Article | Zhang Shule (columnist of People's Daily Online and People's Post and Telecommunications, Internet and game industry observer)

When socializing with strangers, the most fearful thing is to die in the light.

In fact, social applications for strangers are also most afraid of netizens meeting each other and letting the social applications be exposed to death.

In the Internet age, meeting has become easier and users are quickly gathered. iiMedia Research data shows that by 2020, the number of users socializing with strangers on the Internet in my country is expected to reach 648 million.

Everything about age-appropriate dating groups is changing all the time. From those born in the 80s and 90s who were worried about getting married, to now, Generation Z has stepped onto the "stage" of the marriage and love market; from the first-generation dating platforms such as Century Jiayuan and Baihe.com to Momo and Tantan, which focus on good looks and social networking platforms, and then to Soul and Uki that avoid showing their faces and pay more attention to inner social interaction such as three views, personality, hobbies, etc., the "products" of marriage and love matching and blind date have changed greatly from generation to generation, echoing the changing views of young people on marriage and love, but the underlying logic Nothing has changed - social interaction is still the "good medicine" for young people to relieve loneliness.

Not only startups, but also giants such as Tencent and Alibaba are unwilling to let go of this stable and huge "traffic pool."

What is the logic behind the iteration and traffic monetization of stranger social networking?

From the early Baihe.com and Jiayuan to the current Soul, they are essentially social models based on "appointment" as a social model that meets the immediate needs of both parties, and there is no difference in traffic acquisition.

Only in terms of traffic usage, dating websites adopt explicit platform control, while Soul uses implicit platform control, but the user experience is just a chance encounter.

But the essence is that users recharge their membership to achieve more choices or better choices.

Soul’s traffic acquisition is actually buying volume.

Draw traffic from various platforms by purchasing volume (including soft advertising through content platforms), and at the same time use the so-called soul dating gimmick to achieve word-of-mouth communication between users (users of the same gender, that is, male communication) Male, female to female).

Soul is obviously a social product. If it is a tool product, the user stickiness is weak, similar to the plug-and-play function of a USB flash drive.

And its user stickiness and scalability lie in whether it can really achieve the essence of its so-called soul friendship, and within the social scope of strangers, achieve the real short and smooth way for users to log in to the platform. expected goals.

Relying on this feature, Soul, which is known as the "soul" social network, recently submitted a prospectus on Nasdaq.

Among its nearly 10 million average daily active users, more than 70% are born in the 1990s and Generation Z. You are looking for your Soulmate (soulmate) in Soul, but it goes to the capital market with huge traffic to find money. Love, without distinguishing between true and false, just "realizes" like this.

But in fact, there is currently no clear information pointing to the obvious "effect" of this application. After all, the main gameplay of this application is not as simple and crude as Momo and Tantan, and requires users to spend time in the virtual world. The "relationship" is precipitated in it.

Therefore, compared with the early Baihe.com and Jiayuan, Soul is just a product of a different generation.

At the same time, Soul applications are essentially in the category of socializing with strangers, but they do not yet pose a substantial threat to Momo (including Tantan), the top social media platform for strangers.

Moreover, the trend of socializing with strangers has also begun to change.

Socializing with strangers with the initial goal of "making an appointment" (previously socializing with acquaintances and semi-acquaintances also had this kind of starting goal), will eventually lead to "not making an appointment".

Looking only at the field of socializing with strangers, the transformation of Momo (including Tantan) is relatively successful, that is, moving towards live broadcast + social interaction, allowing strangers to socialize with more postures and scenes, and The ultimate goal is not just to meet offline, but to find more profit models besides paying users (members).

This is also reflected in Generation Z’s own perception of marriage and love.

Bida Consulting pointed out that in 2020, the reason why 67% of marriage and dating users are single is "not meeting the right person", and the reason why many users are single is because "the social circle is small and there is a lack of friends of the opposite sex" , "Staying at home lacks social activities."

People are becoming more and more homebound, so that when socializing with strangers, they need to set up more online scenes to cultivate semi-acquaintance relationships, instead of rushing to facilitate offline meetings.

Moreover, there is a bug in socializing with strangers, that is, when meeting offline, both parties have entered the category of acquaintances or semi-acquaintances regardless of whether they have met in person. The result is that after meeting offline in strangers socializing applications, it is inevitable that Light dies.

It can be said that social traffic is not easy to control even by Tencent itself. For socializing with acquaintances, there are WeChat/QQ, and for socializing with strangers, there are Momo and Tantan. If it cannot be subverted, the best channel is Vertical track.

For example, NetEase Cloud Music is a music social network, which makes a small amount of money. Others often fall into the dust. Because they are interested in social networking, most users do not have strong needs, their activity level is not high, and there is still a certain threshold. .

On the other hand, the logic of the iterations of Jiayuan, Lily to Momo, Tantan and Soul is not determined by the so-called characteristics of the product. Instead, external factors and opportunities account for a large proportion.

In the era without mobile Internet, the PC side only had a simple positioning and could only carry out pan-regional socializing. Century Jiayuan is a pan-regional dating at the community level. It is also positioned in Beijing, but it may be a Two hours away.

This creates distance.

But the mobile Internet is different. It connects in real time, matches nearby, and responds online at the same time. This turns the "last mile" of time difference and distance difference into "100 meters downstairs."

However, socializing with strangers still has the problem of being exposed to the light. Relying on soul friendship alone does not seem to be enough to solve everything, whether it is the death of being exposed to the light among users, or the abandonment of social applications after successful exposure to the light. , all like this.

How to break it? There is currently no answer.