Stranger social interaction in China has experienced dating websites in the PC Internet era, strangers and sliding matching based on LBS in the mobile Internet era, and now focuses on "soul social interaction" and "video matching", and finally, the latest "metauniverse" social rookie, gel.
The wind has come and gone, and the product concept and form have changed several times, but there has never been a considerable company or product.
When it comes to social software for strangers, the first thing that many people think of is Momo. Since the establishment of 20 1 1, Momo App has stood out among the Internet giants for ten years, creating the fastest IPO record for startups at that time.
However, in 20 18, monthly users broke through the 65438+ billion mark and fell into a growth bottleneck. Also in this year, Momo began to launch live programs, and the live broadcast business became its main source of income. Even at the highest time, revenue accounted for more than 80%. The second source of income is value-added services, including membership fees, but it faces the double dilemma of user growth bottleneck and user loss.
In the past ten years, Momo has gradually developed from a single social software to a comprehensive platform of social+entertainment.
In recent years, Soul, known as "soul socialization", has sprung up suddenly and gradually become the head player in the social field of strangers. Although the user scale of Soul is not far from Momo's, and it is still in a state of burning money for growth and sustained losses, it is still popular with capital and has won four rounds of investment from shareholders such as Wuyuan Capital, Tencent, Sheng Yuan, DST and GGV.
As a startup that keeps losing money, Soul's cash flow has been very tight. In 2020, Soul spent 620 million yuan on marketing, with a net loss of 488 million yuan. Last year, just one Q 1 cost 383 million yuan in soul loss.
From the evolution of strangers' social products in the era of mobile Internet, LBS (location-based service) is an inflection point of strangers' social products.
/kloc-The speed dispute between WeChat and Mi Chat 0/0 years ago can also prove the importance of LBS. On July 20 1 1 year, wechat launched the function of "viewing people nearby". Since then, the number of users of WeChat has increased, reaching an astonishing 65,438+10,000. Zhang Xiaolong, founder of WeChat, said, "This function has completely turned the tide." .
In the social field, the emergence of LBS determines the evolution direction of similar products later, such as Momo. Even the later "social dark horse" soul began to deliberately improve this problem.
Under the product concept of "social mind", the starting point of richer user matching models and recommendation algorithms based on more dimensions is no longer just matching efficiency, but matching accuracy. For example, love bell matching is also based on LBS, showing the distance between the two sides. There are also additional props, city cards, the use of positioning cards and so on.
On June 23rd, 20021,Soul, who was preparing to go public in the US, suddenly announced that it would suspend the IPO process. Behind this tortuous road to listing, it has triggered various speculations in the industry.
From the bottleneck of Momo's user growth to the suspension of Soul's listing, in fact, the difficulties they face are very similar: with the development of the industry, products gradually fall into homogenization, but there are fewer actions of product innovation; It is difficult to create a content community atmosphere, and it is equally difficult to attract users and retain users; In the realization mode, it still relies on live broadcast service or value-added service, and the exploration of commercialization channels is slow.
By the end of 20 19, Momo had 1. 1.45 million monthly users. By the end of 2020, the monthly active users of Momo were 1. 1.38 billion. In March of 20021year, the monthly active users of Momo were 1. 1.53 billion.
Through the data of the last three years, we can find that Momo's monthly active users have been hovering above 654.38 billion, facing the pressure of declining active users. Even Momo CEO Wang Li mentioned in an interview that Momo has few new users, and many of them are repeat customers, about half and half.
Looking back at Soul, Soul is still in the stage of burning money for growth, but in this social field with saturated traffic and limited room for growth, the pressure of Soul is actually not small. In the past few years, Soul has created amazing user growth by putting in a lot of advertisements, but advertisements have also led to high marketing costs.
According to the prospectus, in 20 19, the advertising cost of Soul was 654.38+97 million yuan. In 2020, Soul's advertising expenses will be 602 million yuan. By the first quarter of 20021,the advertising expenses of Soul had reached 460 million yuan, and the marketing investment was still expanding.
But the problem is that Soul's burning effect is limited, and the growth rate of advertising expenses is much higher than its monthly growth rate.
In 2020, the advertising expenses of Soul increased by 205.58% year-on-year. In the same period, the average number of monthly active users of Soul was 20.8 million, an increase of 8 1% over the previous year.
In 202 1 year, the advertising fee of Soul increased by 784.62% year-on-year. In the same period, the average monthly active users of Soul was 33.2 million, a year-on-year increase of 109%.
The growth space is limited, and the loss of active users is the pain point that Momo and Soul are currently facing.
However, in the face of this pain point, there are far more than Momo and Soul, as well as Yiyi App focusing on "video matching".
Like Momo, Meiyi is also a social App for strangers based on LBS. Although I didn't stand on the tuyere like Momo, I didn't get capital financing like Soul, but with the highlight function of video matching, I quickly opened a market for strangers to socialize.
In February 2020, less than a month after its launch, Miyi welcomed millions of users for the first time with the positioning of "video matching" as a real friend. In July of 20021year, the number of users exceeded 60 million. In August of the same year, she boarded the App Store China free list (making friends) download list top 10.
After several months of development, the number of Iraqi users has exceeded 70 million. Compared with the user growth rate in previous years, the user growth of Miyi seems to have entered a slow period, and this set of data is also reflected in the monthly users.
202 1, 1 1, and the monthly users of Miyi exceeded150,000. Compared with the previous growth rate of monthly users, it also began to enter a slow growth stage.
Although this set of data is not as good as Momo, Soul and other social giants, Jackson Yee, as the youngest of the four social products, still occupies a place in the social list.
Social software has user matching based on one dimension: for example, stranger and exploration, socialization based on LBS (that is, geographical location); Soul is an anonymous society based on soul matching.
Miyi is a real-life social interaction based on video matching. According to user portraits, hobbies, dating labels, dating materials and other information, help similar users who meet the tonality to quickly match and establish emotional interaction in the form of one-to-one video.
This fate matching function can help users quickly break the social ice and build a bridge to communicate with the opposite sex.
Although Mi Yi, Mo Mo and Soul have different matching functions, they all belong to strangers. So in some functions, the three have something in common, such as content construction.
Momo has a dynamic square, Miyi has a mood square, and the soul has an instant square. Unlike acquaintances like WeChat, if we share every moment of life in a circle of friends, we are likely to be magnified. If you have 1000 friends, there may be 500 misunderstandings.
But when strangers socialize, whether they are strangers, souls or Mi Yi, these squares give us an "unscrupulous" relaxation space. Publishing daily life and feelings, and receiving high-quality voices in time just meet the real needs of contemporary young people's social model and the changes of the times.
These squares allow like-minded people to meet and communicate here, giving couples a beautiful living space.
In addition to connecting people, stranger social products should pay more attention to how to establish a strong relationship between people and platforms. The former affects the number of users, while the latter determines user retention, which is the key to the sustainability of business model.
On the social platform of strangers, it is equally easy to start and end a conversation, and most of the conversations of users are one-time social interactions, so it is difficult to form a stable social relationship between users.
However, these unfamiliar users will also flow to platforms such as WeChat and QQ when they enter the acquaintance stage, and this flow is irreversible. In addition to this pain point, the community atmosphere of strangers' social platforms in recent years is also worrying.
Bad behaviors such as foul language of low-quality users hurt the enthusiasm of other users to use the software. If the number of low-quality users increases, the platform may fall into a vicious circle: the proportion of low-quality users increases, and high-quality users quit, which eventually leads to a serious loss of platform users.
Therefore, it is very important to build the community atmosphere of the social platform for strangers, which determines the atmosphere among users. If the platform can't always bring users a high-quality experience, then users' willingness to continue using it will gradually disappear.
As a result, Mo Mo, Soul and Mi Yi all started the management of community atmosphere construction.
For example, the soul, changing the avatar needs to be reviewed. In case of harassment, there are also special reporting channels.
And looking for Iraq, take the measures of first trial and then dispatch. For content creation, for example, when users publish mood dynamics in the square, they have to go through the preliminary examination of the system, and then through the special audit of manpower, and finally they will appear in the mood square. Users upload avatars, photos, personalized signatures, custom chat words, etc. And it must be strictly examined by auditors.
In case of harassment, abuse and other violations of the rules of the platform, you can report it with one click, or you can feed it back to the manual customer service online to deal with it quickly.
The same is true of Mo Mo. If it involves pornography, vulgarity, abuse and other violations of platform rules, you can click Report to get a quick reply.
In addition to the creation of community atmosphere and the retention of users, Momo's practice is really worth learning from Soul and Mi Yi. Momo provides a variety of entertainment places for platform users through the layout of movies and games, which can effectively maintain the user stock.
Of course, in addition to retaining users, the platform must also focus on improving commercial realization and increasing product revenue.
Commercialization of social platforms for strangers is a major difficulty!
Momo has previously launched a 50,000-year-old "black diamond member", and users can use functions such as "super liking", "arbitrarily modifying positioning" and "checking whether the news has been read", and this pricing and setting has always been ridiculed by users as a necessity for local tyrants to "choose concubines online".
After years of exploration of membership payment and advertising, Momo finally stepped out of the realization mode of "live broadcast+value-added service".
Soul lingers in the realization path of membership payment, value-added services, advertising and e-commerce, and also suffers a lot on the road of commercialization.
Whether it is live broadcast or value-added services, the main source of income for Soul and Momo is difficult to support their future. As mentioned above, Soul has been established for five years, and it is still burning money for the market, and it has been in a state of loss. At this rate, Soul can hardly last long.
Since the launch of Miyi, it has opened up business models such as aristocratic privileges and value-added services. The relevant person in charge of Miyi said that advertising is an option, but too many advertisements will definitely further hurt the user experience.
Miyi's value-added services mainly include virtual gifts and aristocratic privileged income. Users can enjoy various vip services of the platform by buying diamonds, including avatar dressing, chat bubbles, entrance special effects, business card display, chat emoticons, and virtual gifts when chatting privately.
From the perspective of the realization modes of Mo Mo, Mi Yi and Soul, they all seem relatively thin. Exploring more realization modes is still the key word for the future development of Mo Mo, Mi Yi and Soul.
Compared with Mo Mo, Mi Yi and Soul, many attempts are still focused on the social level. This means that its income can only be driven by value-added services such as membership fees and virtual gifts.
This is the biggest crux of strangers' social business. Many products come in and out, trying to explore a different path. Later, it was discovered that many roads are not exported, and it is difficult for them to tell a "social"+ecological story that can convince investors and users.
The root cause, the problem of user retention and the natural defects of business model have brought strangers into a deadlock.
When strangers socialize, what they do in essence is to get through the business of strong and weak relations. Whether this business is sustainable or not involves many links such as meeting demand, retaining users and creating value.
At least for now, strangers still have a long way to go to socialize!