At the end of 2020, looking back at this long and destined year in the annals of history, the Internet circle inevitably looks more like a small piece of territory that is easily overlooked in the historical waves.
We finally lost the motivation to criticize severely. For everything that should have been astonished, on the one hand, we acknowledged the public sentiment fueled by hostility, and on the other hand, we are also secretly bearing the impermanent loss of “time”, a scarce trading product.
People always compare this global epidemic to a new round of world wars, but few people mention another key issue that must be faced after any war-what will be destroyed and what should be rebuilt?
Although it is not orderly, the PR incidents of the major Internet platforms throughout the year have dropped to a low level that they are particularly satisfied with-the new owner who will enter the White House, the United Kingdom that has reached an agreement to leave the European Union, or even one round after another. Vaccines that turn on the test are all pushing another visual focus movement.
I hate the use of big words, but the acceleration of information transmission and the suffering of social consumption have become historical facts in the past year. The inequality in technological development and social status is increasing. You and I have to start thinking about the “post-epidemic era.” For procedural justice that may occur, we must react and choose immediately.
This is when entering 2021, I hope to have the three driving forces that will help me better understand the future-expensive instead of free, de-AI information flow returns, and new entrances are re-centralized.
01 Expensive instead of free
Free is not a business model.
Starting from the creation of free models in early Internet products, entrepreneurs seem to regard “monetization of traffic” as a historical keynote, the general idea of continuation and inheritance, and never leave the history of subsidizing users and letting users “use it for me” Big loop.
“Subsidies” are certainly more ruthless than free.
Back then, when I bought Rising anti-virus software from Computer City, I could only sell directly at a price. Later, PC Internet brought the genius commercial creation of “three-level rocket”, and free products were bundled and installed with each other. 360 anti-virus drove away the “little lion” on my desktop. , I never thought that it was the first time I experienced “product matrix”.
The accumulation of user traffic is usually inseparable from the process of recharging.
Product managers are familiar with the discipline of “cost shifting”, advertising is popular, and various DSP units are accurately pushed, squeezing into the information flow of small screens.
Take Baidu as an example. In 2019, its total revenue was 107.4 billion yuan. During the same period, the number of active ecological users was 200-400 million. This means that if there is no free model, Baidu must maintain its revenue cost ratio and profit scale, and it needs to provide users with Charge a “use fee” of hundreds of dollars.
Cost transfer helps users save the cost of unimpeded operation in the Internet circle, but don’t forget the reciprocal effect of business models, which determines the inevitability of value exchange-the nature of willingly paying for users is the behavior of expecting to exchange users Data privacy information such as routing and operating environment to form a guarantee for accurate advertising.
Therefore, talking about privacy protection in the business model controlled by the free model is somewhat comical.
In the past ten years, the growth rate of the advertising market volume has obviously lags behind the growth rate of the Internet volume, which makes the traditional non-discriminatory advertising model greedy for the “precision” of the industry supported by big data starting from the mobile Internet. Advertising engineization determines the underlying data-driven core logic, and it requires continuous supply of user data as a basis for analysis.
Cross-platform device information, network information, and LBS information are divided and collapsed. Almost every application scattered by users becomes the end of the tree-like structure of the underlying advertising engine. They form a set of metabolism in the Internet industry.
Therefore, as long as the free model continues to exist in the Internet field, which is still on the road of development, the advertisements that convey data and blood will become a mouthful. Not only can it not stop the harm to user privacy, but it will intensify the crowding A private domain scene.
From the collaboration between Ali and Focus, Xiaomi occupies the living room, we seem to have seen the “scene” of the big platform, which is constantly compressing the airspace of self-thinking.
How can you talk about data privacy and protection when you can’t even grasp the opening advertisement of a TV in the living room? All kinds of inequalities in information discourse power have formed deep-rooted forces that neither you nor me can resist.
Better examples include the head of Taobao today. As the founder of Youmeng products many years ago, no one can tell what kind of business model the underlying value of data has, except for Alibaba. Free use brings free user behavior tracking, which is the realizable traffic that giants can only play.
Fortunately, a global epidemic has destroyed this equivalent exchange that has lasted for many years-consumption restrictions have reduced the willingness of traditional businesses to continue to pay for data exchange. The data cycle needs to be rescued, and free products are expected to take a sharp turn. This is enough to make We think about a new historical reconstruction——
Say goodbye to most free.
When shocks and changes occur, you can see the meaning of holding right.
The British “Financial Times” concluded that: the growth rate of trade will no longer exceed the growth rate of global output as in the past few decades, but will be roughly the same as the growth rate of global output. The reasons for the slowdown include the drying up of opportunities, the absence of global trade liberalization, and the rise of protectionism.
Trade protectionism and de-globalization are establishing macro-level barriers, the extended data cycle scenario is interrupted, internal competition will be more extreme and cruel, and it has been disturbed by the so-called precision push. Then there is no reason to believe Will it continue?
In the next five years, the new infrastructure represented by energy facilities will replace the old infrastructure represented by the real estate sector. This is a very apt analogy-the Internet is moving towards the most normal commercial loop of “charging”, and subsidies will gradually become active. Free is becoming increasingly rare, and the return of business models is the best solution to smooth the trunk artery of the future Internet.
Of course, we still need the joint promotion of industries, countries, and even regional economies.
For example, the British government has already imposed a 2% digital tax on major digital technology companies in April of this year. This move will affect many Internet giants including Amazon, Google and Facebook. Some left-wing lawmakers even called out the evidence of “digital colonization”. Free Google and free Facebook seem to provide convenient and easy-to-use products and services for the whole of Europe, but the user data exchanged has been supplied to the right side of the equation. Advertising machine.
This shows that even if the free thinking logic cannot be changed in the short term, users should also be allowed to earn income from the transfer of privacy rights. The addition of the national system makes digital tax a promise of future welfare for citizens, which is a positive and welcome change.
In short, we should be aware of the essential logic of the suspension of certain Internet products as soon as possible before the social shock wave brought about by this epidemic subsides, and rethink the product model and the way out for the consumer Internet in the next five years.
02 De-AI information return
One reason that hinders me from continuing to use Douyin products is not just the old-fashioned information cocoon room problem, but the limited content material behind the information cocoon room, which leads to similar information.
This means: the cage of the information cocoon room is like a townhouse with highly uniform construction rules. You only have the right to accept distribution on demand.
Holding the technical scepter of AI data modeling, it can quickly complete the marking and clustering for each new user in a short time. This is the blessing of the big data era-but the global data feeding needs under the information distribution mechanism, And the scarcity of information brought about by exquisite content creation has caused a gap between user content needs and the data engine material library. This is the biggest misfortune.
The existence of this gap makes Douyin products doomed to not fill this pool of content in five years or even longer. Transferring content acquisition rights to the machine learning model will undoubtedly lead to the lack of innovative education.
The life and death crisis encountered by physical bookstores in the past few years makes us seem to forget another form of content-newsstand.
It is reasonable for newsstands to withdraw from the stage of history today when information is online, but it also takes away the channels for ingesting unexpected content and the overall framework for information ingestion after such channels disappear.
The old magazines, abstracts, and newspapers are small, but they carry an unexpected content distribution mission—as Obama once said in a speech on the first school day in the United States, the essence of education is to provide people with opportunities to discover their talent .
Discovery and exploration both point to channels beyond expectations. If we only develop courses for different students according to our interests, we may have some talents while missing most of them.
Destiny should not be compiled. When the user’s attention time is more divided into the pan-entertainment ecology, the content “nipple music” becomes the embodiment of the negative product of education.
Brzezinski’s theory has received renewed attention, which shows that we all subconsciously realize that the innovation transition of society must come from accidental changes, rather than deterministic increments.
What’s more, under the established mode of content distribution, rigid indicators such as the increase in the number of users and the time spent by users make the marketing system the mainstream language, dry goods content gives way to hip-hop entertainment, production and life give way to luxury and extravagance, and ordinary principles give way to exquisiteness. Modification, how to please AI has become the only consideration for content creators.
AI-based information is usually accompanied by the huge voice of the platform, just like the rapid growth and expansion of headline products, and the definition of data tags is like a reality show involving all human beings. Most people are destined to return in dismay, who can become a minority to break through. Success is clouded by doubts.
Growth hackers are still accelerating the R value increase from the other side, and the application of the communication model, let the really boring but simple and explosive content enter your screen grandiosely.
So I once said that compared with the aging population, we should worry more about the simplification of AI models that accelerate the aging of society.
In the next five years, in order to avoid the heavy lessons brought by the exhaustion of innovation, AI engines must focus more on the introduction of unexpected content traffic. Outside of the points of interest, products in the vertical field are enough for us to consume. What society needs is a large number of non-vertical and comprehensive sources.
Today, when opening any news App and customizing the homepage, it is a difficult task to find the logic of flat distribution and the structure of random walk-like content. The reversal of this key logic must rely on the insight of the giants who have more historical responsibility.
De-AI does not mean that the life of AI algorithms is to be eliminated, but rather emphasizes the urgent social need to change the logic of current AI algorithms.
The extension of online time due to the epidemic at home this spring has made it easier to detect the widening gap mentioned in this paragraph. You and I should look forward to and encourage the return of de-AI information distribution.
03 New centralized entrance again
The financial leverage of the corporate and residential sectors is still rising during the epidemic. This seems to be just one example of the global loose monetary policy. The cyclical fluctuation of credit transactions is likely to wipe out the efforts of financial products to enter the sinking market.
The essence of credit is to borrow money from oneself in the future. At some point in the future, people’s consumption will be less than their income, so they are able to fulfill their previous credit consumption promises. Deleveraging has been discussed for several years. Fortunately, there is a general policy of “seeking progress while maintaining stability”. There will be no large-scale faults and concentrated collapse in consumption, but it will inevitably affect the success or failure of traditional innovation models.
In 2020, the financial model of “time for space” represented by Eggshell Apartments failed. The sinking of credit consumption should have created social demand and boosted consumer confidence. However, in the face of the black swan of the epidemic, it has dealt a heavy blow to young dreamers. The crowd, they are at the center of the trap.
The intervention of national policies and regulations must come earlier than our estimate of the time of the crisis. The “cut-off” of the eggshell apartment makes the space for innovation and fault tolerance increasingly narrow. On the one hand, platform giants want to release more entrepreneurial opportunities to start-up companies. On the other hand, the difficulty of innovation will also allow more affordable giants to get more market opportunities.
Many people have miscalculated Ali’s “anti-monopoly” turmoil-as mentioned in the first part of this article, the global Internet free model is facing a rebalancing process of value exchange. The essence of this problem is that it is more difficult for the platform to turn around and change past habits The revenue model of the company frequently affects the ecology, and it is difficult to promote changes in the internal product model.
When we look outside, the problem is much easier to understand. The US Department of Justice also officially filed landmark antitrust lawsuits against Google and Facebook this year, which is another perspective to observe the innovation spin-off of global giants.
Therefore, anti-monopoly is not the same as anti-giant. Innovation is bound to be risky. The ability of giants to withstand risks forms a unique shelter in the social security system. This is the “steady state” that is needed in the current efforts to make progress. “.
The hot potato of WeBank’s acceptance of eggshell rental loans has shown people that the foundation of trust comes from a huge amount. It also means that the entrance will be re-centralized in the future. Entertainment, consumption, culture, combined with various gameplay methods of financial innovation, make users have to accept more difficult choices-either copycat all kinds of imitation disks, or the absolute head of the giant sub-ecology, waist products will die out.
The number of players that a single track can accommodate will be greatly reduced compared to the past, and the value of the entrance will increase, which promotes a high concentration of resources. But this is not necessarily a bad thing.
Large-scale technology companies continue to maintain rapid growth in technology and products. The powerful Hengqiang brought about by the siphon effect does not meet the historical needs of social resources according to the level of distribution. However, the goal of sustainable business operation allows them to always have innovative primitives. power.
In the future when the means of production also include data, giants will have greater policy pressure; but they can also regard the centralization of import rights as the other side of the interdependence of blessings and evils.
The enlightenment for ordinary entrepreneurs is that the national level will no longer want to see or like mentioning the existence of “unicorns”-“unicorns” will strive to be in certain areas before they embark on the ultimate goal of IPO. Becoming a subversive and innovative changer in the upstream, such a role has the meaning of riding the dust, but without the responsibility of social space and historical responsibility.
Regarding the Internet as a business, the diversity of life in the market is the true essence of business development.
In the next period of time, what society needs is a long-running ethnic group. They may not have the cold and stunning “unicorns”, but they are the mainstay in the field of social people’s livelihood.
Jiang Nanchun said that unicorns should not only embody digital value, but also have social value. This is still half-hidden by the pipa-the gathering of giants is a by-product of compromise, and there is no reason to use it to be unique. The “subversion” to replace the “stableness” of the collective glory.
04 People are disappointed and hopeful
In 2020, a pandemic became the force of nature to uncover the last layer of this door, but the elephant in the room has long been standing in front of you and me.
The consumption train only decelerates briefly, and the cost transfer formula for data exchange is no longer balanced; content creators temporarily suspend work, entertainment consumer demand is growing, and homogeneous and indiscriminate feeding exposes the danger of education for all; financial innovation concessions With regard to economic development, once social value becomes the questioning stone cast to the Internet domain, pan-centralization or decentralization will rarely withstand the beating and test, and the re-concentration of entrances will become the only one available. Transition prescription.
In 2020, people are disappointed and hopeful at the same time. We need to use an accurate strategic positioning that does not miss the opportunity to break the crisis.
This is our little confidence in 2021 and the next few years.
