated into the membership system, and QQ members have become the most valuable user group in the QQ user system, and they are also the target user group that Tencent most wants to win for various businesses.
Later, Yellow Diamond, Red Diamond and Green Diamond successively launched similar growth systems, and jointly explored a set of business philosophy and operating system for monthly subscription business.This innovation of Tencent has been recognized by the global Internet.
If we look at the global Internet industry, we can find that QZone's innovation in the profit model can be said to be unique in the world, and no other company can match it.According to Morgan Stanley's Internet research report, for many years, Asian Internet companies have been ahead of their European and American counterparts in the exploration of virtual goods. Before 2005, Japanese and Korean companies led innovation, and after that, Chinese companies represented by Tencent The company's replacement not only enlarges the business scale, but also tends to enrich the service system.
In 2006, the sales of non-game virtual goods in China amounted to US$2.52 million, increased to US$2007 million in 3.99, and US$2008 million in 6.23, more than doubling in two years. The main contributor is QQ The rise of members and Qzone.
Morgan Stanley female analyst Mary Meek, known as the "Queen of the Internet", discussed Tencent's profit model in a research report (2009).In her view, small payments made of virtual goods—not just toys—can generate large revenues. In this regard, “China is the representative and leader in the monetization of virtual goods in the world. China’s The success - due in part to Tencent's success - shows that 'virtual goods' may well represent a huge business opportunity".
Green Diamond: Different from iTunes
In social networks, profiting through membership is one of the secrets of Tencent's success.
Take online music as an example.
Tencent began to provide music services in February 2005. By October, a dedicated digital music department was established, which is affiliated to the Internet business system (B2), and is parallel to the Internet R&D department and the community product department.Wu Xiaoguang said to the department manager Zhu Daxin: "You may be able to be China's Steve Jobs in the music industry."
In the western music industry, Jobs is a "devil and angel" figure. On November 2001, 11, Apple released the iPod digital music player, trying to change the way people listen to music.Two years later, the Apple iTunes music store was officially launched, and Jobs persuaded the record company to sell the music in iTunes.By the end of 10, the "iPod+iTunes" combination had generated nearly $2005 billion in revenue for Apple, accounting for almost half of the company's total revenue. iPod occupies more than 60% market share of music players in the United States, and iTunes surpasses Wal-Mart to become the largest and most successful online music store in the world.
Wu Xiaoguang's expectation for the digital music department is the expectation for the iTunes model.
For many years, China's Internet has been a haven for pirated music. Countless "lovers" have uploaded millions of pieces of music to the Internet, and major websites have provided free platforms to "stick" users. If consumers have never paid a penny for listening to music, Tencent may be able to open up a new world.
However, when Zhu Daxin negotiated with the four major record companies - EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner respectively, they got unanimous indifference. Although the record companies hate online pirated music, they are also not optimistic about the efforts of QQ Music. They all asked Zhu Daxin the same question: "If netizens can listen to music for free on Baidu MP3, then why should they pay Tencent?"
Zhu Daxin obviously couldn't convince the record company.As a result, QQ Music has been in an embarrassing situation since the first day it went online. The service rights granted by the record company to Tencent are: free users can try music for 30 seconds, only provide a monthly subscription service of 10 yuan, and cannot purchase single songs.Such a service has little chance of surviving in a market where piracy is rampant.Therefore, for two years, QQ Music was on the brink of death, and was even removed from the QQ client by Wu Xiaoguang because of its low usage rate.
The turning point came in 2007.With the popularity of Qzone, QQ Music decided to take a different path.
"We started to think about a question, under what circumstances and conditions, netizens are willing to pay for legitimate music? Our answer is not the song itself, but the service." So, what is a music service, and is it a rigid service necessary for netizens?Zhu Daxin touched a new demand point: scene music.
"QQ Zone is an exclusive private place for users in the virtual world, just like the living room of a family. When guests visit, it is the most common courtesy to entertain guests with music. That is to say, there are such One possibility: People are motivated to buy music to express emotion to specific people."
Such reasoning is a bit tortuous, but very real and "Oriental".
Zhu Daxin started a new round of negotiations with the four major record companies. "We turned our backs on the record company, and I told them that the original cooperation model can't go on at all, and we have to start over." According to the new cooperation agreement, QQ Music will provide free listening to the entire song library, and the online listening part will be in the form of advertising revenue share, while the fee part implements a guaranteed share.Zhu Daxin's team designed a service system called "Green Diamond Nobility".
In June 2007, in the newly released version of QQ 6 Beta 2007, the QQ Music monthly subscription service "Music VIP" was officially upgraded to "QQ Music Green Diamond Noble" with a fee of 3 yuan per month. Users who purchase this service can enjoy More than 10 service privileges, including free use of music, free QQ song order, game music privileges, discounts on concert tickets, getting signed photos of singers, and setting your favorite music as the background music of QQ Zone.
Liao Jue, who later replaced Zhu Daxin as the person in charge of QQ Music, revealed: "More than half of the users bought the 'Green Diamond' for the scene music in QQ Zone." In July 2008, QQ Music further launched a high-quality privileged download service. .
Until the end of 2013, on the Internet in China, pirated music was still rampant, and the situation had not been fundamentally improved. Jobs’ iTunes model never appeared. However, Tencent has become the only Internet company that earns income through legitimate music in its own way. .Tencent refuses to release specific revenue data. According to the information provided by the research company Analysys International, by the first quarter of 2012, the domestic wireless music market was 80 billion yuan, of which the three major operators accounted for 96% of the market share, and there are still remaining 4% is mainly taken by Tencent.Analysys International commented: "Although it is only about 4%, Tencent can still cultivate a large number of paying users without the exclusive monopoly resources (CRBT) of similar operators. We have to admire its market planning ability."
Since then, QQ Music has made full efforts to promote the legalization of digital music, and expand the usage scenarios and privileges of members.So far, Green Diamond members have 39 privileges covering different scenarios.At the same time, QQ Music has reached more than 200 copyright strategic partners in total, has accumulated more than 1500 million genuine songs, and has more than 1000 million paid members. QQ Music is also trying to explore new ecology in releasing digital music albums and holding online concerts. At the end of 2014, Jay Chou exclusively released his first digital album through QQ Music, and the sales volume exceeded 15 copies in less than a week.After Jay Chou, more than 40 musicians and music groups, including Lu Han, Li Yuchun, Dou Jingtong, JJ Lin, Hallyu group BIGBANG, and world-class superstar Adele Adkins, have released digital music albums on QQ Music, with cumulative sales breaking through 2000 million copies.In the process of China's digital music from disorder to order, the legalization strategy initiated by QQ Music and various actions to build a payment ecosystem have gradually been accepted and popularized by the entire industry.
American Universities and Chinese Internet Bars
After a systematic description of the operating model of Qzone, the next story is about competition. The enemy of Qzone appeared at the end of 2006.Zheng Zhihao said that he discovered this terrible fact in an Internet cafe in an urban village in Shenzhen.
Like Tang Daosheng, Zheng Zhihao had lived in the United States for more than 10 years before joining Tencent. He was used to wearing a suit and tie, doing things in an orderly manner, and liked to sit in Starbucks and discuss the future of the Internet with others.After joining Tencent, a colleague suggested to him: "You should go to an Internet cafe." Zheng Zhihao said that his real understanding of China's Internet began at that moment. Fierce enemies.
That night, Zheng Zhihao went alone to an Internet cafe in an urban village in Shenzhen. Before he went, he followed the advice of his colleagues, took off his suit and tie, and put on sneakers. The reason was "if you encounter robbery, you can run faster." ".
Shenzhen is a rapidly expanding immigrant city. With the expansion of the urban area, farmers and their villages who are too late to be demolished are surrounded by the city, forming a unique "village in the city" scene.The streets here are narrow, and there are iron houses built illegally everywhere. In addition to the aborigines, more residents are poor migrant workers, jobless people, and even thieves.Because the law and order is very poor, almost all buildings are equipped with iron windows.
What Zheng Zhihao went to was a very inconspicuous Internet cafe, where the lights were dim, and the nostrils were filled with a strange smell of musty wallpaper, low-quality cigarettes, and smelly feet. Dozens of computers emitted blue lights like will-o'-the-wisps, and everyone in the room was shocked. It was very quiet, as quiet as a group of young ghosts imprisoned by desire.For Zheng Zhihao, who has lived in the western United States for many years, he is like walking into the London Underground in a Hollywood movie. This is a strange and dark world with no light.
At the end of 2006, there were 14.4 Internet cafes like Zheng Zhihao's across China, with 657 million computers.And this data is still growing rapidly every year. Its peak appeared in 2009. There are 16.8 Internet cafes in total, with 1260 million computers, and about 1.5 million people go online here every year.These netizens are characterized by the "three lows" - low age, low education, and low income. The average age is 18 to 20 years old, and most of them are students and migrant workers without income.Most of these Internet cafes appear in suburban areas or near universities, with an average of about 100 computers, but there are also very large ones. At the end of 2006, "Julong Internet Cafe", known as the world's largest Internet cafe, appeared in Jinan, Shandong Province. It has 1777 computers and a business area of 5688 square meters. It integrates supermarkets, food courts, billiards and other services.
These more than 10 large and small Internet cafes are the foundation of China's Internet. "Whoever wins Internet cafes wins the world" has been a Chinese secret that has never been publicly discussed for a long time.
For American companies born in Silicon Valley and Seattle, this is not easy to understand.
Throughout the history of the Internet in the United States, universities have been the incubators of all technologies, consumer attributes and cultures.There are more than 2700 four-year universities in the United States. As long as any Internet product occupies 1/3 of them, or "explodes popularity" among the top 100 universities, it is enough to become a large company that attracts capital.But in China, if your product cannot appear on the desktops of more than 10 Internet cafes, then you will always be entertaining yourself.
The highly educated American college students and the "three low" Chinese Internet cafes make the Internet worlds of these two countries face each other across the ocean.
When Zheng Zhihao walked into the Internet cafe in the urban village of Shenzhen, there was a company that had just started a business that was quietly launching an attack on Tencent here.In Zheng Zhihao's impression, the only company that has had an impact on Tencent's basic users over the past few years is this young company called 51.com.
"They compete with us for every Internet cafe"
In the vision of the lofty Tencent, 51 is an invisible enemy.Many years later, Kevin Kelly said to Ma Huateng: "Tencent's future opponents are not on your current list." Ma Huateng immediately thought of 2006 in 51.
Around 2005, when the concept of SNS quietly became popular in the United States, the big Internet companies in China were toasting for collectively getting out of the quagmire of losses.The surge in advertisements on news portals and the popularity of online games have made them eager to reap the rewards.Although farsighted observers have seen the arrival of the Web 2.0 era, everyone is betting on the blogging model.The Sina blog launched by Sina.com in April 2005 has attracted everyone's attention by relying on celebrity effects and skilled media operations.Therefore, the opportunity was left to a few little people outside the spotlight.
Wang Xing, who gave up his doctoral studies at the University of Delaware and returned to China early, founded Xiaonei.com (xiaonei.com), the earliest campus SNS community in China, in December 2005, based on Facebook. In October 12, Chen Yizhou, who graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, acquired it and embarked on a Chinese-style road that completely copied Facebook.
Unlike Wang Xing and Chen Yizhou, who studied in the United States, Pang Shengdong, who was born in a small mountain village in Dongyang, Zhejiang Province in 1977 and worked as a salesman in Jack Ma's China Yellow Pages Company, broke through another grassroots road.
Pang Shengdong once recalled to Internet history researcher Lin Jun the scene when he first heard the term SNS: In May 2005, Pang Shengdong, who made his first pot of gold by real estate speculation, decided to return to the Internet to continue his adventure. Yuan Renminbi acquired 5, a personal database company founded by Zhang Jianfu. One day in June, Pang Shengdong was attending a gathering of Internet entrepreneurs in a coffee bar by the Huangpu River in Shanghai. The founder of Keqiji, Wang Jianshuo, suddenly popped out of SNS. "I took out my notebook and wanted to write it down, but I couldn't write it down, so I just handed over the notebook and asked Wang Jianshuo to write it down, so that I can search online later." After a little understanding of SNS, Pang Shengdong decided Transform 100 into an interactive and social 10770.com.
Pang Shengdong is very keenly aware that pictures are far more attractive than words in social networking. Therefore, 51 has focused on optimizing the picture upload function in terms of technology development, and condoned the dissemination of pictures with a pornographic nature.After more than 3 months of going online, 51 registered users reached 500 million. In January 2006, Sequoia Capital invested US$1 million in 51.
Pang Shengdong, a township enterprise who used to travel day and night in the county and sold Chinese Yellow Pages products for Jack Ma, has a completely different understanding of the Chinese market from the overseas returnees who only "make waves" in campuses and metropolises.From the very beginning, Pang Shengdong targeted young people in border towns like him. He said: "What 51 should learn is not Facebook, but Shi Yuzhu who sells health care products. Occupying the counter is more important than anything else." In the Internet world, this "Counters" are more than 10 Internet cafes all over the urban and rural corners. Pang Shengdong has formed a team of promotion managers who go deep into the cities, and distribute a large number of 51 mouse pads and 51 cultural shirts in various Internet cafes, post posters, and even sell them in Internet cafes at very low prices. The 51 logo is brushed on the side of the signboard.
In Pang Shengdong's heart, there is only one imaginary enemy of 51, and that is Tencent.
在51的界面设计及功能开发上，庞升东采取了全面拷贝QQ空间的做法：51秀、51商城、51群组、51问问。庞升东还建立了与Q币相同的网吧支付体系。“只要腾讯出什么新花样，51在一个月内一定跟上。”
What is even more exaggerated is that Pang Shengdong even came up with a way to attract users from Tencent: when a user logs in to the management center page of 51, he will receive a prompt from the system: "For your memory, please add your homepage address to Fill it in the QQ profile, which will also increase the number of visits to your homepage.” In this way, 51’s personal page was indirectly spread virally on the QQ platform.Another thing that caused Tencent a headache was that 51 went to Tencent to poach the wall. More than 10 Tencent employees collectively jumped to 51, including several core backbones of the game department.
This is what happened when Zheng Zhihao walked into an Internet cafe in an urban village in Shenzhen.In most months of 2006, 51's user growth has been higher than that of Qzone, which made Tencent very nervous. "They compete with us for every Internet cafe," Zheng Zhihao said.
Three Wars 51
"Without the oppressive invasion of 51, the growth of Qzone might not have been so fast." This is the common memory of many people in the future.Over the next two years, Tang Daosheng and Zheng Zhihao led a defensive battle.
The war unfolds on three levels: one is technology, the other is Internet cafes, and the third is the containment of Rainbow QQ cheating.
Although the structure and underlying design have been restructured, compared with the rapid increase in user-generated content, the response speed of Qzone still cannot keep up.For technicians, the worst time of the week is six o'clock on Saturday night, when more than 10 Internet cafes across the country are at their fullest, and it is also the peak time for surfing the Internet. The computer login speed can be suffocating.What's worse, sitting in an office in Shenzhen or Beijing, you can't experience the real situation. China's network layout is very complicated, and the speed of Internet access in different regions is different, which causes many technical difficulties.Zheng Zhihao said: "When I first arrived, all I heard were complaints. The QQ space could not be opened, and the download speed of photos was very slow. I calculated that it usually takes 5 seconds to open a space."
Therefore, Zheng Zhihao asked the technicians to make a map of the whole country, and all the opening speeds above 5 seconds were painted in red, those below 3 seconds were painted in yellow, and those between 3 and 5 seconds were painted in green.After the map was made and hung on the wall, what everyone saw was "the motherland is all red", especially in the northwest, southwest and northeast regions.The next task is that the technical team gnawed piece by piece, and on the map, green and yellow increased little by little.It took almost a year, and by the end of 2007, a yellow map of China finally appeared in front of everyone.
This breakthrough in speed optimization provides a crucial guarantee for the double growth of QZone's traffic in the future.
The competition for Internet cafes has become more intense.
Both 51 and Tencent will hire people to post advertisements in various Internet cafes, and the two families often conflict because of this. "I paste it, and you send someone to tear it off, or cover it with your own advertising poster, and then I tear it up and cover it again. Sometimes, there will be fights." Later, Zheng Zhihao came up with a promotional activity : QQ Zone issued a promotional announcement, announcing that it will present "yellow diamonds" to Internet cafes at 12 o'clock every night, and netizens can go to the front desk of the Internet cafe to claim the code number at that time. "So every 12 o'clock, there will be a long queue at the front desk of many Internet cafes. Everyone knows that Qzone is distributing 'yellow diamonds'. 51 does not have such promotional items, so we have to stare blankly."
By the end of 2007, the two sides looked like a tie.Both announced that the number of registered users has exceeded the 1 million mark.A report provided by Analysys shows that among the top ten social networking sites: QZone ranks first in terms of traffic and visiting users, and fifth in terms of interactivity; 51 ranks second in terms of traffic and visits The number of users ranks behind Qzone, Sina Blog and Baidu Space, and ranks first in terms of interactivity.This is already a very impressive record for 51 without any entrance resources.
After that, however, 51 suddenly made a series of regrettable strategic mistakes.
First of all, internal strife broke out in the entrepreneurial team. Zhang Jianfu, who had been leading the product development team, quit due to illness. The contradiction between the product department and the marketing department became prominent, and various rumors began to sway the morale of the army.
Secondly, under the urging of venture capital, 51 hastily promoted the "de-low-end experiment".After Sequoia, Intel Capital, SIG Heiner Asia, and Redpoint Ventures successively invested in 51. In July 2008, Shi Yuzhu exchanged US$7 million for 5100% of the equity, and announced that he would promote 25 to 51 in one and a half years. Stark.Pang Shengdong abandoned the previous Internet cafe strategy and shifted the focus of promotion to campuses and large and medium-sized cities.
In the end, 51 was eager to increase profits, hastily opened the application programming interface (API), and introduced more than 100 online games.Due to lax censorship, the quality of the game varies. Although it attracted users in a short period of time, it quickly lost a large number of users due to environmental damage.
When the 51 action deformed, Tencent seized the plug-in incident and gave it a fatal blow.
In February 2008, Honglian Network Technology Co., Ltd. was established in Shanghai. It launched a third-party plug-in product called "Rainbow QQ", which claimed to have "value-added" functions of Tencent QQ such as IP address detection and display of invisible friends. This plug-in quickly became popular on the Internet.It became clear in the future that 2 is Honglian's investor. In this way, 51 can easily obtain Tencent's user data and use it for itself.
On November 2008, 11, Tencent sued 7 former employees who collectively switched to 15 in Shenzhen Futian Court for violating their non-compete obligations.On the 51th of the same month, Tencent announced that Rainbow QQ was an illegal plug-in, and began to uninstall it on a large scale. All users who installed Rainbow QQ were prompted to "find illegal QQ plug-ins", claiming that such plug-ins are easy to leak user privacy, and it is recommended to uninstall them immediately. If the user does not uninstall, QQ will exit immediately and cannot be used normally.
Pang Shengdong made a public response to Tencent's approach. He insisted that "Rainbow QQ is a product launched entirely based on user experience needs, and has no commercial profit purpose."In December, he simply changed the name of Rainbow QQ to "12 Rainbow".
In 2009, Tencent filed a lawsuit with the People's Court of Jiang'an District, Wuhan City, Hubei Province, suing Shanghai Honglian Network Technology Co., Ltd. and Shanghai Woyao Network Development Co., Ltd. of which Pang Shengdong is the chairman, for alleged computer software copyright infringement and unfair competition, requiring them to stop Provide the download service of 51 Rainbow, and compensate 50 RMB. In July 2011, the court ruled in favor of Tencent.At this time, 7, which was troubled internally and externally, had been completely marginalized in the battle for Chinese social networking sites, and the highest daily concurrent online users dropped to about 51.
Ma Huateng and Zuckerberg
When Tencent was trying its best to block 10 in more than 51 Internet cafes, another battle for Facebook to surpass My Space was taking place in the social network field in North America. Zuckerberg's tactic was to open up. David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect, writes: "Facebook has never been able to design the best apps, but Zuckerberg unburdened himself by (becoming) a platform, and No need to be exhaustive anymore.”
On May 2007, 5, Facebook held an "F24 Openers Conference" in San Francisco. Zuckerberg, who had just passed his 8rd birthday, was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of rubber sandals with exposed toes, and presented to 23 spectators Shouted: "Hand in hand, let's start a movement." Facebook announced the opening of the application programming interface (API) to all developers.
It was a revolutionary movement, and in the six months that followed, 6 openers launched various applications on Facebook.In the second year, Facebook improved its open review rules and introduced a scoring system, which made the open ecology look more orderly, and the popularity was finally completely detonated. In May 25, Facebook's global traffic surpassed that of My Space for the first time.By September 2008, users had soared to 5 million, and more than 2009 million registered developers from 9 countries had used Facebook as a platform for entrepreneurship.
The sudden rise of Facebook naturally makes its Chinese imitators follow suit. On May 2008, 5, Chen Yizhou's Xiaonei website announced the launch of the beta version of the API open platform, becoming the first local SNS website in China to test the waters of the open platform. After that, 30 also opened its own game platform.
Within Tencent, openness has always been a taboo topic—this scene has not changed subtly until 2011. "It's not that we haven't thought about this topic, but Tencent is different from Facebook, and China is different from the United States," Ma Huateng said later.
The difference between Tencent and Facebook is reflected in five points.
First, when Facebook implements the open strategy, it is a latecomer who attacks from the bottom up. It uses this to subvert the rules and reconstruct the order. To apply Marx's famous saying, Zuckerberg "lost the chains and gained It's the whole world."Since 2006, Tencent has become the leading enterprise with the largest number of users and the largest market value, and is the biggest beneficiary of the existing order. In Ma Huateng's view, opening up cannot bring decisive growth to Tencent.
Second, Tencent and Facebook have inherent differences in the underlying design of the relationship chain. Facebook is a social community by nature, and its friend relationship is open, while QQ started as an instant messaging tool, and the relationship chain is relatively closed. "Friends of friends are not my friends." Full opening means a betrayal of this logic .Compared with Facebook, which has a real-name system, Qzone, which is also an SNS community, does not have mandatory real names, but most of the people who enter the space are acquaintances, so they can have private interactions, which is fundamentally different from blogs of a media nature.What is more advanced than Facebook is that Qzone and QQ are innately integrated, thus forming a richer variety of communication methods and profit models-Facebook did not open its own IM until 2008.
Third, Facebook has nothing but a platform, while Tencent is a "platform + product" type. It itself is the best product developer in China. If it is fully opened up, it will inevitably lead to "left hand fighting right hand" and "referees and athletes competing in the same field." This embarrassing situation is almost unbearable and unmaintainable for Tencent.
Fourth, in terms of profit model, what Facebook really cares about is the amount of information generated by application software on each platform, and then makes money through advertisements, which account for as much as [-]% of its revenue. Equivalent to an additional bonus.While Tencent's revenue comes from virtual value-added services and online games, community advertising has never been negligible, and it may not be welcomed by Chinese users.
Fifth, compared with Facebook's globalization model, China is an "isolated market" due to the influence of ideology, and outsiders cannot enter freely, and it is very difficult for Chinese Internet companies to go out.Therefore, even if Tencent overcomes all difficulties and marches to the world, it is absolutely impossible to become the second Facebook.
Perhaps, more differences can be listed, but the above five points are enough to make Ma Huateng fearful of the road to Facebook.A Tencent executive recalled that before the summer of 2011, Ma Huateng used to organize executives to seriously discuss open topics at the president’s office meeting—Tencent’s top executive meeting, held every two weeks—and finally stopped them. The reason is that Chinese developers faced a mixed environment at that time, and opening up without sufficient preparation may affect the information security of users.Prudence may be the biggest difference between Ma Huateng and Zuckerberg. "He admires Zuckerberg, but he will never go to any public occasion wearing a T-shirt and rubber sandals with exposed toes."
On the business level, Wu Xiaoguang and Tang Daosheng still took defensive actions. In December 2008, Tencent launched the real-name registered QQ alumni network, which almost completely imitated Facebook in terms of structure and social scene.By July 12, QQ Alumni Network was renamed "Friends Network", and this social platform once ranked among the top six social networking sites in the country.In the battle of the domestic social network market, Tencent uses the strategy of QZone and Friends.com to keep pace with each other, providing QQ users with different forms of social network services and allowing the two social platforms to develop in a differentiated manner.
Later facts proved that Tencent's alternative posture in the Facebook heat wave may be right, at least commercially appropriate. Xiaonei, Facebook's most loyal imitator in China, has not been able to replicate the great success of the former in the United States. Chen Yizhou changed its name to "Renren" in August 2009 and listed it on the New York Stock Exchange on May 8, 2011. It went public, but Renren fell into a huge loss in the second year, and has not found an ideal profit model. The gap between the number of active users and Qzone is getting wider and wider.
American strategic thinker John Galbraith once said: "If we look at India or China based on the experience we have gained in the United States, half of it is incomprehensible, and half of it is wrong." The fever is vividly presented.In the more than a year after May 2009, Qzone achieved explosive growth in a very unexpected and almost unthinkable way for Americans.
Its theme is "Growing Vegetables and Stealing Vegetables".
The Explosive Effect of "Happy Farm"
After entering 2009, Tang Daosheng, who had just breathed a sigh of relief from the war against 51, was restless every day. The first thing he did after going to work was to open Facebook and various social networking sites in China.
At that time, it was a great moment for social network to form dominance. Nielsen announced in March 2009 that Internet users all over the world spent more time on social network than on mailbox for the first time. Communication methods have become mainstream.At the same time, the opening effect of Facebook is fermenting, and many novel application software emerge in endlessly, and they will be copied to domestic social networking sites in the shortest possible time. Happy network.Founded in March 3, the company has adopted rapid replication as its strategy from the first day. It took the lead in introducing the two most popular game-type applications on Facebook, "Friends Buying" and "Grab Parking Space", to China. Urban white-collar workers flock to it.
Just before and after the Spring Festival in 2009, Tang Daosheng discovered that a Chinese self-developed game "Happy Farm" suddenly became popular on the Xiaonei website.Its gameplay is simple and interesting. The user plays the role of a farmer, reclaims the land in his own farm, grows various vegetables and fruits, and at the same time steals other people's fruits.
This game was successfully developed by a college student start-up company in Shanghai called "5 Minutes". It was launched on the Xiaonei website in November 2008, and it ranked among the top 11 plug-in applications on the Xiaonei website in just one week. After that, the number of daily active users exceeded 10 that day, and quickly exceeded 10 million more than two months later.In February 100, Kaixin.com also launched "Happy Garden", further heating up the heat wave of "stealing and growing vegetables".
"Qzone is different from Facebook or Xiaonei. It is not an open platform, but we can cooperate with '5 Minutes' to introduce this game to Qzone. However, one of the most annoying problems is that Tencent already has For the game department, if we also get involved in the game, will it lead to a disorder in the division of labor?" This was Tang Daosheng's biggest worry at the time.
One day in April, Tang Daosheng and the equally restless Zheng Zhihao sat in the office, looking at each other.Just in the past two months, as the farm game continued to heat up, the user activity of Kaixin.com and Xiaonei.com has increased rapidly, and QZone has obviously been marginalized.
Zheng Zhihao said to Tang Daosheng: "Let's try."
Tang Daosheng said in unskilled Mandarin: "Then try it."
The next day, Tencent's negotiator appeared in the office of Gao Shaofei, CEO of "5 Minutes".In the next few days, the two parties negotiated on the details of "Happy Farm" entering Qzone.
Tencent proposes three cooperation methods: one-time purchase of agency rights; all revenues are divided in proportion; Tencent promises to guarantee the bottom income, and cap it after a certain base.Gao Shaofei chose the third option, and looking at it later, this was the biggest mistake in Gao Shaofei's life. "No one thought it would be so crazy," said the young entrepreneur.
It is precisely because of the underestimation of the possibility that Gao Shaofei also insisted that the game server is maintained by "5 minutes".
"Happy Farm" was launched on Qzone on May 2009, 5, and what happened next exceeded everyone's expectations.
On the first day of launch, the huge amount of user traffic immediately overwhelmed the server. In the history of Tencent, there has never been such a precedent. "5 minutes" had to transfer the management authority of the server to Tencent .The original software written by Gao Shaofei's team could not withstand such a huge traffic impact, so Wu Xiaoguang urgently summoned the most elite programmers to rewrite the software.
As of June 6, the number of active farm users per day has reached 1 million, and all the servers assigned to the "Happy Farm" project are fully loaded. The technical team continues to optimize, but it is clear that it will face the danger of bursting.Zheng Zhihao wrote an e-mail to Zhang Zhidong overnight, "I would like to ask for your support in server launch and capacity expansion." He reported that "Happy Farm" has greatly stimulated the activity of QZone and commercialized income.According to his calculations, at least several hundred more servers will need to be added in the next two months.
Ten minutes later, Zhang Zhidong replied: "I'm glad to see that our social game (SNS Game) has started to have a business model, and it has considerable economies of scale." He approved nearly a thousand servers at one time.
In August 2009, "Happy Farm" was renamed "QQ Farm". The new version added more varieties of crops, and fully connected the yellow diamond service system of QQ members with the purchase of virtual items such as "seeds" and "pesticides".Since then, the number of farm players has increased sharply by 8 million per day, and their online and hang-up time has exceeded all previous experience points.
A few years later, when the Qzone team recalled the scene at that time, everyone still couldn't hide their suffocating expressions.
Tencent has never released the traffic data of "QQ Farm".
"That is an incredible number, and it may not be broken for a long time." Tang Daosheng said quietly.
Lu Shan, who is in charge of the entire background system, revealed a detail: in the second half of 2009, Tencent added more than 4000 servers for "QQ Farm"-"this has never happened before."In addition, check Tencent's 2009 third-quarter performance report, which mentions that the active accounts of Qzone increased by 33.7% quarter-on-quarter, reaching 3.053 million at the end of the third quarter. The increase was mainly due to the launch of new social network applications (especially based on Casual games for social networks) are very popular among users.
According to this calculation, Qzone actually added more than 7000 million active users in one quarter, which of course comes from the stimulating effect of "QQ Farm".
The income that "QQ Farm" brings to Tencent is also a secret that has not been made public.Shandong's "Qilu Evening News" once reported the expenditure of a player named Wang Hao: "Dog food costs 0.4Q coins a day, fertilizers vary from good to bad, medium high-speed chemical fertilizers cost 1Q coins per bag, and two bags of chemical fertilizers a day is enough. 2Q coins, but if you have yellow diamonds, you can get a 1.92% discount.” Wang Hao’s final result is that he spends 80 yuan per day, so that together with membership fees and yellow diamond privilege fees, he has to invest [-] yuan a month on “QQ Farm” about.
This is the monthly expenses of a "medium gamer".If there are 100 million "Wang Hao" in the country, then the monthly income of "QQ Farm" will be around 1 million yuan, and this is undoubtedly a very conservative period from 2009 to 2010 when "all people steal food". estimate.
In the history of Qzone, "QQ Farm" is like the most powerful booster that pushes satellites into the established orbit.Not only did it push the number of users to 3 million—Facebook also reached this number of users in the third quarter of 2009 due to its open strategy. There are two more important changes:
First, it allows Tencent to find a revenue model different from Facebook's in the field of social networking. The profit of "QQ Farm" comes from the enthusiasm of users to buy virtual items, and this is Tencent's most skillful profit method since it invented the QQ show.Since 2009, the revenue of Qzone has increased significantly, becoming the second largest revenue contributor after online games, and the revenue of Yellow Diamond reached its peak in 2010.By 2011, Tencent's revenue from community value-added services was 72.21 billion yuan, most of which came from various membership services and virtual game props.
Second, in the more than a year when the "stealing food movement" was the most popular, Qzone used "farm" as the traffic entrance to support 38 application products of Tencent's full product line, including QQ browser and QQ housekeeper. , phone bill recharge, and casual competitive games, etc., the activity of "recharge phone bill, get fertilizer" is also particularly impressive. Therefore, Qzone won the 2009 Tencent Cooperation Culture Award.Since then, Qzone has become Tencent's most important entry-level product on the computer side.This small team of only 20 people at the time of formation made great achievements for Tencent in the social network upsurge in a way completely different from Facebook.
The success of "QQ Farm" gave the QZone team more confidence to introduce more social applications, and later developed into an open Tencent platform with clearer strategic goals.Lin Songtao once again took on the important task of developing a new model, held up the banner of Tencent's open platform, and established opening and sharing rules in line with the Chinese market, allowing Tencent to take a big step in serving the industry ecology.Later, Tencent's open platform integrated the traffic of multiple platform products, allowing Tencent to win the largest share in the web game market.
(End of this chapter)
China's success - thanks in part to Tencent's success - suggests that "virtual goods" may well represent a huge business opportunity.
—Mary Meek (Female Analyst at Morgan Stanley)
Qzone was an accident. We broke into the era of social networks by chance and formed our own style.
——Liu Chiping
"A large QQ show"
Tang Daosheng, a Hong Kong native, joined Tencent at the end of September 2005. At that time, he could not speak a word of Mandarin.When he first moved back to Hong Kong from the United States, he took a bus back and forth every day, and it took three hours on the road. There were many changes in his life.Tang Daosheng graduated from the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Michigan. Later, he studied for graduate studies at Stanford University and worked at Oracle Corporation, specializing in database and enterprise management applications. He was also familiar with communication network and mail system technologies.
Invited by Lau Chiping, Tang Daosheng joined Tencent, and he was assigned to the Architecture Department. "The first two months were mainly for getting familiar with QQ's technical architecture and learning Mandarin through the pinyin input method."
At the end of the year, Wu Xiaoguang, the senior vice president in charge of Internet value-added business, suddenly broke into his office and said to him, "Dowson, there is a project in the Internet business department, and now we are in a lot of trouble. Please go and help."
It is Qzone that is in trouble.The Architecture Department has sent two groups of people to reinforce, but they all returned without success.Tang Daosheng was immediately transferred to the Internet business department as the technical director of Qzone.
QQ Zone is an attempt by Wu Xiaoguang's department to deal with new changes. It is just a department-level product. No one expected that Tencent would make a bloody breakthrough from here.
Throughout 2005, when Tencent and MSN were fighting for instant messaging clients, another more drastic transformation took place in the Internet world at this time, and a monster called a social network was born. , it will attack from the bottom up and penetrate the world controlled by giants.
In China, blogs were the first product with a social nature accepted by netizens. In June 2003, a female netizen named "Mu Zimei" published an online sex log on China Blog Network, which aroused the discussion of the "blogging phenomenon" in the whole society. Since then, every netizen has become a creator of content, and the Internet has entered the A generation of grassroots carnival.
At the end of 2003 and the beginning of 2004, My Space and Facebook were successively born in the United States. The former quickly detonated the popularity, and the latter replaced it after 2007.In Asia, South Korea's Cyworld (CYworld) designed a "mini nest" online personal space as early as 2001. Two years later, with the trend of blogging and making friends, Cyworld became the Korean Largest online community.
In December 2004, under the leadership of the Strategic Development Department, the Internet value-added department began to set up a project, and the team was quickly established. Xu Liang was the general manager, and Lin Songtao, who was the product manager of QQ at the time, was transferred to lead the product development work. When discussing new product directions, everyone is faced with a choice.
According to Xu Liang’s recollection: “The two models that were discussed at the time were blog and cywo. We didn’t notice Facebook.” Blogs are too media-oriented, and almost none of the participants had any experience in this aspect. Experience, in contrast, the Cywo model is no stranger.
"Actually, we can make a large QQ show." A technician shouted.
His views were echoed by all.However, during the planning process, Lin Songtao and the product team gradually discovered that the enhanced version of the QQ show is far from enough.First of all, even if users show themselves, they must be based on the basis of social networking. QQ Show naturally grows on the QQ platform, and Qzone needs to create its own community atmosphere and interactive methods.Secondly, the way of showing should also keep pace with the times. It can’t be as simple as selecting pictures, but requires users to have more in-depth participation and content contribution.Finally, in order to get users to pay for these decorative value-added services, it is necessary to cultivate the sense of belonging of users and make users really feel that this is their home, so the team decided to position QQ Zone as a "platform for self-expression and interaction with others." ", embarked on a different path from blogs and cywo.com.
Qzone’s data performance at the beginning was unexpectedly good, with rapid growth in users, high activity levels, and even revenue exceeding expectations, but problems soon appeared.
The early Qzone products that were developed were more like a multi-functional personal homepage system, with more than 10 functions such as skin change, log, photo album, message board, music box, interaction, personal file, etc. Technically, this is a Relatively large web projects.However, for Xu Liang's team who only worked on client-side products, they did not expect the complexity of operations.When the number of users increases to 60 people online at the same time, the system will not be able to run.Although it seems that QZone is a collection of some web pages, users have different usage habits. A large number of user-generated content (UGC) has been generated, especially the number of photo uploads has increased exponentially. The original underlying design did not take such pressure into consideration, so , the speed becomes very slow.
After Tang Daosheng joined the project team, he first revised the process of technical research. "The previous practice was to treat the head for the headache and the foot for the foot, where to hit and where to change, but what I use in my work in the United States is the data-based management method, which is to think about problems systematically and arrange all the details. , and then follow the rhythm and solve it in a refined manner, only in this way can the 'invisible problem' be discovered."
Under the leadership of Tang Daosheng, Qzone entered a stage of rapid iteration: in April 2006, Qzone released version 4, which completed a comprehensive architecture and performance optimization; in June, released version 3.0, launching a full-screen mode; in July, the space log A new version of the text editor was released, supporting animation, audio and other multimedia content; in September, the information center and circle of friends were launched.Although the definition of SNS products in the industry was not very clear at that time, QZone already had a lot of interactive functions between friends. The yellow stars next to the avatar will flash, guiding friends to view and comment.In fact, this is the rudiment of the "friend dynamics" that is necessary for every SNS product later, and it is even earlier than Facebook's launch of the News Feed function.
Also in September, Zheng Zhihao, who was in charge of the MSN Spaces business in Microsoft China, was also recruited by Wu Xiaoguang to Tencent to assist Tang Daosheng in promoting the development and layout of the SNS business. The number of registered users of Qzone exceeded 9 million in the third quarter, the number of monthly active users was approximately 5000 million, and the number of daily visitors exceeded 2300 million.
Yellow Diamond and Advanced Membership System
The success of Qzone was beyond the expectations of Tencent’s decision-makers. In interviews with me later, everyone from Ma Huateng, Zhang Zhidong to Liu Chiping mentioned this point repeatedly.
In 2005, when the wave of socialization became increasingly hot, China's three major news portals all chose the blog mode, among which Sina was the most active and made the greatest achievements.By the middle of 2006, the number of monthly active users of Sina Blog had exceeded 2000 million, completely replacing portal channels as a new user entrance.However, the inherent flaws in the business model made it impossible to realize the accumulated value of all users, which made the three major portals go astray in social transformation and directly led to the end of the portal era.
Just as Google surpassed Yahoo not because of its user base, but mainly because of the application of the keyword advertising model, Tencent’s sudden emergence by relying on QZone, in essence, is determined by the innovation of the profit model.Tang Dao concluded after his birthday: "After the release of version 2006 in 4.0, Qzone was still defined as a QQ blog zone, but in terms of form, it actually already has the foundation of an SNS community."
When Qzone gradually became a strategic product, Wu Xiaoguang and Tang Daosheng began to consider another question: "How can Qzone achieve profitability?"
After much deliberation, they made a choice between the advertising model and the membership model.
In May 2006, Qzone launched the "Yellow Diamond Nobility" service, which is the second "Diamond" system after the QQ show "Red Diamond".The monthly fee of Yellow Diamond is also 5 yuan, and buyers can enjoy more than 10 privileges, including personalized space skin, flower and vine growth acceleration, photo photo stickers, personalized domain name, video log, dynamic photo album, etc. Its operating logic is similar to that of "Red Diamond" "same.
In 2007, although Tencent's wireless value-added business came out of the slump, it could only maintain a low level of growth, while its online game business was still struggling to find its way.Under such a situation, the sudden development of Qzone will undoubtedly make Tencent very excited.
In the 2007 financial report, there is such a description: "The main achievement of the Group in 2007 is to develop QQ Zone into a very important social network platform, with 1.05 million active users at the end of the year...QQ members benefit from bundled Strong organic growth has been achieved through the strategy (adding functions to subscribers and giving them privileges to increase their loyalty)." In this year, Tencent's Internet value-added business revenue reached 25.14 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 37.7%.
The Internet value-added business led by Wu Xiaoguang, including QQ membership, yellow diamond, red diamond and green diamond four monthly subscription services, has achieved rapid development in the following years, and its revenue has continued to grow. It was once the largest source of income for Tencent.The four monthly subscription business teams are in different product departments. Each team has its own exploration in product functions and operations. Each team wants to become the monthly subscription business with the best performance and the highest income. At the same time, there is also a friendly atmosphere for mutual learning. Copy successful experiences.
In September of the same year, Tencent fully upgraded the QQ membership service, launched the "QQ membership growth system", and designed the concept of "QQ membership growth value", which strengthened the willingness of membership users to continue paying, and brought the best quality and loyal users Precipitated into the membership system, and QQ members have become the most valuable user group in the QQ user system, and they are also the target user group that Tencent most wants to win for various businesses.
Later, Yellow Diamond, Red Diamond and Green Diamond successively launched similar growth systems, and jointly explored a set of business philosophy and operating system for monthly subscription business.This innovation of Tencent has been recognized by the global Internet.
If we look at the global Internet industry, we can find that QZone's innovation in the profit model can be said to be unique in the world, and no other company can match it.According to Morgan Stanley's Internet research report, for many years, Asian Internet companies have been ahead of their European and American counterparts in the exploration of virtual goods. Before 2005, Japanese and Korean companies led innovation, and after that, Chinese companies represented by Tencent The company's replacement not only enlarges the business scale, but also tends to enrich the service system.
In 2006, the sales of non-game virtual goods in China amounted to US$2.52 million, increased to US$2007 million in 3.99, and US$2008 million in 6.23, more than doubling in two years. The main contributor is QQ The rise of members and Qzone.
Morgan Stanley female analyst Mary Meek, known as the "Queen of the Internet", discussed Tencent's profit model in a research report (2009).In her view, small payments made of virtual goods—not just toys—can generate large revenues. In this regard, “China is the representative and leader in the monetization of virtual goods in the world. China’s The success - due in part to Tencent's success - shows that 'virtual goods' may well represent a huge business opportunity".
Green Diamond: Different from iTunes
In social networks, profiting through membership is one of the secrets of Tencent's success.
Take online music as an example.
Tencent began to provide music services in February 2005. By October, a dedicated digital music department was established, which is affiliated to the Internet business system (B2), and is parallel to the Internet R&D department and the community product department.Wu Xiaoguang said to the department manager Zhu Daxin: "You may be able to be China's Steve Jobs in the music industry."
In the western music industry, Jobs is a "devil and angel" figure. On November 2001, 11, Apple released the iPod digital music player, trying to change the way people listen to music.Two years later, the Apple iTunes music store was officially launched, and Jobs persuaded the record company to sell the music in iTunes.By the end of 10, the "iPod+iTunes" combination had generated nearly $2005 billion in revenue for Apple, accounting for almost half of the company's total revenue. iPod occupies more than 60% market share of music players in the United States, and iTunes surpasses Wal-Mart to become the largest and most successful online music store in the world.
Wu Xiaoguang's expectation for the digital music department is the expectation for the iTunes model.
For many years, China's Internet has been a haven for pirated music. Countless "lovers" have uploaded millions of pieces of music to the Internet, and major websites have provided free platforms to "stick" users. If consumers have never paid a penny for listening to music, Tencent may be able to open up a new world.
However, when Zhu Daxin negotiated with the four major record companies - EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner respectively, they got unanimous indifference. Although the record companies hate online pirated music, they are also not optimistic about the efforts of QQ Music. They all asked Zhu Daxin the same question: "If netizens can listen to music for free on Baidu MP3, then why should they pay Tencent?"
Zhu Daxin obviously couldn't convince the record company.As a result, QQ Music has been in an embarrassing situation since the first day it went online. The service rights granted by the record company to Tencent are: free users can try music for 30 seconds, only provide a monthly subscription service of 10 yuan, and cannot purchase single songs.Such a service has little chance of surviving in a market where piracy is rampant.Therefore, for two years, QQ Music was on the brink of death, and was even removed from the QQ client by Wu Xiaoguang because of its low usage rate.
The turning point came in 2007.With the popularity of Qzone, QQ Music decided to take a different path.
"We started to think about a question, under what circumstances and conditions, netizens are willing to pay for legitimate music? Our answer is not the song itself, but the service." So, what is a music service, and is it a rigid service necessary for netizens?Zhu Daxin touched a new demand point: scene music.
"QQ Zone is an exclusive private place for users in the virtual world, just like the living room of a family. When guests visit, it is the most common courtesy to entertain guests with music. That is to say, there are such One possibility: People are motivated to buy music to express emotion to specific people."
Such reasoning is a bit tortuous, but very real and "Oriental".
Zhu Daxin started a new round of negotiations with the four major record companies. "We turned our backs on the record company, and I told them that the original cooperation model can't go on at all, and we have to start over." According to the new cooperation agreement, QQ Music will provide free listening to the entire song library, and the online listening part will be in the form of advertising revenue share, while the fee part implements a guaranteed share.Zhu Daxin's team designed a service system called "Green Diamond Nobility".
In June 2007, in the newly released version of QQ 6 Beta 2007, the QQ Music monthly subscription service "Music VIP" was officially upgraded to "QQ Music Green Diamond Noble" with a fee of 3 yuan per month. Users who purchase this service can enjoy More than 10 service privileges, including free use of music, free QQ song order, game music privileges, discounts on concert tickets, getting signed photos of singers, and setting your favorite music as the background music of QQ Zone.
Liao Jue, who later replaced Zhu Daxin as the person in charge of QQ Music, revealed: "More than half of the users bought the 'Green Diamond' for the scene music in QQ Zone." In July 2008, QQ Music further launched a high-quality privileged download service. .
Until the end of 2013, on the Internet in China, pirated music was still rampant, and the situation had not been fundamentally improved. Jobs’ iTunes model never appeared. However, Tencent has become the only Internet company that earns income through legitimate music in its own way. .Tencent refuses to release specific revenue data. According to the information provided by the research company Analysys International, by the first quarter of 2012, the domestic wireless music market was 80 billion yuan, of which the three major operators accounted for 96% of the market share, and there are still remaining 4% is mainly taken by Tencent.Analysys International commented: "Although it is only about 4%, Tencent can still cultivate a large number of paying users without the exclusive monopoly resources (CRBT) of similar operators. We have to admire its market planning ability."
Since then, QQ Music has made full efforts to promote the legalization of digital music, and expand the usage scenarios and privileges of members.So far, Green Diamond members have 39 privileges covering different scenarios.At the same time, QQ Music has reached more than 200 copyright strategic partners in total, has accumulated more than 1500 million genuine songs, and has more than 1000 million paid members. QQ Music is also trying to explore new ecology in releasing digital music albums and holding online concerts. At the end of 2014, Jay Chou exclusively released his first digital album through QQ Music, and the sales volume exceeded 15 copies in less than a week.After Jay Chou, more than 40 musicians and music groups, including Lu Han, Li Yuchun, Dou Jingtong, JJ Lin, Hallyu group BIGBANG, and world-class superstar Adele Adkins, have released digital music albums on QQ Music, with cumulative sales breaking through 2000 million copies.In the process of China's digital music from disorder to order, the legalization strategy initiated by QQ Music and various actions to build a payment ecosystem have gradually been accepted and popularized by the entire industry.
American Universities and Chinese Internet Bars
After a systematic description of the operating model of Qzone, the next story is about competition. The enemy of Qzone appeared at the end of 2006.Zheng Zhihao said that he discovered this terrible fact in an Internet cafe in an urban village in Shenzhen.
Like Tang Daosheng, Zheng Zhihao had lived in the United States for more than 10 years before joining Tencent. He was used to wearing a suit and tie, doing things in an orderly manner, and liked to sit in Starbucks and discuss the future of the Internet with others.After joining Tencent, a colleague suggested to him: "You should go to an Internet cafe." Zheng Zhihao said that his real understanding of China's Internet began at that moment. Fierce enemies.
That night, Zheng Zhihao went alone to an Internet cafe in an urban village in Shenzhen. Before he went, he followed the advice of his colleagues, took off his suit and tie, and put on sneakers. The reason was "if you encounter robbery, you can run faster." ".
Shenzhen is a rapidly expanding immigrant city. With the expansion of the urban area, farmers and their villages who are too late to be demolished are surrounded by the city, forming a unique "village in the city" scene.The streets here are narrow, and there are iron houses built illegally everywhere. In addition to the aborigines, more residents are poor migrant workers, jobless people, and even thieves.Because the law and order is very poor, almost all buildings are equipped with iron windows.
What Zheng Zhihao went to was a very inconspicuous Internet cafe, where the lights were dim, and the nostrils were filled with a strange smell of musty wallpaper, low-quality cigarettes, and smelly feet. Dozens of computers emitted blue lights like will-o'-the-wisps, and everyone in the room was shocked. It was very quiet, as quiet as a group of young ghosts imprisoned by desire.For Zheng Zhihao, who has lived in the western United States for many years, he is like walking into the London Underground in a Hollywood movie. This is a strange and dark world with no light.
At the end of 2006, there were 14.4 Internet cafes like Zheng Zhihao's across China, with 657 million computers.And this data is still growing rapidly every year. Its peak appeared in 2009. There are 16.8 Internet cafes in total, with 1260 million computers, and about 1.5 million people go online here every year.These netizens are characterized by the "three lows" - low age, low education, and low income. The average age is 18 to 20 years old, and most of them are students and migrant workers without income.Most of these Internet cafes appear in suburban areas or near universities, with an average of about 100 computers, but there are also very large ones. At the end of 2006, "Julong Internet Cafe", known as the world's largest Internet cafe, appeared in Jinan, Shandong Province. It has 1777 computers and a business area of 5688 square meters. It integrates supermarkets, food courts, billiards and other services.
These more than 10 large and small Internet cafes are the foundation of China's Internet. "Whoever wins Internet cafes wins the world" has been a Chinese secret that has never been publicly discussed for a long time.
For American companies born in Silicon Valley and Seattle, this is not easy to understand.
Throughout the history of the Internet in the United States, universities have been the incubators of all technologies, consumer attributes and cultures.There are more than 2700 four-year universities in the United States. As long as any Internet product occupies 1/3 of them, or "explodes popularity" among the top 100 universities, it is enough to become a large company that attracts capital.But in China, if your product cannot appear on the desktops of more than 10 Internet cafes, then you will always be entertaining yourself.
The highly educated American college students and the "three low" Chinese Internet cafes make the Internet worlds of these two countries face each other across the ocean.
When Zheng Zhihao walked into the Internet cafe in the urban village of Shenzhen, there was a company that had just started a business that was quietly launching an attack on Tencent here.In Zheng Zhihao's impression, the only company that has had an impact on Tencent's basic users over the past few years is this young company called 51.com.
"They compete with us for every Internet cafe"
In the vision of the lofty Tencent, 51 is an invisible enemy.Many years later, Kevin Kelly said to Ma Huateng: "Tencent's future opponents are not on your current list." Ma Huateng immediately thought of 2006 in 51.
Around 2005, when the concept of SNS quietly became popular in the United States, the big Internet companies in China were toasting for collectively getting out of the quagmire of losses.The surge in advertisements on news portals and the popularity of online games have made them eager to reap the rewards.Although farsighted observers have seen the arrival of the Web 2.0 era, everyone is betting on the blogging model.The Sina blog launched by Sina.com in April 2005 has attracted everyone's attention by relying on celebrity effects and skilled media operations.Therefore, the opportunity was left to a few little people outside the spotlight.
Wang Xing, who gave up his doctoral studies at the University of Delaware and returned to China early, founded Xiaonei.com (xiaonei.com), the earliest campus SNS community in China, in December 2005, based on Facebook. In October 12, Chen Yizhou, who graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, acquired it and embarked on a Chinese-style road that completely copied Facebook.
Unlike Wang Xing and Chen Yizhou, who studied in the United States, Pang Shengdong, who was born in a small mountain village in Dongyang, Zhejiang Province in 1977 and worked as a salesman in Jack Ma's China Yellow Pages Company, broke through another grassroots road.
Pang Shengdong once recalled to Internet history researcher Lin Jun the scene when he first heard the term SNS: In May 2005, Pang Shengdong, who made his first pot of gold by real estate speculation, decided to return to the Internet to continue his adventure. Yuan Renminbi acquired 5, a personal database company founded by Zhang Jianfu. One day in June, Pang Shengdong was attending a gathering of Internet entrepreneurs in a coffee bar by the Huangpu River in Shanghai. The founder of Keqiji, Wang Jianshuo, suddenly popped out of SNS. "I took out my notebook and wanted to write it down, but I couldn't write it down, so I just handed over the notebook and asked Wang Jianshuo to write it down, so that I can search online later." After a little understanding of SNS, Pang Shengdong decided Transform 100 into an interactive and social 10770.com.
Pang Shengdong is very keenly aware that pictures are far more attractive than words in social networking. Therefore, 51 has focused on optimizing the picture upload function in terms of technology development, and condoned the dissemination of pictures with a pornographic nature.After more than 3 months of going online, 51 registered users reached 500 million. In January 2006, Sequoia Capital invested US$1 million in 51.
Pang Shengdong, a township enterprise who used to travel day and night in the county and sold Chinese Yellow Pages products for Jack Ma, has a completely different understanding of the Chinese market from the overseas returnees who only "make waves" in campuses and metropolises.From the very beginning, Pang Shengdong targeted young people in border towns like him. He said: "What 51 should learn is not Facebook, but Shi Yuzhu who sells health care products. Occupying the counter is more important than anything else." In the Internet world, this "Counters" are more than 10 Internet cafes all over the urban and rural corners. Pang Shengdong has formed a team of promotion managers who go deep into the cities, and distribute a large number of 51 mouse pads and 51 cultural shirts in various Internet cafes, post posters, and even sell them in Internet cafes at very low prices. The 51 logo is brushed on the side of the signboard.
In Pang Shengdong's heart, there is only one imaginary enemy of 51, and that is Tencent.
在51的界面设计及功能开发上，庞升东采取了全面拷贝QQ空间的做法：51秀、51商城、51群组、51问问。庞升东还建立了与Q币相同的网吧支付体系。“只要腾讯出什么新花样，51在一个月内一定跟上。”
What is even more exaggerated is that Pang Shengdong even came up with a way to attract users from Tencent: when a user logs in to the management center page of 51, he will receive a prompt from the system: "For your memory, please add your homepage address to Fill it in the QQ profile, which will also increase the number of visits to your homepage.” In this way, 51’s personal page was indirectly spread virally on the QQ platform.Another thing that caused Tencent a headache was that 51 went to Tencent to poach the wall. More than 10 Tencent employees collectively jumped to 51, including several core backbones of the game department.
This is what happened when Zheng Zhihao walked into an Internet cafe in an urban village in Shenzhen.In most months of 2006, 51's user growth has been higher than that of Qzone, which made Tencent very nervous. "They compete with us for every Internet cafe," Zheng Zhihao said.
Three Wars 51
"Without the oppressive invasion of 51, the growth of Qzone might not have been so fast." This is the common memory of many people in the future.Over the next two years, Tang Daosheng and Zheng Zhihao led a defensive battle.
The war unfolds on three levels: one is technology, the other is Internet cafes, and the third is the containment of Rainbow QQ cheating.
Although the structure and underlying design have been restructured, compared with the rapid increase in user-generated content, the response speed of Qzone still cannot keep up.For technicians, the worst time of the week is six o'clock on Saturday night, when more than 10 Internet cafes across the country are at their fullest, and it is also the peak time for surfing the Internet. The computer login speed can be suffocating.What's worse, sitting in an office in Shenzhen or Beijing, you can't experience the real situation. China's network layout is very complicated, and the speed of Internet access in different regions is different, which causes many technical difficulties.Zheng Zhihao said: "When I first arrived, all I heard were complaints. The QQ space could not be opened, and the download speed of photos was very slow. I calculated that it usually takes 5 seconds to open a space."
Therefore, Zheng Zhihao asked the technicians to make a map of the whole country, and all the opening speeds above 5 seconds were painted in red, those below 3 seconds were painted in yellow, and those between 3 and 5 seconds were painted in green.After the map was made and hung on the wall, what everyone saw was "the motherland is all red", especially in the northwest, southwest and northeast regions.The next task is that the technical team gnawed piece by piece, and on the map, green and yellow increased little by little.It took almost a year, and by the end of 2007, a yellow map of China finally appeared in front of everyone.
This breakthrough in speed optimization provides a crucial guarantee for the double growth of QZone's traffic in the future.
The competition for Internet cafes has become more intense.
Both 51 and Tencent will hire people to post advertisements in various Internet cafes, and the two families often conflict because of this. "I paste it, and you send someone to tear it off, or cover it with your own advertising poster, and then I tear it up and cover it again. Sometimes, there will be fights." Later, Zheng Zhihao came up with a promotional activity : QQ Zone issued a promotional announcement, announcing that it will present "yellow diamonds" to Internet cafes at 12 o'clock every night, and netizens can go to the front desk of the Internet cafe to claim the code number at that time. "So every 12 o'clock, there will be a long queue at the front desk of many Internet cafes. Everyone knows that Qzone is distributing 'yellow diamonds'. 51 does not have such promotional items, so we have to stare blankly."
By the end of 2007, the two sides looked like a tie.Both announced that the number of registered users has exceeded the 1 million mark.A report provided by Analysys shows that among the top ten social networking sites: QZone ranks first in terms of traffic and visiting users, and fifth in terms of interactivity; 51 ranks second in terms of traffic and visits The number of users ranks behind Qzone, Sina Blog and Baidu Space, and ranks first in terms of interactivity.This is already a very impressive record for 51 without any entrance resources.
After that, however, 51 suddenly made a series of regrettable strategic mistakes.
First of all, internal strife broke out in the entrepreneurial team. Zhang Jianfu, who had been leading the product development team, quit due to illness. The contradiction between the product department and the marketing department became prominent, and various rumors began to sway the morale of the army.
Secondly, under the urging of venture capital, 51 hastily promoted the "de-low-end experiment".After Sequoia, Intel Capital, SIG Heiner Asia, and Redpoint Ventures successively invested in 51. In July 2008, Shi Yuzhu exchanged US$7 million for 5100% of the equity, and announced that he would promote 25 to 51 in one and a half years. Stark.Pang Shengdong abandoned the previous Internet cafe strategy and shifted the focus of promotion to campuses and large and medium-sized cities.
In the end, 51 was eager to increase profits, hastily opened the application programming interface (API), and introduced more than 100 online games.Due to lax censorship, the quality of the game varies. Although it attracted users in a short period of time, it quickly lost a large number of users due to environmental damage.
When the 51 action deformed, Tencent seized the plug-in incident and gave it a fatal blow.
In February 2008, Honglian Network Technology Co., Ltd. was established in Shanghai. It launched a third-party plug-in product called "Rainbow QQ", which claimed to have "value-added" functions of Tencent QQ such as IP address detection and display of invisible friends. This plug-in quickly became popular on the Internet.It became clear in the future that 2 is Honglian's investor. In this way, 51 can easily obtain Tencent's user data and use it for itself.
On November 2008, 11, Tencent sued 7 former employees who collectively switched to 15 in Shenzhen Futian Court for violating their non-compete obligations.On the 51th of the same month, Tencent announced that Rainbow QQ was an illegal plug-in, and began to uninstall it on a large scale. All users who installed Rainbow QQ were prompted to "find illegal QQ plug-ins", claiming that such plug-ins are easy to leak user privacy, and it is recommended to uninstall them immediately. If the user does not uninstall, QQ will exit immediately and cannot be used normally.
Pang Shengdong made a public response to Tencent's approach. He insisted that "Rainbow QQ is a product launched entirely based on user experience needs, and has no commercial profit purpose."In December, he simply changed the name of Rainbow QQ to "12 Rainbow".
In 2009, Tencent filed a lawsuit with the People's Court of Jiang'an District, Wuhan City, Hubei Province, suing Shanghai Honglian Network Technology Co., Ltd. and Shanghai Woyao Network Development Co., Ltd. of which Pang Shengdong is the chairman, for alleged computer software copyright infringement and unfair competition, requiring them to stop Provide the download service of 51 Rainbow, and compensate 50 RMB. In July 2011, the court ruled in favor of Tencent.At this time, 7, which was troubled internally and externally, had been completely marginalized in the battle for Chinese social networking sites, and the highest daily concurrent online users dropped to about 51.
Ma Huateng and Zuckerberg
When Tencent was trying its best to block 10 in more than 51 Internet cafes, another battle for Facebook to surpass My Space was taking place in the social network field in North America. Zuckerberg's tactic was to open up. David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect, writes: "Facebook has never been able to design the best apps, but Zuckerberg unburdened himself by (becoming) a platform, and No need to be exhaustive anymore.”
On May 2007, 5, Facebook held an "F24 Openers Conference" in San Francisco. Zuckerberg, who had just passed his 8rd birthday, was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of rubber sandals with exposed toes, and presented to 23 spectators Shouted: "Hand in hand, let's start a movement." Facebook announced the opening of the application programming interface (API) to all developers.
It was a revolutionary movement, and in the six months that followed, 6 openers launched various applications on Facebook.In the second year, Facebook improved its open review rules and introduced a scoring system, which made the open ecology look more orderly, and the popularity was finally completely detonated. In May 25, Facebook's global traffic surpassed that of My Space for the first time.By September 2008, users had soared to 5 million, and more than 2009 million registered developers from 9 countries had used Facebook as a platform for entrepreneurship.
The sudden rise of Facebook naturally makes its Chinese imitators follow suit. On May 2008, 5, Chen Yizhou's Xiaonei website announced the launch of the beta version of the API open platform, becoming the first local SNS website in China to test the waters of the open platform. After that, 30 also opened its own game platform.
Within Tencent, openness has always been a taboo topic—this scene has not changed subtly until 2011. "It's not that we haven't thought about this topic, but Tencent is different from Facebook, and China is different from the United States," Ma Huateng said later.
The difference between Tencent and Facebook is reflected in five points.
First, when Facebook implements the open strategy, it is a latecomer who attacks from the bottom up. It uses this to subvert the rules and reconstruct the order. To apply Marx's famous saying, Zuckerberg "lost the chains and gained It's the whole world."Since 2006, Tencent has become the leading enterprise with the largest number of users and the largest market value, and is the biggest beneficiary of the existing order. In Ma Huateng's view, opening up cannot bring decisive growth to Tencent.
Second, Tencent and Facebook have inherent differences in the underlying design of the relationship chain. Facebook is a social community by nature, and its friend relationship is open, while QQ started as an instant messaging tool, and the relationship chain is relatively closed. "Friends of friends are not my friends." Full opening means a betrayal of this logic .Compared with Facebook, which has a real-name system, Qzone, which is also an SNS community, does not have mandatory real names, but most of the people who enter the space are acquaintances, so they can have private interactions, which is fundamentally different from blogs of a media nature.What is more advanced than Facebook is that Qzone and QQ are innately integrated, thus forming a richer variety of communication methods and profit models-Facebook did not open its own IM until 2008.
Third, Facebook has nothing but a platform, while Tencent is a "platform + product" type. It itself is the best product developer in China. If it is fully opened up, it will inevitably lead to "left hand fighting right hand" and "referees and athletes competing in the same field." This embarrassing situation is almost unbearable and unmaintainable for Tencent.
Fourth, in terms of profit model, what Facebook really cares about is the amount of information generated by application software on each platform, and then makes money through advertisements, which account for as much as [-]% of its revenue. Equivalent to an additional bonus.While Tencent's revenue comes from virtual value-added services and online games, community advertising has never been negligible, and it may not be welcomed by Chinese users.
Fifth, compared with Facebook's globalization model, China is an "isolated market" due to the influence of ideology, and outsiders cannot enter freely, and it is very difficult for Chinese Internet companies to go out.Therefore, even if Tencent overcomes all difficulties and marches to the world, it is absolutely impossible to become the second Facebook.
Perhaps, more differences can be listed, but the above five points are enough to make Ma Huateng fearful of the road to Facebook.A Tencent executive recalled that before the summer of 2011, Ma Huateng used to organize executives to seriously discuss open topics at the president’s office meeting—Tencent’s top executive meeting, held every two weeks—and finally stopped them. The reason is that Chinese developers faced a mixed environment at that time, and opening up without sufficient preparation may affect the information security of users.Prudence may be the biggest difference between Ma Huateng and Zuckerberg. "He admires Zuckerberg, but he will never go to any public occasion wearing a T-shirt and rubber sandals with exposed toes."
On the business level, Wu Xiaoguang and Tang Daosheng still took defensive actions. In December 2008, Tencent launched the real-name registered QQ alumni network, which almost completely imitated Facebook in terms of structure and social scene.By July 12, QQ Alumni Network was renamed "Friends Network", and this social platform once ranked among the top six social networking sites in the country.In the battle of the domestic social network market, Tencent uses the strategy of QZone and Friends.com to keep pace with each other, providing QQ users with different forms of social network services and allowing the two social platforms to develop in a differentiated manner.
Later facts proved that Tencent's alternative posture in the Facebook heat wave may be right, at least commercially appropriate. Xiaonei, Facebook's most loyal imitator in China, has not been able to replicate the great success of the former in the United States. Chen Yizhou changed its name to "Renren" in August 2009 and listed it on the New York Stock Exchange on May 8, 2011. It went public, but Renren fell into a huge loss in the second year, and has not found an ideal profit model. The gap between the number of active users and Qzone is getting wider and wider.
American strategic thinker John Galbraith once said: "If we look at India or China based on the experience we have gained in the United States, half of it is incomprehensible, and half of it is wrong." The fever is vividly presented.In the more than a year after May 2009, Qzone achieved explosive growth in a very unexpected and almost unthinkable way for Americans.
Its theme is "Growing Vegetables and Stealing Vegetables".
The Explosive Effect of "Happy Farm"
After entering 2009, Tang Daosheng, who had just breathed a sigh of relief from the war against 51, was restless every day. The first thing he did after going to work was to open Facebook and various social networking sites in China.
At that time, it was a great moment for social network to form dominance. Nielsen announced in March 2009 that Internet users all over the world spent more time on social network than on mailbox for the first time. Communication methods have become mainstream.At the same time, the opening effect of Facebook is fermenting, and many novel application software emerge in endlessly, and they will be copied to domestic social networking sites in the shortest possible time. Happy network.Founded in March 3, the company has adopted rapid replication as its strategy from the first day. It took the lead in introducing the two most popular game-type applications on Facebook, "Friends Buying" and "Grab Parking Space", to China. Urban white-collar workers flock to it.
Just before and after the Spring Festival in 2009, Tang Daosheng discovered that a Chinese self-developed game "Happy Farm" suddenly became popular on the Xiaonei website.Its gameplay is simple and interesting. The user plays the role of a farmer, reclaims the land in his own farm, grows various vegetables and fruits, and at the same time steals other people's fruits.
This game was successfully developed by a college student start-up company in Shanghai called "5 Minutes". It was launched on the Xiaonei website in November 2008, and it ranked among the top 11 plug-in applications on the Xiaonei website in just one week. After that, the number of daily active users exceeded 10 that day, and quickly exceeded 10 million more than two months later.In February 100, Kaixin.com also launched "Happy Garden", further heating up the heat wave of "stealing and growing vegetables".
"Qzone is different from Facebook or Xiaonei. It is not an open platform, but we can cooperate with '5 Minutes' to introduce this game to Qzone. However, one of the most annoying problems is that Tencent already has For the game department, if we also get involved in the game, will it lead to a disorder in the division of labor?" This was Tang Daosheng's biggest worry at the time.
One day in April, Tang Daosheng and the equally restless Zheng Zhihao sat in the office, looking at each other.Just in the past two months, as the farm game continued to heat up, the user activity of Kaixin.com and Xiaonei.com has increased rapidly, and QZone has obviously been marginalized.
Zheng Zhihao said to Tang Daosheng: "Let's try."
Tang Daosheng said in unskilled Mandarin: "Then try it."
The next day, Tencent's negotiator appeared in the office of Gao Shaofei, CEO of "5 Minutes".In the next few days, the two parties negotiated on the details of "Happy Farm" entering Qzone.
Tencent proposes three cooperation methods: one-time purchase of agency rights; all revenues are divided in proportion; Tencent promises to guarantee the bottom income, and cap it after a certain base.Gao Shaofei chose the third option, and looking at it later, this was the biggest mistake in Gao Shaofei's life. "No one thought it would be so crazy," said the young entrepreneur.
It is precisely because of the underestimation of the possibility that Gao Shaofei also insisted that the game server is maintained by "5 minutes".
"Happy Farm" was launched on Qzone on May 2009, 5, and what happened next exceeded everyone's expectations.
On the first day of launch, the huge amount of user traffic immediately overwhelmed the server. In the history of Tencent, there has never been such a precedent. "5 minutes" had to transfer the management authority of the server to Tencent .The original software written by Gao Shaofei's team could not withstand such a huge traffic impact, so Wu Xiaoguang urgently summoned the most elite programmers to rewrite the software.
As of June 6, the number of active farm users per day has reached 1 million, and all the servers assigned to the "Happy Farm" project are fully loaded. The technical team continues to optimize, but it is clear that it will face the danger of bursting.Zheng Zhihao wrote an e-mail to Zhang Zhidong overnight, "I would like to ask for your support in server launch and capacity expansion." He reported that "Happy Farm" has greatly stimulated the activity of QZone and commercialized income.According to his calculations, at least several hundred more servers will need to be added in the next two months.
Ten minutes later, Zhang Zhidong replied: "I'm glad to see that our social game (SNS Game) has started to have a business model, and it has considerable economies of scale." He approved nearly a thousand servers at one time.
In August 2009, "Happy Farm" was renamed "QQ Farm". The new version added more varieties of crops, and fully connected the yellow diamond service system of QQ members with the purchase of virtual items such as "seeds" and "pesticides".Since then, the number of farm players has increased sharply by 8 million per day, and their online and hang-up time has exceeded all previous experience points.
A few years later, when the Qzone team recalled the scene at that time, everyone still couldn't hide their suffocating expressions.
Tencent has never released the traffic data of "QQ Farm".
"That is an incredible number, and it may not be broken for a long time." Tang Daosheng said quietly.
Lu Shan, who is in charge of the entire background system, revealed a detail: in the second half of 2009, Tencent added more than 4000 servers for "QQ Farm"-"this has never happened before."In addition, check Tencent's 2009 third-quarter performance report, which mentions that the active accounts of Qzone increased by 33.7% quarter-on-quarter, reaching 3.053 million at the end of the third quarter. The increase was mainly due to the launch of new social network applications (especially based on Casual games for social networks) are very popular among users.
According to this calculation, Qzone actually added more than 7000 million active users in one quarter, which of course comes from the stimulating effect of "QQ Farm".
The income that "QQ Farm" brings to Tencent is also a secret that has not been made public.Shandong's "Qilu Evening News" once reported the expenditure of a player named Wang Hao: "Dog food costs 0.4Q coins a day, fertilizers vary from good to bad, medium high-speed chemical fertilizers cost 1Q coins per bag, and two bags of chemical fertilizers a day is enough. 2Q coins, but if you have yellow diamonds, you can get a 1.92% discount.” Wang Hao’s final result is that he spends 80 yuan per day, so that together with membership fees and yellow diamond privilege fees, he has to invest [-] yuan a month on “QQ Farm” about.
This is the monthly expenses of a "medium gamer".If there are 100 million "Wang Hao" in the country, then the monthly income of "QQ Farm" will be around 1 million yuan, and this is undoubtedly a very conservative period from 2009 to 2010 when "all people steal food". estimate.
In the history of Qzone, "QQ Farm" is like the most powerful booster that pushes satellites into the established orbit.Not only did it push the number of users to 3 million—Facebook also reached this number of users in the third quarter of 2009 due to its open strategy. There are two more important changes:
First, it allows Tencent to find a revenue model different from Facebook's in the field of social networking. The profit of "QQ Farm" comes from the enthusiasm of users to buy virtual items, and this is Tencent's most skillful profit method since it invented the QQ show.Since 2009, the revenue of Qzone has increased significantly, becoming the second largest revenue contributor after online games, and the revenue of Yellow Diamond reached its peak in 2010.By 2011, Tencent's revenue from community value-added services was 72.21 billion yuan, most of which came from various membership services and virtual game props.
Second, in the more than a year when the "stealing food movement" was the most popular, Qzone used "farm" as the traffic entrance to support 38 application products of Tencent's full product line, including QQ browser and QQ housekeeper. , phone bill recharge, and casual competitive games, etc., the activity of "recharge phone bill, get fertilizer" is also particularly impressive. Therefore, Qzone won the 2009 Tencent Cooperation Culture Award.Since then, Qzone has become Tencent's most important entry-level product on the computer side.This small team of only 20 people at the time of formation made great achievements for Tencent in the social network upsurge in a way completely different from Facebook.
The success of "QQ Farm" gave the QZone team more confidence to introduce more social applications, and later developed into an open Tencent platform with clearer strategic goals.Lin Songtao once again took on the important task of developing a new model, held up the banner of Tencent's open platform, and established opening and sharing rules in line with the Chinese market, allowing Tencent to take a big step in serving the industry ecology.Later, Tencent's open platform integrated the traffic of multiple platform products, allowing Tencent to win the largest share in the web game market.
(End of this chapter)
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