Business Story: Lonely Strange Social Business

More than a hundred years ago, Thoreau wrote in Walden: "social intercourse is often cheap. The time of meeting is too short for each other to acquire anything new and valuable. "

Some psychologists believe that loneliness is not always harmful, in some cases, it can bring benefits. Those who choose to be alone are very clear about what they want. The passive choice of lonely people, has become the potential users of Internet entrepreneurs. Their social needs are a real business.

Recently, according to the data released by the data Research Institute of a well-known institution, in the past 10 years, a total of 474 strangers have raised money, and the amount of financing disclosed has reached 29.299 billion yuan. In 2018, the amount of social financing reached 16.199 billion yuan. But the track is cooling down. In the first half of this year, there were seven financing cases in the social sector, with a total amount of only 87 million yuan.

On the one hand, under the background of stricter supervision, it is difficult for social applications to wander in the gray area; On the other hand, the homogenization of products leads to the difficulty of realization. For various reasons, the "lonely" business in the spiritual world has become a tough business.

Relieving loneliness in a strange place

On May 11, the results of the seventh national census were released. It is estimated that the number of single people this year will reach 250-260 million, and that the number of adults still living alone will exceed 92 million.

Since 2011, a large number of LBS (location-based services) social and soft pornographic content have sprung up like mushrooms on stranger social platforms. The one who can find a place outside wechat and live a good life is Momo. In November 2014, Momo was valued at about $3 billion when it went public. Getting rid of the soft pornographic label behind numerous beautiful PS photos like immortals is an important consideration for Momo founder Tang Yan to go to the capital market.

According to him, Mo Mo is a social story of a stranger. Many years ago, we had an insight into the social needs of the same person in different environments, and Momo can be regarded as success. Many years later, when slogan, which soul called "follow the soul to find you", was born, the Internet world had already changed.

"I'm from Shandong Province. I studied in Xiamen five or six years ago. I'm far away from home, and I haven't got any new friends when I just entered school. At that time, soon after soul was launched, and with a little curiosity seeking psychology, I signed up for this app. Some new friends have eased the loneliness Liu Xiaoyu, a post-95 girl, revealed that she spent 50-100 yuan a month on soul. If she didn't pay for the membership fee, many functions would be limited and some of the fun would be lost.

When Momo was just beginning to transform into "live + social", Liu Xiaoyu also made hundreds of yuan as an anchor on Momo platform for a week. But with the high percentage of the platform, and the users who watched the live broadcast often had special purposes and were not friendly to girls, they returned to soul until she found her current boyfriend here.

In her opinion, there is no real Platonic community on the Internet. Everyone who registers on these platforms has different purposes.

Compared with strangers, dating apps bring more anxiety to users. Mandy, 36, runs her own company in Beijing. In the past three years, she has used all the dating apps on the market.

"Basically, these are paid to use, and there are certain thresholds. Like century Jiayuan and Baihe, the user base is large and sinks earlier, so the stratification of users is very unclear, which can be said to have brought no help at all. " She said with a slight dissatisfaction that she had clearly set the conditions for finding a partner, but there would still be strangers with a monthly income of two or three thousand yuan and a degree in primary or junior high school to add themselves as friends.

Mandy is still single after a bit of a spin. "In fact, making friends and looking for a job are the same thing. The problem is that people can't see themselves correctly, they don't have a correct understanding of themselves, and the platform only wants to reap and make money, so dating is doomed to be a very difficult thing to succeed."

Platform supervision can't keep pace with user expansion

Since there is just need, there will be a steady stream of people coming in. Professor Huang Weiping, former dean of the school of economics of Renmin University, believes that the emergence of strangers' social platforms is to provide services on the premise of integrating demand and resources, and that "proximity" in geographical sense is transformed into "nearby" in digital meaning, which can extend people's feelings, find the intersection of the two in virtual space, and solve people's highest level needs.

But in real life, it's just a beautiful vision. Zhuang Lili was originally a live broadcast anchor assistant of a media company. Her daily work was to register accounts with strangers and chat with strangers by using the anchor's Avatar and identity. The purpose is to drain the company's live broadcasting platform and brush gifts for the anchor.

"Because the head portrait of the anchor is used, it is very beautiful, so it is often subject to blatant harassment. I can report to the platform, but my job is to guide this group of strangers to the live room, so as long as it is not particularly excessive harassment, I will not report. " Zhuang Lili, who has just graduated from college, has been working in this kind of working environment for a month and then left.

From her description, it is not difficult to see the general chaos of strangers' social platforms. One is the inevitable harassment and being harassed. When users escape from the social circle of acquaintances and choose hidden identities, experiences and avatars to enter the strangers' social platform, the moral binding force is greatly weakened at this moment, and there are a lot of gaps in the platform supervision. Users can show their dark side without any responsibility.

Besides female users, male users are not immune. Lin Cheng, who is also a senior user of the social platform of strangers, has been harassed by female users on the platform“ They often chat with you to make friends, engage in criminal activities, or sell you fitness courses, or introduce investment and financial products He pointed out his own distress. His avatar, real estate, car, income and other information certified on the social platform have made him a transparent person and have a strong sense of insecurity.

This is not only a lonely age, but also an age of looking at faces. According to the relevant questionnaire data of AI media consultation, 66.6% of the respondents said that they would give priority to platforms with complete real name authentication process. Live social networking can also make users have a better sense of mobile social security, more favored by users.

But in fact, in addition to the authenticity of the external display, the platform is also difficult to ensure the authenticity of the user behind the account. For example, in the media company where Zhuang Lili works, it is a common practice for an assistant to operate an account. Xu Yun, a social software product manager, also revealed that the general platform will develop AI chat function to create the illusion of high user activity. From this point of view, the back of the screen may not only be the account avatar itself, but also may not be a real person.

Such chaotic layers of stacking make high-quality users gradually lose confidence in the platform. In the stranger social platform with strong matching attribute, the butterfly effect results in the loss of users and the decline of platform reputation and performance.

User retention is a huge challenge

When asked whether he would continue to use the stranger social platform after meeting his current boyfriend, Liu Xiaoyu candidly replied: "no matter whether there are boyfriends or not, playing soul is because there are strangers on it, and there will be no pressure to talk to them. But if you are familiar with it, you will return it to wechat. First, because of the limited time and energy, the main social circle is still on wechat. Switching back and forth between the two software is very troublesome. Second, some platforms will have loopholes and delays, which are not as convenient as wechat chat. When the goal is achieved, go to chat on wechat. "

Behind the seemingly beautiful stranger social business, there is a challenge to user retention, which has become the pain point of the whole platform of stranger social circuit. Whether it is hormonal economy or platonic community, it is inevitable that when the user relationship changes from strangers to acquaintances and turns to acquaintance relationship products, the pressure of strangers' social platform to attract new customers increases sharply, and the cost of acquiring customers remains high.

According to public data, soul, which recently suspended its IPO in the US, accounted for 62.9% of its marketing expenses and 18.3% of its R & D expenses. It can be seen that the major platforms are making efforts to obtain more user traffic. How to retain new users and improve user stickiness is still the primary goal of stranger social platform, and constructing subsequent experience scenarios is the key to maintain the stock of users.

According to the "2020-2021 China mobile social industry research atlas" released by AI media consulting, the quality of community content in the product is the key to attract users, and the user's activity in the community and the positive willingness to communicate are the key to improve user stickiness.

Xu Yun told the 21st century economic reporter that in order to attract more traffic, it was inevitable to indulge the platform to produce vulgar content. With the intervention of external supervision, the content and operation of the platform are more strictly controlled. In addition to the internal machine audit, manual audit also continues to follow up. However, due to the large number of users, it is difficult to achieve all-round supervision, and it is inevitable that some fish will miss the net. Good and attractive content is not necessarily vulgar, which also tests practitioners' operation and understanding of stranger community.

Regularization is the inevitable development direction of stranger social products. At the same time, the development of stranger social platform not only has insight into the needs of users, but also needs to face the severe test of commercialization for stricter self-management and self-examination and reduction of vulgar content.

Applications that roam around the gray area, including rent me and happy rent me, have long been removed from the shelves due to violations, and rhinoceros story will be suspended in 2019.

"When the number of users reaches a certain level, people's portraits will become blurred and personalized labels will disappear, which will eventually lead to the loss of users. All social apps face this problem." Some practitioners have pointed out that when the product can not satisfy the users' desire of "being seen" and "I want to see", it is basically near death.

(at the request of the interviewees, Liu Xiaoyu, Zhuang Lili, Lin Cheng and Xu Jun are pseudonyms)

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