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At the beginning of this year, Renren closed the site's internal message, and at this point in time, rumors spread about Renren.com's imminent curtain call. A few days ago, Renren's fourth-quarter financial report released by Renren showed that Renren's net revenue in the fourth quarter was US$17.2 million, down 38.5% from the same period last year; net profit was $35 million, down 65% from the same period last year. And the performance of Renren has obviously made shareholders restless, and an investor named Jerry Jefferies even fired directly at Chen Yizhou at the analyst meeting: Why don't you resign? Chen Yizhou replied to the investor: "The competition situation in China's Internet market is different from that of the United States, and the competition faced by Renren and Facebook in the United States is also completely different. ” Renren's market capitalization was $5.53 billion when it went public, and now its market value is 955 million, a decrease of nearly 80%. We see that Renren has been falling since 2011, what happened? Burning money is constant, and horizontal investment strategies involve everyone's energy and pace We know that the predecessor of Renren was the campus intranet, which was the early campus version of MySpace, which was the base of student social circles and campus culture. But Renren is obviously not satisfied with this, because campus social networking is too vertically subdivided and the imagination space is too small, so the school intranet was later renamed Renren.com, and Chen Yizhou wanted to break through the campus fence and grasp social groups. But in this way, it rushed to the territory of WeChat and Weibo, which is also one of Chen Yizhou's strategic mistakes, in 2013, Renren wanted to return to campus, but the user has left. What everyone once made Chen Yizhou proud of was the story of facebook (Renren.com) plus Groupon (glutinous rice) plus Zynga (everyone's game) and Linkedin (Jingwei). But Chen Yizhou may not want to mention this story again, because we see that after the launch of the glutinous rice network in 2010, it has been burning money, and after everyone accelerated the mobile Internet in 2012, the money burned more and more, and the glutinous rice turned into a burden that urgently needed to be thrown off. After everyone sold glutinous rice to Baidu, they were able to achieve net profit in three consecutive quarters of financial reports. But in addition to group buying, the video business is even more expensive, and with the sharp decline in Renren's performance, 56.com was sold by Renren again. As Chen Yizhou himself said: "Other video websites are larger than 56.com, and they can spend a lot of money to buy popular content such as "House of Cards", and the content procurement cost of these video websites is as high as hundreds of millions of dollars, and no one can afford to burn it. You must know that both online games and online videos are facing a stage of slowing growth, for the video business, bandwidth and copyright costs are like a black hole for sucking gold, Youku, the No. 1 in China, and even YouTube abroad are not profitable; This series of horizontal investment strategies greatly involves everyone's energy and pace, causing huge pressure on their cash flow, dragging down their company's stock price, and its core social business is also in a state of long-term stagnation. In addition to selling products, everyone's profits in recent years are investment. For example, after investing in eLong, Vipshop and other companies, in March 2012, Chen Yizhou sold all the previously purchased eLong shares to Expedia for $72.4 million, making a net profit of more than $51 million. In addition, Renren has continued to lose money since 2009~2013, but its net loss in 2013 has narrowed significantly. The reason is that Chen Yizhou made a profit by speculating on U.S. stocks and sold some Vipshop shares that he had previously bought at low prices. Content production is the lifeline of social products, and everyone lacks an effective content production mechanism In the author's opinion, the primary reason for the decline of Renren is the lack of an effective content production mechanism. Because for social products, content production is one of the core competitiveness. Both Weibo and WeChat have an effective trigger for user content production mechanisms, scenarios and product design. For example, Weibo, through 140-word content production, forwarding mechanism and fan culture, has created a content production scene of joke culture and social media, and the product design method promotes the continuous production of content by highlighting the presence and influence of celebrities and big Vs. WeChat is the main private life sharing of the circle of acquaintances, creating a content production mechanism that creates a sense of presence in the circle of acquaintances, promoting the explosion of information flow in the circle of friends and the cultivation of user habits, and at the same time, it always enriches the scene around the social core, and has absorbed a large number of celebrities and grassroots self-media to produce content for profit and enhance influence through the construction of an ecological chain. But what about everyone? "No high-quality content production, garbage sharing is rampant" has become a label of Renren to some extent. What Renren should do is to operate the core assets of its own platform, that is, dig deep into the user value of the student group, and students are really concerned about the dynamics of the school. When Weibo was hot, everyone began to emphasize the attributes of news content, but the content update was seriously lagging behind, causing some users to complain: basically the joke that I had read several times on Weibo had just been hyped up on Renren. When WeChat rose, Renren Mobile client began to imitate WeChat again, but how could it be another WeChat that defeated WeChat? In essence, Renren has not created an effective content production mechanism based on campus circles, and after encapsulating users, Renren has not made a fuss about user retention and activity, let alone looking for a profit model from the aspect of highlighting the culture of the circle and content differentiation. In fact, the Renren open platform itself is a good base for big V franchise settlements, but its product design is too weak, leading to confusion in the design and process of the platform. Some developers said that in the process of using Renren's open platform, every step from the development process to the submission of review is full of pain and discomfort. The overly strict review system of Renren has squeezed users' products on RenrenMarketingand the space to enhance one's influence cannot attract big V, celebrities and third-party developers to join and settle in, and then lose the possibility of producing excellent original content. Everyone's mistake lies in being too greedy, in the case of unstable user foundation, content production mechanism has not been cultivated well, and weak scene creation ability, the step is too big, jumping out of the campus circle to intervene in the pan-social field, and then distorting everyone's segmentation and positioning attributes. Businessmen's thinking is everywhere, the social walls are unstable, and the core hinterland is lost In fact, the key is whether its investment acquisition has strengthened the city wall around the core territory and deepened its core advantages. If Renren wants to benchmark Facebook, you can take a look at Facebook's acquisitions in recent years. After Facebook's acquisition of Instagram, it won the instant messaging tool WhatsAPP for $19 billion, and then won the photo sharing website Divvyshot and the social event service company Hot Potato, as well as the social network software manufacturer WhoGlue, etc., it can be seen that Facebook's series of acquisitions are all laid out around the core advantages of social platforms in the field of social segments, and continue to improve the social sharing experience and capture new user groups , expand the territory of the social core hinterland and enhance its own social leadership. However, everyone's investment is not reflected in how to improve their SNS social leadership and product core advantages. In the previous case, it can be seen that everyone's investment is more of the founder Chen Yizhou's businessman thinks widely, only seeking profits and not paying attention to layout, resulting in games, group buying, and videos attacking everywhere but lacking highlights, resources and funds are scattered, and the core hinterland of its own social city has become an empty shell without content sharing. In addition, the product experience of the series of mobile terminals cannot keep up, and in the end they can only survive by selling these non-performing assets. In addition, the positioning of platform products is ambiguous, value is lost, and user loss becomes inevitable.
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Posted on 3/28/2015 5:19:13 PM
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