Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

New Year's Day is approaching, at the time of the change of the year, the "summary" of various industries has been put on the agenda again. Marketing teams of various brands are stepping up production of the H5, telling users how many taxis they took and how many takeouts they ordered in 2019. Even Weibo netizens, who love quarrelling, began to sum up that they had scolded XX personally this year.

However, looking back on the year 2019, we will find that this year can be described as the "year of removal" of the Internet. not only have industry leaders and huge users of App been removed from the shelves since the beginning of the year, but recently, the National Network Security Notification Center has issued a notice to rectify and rectify the 100th illegal App. These include the products of banking institutions such as the Bank of Tianjin and Everbright Bank, as well as content products such as Fan Deng Reading and Jinjiang novel Reading, as well as e-commerce products such as Koala Haitao.

For developers, their summary of the year may be: in recent years, some of the products you participated in the development of have been removed from the shelves, and the cumulative time has reached XXD. In order to deal with the removal problem, you have attended X emergency meetings.

The History of Mobile Internet norms: why are App off the shelves?

Looking back on the barbaric growth of the App ecology around 2015, unless legal issues were involved, the decision to "get off the shelves" was often made by the app store. In particular, App Store, which is particularly "abusive", often engages in "intrigue" with operators because of issues such as rankings. At that time, if App was removed from the shelves, it was often because developers exploited loopholes or violated some rules in the ASO process, and were punished by app stores. After re-entering the shelves, they often encountered the situation that rankings, weights, and even ratings were emptied.

Of course, over time, App Store has also put forward relevant requirements for the "application of iOS 11", "hot update", "GDPR standard" and so on, but in general, the removal of app stores will not have much negative impact. The real impact is the App rectification and reform led by the Internet Information Office, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and other regulatory departments.

The history of the removal of App can also be regarded as the "normative history" of the mobile Internet.

The norms of the relevant departments for the mobile Internet are gradually refined, and at first they pay close attention to the whole category; for example, around 2016, the largest scale of removal is the gambling-related lottery category. Then gradually increase the focus on content compliance, such as the high attention to live broadcast and information distribution products since 2017, even high-profile products such as Jinri Toutiao and Xiao Hongshu, and phenomenal products such as connotation jokes have been "shot".

Due to the recent large-scale removal of the shelves, the Ministry of Public Security stepped up efforts to crack down on crimes that infringe upon citizens' personal information, and organized a centralized crackdown on the illegal collection of personal information by APP. Most of the products removed from the shelves are due to the lack of detailed privacy agreements or out-of-scope and illegal collection of user information. It can be seen that the normative action of the mobile Internet has moved from category to content, and then to data privacy.

Development comes before regulation, which seems to be a common phenomenon in the business world. When the mobile Internet develops to its peak and begins to be combined with voice recognition, face recognition and other AI technologies in the future, the gradual improvement of regulation is a natural phenomenon.

Of course, it is best for developers to be able to check themselves and reduce the possibility of violating the regulatory red line, but what we are going to discuss today is, what impact will the removal of the shelves have on products and even brands?

Being scolded, abandoned, and copied: the story of taking it off the shelves in 2019

In our previous understanding, the most consequence caused by the removal of App is that users can not continue to grow for a period of time, more serious, may affect the search weight, keyword ranking and so on. However, judging from the cases in the past two years, "off the shelf" has often become the wing of a butterfly, setting off a series of problem storms.

There are external public relations problems.

In February this year, shortly after the listing plan was announced, the well-known "straight men gathering place" Tiger Pop was removed from the shelves because of "internal problems" according to the official caliber. Such a statement obviously could not quell speculation. Coupled with the fact that Tiger Pop had always been at odds with the "pink circle", Tiger Pop was quickly searched when it was removed from the shelves, and a large number of fans of different artists controlled and commented on it. The direction of public opinion quickly changed from "internal problems" to "whether Yang Chao fans let Tiger jump off the shelves or Wang Yuan fans let Tiger jump off the shelves." Fans focused on attacking that the atmosphere in the Tiger Community was too "straight" and extremely unfriendly, which once again led to widespread discussion and doubt on the sexuality of Tiger users and even the profitability of the entire product.

For Tiger Pop, which has not yet entered the capital market, the issue of public relations is just talk. For companies that have already gone public, the results will be directly reflected in the performance of the capital markets, just as Momo's shares fell 10% after Momo's social product exploration was removed from the shelves.

If the public opinion caused by the removal of the shelves affects the stock price at most, but the internal content ecological problems have really affected the commercial value of the product.

The most closely watched incident this year came from Xiao Hongshu, whose reasons are also complicated. Some say it is due to improper values of a large number of content showing off their wealth, others say that the e-cigarette ads released by KOL involve violations, and there are even claims that there are many "secret prostitutes" among the online celebrities in Xiaohongshu.

In fact, for Xiaohongshu, a product with up to 250 million users, even if it is temporarily removed from the shelves, the number of users in its stock can ensure the smooth operation of the content ecology. But the fact is, during the period of taking it off the shelves, the originally booming KOL advertising business was hit hard. Not only have advertisers reduced their budgets, but the "vegetarian model" unique to Little Red Books (widely advertising to bloggers with only a few thousand or a few hundred fans) has almost disappeared. A man who used to be engaged in advertising sales of Little Red Book KOL told us that he was originally responsible for the sales of this kind of "plain person advertising". At the peak of the business from the end of 2018 to the beginning of 2019, advertisers often put ads to more than a thousand plain people bloggers a day, but after the off-shelf event, advertisers will not only have a risk aversion mentality, but also doubt the authenticity of the traffic. Some ordinary bloggers find that there is no profit, slowly also reduce the content update, this industry chain is also slowly flagging.

While excessive commercialization is bad for the content community, proper commercialization opportunities must be a lubricant for content ecology, and the impact of removal on business will eventually translate into an impact on user activity-according to QuestMobile, Xiaohongshu had 72.88 million monthly active users as of the end of September, down from 93 million in June.

If the public relations crisis and the impact of commercial value are still individual cases caused by product attributes, then the next problem is that every product that is removed from the shelves is likely to encounter-counterfeit products.

In most cases, when the product is taken off the shelves, the app store can no longer protect the product through column recommendations, rankings, and so on. At this time, shanzhai App through similar names, VI design to rub against the traffic situation, will occur frequently. Products such as Little Red Book, werewolf killing and so on have encountered a similar situation.

To say that the most tragic is the completely shut down of the "connotation joke", because this product seems to never recover, shanzhai products are also particularly rampant, not only using similar names and icon, there are even products with connotation jokes named icon funny, even connotation jokes reincarnated trumpet. Enthusiastic netizens had to go to the comment area for guidance, saying that mantis shrimp is the real connotation joke 2.0.

What else can we do but build a buffer zone?

From these bizarre "off-shelf stories", it is not difficult to find that seemingly unimportant situations such as "cannot be downloaded for a period of time" actually start the whole body. This is especially true for those products that are on the rise and whose internal ecology is complex.

Sadly, after four or five years of running, many products can look back and see traces of original sin. This includes not only data acquisition rules related to technical implementation, but also content values, user tonality, user behavior and so on, which are difficult to give black-and-white evaluation elements. Especially for social and content products, the slightest consequence of regulation and removal is always the sword of Damocles hanging overhead.

Of course, we can also find some positive cases to see how some products have survived the storm off the shelves: for example, the future bazaar of e-commerce products rumored to be in the 100th App clarified immediately after the news that App was not off the shelves, even though rectification was carried out after receiving the notice. NetEyun Music, for example, simply made a large-scale update when it was off the shelves, and let Yuncun, live broadcast and other new features support the new traffic entrance after it was put back on the shelf.

Like these products, making a clear public relations response in time after they are off the shelves, and adding new features or announcing new policies when they are back on the shelves can better dilute the negative effects of taking them off the shelves. But all this can barely serve as a buffer, and it is even more difficult for us to solve the other uncertainties about the removal of App from shelves.

In the next meal, it is clear that the story of taking it off the shelves will continue. Perhaps the best solution is not to be the protagonist.

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