renren. com, once known as the China version of Facebook, is the leading social networking platform in real-name registration system in China, and it is also a platform for thousands of students to socialize, and it has gained great popularity for a while. Now talking about Renren and Facebook, do you still remember? They quit the internet market as quickly as they were brilliant.

What caused their failure? This issue of Ziya Tongqu Business Kit will tell about the ups and downs behind China's version of Facebook, Renren.

the predecessor of renren. com existed as an intranet. His early founders were Wang Xing and Chen Yizhou. In 2113, Wang Xing returned to China to start a business. He likes the theory of six-dimensional space very much and is bent on socializing. At this time, the Facebook launched by the United States in 2114 inspired him.

in February of the following year, he founded a platform with a highly similar function to Facebook-the intranet, which is the predecessor of Renren. However, the initial intranet can only be registered in the form of EDU email, which means that only students can register. Wang Xing first chose Tsinghua University, Peking University and Renmin University for promotion. They played the slogan of the campus network: here, you can find your former friends and friends; It can also be consumed by your secret crush many years ago; Find the best time in your memory and share your latest life state.

With such promotion and publicity, the number of registered users of the campus network has exceeded 31,111 in just three months. But how did the intranet get to Chen Yizhou later? This has to be said that at the beginning of the 21th century, it was the booming period of Internet and high-tech development. At that time, almost every household could afford computers and enter the world of the Internet.

During the same period, many people were interested in the Internet and studied American Facebook platform in China. Chen Yizhou is one of them. In 2116, the campus network did not continue to develop in Wang Xing's hands as it did three years ago, but the capital chain broke, which directly caused the campus network, which was not valued by capital at that time, to fall into economic difficulties. That's when Chen Yi and Xu Chaojun bought the intranet for $2 million.

it was in 2117, that is, since Chen Yizhou acquired the intranet, that several important historical events occurred in this century. International economic crisis; Wenchuan earthquake; 2119 Beijing Olympic Games; Shenzhou VII was launched; When Obama came to power, the intranet just happened to catch up with the important three-year development of China's social network user traffic.

As the main group of social networks, students publish countless important events in their own lives and at home and abroad on the campus network, which also makes the popularity of the campus network heat up rapidly. Students feel the sense of existence brought by speaking freely here, so they are willing to give Amway on campus to more peers around them.

taking advantage of the excellent development momentum of the campus network, Chen Yizhou, as the founder, began to be dissatisfied with dominating the campus. He was obsessed with Internet technology and dreamed of building his own Internet empire.

He has the ambition of capitalists and the persistence of technology enthusiasts. Driven by the dual forces, in 2119, Chen Yizhou officially renamed the campus network Renren. From this name, we can see that Chen Yizhou mainly emphasized that this platform can strengthen people.

Although Chen Yizhou changed the name of the campus network to Renren and began to transform, the timing was not accurate enough compared with the development momentum at that time. However, at the beginning of 2111, the number of active users of Renren was still as high as 17 million. At the peak of development, 75% of college students in China were using Renren.com as a social platform.

With this development momentum, Renren was listed in the United States, and the market value was $8 billion when the stock market closed on the day of listing. In the years after listing, except for a short-term loss in 2112, the net profit in 2113 and 2114 exceeded $611 million.

But there are hidden dangers of Renren under such superficial scenery. With the departure of the post-81s and post-91s graduates who used the intranet at that time, their social networks moved from campus to society. And the application software they use has also been transferred from Renren to other platforms. At this time, the appearance of WeChat and Weibo also brought great pressure to Renren.

How did such a great Renren network go downhill step by step? In just eight years, Renren declined rapidly from the peak of 1.17 billion registered users. All this is rooted in Renren's blind follow-up, but it is not profound to cast a net everywhere.

first of all, follow the trend blindly and follow it thoroughly. After the appearance of Weibo and WeChat, Chen Yizhou, in order to maintain the benefit of Renren, was misled by the development momentum of game business and video business, and used the funds originally used for game business and video business to develop Internet financial services in 2114.

but he didn't expect that the hasty transformation of video business and game business into financial services became the fuse of Renren's decline.

Internet finance that followed suit was not very successful in 2114, but the net profit of game business and video business began to decline, and users began to lose obviously. In 2115, Renren's profit was directly reduced from $611 billion to $211 million.

From then on, Renren's nightmare of going downhill began. Later, online games were followed by online games; Video or video; Group buying or group buying, the result is a loss with one. .

Secondly, the development direction is too narrow. The crowd is mainly college students. When a college student graduated from campus, he was naturally abandoned. Moreover, the topic is too single, focusing on campus life and lacking certain sociality. Furthermore, there is no fresh blood injection, the content is dull and monotonous, and the product experience is poor.

renren's online experience can't be improved due to various small advertisements, repeated overlapping of platform pages and poor optimization function, so it naturally abandons renren.

Faced with this situation, Chen Yizhou, the founder of Renren.com, also tried to save Renren.com from its declining development momentum, but in the end it didn't help. First of all, Chen Yizhou began to get involved in live broadcast, and 2116 was called the first year of live broadcast. Although the live broadcast is the product of Renren.com's follow-up, in fact, in 2115, Renren.com no longer relied on advertising to make money.

In order to keep it going, Renren started live broadcast, but the public didn't buy it. Users have voiced that Renren.com has lost its original flavor and is no longer a website in memory. Based on this, Renren.com had to give up. However, with the live broadcast of Momo appearing in the market in 2117, everyone once again started the idea of live broadcast. This time, although it was not contradicted, the former users had already lost their lives. The scarcity of users forced everyone's live broadcast plan to collapse again.

the second thing everyone does is to make used cars. In the years when used cars were very popular online, Renren.com started to do used car business, but the difference with melon seeds used cars in the same period was that it was a happy car. This time, the strategic deployment seems to be more successful than the last time, and soon the business of Happy Car will account for one-third of Renren's revenue.

However, the second-hand car business can't be the main income of Renren, so Chen Yizhou finally decided to sell Renren's social network. Once this news broke out, many netizens were puzzled. Chen Yizhou, the founder of Renren.com, said that he was no longer suitable to be a social network for young people, and hoped that young people could take up this responsibility in the future.

Counting the reasons for Renren's failure, it can be said that its positioning has not been clear enough. It is a lesson that every company leader must take to pursue new business opportunities, but blindly following the trend will lead to the wider the scope, the less profound it will be. And this is a fatal gap that leads to the failure of a company.

renren. com disappeared quietly when the internet was developing at the right moment, which is a warning to us: only by doing things with great skill can we achieve something.