How to treat "free" on the Internet (how Tencent and 360 succeeded) and how to succeed?

Last quarter, the sales revenue of virtual goods reached $38.538 million, including QQ show, pets, QQ QZONE, QQ members and so on. This part of the business has accounted for 42% of the business income and has become the main source of income. C2C e-commerce, with interests as its appeal, is incompatible with the community with emotions as its appeal, and is the "ceiling" of many SNS at present. Who is the largest SNS in China? The community QZONE developed on the basis of instant messaging (IM) is a strong competitor for this title. The envy of 200 SNS operators in China is the 57 million users of QZONE, and it is still growing.

Behind the 57 million, there are those amazing figures-580 million registered QQ users, 230 million active QQ users, and the highest online number of QQ board games is 27 1 0,000.

More importantly, QZONE makes money! Although the financial indicators of QZONE are not disclosed separately due to the restrictions of the rules of listed companies, it is inevitable that QZONE bound with QQ will profit from its business model, and what is more worthy of attention is how big its profit space is.

The latest form of communism

"SNS is nothing new." Wu, executive vice president, is a veteran who is in charge of the "most competitive" and "most profitable" Internet business at present. In his view, the process of SNS has already begun.

"Since instant messaging, many applications have been discovered, and the process of development is a process of gradually enriching applications and services." Wu Shuguang said. According to the order of launch, QZONE is the latest community form in the development chain such as instant messaging, chat room, QQ group, QQ show and QZONE.

Wu believes that instant messaging (IM) is the core of everything. As early as the OICQ era, users had their own "personal attributes" and "relationship chains" on the Internet. These two elements are the most important components of social networking service (SNS).

At the stage when users can only express their personality with a few words, many teenagers introduce themselves with variant characters or spell out weird graphics to attract attention. It's called personal attributes. After the launch of QZONE, its support for pictures and audio makes it easier for users to introduce themselves. Moreover, QZONE has a larger capacity, and users can constantly add content to it.

"After providing QQ group services, we have seen users' demand for social networking services." Fang Cheng, senior public relations manager, said.

It is found that QQ group can have various applications: both party branch group and class group; There are both groups formed by interests and groups formed by work. In a sense, QQ group is equivalent to "circle" and "group" in other SNS products. After the launch of QZONE, QQ group can be bound with QZONE service, and the chat records of QQ group can be saved in the group log, thus forming a space belonging to group users.

Referring to the six-degree relationship theory, in the era of peer-to-peer chat, the user's relationship chain can only be established and managed once; After providing chat room function, temporary group relationship can be established; QQ group "solidified" this temporary group relationship, and then "sealed"; On the other hand, QZONE adds more relational dimensions, more like a community.

"packaging" emotion

In a sense, QZONE is an expanded version of the profit model of QQ Show.

The application of QQ Show, one of the cash cows, originated from an employee traveling to South Korea.

After returning from Korea, the employee reported to Ma that the paper doll system was popular in Korea and made a lot of money. Have a meeting to discuss this new model. Ma raised several questions, but in the end, everyone unanimously decided to launch the QQ show.

The initial QQ show was simple, but it was a success. Since then, QQ pets have been launched, which has also been successful.

The only difference between QZONE and QQ show is that if only clothes, backgrounds and props can be sold on QQ show, everything from desks and chairs to lighters can be sold on QZONE.

In the fourth quarter of 2006, the sales revenue of virtual goods reached $38.538 million, including QQ show, pets, QZONE and QQ members. This part of the business has accounted for 42% of the business income and has become the most important source of income.

Those who have a large number of users don't even need to spend their energy on the design of these virtual goods.

Sign outsourcing agreements with some design companies, design drawings externally, and then sell them on their own platforms. This makes the richness of virtual goods break through the limitation of enterprise resources, thus achieving a substantial increase in sales revenue.

For many users, buying virtual goods is even more convenient than buying real goods. Q coins may be the most influential virtual currency in China. Q coins can be obtained by purchasing physical cards, voice calls and online banking payment.

Wu believes that satisfying users' emotional needs is the value of virtual goods. From this perspective, it is no longer a simple product company. It is the slogan that everything is based on user value. Technology can only be used to build a platform, and the ability to tap users' emotions can bring profits.

This means that every employee had better be a sensitive "emotional catcher", not just sensitive to technology. "Of course, our employees are all users, and many people have been users since their student days." Fang Cheng believes that this makes them understand the user's emotions without any obstacles.

Wu described that the emotions caught will have a process of being "packaged". Each service provided must find one or more matching emotions from these "packages". "In other words, it is to provide a suitable channel for users' emotional expression and transmission. "

Cooperation with traditional industries

A netizen who just wrote a blog will go to QZONE, which may be too fancy. He may not know that young users may not be able to stand the seriousness, coldness and monotony of professional blogs.

Because QZONE provides some dynamic display functions, users even need to download a small plug-in in order to read QZONE smoothly. However, for young netizens with sufficient curiosity and time, this is not an obstacle. What does it matter if you can let the flowers float around in your own space?

For operators, this "flower after flower" is profit. Users need to pay to "deploy" lively and personalized decorations in their own space. Users' acceptance and tolerance of community complexity is directly related to their income. The more complicated the structure, the more products will be sold. Of course, it is impossible to start them at once, so users should learn about them one by one.

Of course, a large and segmented community can bring other benefits. QZONE has become the largest part of network traffic. Traffic is the value of advertising.

"Capturing user characteristics and using data mining technology to provide advertisers with more targeted delivery will be the direction of QZONE's next efforts." Wu Shuguang said. Although network traffic has surpassed Netease, its advertising value has not been fully tapped. Making advertisements find more accurate target audiences through the community has become a new means to tap the value of advertisements.

In addition, we are also trying to learn from and cooperate with traditional industries.

"Learning from reality is also a good way to innovate." Wu believes that what can be sold in reality can also be sold in QZONE in theory.

In reality, users can't satisfy the desire to buy a lot of clothes, but they can do it in QZONE. Some well-known clothing brands have cooperated. When they launch new products, they can launch corresponding virtual goods, which has a good advertising cognitive effect. At present, we are also cooperating with fast-moving consumer goods brands such as Coca-Cola.

"In fact, we are not as successful as the outside world imagined. We also have many failures, but the risks are not too great. " Wu Shuguang said. He thinks this is a company that can tolerate failure, but can't tolerate making the same mistakes. This requires everyone to be brave in innovation and be good at summing up experiences and lessons.

All SNS providers are learning objects. As long as you think the service is good, you will organize a team to study it. If appropriate, you will mobilize resources to do it. Learning from others, others also learn, which may become a long-term interesting phenomenon in China's internet community.

Perceptual consumption bottleneck

If the number of users is compared to the population, then QZONE is larger than most countries in the world. As the maker of huge virtual community rules, it is inevitable to control all "mines" and "shops" to make money.

The problem of cost can be solved by technology. Xiong Minghua, a co-CTO from Microsoft, said with great certainty that the number of servers is only a quarter of that of MSN. Even if users accumulate more and more content on QZONE, there will be enough income to offset the increase in costs.

But the problem may come from the management and operation ability of the huge virtual community.

As a listed company, we must constantly urge the profit carriage, and the source of profit is the users. Although the number of QZONE users is still growing, due to the positioning of QZONE, the number of active users of QZONE will eventually stabilize at a certain level. At this time, can the average user contribution (ARPU) continue to increase?

Too much emphasis on the satisfaction of users' emotional needs will lead to the situation of users' emotional consumption. For the perceptual consumption of virtual goods, there will be a bottleneck in the user's acceptance scale, which will be more obvious when the user is taken as a whole.

It has been realized that one day, the income growth of QZONE to meet emotional needs will slow down. Therefore, the introduction of C2C website Paipai. com not only meets the needs of users for online transactions, but also improves the realism of QZONE users' consumption. More three-dimensional services will be launched around the theme of "online life". However, these services will still focus on instant messaging services, not QZONE.

This is also the "ceiling" of many SNS at present. Even from the same company, C2C e-commerce with interests as its appeal and the community with emotions as its appeal are incompatible. SNS, which evolved from other services, cannot be separated from the seed service that was originally developed.

Another example is Taobao. It is very competitive to join e-commerce, but Taobao will go a long way on the road of community, and the road will be more difficult.

In fact, in Tencent's five and a half years of life, it struggled to find a profit model to make money. Who would have thought that he would "make money day by day" later?

1998165438+10 In October, college classmates Ma and Zhang Zhidong decided to go into business, so they founded Tencent. The initial business is to do system integration for some paging stations. They all worked as sales and engineers, and later QQ software, which was popular all over the country, was actually a by-product given by the project that year.

QQ was originally named "Online Chinese Pager" or OICQ for short. In any case, OICQ is a horse's improvisation imitating ICQ. At that time, ICQ was popular all over the world, but there was no Chinese version yet. Chinese instant messaging software such as PICQ and CICQ has appeared, but it has not effectively opened the market.

The exact reason is unknown. Maybe Ma Hua Teng saw ICQ sold from Israel to the United States at a sky-high price of $287 million. Maybe he saw the stock market climax in 2000. Com company is calling for free on the other side of the ocean. Maybe he saw the first batch of online heroes in China surging. One day at the beginning of 1999, OICQ software suddenly hung on the Internet, and it was changed from directional gift to free download.

OICQ, with its concise, practical style and elaborate design, became an instant hit in colleges and universities at first, and then spread at an alarming speed centering on colleges and universities. Opponents such as PICQ and CICQ are almost vulnerable. At this time, Tencent continued to develop projects while supporting OICQ with the money it earned.

However, the geometric increase in the number of OICQ users has made the problem of whether it can support OICQ serious, and the geometric increase in monthly server hosting costs has also made Tencent unbearable. Ma Hua Teng later recalled the scene at that time and said that he wanted to sell OICQ and sold it many times, but he didn't sell it. He can only make a living.

This strategy is financing.

At the beginning of 2000, relying on OICQ to occupy the market position for only half a year, Tencent was lucky to attract the investment of $2.2 million from IDG and PCG owned by Li Zekai, accounting for 40% of the shares.

Despite a sum of money, there is no worry about life and death for the time being. However, the registered number of OICQ continues to grow with a steep curve, but the profit model of OICQ has not yet been found. In fact, ICQ, the pioneer of OICQ, has never had a profit model.

Tencent's exploration of OICQ profit model began with online advertising. In the new version of the software on July 25th, 2000, a banner was inserted at the message receiving end.

Although Tencent's online advertising sales have developed very well, it once ranked third in the survey of "pioneers of online advertising", followed by Sina Sohu. However, compared with the investment of adding hundreds of thousands of registered users every day (up to 800 thousand at the peak) and adding two servers every month, online advertising is a bit of a drop in the bucket.

Throughout 2000, Tencent spent two rumors: one rumor was that Tencent would charge full fees; The second rumor is that Tencent will be sold by TOM or Pulse. These two rumors are related to Tencent's "no money", and the evidence of "no money" is that OICQ software stopped registering free new users.

Value Breakthrough Brought by Monternet

When China Mobile launched Monternet at the end of 2000, it probably didn't know that this innovative value chain would save a number of Internet companies. Tencent is at the forefront of this list.

At that time, Tencent had nearly 1 100 million registered Internet users, and these users contained a large number of consumer demands. However, Tencent suffers from no charging channels. However, Monternet's "28-20 split" agreement (operator 20%, SP 80%) was like a flash of lightning, which awakened the sleeping Tencent.

Tencent quickly launched a fee-paying membership service, restricted page registration, and launched a mobile QQ service. For a time, Tencent became the backbone of Monternet, with the highest share accounting for 70% of Monternet.

Tencent makes money at the same speed as registered users. Only in July of 20001,Tencent realized positive cash flow, and by the end of 20001,Tencent realized a net profit of/kloc-0.022 million RMB. At the same time, in March of 20001year, Tencent changed the name of the software to QQ in response to the copyright lawsuit of ICQ.

Tencent's performance growth began to shine in 2002 and 2003. In the past two years, Tencent has launched some new services such as QQ line and QQ Show. On the other hand, it is constantly learning, such as learning Sina to push text messages and ringtones, learning Netease to launch dating services for QQ men and women, and learning to play online games. In 2002, Tencent's net profit was 65.438+0.44 billion, an increase of 654.38+00 times over the previous year. In 2003, Tencent's net profit was 338 million, nearly double that of 2002.

According to Tencent's prospectus, Tencent's main profits are divided into three parts, namely, Internet value-added services (including membership services, community services, games and entertainment services) and mobile and communication value-added services (including mobile phone chat, voice chat, SMS ringtones, etc.). ) and online advertising.

As of the first three months of 2004, the revenue of the first two parts accounted for 96. 1% of Tencent's total revenue. Therefore, in a broad sense, Tencent is SP (content provider, the specific extension is currently to be determined), because most of the money collection methods in the first two parts are divided through Monternet.

Su, investment director of Tencent, declined to disclose the proportion of Monternet's revenue to total revenue. Although some of Tencent's membership cards and online game cards are sold through some book stands and convenience stores, insiders point out that more than 90% of users charge through Monternet.

Statistics in the first quarter of this year show that Tencent has 7.3 million paid members, among which senior members contribute 10 RMB to Tencent every month and QQ Bank members contribute 2 yuan RMB every month; At the same time, Tencent has 1365438+ millions of SMS registered users. In addition, QQ men and women, color ring tones, pictures and other short message services are profitable in various forms.

Tencent also intends to participate in sharing plans such as "Internet Star". Through video QQ or QQ games, Tencent can share some revenue from broadband operators. In addition, Tencent's enterprise QQ is another ambition. Tencent is eager to get income from enterprises by customizing the use of enterprise QQ.

Tencent also "leased" the QQ brand to a toy company to produce QQ toys. Tencent gets a fixed income for this every year.

The future of QQ: be enemies with everyone. Com users?

If we only look at mobile value-added services from the perspective of narrow sense SP, its proportion in Tencent's total revenue is gradually shrinking.

Tencent's revenue from mobile and communication value-added services accounted for 75.6% of the total revenue in 2002 and 63.6% in 2003. By the first three months of this year, this proportion had steadily dropped to 55.5%, and Tencent began to get rid of the status of "pure SP". At the same time, the income from Internet value-added services rose sharply, from 15.5% and 5438+0 in 2006 to 40.6% in the first three months of this year, which should be contributed by online game income.

A long time ago, Ma said that "mobile business can only reflect the peripheral part of our core value, and value-added services based on PC are our core value". Then, the change of Tencent's profit model shown by financial data is confirming Ma's statement.

"Compared with the general SMS SP, Tencent's biggest advantage is the monopoly on the desktop, which is the lifeblood and core competitiveness." Market analyst Han Jingkui said that for more than four years, Han has been paying attention to the development of Tencent and has communicated with many senior executives including Ma.

From this perspective, Tencent, which is now regarded as a high-risk SP, may get farther and farther away from it. On the contrary, as reflected in the financial statements, its income from Internet value-added services will increase.

In terms of Internet value-added services, "Tencent may continue to use the follow-up strategy in the future." Han Jingkui told this reporter, "Tencent is a bit like Microsoft, with huge user resources."

At present, QQ has 290 million registered users. On this basis, you can see the success of others before you follow, because the cost of new business development will be relatively low.

An example that can be proved is QQ game. From the middle of last year to now, it is less than 1 year, and the investment is not much. However, due to the binding with QQ community, it is almost equivalent to the scale of Lianzhong game in less than one year, which is the embodiment of the follow-up strategy. In addition, the services developed in the past, such as ringtones, short messages, making friends and alumni records, are all the results of following this strategy.

The consequence of using the follow-up strategy is that "Tencent may be the enemy of everyone. COM "and" because of Tencent's user base and. The user groups of COM greatly overlap. "

According to the Prospectus, two-thirds of the funds raised by Tencent IPO will be used to expand new business. At the same time, the prospectus lists the direction of new business expansion, with the focus on Internet business, which coincides with analysts' views on Tencent's future strategy.

Tencent mentioned that the core of future Internet business includes expanding the entrance of QQ games, establishing online dating communities and establishing vertical information websites. What's more worth mentioning is that Tencent mentioned that it will participate in the "commercial advertising ranking technology" in the future and contact Tencent browser, which has been bound to QQ. Tencent's ambition to compete with Internet companies such as 372 1 and Baidu is obvious.

It seems to be Tencent's development logic to gain a large number of users through free registration, make profits through mobile phone charges, and then enter other profitable network business fields. However, the basis of this logic is still the huge number of active registered users. In the face of QQ charges, another instant messaging service, Microsoft MSN messager, which is still free, will inevitably become a rival of QQ.

Zhou, chairman of 360 Company, said at the fifth annual meeting of iResearch New Economy today that it was unintentional and without foresight to do 360 safety and health at the beginning, but the success of 360 lies in daring to constantly subvert the tradition.

Zhou said that Qihoo didn't think too clearly when it started to do 360, but unconsciously found that network security was the demand of every netizen. He believes that the essence of the Internet is to gather people's power online, and Internet products can only be welcomed by users if they serve the people.

Zhou said that everyone should not only kill viruses and prevent Trojans when surfing the Internet, but also prevent their logs from being discarded and their indecent photos and privacy from being uploaded to the Internet, so security is very important to every netizen. At the same time, free is the inherent spirit of the Internet, so 360 should also use the free mode.

"Today 360 has a large number of users because we insist on serving the people. I believe that eventually we can find a brand-new model. "

Zhou pointed out that domestic entrepreneurs are good at copying American projects. Start-ups should learn more about what netizens in China think and need according to the actual situation in China, instead of looking at the United States every day.

"360 can go today, that is, it is necessary to constantly subvert, do things that others dare not think, and do things that others dare not do." Zhou finally appealed, "I hope more companies can have their own innovations instead of copying."

Zhou also pointed out that if a company provides valuable services that many people like, and the cost of such services is controllable, it will eventually find a business model.

"For example, Twitter and Facebook in foreign countries, almost everyone is on Twitter, using Facebook to contact friends and having a large number of loyal users. This service will definitely give birth to a new business model in the future. "

The fifth annual summit of iResearch, sponsored by iResearch Group, was held at the Beijing National Convention Center today. Tencent Technology officially designated the strategic cooperation entrance of the conference.