I've been shouting free online articles for several years, and now I'm charging you again. The outside world has questioned the business model of free online text for more than two days. Now, the byte beat (hereinafter referred to as byte) of "tomato novel", which once hatched the head product of free online text, has begun to have a "new" answer to this question. The reason why "new" is quoted is that the answer given by bytes is actually an old way - paying.
Previously, byte beat launched two new applications based on paid novels, "ice shell novel" and "new grass novel". In fact, since the second half of 2021, byte has incubated no less than seven paid novel products, including Shuowen novel, frequently read novel, after dinner novel, carefree novel, long read novel, frequently read novel and cuiguo novel.
From the introduction, the services provided by these paid online text applications are similar. Taking "Shuowen novel" as an example, it focuses on "genuine high-quality novel without advertising". Reading the next chapter of a novel requires a certain book currency. At the same time, it provides the function of "monthly reading", which is convenient for users to read books at a cheaper price every month; In addition, it is reported that Shuowen novels mainly focus on the category division of male and female channels, and include sub themes such as fantasy, history, immortal Xia and city.
Figure source: Tech planet byte obviously hopes to run a product that can compete with reading text in the field of paid online text through "horse racing".
Although this behavior seems to contradict its previous efforts - the banner of byte occupying the online text market has been free for more than two years. In November 2019, "tomato novel", born from today's headline's novel channel, was officially launched and operated independently. Although it is not the first entrant, tomato novel has completed the content reserve and user surge in less than a year by relying on the free mode and byte beating traffic. According to the third-party data, it won the first place in the domestic free novel market with 61.62 million monthly live users in 2020.
A company that has made some achievements in the free field has now turned to thinking about the paid business that its competitors are good at and have been verified, which inevitably makes people wonder whether the model innovation that the free platform has been shouting for several years can continue.
Once confident free web article
In 2018, free online articles were born. Unlike the business model in which payment platforms mainly rely on users to pay for works in the past, the initial logic of free online articles is to realize traffic based on Advertising - users can read novels for free on these platforms at the cost of having to endure a certain number and length of advertising.
It's easy to recall the wild era of piracy many years ago. Because it seems that the way that online pirated websites rely on advertising is no different from the current free online platform. The difference is probably only the legitimacy of the source of copyright.
Piracy has been a persistent disease that has plagued the online literature industry for several years. Under such circumstances, readers don't have to spend money for works, and authors don't get due respect. Similarly, at the beginning of its birth, free online articles were not favored by many people. At that time, some readers commented that "the free platform is like turning a pirated website into an app, with as many advertisements and the same water content, which attracts readers by playing a marginal ball and free". Some media directly took the sentence pattern similar to "online text payment has worked hard for 20 years and a free move back to before liberation" as the title.
However, advocates of the free web articles themselves do not have much doubt about this model.
A practitioner who works for a free online text platform explained the innovation of the free model to pinplay, "Although some people have made similar explorations before, they have only tried, but in fact, they have not thoroughly penetrated this model... The biggest problem in the middle is the liquidity, because the copyright and user operation costs of the webwen platform are very high. If a free platform's liquidity engine is not strong, its single customer economic model will be difficult to level, and the business will not be sustainable."
"It also depends on the timing and the execution of the whole team." He went on. To a large extent, the confidence of his free platform comes more from his experience in traffic growth and the free online text traffic bonus that still existed at that time, which can quickly accumulate a large number of users in the short term and cover all kinds of costs.
The advocates of free online writing almost all firmly believe that they are doing something to benefit the online writing industry.
According to the report, an executive of tomato novel once said internally that tomato novel should educate the online literature industry. Yang Ji, CEO of Midu novel, also said in an interview with PinWan that what free online articles are actually doing is to "expand the source":
"Many users will choose not to read a novel because of the threshold of payment. In fact, this may not be a good thing for the development of online text itself, because the content created by an author may only be appreciated by a small number of users who have the ability and willingness to pay... The logic of meter reading at the beginning is to open the source and find more users who are interested in online text, so that they don't need to consider the problem of large threshold of payment, And then become a continuous fan of online articles, which is certainly a good thing for the long-term development of the industry. "
From the perspective of commercial realization, the logic of free online text seems to be no problem. This model has indeed enabled the free platform to quickly occupy a place in the online text market in a short time, and even compete with the payment platform with a history of more than 20 years.
According to questmobile, by December 2020, the number of monthly active users in the free online app industry will be 144 million, an increase of 22% over 118 million in the same period last year; The situation of paid online app is just the opposite. The monthly active users of the industry fell to 219 million from 254 million in December 2019, a decrease of 13.7%. In addition, in the top 10 ranking list of monthly activities in the whole online literature industry, the top two are free platforms by December 2021.
Figure source: another typical footnote to the impact of questmobile free online articles on paid online articles is that it indirectly led to the withdrawal of the founder team of reading articles in 2020, and made Tencent end up in person and begin to explore the free mode.
According to the ideas of free platforms, free online text should be a user growth system similar to snowballing. Some practitioners told pinplay that in an ideal state, while the number of users of the free platform has increased steadily, if the retention of users is good enough and the brand communication effect is gradually formed, the platform can have a stable and continuous daily life and user duration. On this basis, "as long as the advertising filling and diversity are large enough, the realization mode will have a stable foundation".
This sounds like a set of completely self consistent logic, but in the actual implementation, the problems that have been lingering on the free platform have not been solved, and new problems come one after another.
Go back to the old way
What has not been solved well is the problem of work quality.
A fact is that most of the leading authors or authors who have requirements for the work itself are opposed to free online writing. According to the observation of pinplay, the free platforms have not been able to come up with enough conditions (whether income sharing or creative atmosphere) to attract the head authors.
A 10-year-old bookworm said that now the novels that are really good-looking and keep up with the trend are basically on the payment platform, while the free platform is full of "small white texts popular five to ten years ago, which are really hot eyes". The quality of works is exponential compared with the payment platform, "For example, the top 200 of the starting point list are very good-looking, and there are many works with highlights in the top 1000, but other websites also turn around in the top 10 to see if they are suitable for their taste. For example, my favorite jidaoliu and the fourth day disaster stream recently, there are no other novel websites at all, and they are basically hot-blooded and industrialized white texts."
These are basically determined by the business models chosen by free and paid platforms - the difference between the two is whether they are doing traffic business or content business.
Although free platforms claim to be a content company, the free model makes it destined to rely on traffic to realize (at least for now). In the free mode, readers do not need to pay for the works, and the income of authors will depend heavily on users' clicks and reading time, which determines how much income they can share from advertisers; In order to maximize the benefits, the platform will also rely more on algorithm recommendation. In other words, in the free online text platform, it is important to write well and be seen by more people.
This has caused a very serious problem. When the work itself has no value, the rising channel of the author will no longer exist.
Moreover, the free platform makes money from advertisers, which is equivalent to "wool comes from pigs", which makes the author unable to clearly know his income. At the beginning of last year, tomato novels were revealed to be divided into the proportion of dark change, which was considered to embezzle the royalties by taking the opportunity of revision. In fact, this exposed the opacity of advertising transformation under the free mode. The author could not confirm how much advertising opening rate a novel had, which was actually very passive.
These are in sharp contrast to the tradition of "readers voting with their feet" developed by payment platforms over the years. Under the payment system, whether readers are willing to pay or not is entirely determined by the quality of the work. How many paid readers a novel has can be easily and clearly presented to the author. Moreover, the author and readers are more the result of mutual selection. In the process of interaction with readers, the author can constantly adjust his works and exercise himself according to the feedback. This virtuous circle is also easier to polish a great God author.
In the final analysis, the quality of the works of the free platform is not good, and the result is that it can not form a continuous attraction to new readers. The so-called user retention can not be done well.
However, for the free platform, the more fatal problem may also be that the content has not been done and the number of users has not increased.
Pinplay learned that putting (buying) and copyright are the two largest expenses of the free online text platform, and the former is especially related to the early user growth of the platform. It is reported that the craziest time of buying free online articles began in March 2019. The single day consumption of novel categories alone is more than 10 million. However, a year ago, the delivery and transformation effect of free platforms in fact showed weakness. The analysis said that since 2020, the purchase of free online texts has tended to balance, because most potential users of many short video platforms (the main delivery channels of free online Texts) have been transformed, and the user conversion rate has become lower due to the serious homogenization of free online advertising materials.
The most direct result of the deterioration of the launch transformation effect is that the growth rate of the user scale of the free platform has slowed down. According to questmobile, in December 2021, the number of active users of the free platform was 152 million, an increase of 27.3% over the same period in 2020, while the growth rate in December 2020 was 47.1% over the same period in 2019. Moreover, the growth rate of monthly per capita use time of free platforms is also slowing down. From 2019 to 2021, the monthly per capita use time is 39.5 minutes, 68.3 minutes and 86.3 minutes respectively.
Source: questmobile all this means that everything is back to the starting point.
Like streaming media and online music, maybe webwriting should recognize a reality as soon as possible. This is not a large-scale "big business" once imagined by capital. However, as long as we seriously serve high-quality authors and readers who are still not disappointed, it will not be a bad business that can't be done.
I hope this is not the beginning of another meaningless business model cycle.