Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

Business legends are advocated in every era, and today is no exception.

The experience and story of the rise of an enterprise constitute the "human setting" of the enterprise. Amplifying the effect of enterprise label in the form of anthropomorphism can not only deepen people's impression of an enterprise, but also virtually guide the enterprise and let the enterprise continue on the established road.

In most cases, the personnel establishment of an enterprise is inseparable from the personality of corporate spokesmen such as CEO and the chairman of the board of directors. For example, we like to hear the story of Mark Zuckerberg dropping out of Harvard, thinking that Facebook is a new social model that breaks down barriers and connects you and me; for example, Ding Lei's goodwill and fun makes NetEase's products a bit more restrained and pragmatic; Liu Qiangdong emphasizes that the whole company is all brothers, which makes JD.com a bit more aggressive.

So in China's Internet industry, is there a company that relies solely on business and does not need CEO to tell stories?

Of course there are, and most of them are new enterprises in recent years, because as long as Zhang Chaoyang is there, even if he is lonely, no one will forget Sohu. Compared with the legendary color of the early Internet corporate leaders baptized over the years, newcomers need to use the real growth of their business to make up for the lack of public awareness of their tagged characters. Among them, the byte jump is a distinct example of the new Internet enterprises. Like a sudden and fast-growing challenger's byte beat, once "cut through the thorns" under many light damage, but when the pace fell to the ground, every move, has become a brick by brick of the enterprise building.

However, when the wind and rain comes, the byte-beating people building seems to be facing a series of collapses and upheavals.

Technology-driven growth: byte jumping was once the "innovation responsibility" of Internet companies

First of all, we can take a look at what the byte-beating "human setting" is like.

Since its release in 2012, Jinri Toutiao, the first byte-beating product, quickly swept the market by relying on the algorithm-driven content recommendation model, and even once had 140 million active users, which not only made a large number of news client products look sideways, but also injected a shot in the heart into the entire content industry, so that many products began to introduce intelligent recommendation algorithms.

At that time, the human setting established by byte beat was a low-key technological innovator, and achieved rapid success by using AI technology to change the driving mode of the product.

In the later period, the rapid rise of a series of products, such as "connotation joke", "Douyin", "volcano short video" and so on, makes this person set up more stably.

The building will tilt: the byte jumps to put on a reversal drama.

But the collapse of byte-beating people is also coming faster than we thought.

Today, Jinri Toutiao, suspected of stealing a large number of Baidu "TOP1" search product results, was sued by Baidu to the Beijing Haidian District people's Court on the grounds of unfair competition, demanding that the byte beat immediately stop the infringement, compensate for related economic losses and reasonable expenses totaling 90 million yuan, and apologized on its APP and website home page for 30 consecutive days.

In other words, in the headline search, byte jump did not invest in the proper technology research and development and use of algorithms to mine information, but climbed the search results of competitive products.

So far, we can't remember clearly that this is about the reversal of byte jump "technology-driven human setting". Before that, there have been a series of problems in byte-beating products. First, he openly poached Zhihu users to Wukong to answer questions and posted a poster "touching porcelain" Zhihu called him "Li Zhongke"; then he completely removed the jokes because of his vulgar content and rectified Jinri Toutiao; the first step in launching the social field of multi-flash bureau was to "carry" Wechat at the press conference; Douyin went out to sea but encountered litigation and removal in different countries....

We began to find that behind the byte-beating "technology-driven growth human setting" is actually constantly digging kol, touching porcelain and even plagiarizing larger competitive products and repeatedly banned vulgar content.

Three thresholds that cannot be crossed

So what is the reason for the collapse of the byte jumper? As a company valued at tens of billions of dollars, it is hard to imagine that byte jumps deal with the most basic job of poor content compliance. Taken together, byte-beating people set collapses from these three thresholds.

The first threshold is the course deviation driven by interests.

Byte jump is currently in the Pre IPO stage, and it is an indisputable fact that it will impact IPO in the future. We must admit that today's market conditions are harsher than those of 2016-2018, when the capital markets were full of bubbles. Byte jump, as an enterprise that has almost accompanied the whole process of the capital market bubble, can only meet the expectations of the capital market only by speeding up replication, entering more product areas, impacting more market share, and obtaining more users.

In the process of excessive growth, it is easy to ignore some business ethics issues, such as content compliance, product originality and so on. Especially today, byte jump has a large number of product lines and a large number of users, just like a super-speed ship, a little deflection of the rudder may cause a great disaster to the course.

The second threshold is the confusion of the core business model.

We can find that, in addition to Jinri Toutiao, most of the information platforms belong to mature corporate ecology or media organizations, such as Phoenix Media and Information, Baidu and Baijia, Tencent and Tencent News, and so on. Based on this ecological relationship, the information platform does not need to bear excessive realization pressure, but can integrate itself into the whole industrial ecology to create benefits.

But one of the major problems faced by byte beating is that it is difficult to get a secure business cycle from a product in an isolated business ecology. In the final analysis, Jinri Toutiao, Douyin and other products, do nothing more than traffic business to rely on advertising profits. And still in the growing period of byte beat, they have to spend a lot of money on getting users to buy traffic. According to The Information's previous report, byte jumping lost $1.2 billion a year last year due to the overseas promotion of tiktok.

At the latest fundraising event, Byte Jump told investors that the company expects revenue of 50 billion to 55 billion yuan in 2018, according to Bloomberg. But the delay in the cash-out schedule for new products and factors such as China's economic slowdown curbing advertising spending have left the company with revenue only slightly above its minimum target.

All the signs seem to implicitly convey a voice that the core business model with byte beat is nothing more than traffic fattening, propping up one new product after another at a high cost, and it is difficult to see the emergence of this so-called "business model".

The third threshold is the connivance of social environment.

Mistakes made by byte jumps seem to be easily forgiven. Content jokes have been removed from the shelves because of serious content compliance issues, and a different name can be widely promoted on variety shows. In the United States, TikTok was punished by FCC for children's privacy issues, and byte jumps only need to pay a fine.

This kind of connivance seems to be a good thing for the enterprise, reducing the loss suffered by the enterprise. But isn't connivance the biggest trap? The result of this environment is to let the byte beat touch the red line again and again, and even create a search content plagiarism, which can be regarded as a fatal scandal in terms of technology.

It can be said that each of these three thresholds stumbled the byte beat, and finally let the byte beat "human setting" fall into shock.

How far is the distance from collapse to remodeling?

For enterprises, how terrible is human collapse?

After the Cambridge scandal at Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, who had started a business in a university dorm, was transformed from a talented teenager to a greedy businessman who colluded with big companies and sold out the privacy of his users. The impact of the human collapse not only led to public attacks on the fall in Facebook's share price, but also plunged the technology industry as a whole into privacy panic. Until today, more than a year has passed, and Facebook has not yet recovered.

By the same token, the collapse of Liu Qiangdong's people also brought inestimable losses to JD.com. He did not know that it would be appropriate to rebuild his image to make up for it.

So for the byte beat on the road of IPO, how much time and economic cost will it take to make up for the collapse at this time? Can the byte beat under capital pressure really wait until that day?

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