Once so brilliant, registered users reached 65.438+0.3 billion, and active users reached more than 30 million. But after just a few years of glory, it declined.
It copied American Facebook from head to toe, and even the interface looks exactly the same. How can Facebook be good, growing bigger and bigger under Xiaozha's leadership, but it's a flash in the pan and it's going to die for no reason?
1. Tsinghua Xueba wants to be China's Facebook.
Renren. com was originally named "Intranet", and its founder was also Wang Xing, the founder of Meituan.
In 2003, Wang Xing was still a young man, studying for a doctorate in the United States. Because studying in the United States has seen the world and caught up with the good opportunity of the great development of the Internet, various Internet companies have risen in large numbers. Wang Xing also plans to start his own business.
However, at that time, Wang Xing didn't have much entrepreneurial experience, so it was a bit difficult to make a completely new thing. But if you can't do it yourself, won't you imitate it first?
He looked around and found that there was a new company in the United States called Facebook, which had a particularly good model. It has become popular in several American universities and has become an important platform for students to communicate.
In that case, why not build a similar one in China? I graduated from Tsinghua, so building a similar platform is also convenient for alumni to communicate. Just do it, Wang Xingshu stopped studying and getting a doctorate, and returned to China to set up a campus network.
Intranet first spread among students in Tsinghua and Peking University. Everyone likes this interesting website very much, and in a few months, the number of registered people has increased to hundreds of thousands. Wang Xing was very happy at that time and felt that he had done the right thing by coming back to start a business. But he was not happy for long, and trouble came.
At that time, Wang Xing's entrepreneurial team had about 14 people, most of whom were newly graduated students. This group has physical strength, courage and ideas, and is willing to stay up for a few nights for the project, but the shortcomings are also obvious, green and inexperienced. However, due to the lack of management and checks and balances, meetings are easy to quarrel and opinions cannot be reached.
Internet is a particularly expensive industry. When the problem of lack of money begins to stand out, the team is more prone to cracks. At that time, Wang Xing found many venture capital companies, and none of them were willing to invest. One investor is willing to buy the whole campus network directly and do it himself. This is Chen Yizhou.
Chen Yizhou was one of the first people to contact the Internet. He has vision and courage, but he hasn't really run an internet company from beginning to end for a long time.
There is a consensus in the industry that Chen Yizhou is a good investor, but not a good entrepreneur. Not knowing the operation also laid the groundwork for Renren's great defeat.
2. From Intranet to Renren.
In 2006, Chen Yizhou bought the campus network for $2 million, and then merged it with the 5Q network owned by Thousand Oaks Group.
Since 2008, the development of campus network has been particularly rapid. At that time, the students who just entered the campus were the main force of the Internet. After the students arrived at the university, they had their own laptops for the first time, and they became heavy users of the Internet, mostly loyal users of Renren.
Chen Yizhou is not satisfied with being a platform for college students to communicate and interact. He has seen the wealth-making ability of American internet companies. Once a company has a large enough number of users and is listed on the stock exchange, it is equal to the skyrocketing wealth and value.
From this point of view, the name "intranet" is not appropriate. Because if the website is only for college students, what should college students do after graduation? Will it land again? I don't think so. There is no room for long-term growth in the number of users. Isn't it a daydream to go public with equity appreciation?
Since the name is not suitable, it must be renamed. In 2009, the intranet was officially renamed Renren. Renren. com Everyone can log in and use it. In this way, this platform has become a more diverse and broader communication space, so that many people who have just graduated from college or have worked for many years can join in.
But to put it bluntly, this trick is still copied from Facebook. At first, Facebook was only for college students. In 2006, it announced that it was open to all Internet users. Since then, in just one year, the ranking of the website in the United States has risen from 60th to 7th. There is no doubt that Chen Yizhou also wants to copy the myth of Facebook.
However, there is an idiom that painting a tiger is not against a dog. When Facebook announced its opening, it also introduced many innovative measures to optimize the user experience, appease the protests of student groups and maintain the competitiveness of the website. In contrast, Chen Yizhou changed the name of the campus network to Renren. Looks like it's really just a name change. In content operation, campus users are the main users, which corresponds to the content related to school life.
Almost all the people registered on the website are students, and few people you know or are interested in. Occasionally, I will see a few beautiful women or handsome guys, but I can't open them to watch the dynamics. Will you still be interested? It is estimated that after quitting, I will never think of logging in for the second time.
It can be seen that although Renren.com has changed its name and made a good transformation, it is impossible to realize the transformation by such an operation method.
But then again, even if it can't be transformed, there are 20-30 million online college students in China every year. Although people continue to graduate, they are constantly supplemented by new students. Therefore, Renren. com will at least survive even if it just guards the campus. Why is it getting worse? This has to mention its internal chaotic management.
3. Failed management and operation
Renren. com Com started on campus. It stands to reason that even if it can't be transformed into an open public platform, at least student users have to suffer. But Renren just doesn't do it. It can be said that its biggest problem is that it does not focus on solving the pain points of students' social or online socialization.
People go to social networking sites for two simple reasons. One is to spit out your daily life, update your own dynamics and ideas, and the other is to look at interested people and content. In the first aspect, Renren has done well, but in the second aspect, Renren's performance is simply terrible.
The Internet has a 28 principle: 20% of the core users are content creators and 80% are followers. Therefore, for a social networking site, how to retain these 20% creative core users has become a top priority.
However, really let everyone network. "Everyone hates it" is another important factor, and that is the overwhelming advertising. Perhaps it is too eager to cash in and go public, and Renren's advertisements can be said to be notorious. Not only the number of people is angry, but also it occupies an important position on the page, which is difficult to close and cannot be shielded, and the user experience is poor! At that time, there was even a plug-in called "Renren.com Modifier" on the market. Its selling point is that it can directly block and reject advertisements from Renren.com. ..
In the face of users' opinions, even backstage operators publicly replied to netizens and said, "The boss doesn't care, why update it?"
According to public data, the turnover rate in Renren.com is so high that it is difficult to form sustainable operation and product improvement. In addition, the operation team has no good incentive policy. Therefore, it is inevitable that the team will act according to the opinions of the leaders, and it is better to do more than one thing. That's it, Renren. Com is caught in the common fault of enterprise management, the layman guides the expert and the layman leads the expert.
There is a popular saying in the Internet industry that "the product winner wins the world". Whether it is WeChat or Weibo, their success is inseparable from excellent product managers.
But in Renren.com, Chen Yizhou himself is the biggest product manager, and obviously not a very good product manager. He doesn't understand the operation and products, which seriously affects the execution and efficiency of the operation team.
However, even though Renren.com began to show such shortcomings, many people did not give up this platform. After all, for many post-80s generation, Renren.com is not only a platform, but also their own youth, beautiful university life and unforgettable old memories.
However, after the rise of mobile Internet, Renren finally lost its development momentum.
4. Reject everyone, meaningless transformation
20 1 1 year is the year when Renren turned from prosperity to decline and fell from its peak. The rapid rise of mobile Internet has become the last straw to overwhelm Renren.
After 20 1 1 year, the iPhone4 sold well. In the second year, iPhone5 continued to create sales myths, bringing Jobs and Apple to the altar and making the mobile Internet a reality. Since then, everyone can surf the Internet easily through smart phones, and the terminals of the Internet have also been transferred from traditional computer terminals to mobile phones.
This change also means great changes and shuffling of social platforms. Weibo, WeChat and other mobile Internet-adapted apps have sprung up, quickly attracting netizens of all ages. On the other hand, Renren.com has made no efforts in this regard. The mobile terminal doesn't do well at home, it takes a long time to log in, let alone upload photos, and users naturally lose a lot.
By 20 16, Renren.com basically withdrew from the stage of mobile social interaction. In the ranking of active users of a social platform that year, active users of WeChat and QQ ranked first, accounting for more than 70%; Sina Weibo ranks second with active users accounting for about13%; What about renren. com? The proportion of active users is only 1%.
It can be said that the mobile Internet is coming too fast. While Chen Yizhou was still addicted to the computer-based Internet era, Renren.com has been left behind by new changes and trends. The Internet is a stage for young people. As a post-60s generation, Chen Yizhou is really a bit too old and a bit at a loss.
Seeing that most of the aborigines abandoned Renren.com, Renren.com's share price fell again and again, and Chen Yizhou began to pursue hot spots, hoping to turn around against the wind.
In 20 16, webcasting became a hot spot, and Renren.com also aimed at this field, turning into a live broadcast of renren. com ... for two years, everyone's live broadcast did not cause any waves.
Seeing that the price of bitcoin skyrocketed at the beginning of 20 18, blockchain and cryptocurrency became new outlets, and Renren.com turned around and started its own Renren coin. The company's share price also rose by 20%. However, cryptocurrency is a familiar field in Chen Yizhou. Coupled with the heavy blow by the regulatory authorities to illegal digital currency, the project was subsequently suspended.
20 18 1 1 packaged and sold the business assets of Renren's social platform to Beijing Duoniu Media at a price of only $20 million.
As for Renren.com, which is still hanging on NASDAQ, it is no longer the Renren.com we remember, but a used car company, a beauty live broadcast company and an Internet blockchain currency company. In the third quarter of 20 19, Renren's net loss was $22.8 million, equivalent to the net loss for the whole year of 20 18. The transformation of Renren.com was a complete failure.
5. Failure summary: product operation is fundamental.
Renren.com's downfall is closely related to Chen Yizhou's character and style. As one of the earliest entrepreneurs in the Internet industry, Chen Yizhou succeeded too early, and his successful investor role made him ignore the products. Only paying attention to profit cashing and not paying attention to product operation has become the key to Renren's failure.
But in fact, the product itself is the most important foundation for the development of Internet companies. For example, the original target Facebook has continuously improved the user experience, and it is still alive and getting better and better.
To take a step back, even if you don't learn Facebook and don't open it to the whole society, you will only focus on the subdivision of the campus classmate circle from beginning to end. If you work hard, it may not break out.
Unfortunately, the internal struggle of Renren.com is fierce, it has no intention to operate, its positioning is not accurate, and its products are too poor; Externally, it is normal to fail to grasp the general trend of mobile Internet development and be abandoned by the times.
After the decline of Renren.com, campus socialization has once again become a battleground for Internet giants. JD.COM, Tencent and Ali are all involved.
2065438+At the beginning of September 2009, JD.COM launched the campus social software "Pear Wow" for college students, which not only focused on college students and expanded business lines, but also aimed at strengthening JD.COM's financial credit system.
Ali also simultaneously launched the campus social software "Coming and Going" and "Real Me" for low-key testing and implementation in Zhejiang campus.
Tencent also launched a brand-new campus social app-Tencent School Ape on the basis of previous QQ alumni to seize the highland of campus social application.
At present, there is no software that can reach the height of Renren, but the exploration of campus socialization will not stop. It is still unknown which website or APP will win the favor of students in the future.
Editor | Liangshan
Paibianliangshan
Reading on the Road: Doctors from world-renowned universities intensively read a good book for 30 minutes.