Originally, Tencent's success was based on their finding a clear profit model, which was games, relying on the huge traffic of QQ to attract traffic to their game business.
Whether it is a QQ show or a diamond aristocracy system, these incomes are nothing compared to game income.
In fact, Tencent's earliest game attempts were not successful. It was not until the start of QQ Hall that it found the knack of tapping into the game business. Later, in just one year, the number of users of QQ Game Hall surpassed that of Lianzhong Games, which has a history of nearly ten years. .
After the number of users surpassed that of Lianzhong Games, the snowball effect became more and more obvious. The number of users of Lianzhong Games quickly dropped from one million to less than 10,000. At that time, this incident shocked all Chinese Internet practitioners. After this incident, I started to think seriously about a question: If one day Tencent starts to enter our field, can we resist?
Later, Bao Yueqiao, chairman of Lianzhong Games, said during the meeting: Unlike large-scale online games, chess and card games have fixed rules and lack of technical thresholds. There is a high degree of overlap between players and QQ users, and it is easy for Tencent to imitate them.
Users at the time also said: QQ Game Hall and Lianzhong Games directly copied everything from game rules to interface, distribution of functions, and prompts. If you are not a familiar enough user, you cannot even tell which one is QQ Game. , which is Lianzhong Games.
Tencent's game kingdom reached its peak after Tencent distributed "Dungeon Fighter" and "Cross Fire". These two games brought Tencent huge profits.
But now the situation is different. With Riot Games at the forefront, after Riot Games enters the Chinese market in the future, it will be difficult for Tencent to replicate their success in the gaming field. When players’ traffic is monopolized by Riot Games, and with a future vision, Being able to cut off games that will become popular in China in advance, even if Tencent can achieve success in video games, the upper limit will become even lower.
Under such a situation, and Zhou Xin controlled Tencent, he knew that he needed to help Tencent find a new profit model.
At the same time, he is also confident that if Tencent goes overseas early and completes Facebook's business, Tencent will not be worse than the original Tencent in terms of scale and revenue.
Compared with domestic advertisers, foreign advertisers offer much higher unit prices, and they are priced in US dollars.
“Pony, with the bursting of the Internet bubble over the past year and the success of Quora, the industry has begun to have serious doubts about scaling up.
Can more users really bring greater benefits? So much so that advertisers have begun to doubt when placing advertisements, doubting whether the advertisements they place on the Internet can really be converted into results?
In fact, users are always treasures, whether it is advertising or some other value-added services, users are the basis of these.
Without users, can QQ show be successful? Without users, would Quora’s paid Q&A and Golden Elections be successful?
The original method will be questioned because it lacks a set of measurement standards. Advertisers place ads on the Internet and then use the click-through rate as a reference standard. This is not reasonable enough.
For example, Brand A placed a total of one million US dollars in advertising on Yahoo for one year. During this year, their homepage views increased by 1,000% compared with before the advertising.
It seems to have a good effect, but is it worth the one million? How to evaluate it? No one can tell clearly.
For this 1000% increase in page views, Yahoo has data on how many users clicked on the advertising link on the advertising page and clicked to the homepage of brand A. But how much have sales figures increased? How much of that growth is attributable to Yahoo? No one can explain this clearly.
Moreover, no one can explain clearly how much sales Brand A can increase by relying on Internet advertising of US$1 million to make this money worthwhile.
Most Internet companies today rely heavily on advertising revenue. Internet advertising is a blind box for advertisers, lacking an evaluation system to measure effectiveness.
This is just the current situation. When online shopping matures in the future, advertisers can directly place electronic shopping links, so that the conversion rate will be clear at a glance.
The huge users of enterprise QQ, personal QQ and mobile QQ will become a solid foundation for Tencent's advertising business.
As for how to place ads, it seems that ads cannot be placed in instant messaging software.
Pony, during this time we have developed a mobile instant messaging software that takes into account both instant messaging and blogging functions.
Since I only have two engineering prototypes on hand now, Pony, you take a look first, and then Jingyi. "
Zhou Xin handed the Matrix prototype to Pony, "The applications in the row below the main page of the mobile phone are NewPay and NewChat. NewChat is the mobile instant messaging software we developed."
When future generations see NewChat, they will definitely feel like WeChat.
Zhou Xin briefly introduced the functions of NewChat, and then sent a message to the account associated with Pony's mobile phone using NewChat.
"Welcome to the world of NewChat."
Pony didn't feel there was anything special about NewChat. He just felt that the entire interface was designed very simply, with only a few buttons.
The appearance of such an app on today's mobile phones is quite amazing. In the information age when other mobile phones are all composed of pixels, the display effect of Matrix has given him a delicate feeling.
Pony was also complaining about the name in his heart. He lamented that Zhou Xin really liked the word New. Whether it was a payment application or an instant messaging software on his mobile phone, New should be put in front.
Li Jingyi's understanding was that this was Zhou Xin's bad taste.
"This will be a new beginning." Pony replied to Zhou Xin using NewChat.
After actually using it, Pony feels comfortable just typing. The physical key feel of the Matrix mobile phone keyboard combined with the vibration feedback given by the horizontal motor makes the typing experience of the Matrix far superior to any current mobile phone.
From the outside, Matrix looks larger than a 9-key phone because it is a 26-key phone. After using it, Pony found that the curved border of the Matrix phone gave him the illusion of being thin and light.
Holding and typing with both hands gives you the illusion of having the world at your fingertips.
Newman: "Pony, I originally planned to launch NewChat as a mobile instant messaging software. Now that I have a controlling stake in Tencent, this instant messaging software will also be renamed WeChat. Translated in Chinese, it will be called WeChat."
"Integrated into Tencent, you can think of it as QQ on the mobile side, which can realize information interconnection and interoperability with QQ on the PC side."
Secondman: "Okay, I have another question. In my opinion, both WeChat and Xinxin are mobile instant messaging software. Now that I see it, it is very similar to SMS."
"I have just started using WeChat, and I have a feeling that this is a text message with more complex functions."
"Based on this logic, text messaging is mainly about socializing with acquaintances, which means that you know the person you send text messages to and the person you receive text messages from, and you know who they are."
"QQ mainly focuses on socializing with strangers. No one knows your identity in real life. The proportion of online relationships that can be transferred to offline relationships is very small."
"If the two are connected, will there be a conflict in strategic positioning between socializing with acquaintances and socializing with strangers?"
Newman is Zhou Xin, and it is also Zhou Xin who sets up this horse to use.
When Zhou Xin sends messages on WeChat, he sends them sentence by sentence. Pony Ma quickly mastered this trick and sends them sentence by sentence.
Newman: "Yeah, so it's called WeChat, not qq."
"What you said is indeed a problem. We need to think carefully about the relationship between enterprise QQ and QQ, and how to achieve balance and interconnection between these three products."
After finishing this sentence, Zhou Xin stopped typing. During the short five minutes of typing, the whole room was extremely quiet. Li Jingyi could only hear the beeping sound of the keyboard on her mobile phone.
Zhou Xin said: "Pony, you just said something wrong, that is, WeChat is similar to SMS, but there is a big difference between WeChat and SMS.
The only similarity they have is the text messaging above. "
Zhou Xin raised his phone to his mouth and pressed a button: "WeChat can send voice messages."
About half a minute after it was sent, Pony Ma received a voice message on his phone. Zhou Xin didn’t need to say it. The red dot next to the voice message prompted him to click. After Pony clicked, Zhou Xin’s message came from the phone. New sounds.
Pony closed his eyes, and then whispered: "What an amazing idea, combining text messaging and phone message functions.
No, this is not just as simple as leaving a message on the phone. WeChat is an instant messaging software on mobile phones. Users can use this function to reply to other people's messages while doing other things.
Originally, I was thinking that the size of the matrix and the setting of 26 keys would cause the user to only operate with both hands.
With the message function, users can operate it with either one hand or both hands.
The only problem is that if the voice sent takes too long, the network transmission speed will cause a long delay.
But this is not a problem. The phone has its own recording function. You only need to record the spoken content locally and then transmit the information from the background. "
Zhou Xin: "As expected of Pony, voice content of less than one second is directly transmitted over the network, and voice content of more than five seconds will be stored locally before being transmitted.
Networking is a big problem.
This is just one of the functions of WeChat. It also has a series of functions such as Moments, scanning QR codes to add friends, and drifting bottles. "
After Zhou Xin introduced them separately, he said: "This is a series of functions, and text messages are just its appearance."
Zhou Xin has not yet introduced the public accounts that will be launched in the future. After the public accounts are launched, the concept of new media will be further promoted to more fields.
“So ads can be placed in Moments.
In this way, the user's perception level is the lowest, and the purpose is achieved without affecting the user experience.
What we want to explore in the future is the evaluation system for advertising effectiveness and how to accurately place ads.
This will be Tencent's core profit source, including enterprise QQ. Facing consumer companies, this will be our best means of premium. "
What Zhou Xin didn't finish saying is that if Tencent is just an Internet company in China, then their best way to make money is games, which is a time-proven way. If Tencent wants to go overseas, advertising will be a better business form.
Facebook can make a good living on advertising fees in Americen, and YouTube can give bloggers a high share of revenue through pre-roll ads. Renren and Tudou, China’s benchmark Internet companies, have lost their presence. The essence is that the advertising costs of developed countries are much higher than those of China.
"What is precise advertising? The search engine we just mentioned is one type. Only search engines can do this kind of advertising.
What I’m going to talk about next is another one. I have another company called Riot Games. Riot Games has also started advertising. Riot Games has a whole team that specializes in how to place ads and the algorithms for advertising.
We will jointly construct a portrait of the user based on the user's active forums in the Riot Games community, as well as grabbing keywords from his past comments. The portrait mainly lies in what price range of games he prefers and which type of game he is most willing to play. Pay for the game, and then judge his future payment preferences.
Then target the user's portrait and place corresponding advertisements specifically for him.
In other words, on the same page, different users will see different advertising content after logging in to their account.
Real-time strategy games will be released to users who prefer real-time strategy games, and simulation business games will be released to users who prefer business simulation games.
This is a precise push based on user preferences, pushing content according to user preferences.
The payment method is also user-friendly. For game developers who purchase this method, we do not charge a one-time fee, but increase the share ratio. Generally, Riot Games takes a 30% share, and for this type of advertising customers, our share The ratio is 50%, and the ratio for some old games is even 70%.
In other words, the better the sales, the higher the revenue of Riot Games.
There is another advertising push model, launched by NewPay, which performs precise advertising based on the user's credit card limit.
Because the vast majority of users bind their credit cards to NewPay, we include a clause in the signed electronic agreement that allows us to obtain their credit card limits.
In other words, we can know the user’s monthly credit card limit and their usage. The bank's credit card has helped NewPay make a judgment on the user's repayment ability and willingness to repay.
Based on these data, NewPay pushes insurance, funds, savings and other services to users accordingly.
This is accurate push based on data analysis.
In the future, Tencent will also explore Tencent's advertising model. If instant messaging is the cornerstone of Tencent, then this advertising algorithm is the nutrient for Tencent's growth rate. "
After the delivery mechanisms of Riot Games and NewPay were introduced to the market, users did not have an intuitive experience. They would not have two accounts, and they would not find that the store recommendation content they saw was different from the electronic community post-advertisement.
Those who have an intuitive feeling about this are mainly advertising advertisers.
Especially game developers. When the marketing team of Riot Games talked with them, the game developers were shocked by this new advertising method. Logically speaking, it is a rigorous advertising mechanism, such as The previous blind box advertising delivery mechanism was much better.
These game developers initially put their previously developed games on Riot Games for sale. These games were already obsolete offline products, but their sales were impressive. After being placed on Riot Games' online store, they were revived, and Riot Games’ commissions are even lower than those in offline stores.
Later, more and more game developers gradually released their latest masterpieces on Riot Games, and even a few game developers completely abandoned offline channels.
Now that Riot Games' distribution mechanism has been launched, everyone is still accustomed to testing the water with old games first. Old games would not invest in marketing expenses. Now it is not a bad idea to do another round of marketing by increasing the share ratio.
The effect of marketing can be good or bad, just like the free channels of Qidian. With the same distribution mechanism, some can soar into the sky, while some can just gain an extra income. But for Riot Games, they will judge the effectiveness of advertising as a whole and negotiate with game developers.
NewPay is even more exaggerated. In the absence of this advertising distribution mechanism, advertisers have offered very high prices, especially insurance companies and fund companies focusing on Internet investment.
Take insurance as an example. Americen's car insurance has a unit price of about US$100 per month. This price determines their willingness and ability to place high-cost advertising. The monthly subscription payment service launched by NewPay is also popular with insurance companies.
After the Nasdaq bubble burst, fund companies lost their presence and insurance companies became even more enthusiastic. After seeing NewPay’s new precise advertising push mechanism, insurance companies immediately thought of using user consumption data to push services corresponding to premiums.
So when Zhou Xin announced that NewPay was about to conduct its next round of financing, Peter Thiel was frightened by the crazy Wall Street investment banks, and everyone came to him if they couldn't find Zhou Xin. , famous figures from various investment banks come to NewPay to visit him every day.
If these big shots on Wall Street knew that Zhou Xin dedicated half a day to communicating with Pony alone, they would definitely feel unhappy.
After listening, Pony asked: "I can completely understand the benefits of the precise advertising delivery mechanism and its appeal to advertisers.
But how does our instant messaging software analyze user preferences? Unless we grab his chat history.
The problem is that if we capture user chat records, once they are exposed, it will be a devastating blow to us. "
Zhou Xin nodded: "I didn't ask you to capture the user's chat history, so this is a topic that Tencent needs to study.
This is also a test for you. I only have a vague idea at the moment. After you go back, you can also think about this issue with the Tencent team and how Tencent can achieve precise advertising placement.
It's about half a year until the launch of Matrix mobile phone. During this half year, the main things you need to think about are two questions:
How can the relationship between enterprise QQ and QQ be built into a system without affecting existing business.
Another one is how Tencent will do advertising. "
After Pony left with answers and questions, Zhou Xin took Li Jingyi back to his villa in San Francisco, a landmark mansion located in Hillsborough.
"Jingyi, just pick a room as your residence here. Just treat this as a job, a somewhat special job. After you settle in first, we can talk." Zhou Xin said .
After Li Jingyi came out, Li Jingyi, who was dressed in a completely different style from the young people in America today, was sitting on the sofa in the living room. She felt out of place with the decoration style of the villa.
Zhou Xin stood up and shook hands with her: "I officially join the job today.
The point we talked about before is your future positioning. Do you hope to simply be a vase, that is, to cooperate with me in pretending to be a couple when I go out to socialize? It does not rule out that we will actually become a couple in the future.
No matter what, he is just a vase, but he still participates in my work, acting as a secretary and doing some auxiliary work.
Or get deeply involved in a certain piece of my business and then help me manage that piece of business. You need to give me an answer now.
No matter which one you choose, you need to play the role of your girlfriend in public. "
After Li Jingyi came to Amerikan, she attended a product discussion meeting in Zhou Xin's office. It was an eye-opener for her and she learned how Zhou Xin thinks about products.
Before coming to the residential area, Li Jingyi was a little uneasy and didn't know what would happen. After Zhou Xin finished her opening remarks and was working and joining the company, she relaxed instantly: "I hope to be deeply involved in a certain piece of business. .
Because I am a complete newcomer, I am not interested in the role of secretary, but I am not willing to be a vase either. I still hope to participate in the business, learn something, and broaden my horizons. "
Zhou Xin nodded: "I understand, you go to Matrix, the mobile phone I just showed you. As a newcomer, you can give some opinions on the product.
Your position in Matrix is that of secretary, doing some testing work.
Because we will spend a lot of time together in the future, I will dynamically adjust your position based on your performance.
If you have any ideas, you can always communicate with me. "
Zhou Xin thought for a while, and then continued: "As you can see, I am very short of people now. Most of the executives of my companies are professional managers, and it is difficult to have loyalty.
I hope that in the future I can slowly replace them with people I am familiar with, so as long as you perform well, there will be many opportunities.
In addition, I would like to remind you that your top priority after coming here is to master English proficiently, especially oral expression and listening, which will directly determine your work efficiency. "
Li Jingyi said: "Okay."
English is not difficult for students who can get into Yan University on their own, let alone in an all-English environment. Li Jingyi also studied English listening and speaking for a period of time before coming.
Zhou Xin said: "Then take a good rest. The intensity of work at Matrix will definitely be far beyond your imagination. Although we strictly follow the eight-hour work system of five days a week, eight hours when the brain is running at high speed is better than not using the brain." Twelve hours will be even more tiring."
There are still some at night, this is to make up for yesterday.
Then let me tell you, although there was only one chapter the day before yesterday, it was still a chapter of 6,000 words!
(End of chapter)
