In 2020, when the mobile internet enters its 10th year, the world has changed completely.
Text, pictures, audio, video and other information media are monopolized by giants. Under the situation that Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu and Headline account for 70% of the traffic, the road to “climbing the mountain” is almost blocked; Even the “go to the countryside” movement, which is digging the sinking market, has not been able to turn out too much waves with the crazy invasion of many players.
As a result, there is a saying that the structural transformation of economic infrastructure by the Internet has been basically completed, and the curtain of traffic dividend has fallen.
Available flow has always been the main driving engine of growth. When money is burned for flow, it also starts to fail. From boiling point to freezing point, what can growth rely on? While the traffic anxiety was widely spread, QuestMobile disclosed a set of data worth thinking in the report of “2019 Traffic Growth Review”: the number of industrial users of smart device APP has reached nearly 120 million, with a year-on-year increase of 16.8%. The number of new monthly users of apps such as Xiaodu (including Xiaodu speakers), Gome Intelligence, Haier Laundry has reached more than 4 million.
When Internet traffic meets the ceiling, does the eye-catching performance of smart device APP indicate a new growth path?
01 Ignored “barbarians”
2019 can be said to be an unprecedented year of “traffic war”.
The battle of “one out of two” on the e-commerce platform has reignited, the social beacon of strangers has risen again, and the tragedy of “live broadcast of death” has happened again… so that the entertainment circle has staged a traffic battle between Jay Chou and Cai Xukun.
All chaos or agitation have a common premise, that is, the saturation of China Mobile Internet traffic pool.
According to the data report of QuestMobile, the year-on-year growth rate of China’s Internet user scale fell below 1% for the first time in 2019, with a growth rate of 4.5% in the same period last year; This fact can also be supported by the 44th Statistical Report on the Development of Internet in China released by CNNIC. As of June 2019, the number of Internet users in China reached 854 million, an increase of 25.98 million over the end of 2018, and the growth rate dropped to 1.6%.
China’s Internet has completely entered the stock market, and the competition of “more wolves and less meat” has begun slowly. At the same time, the Internet giants of “bloodthirsty as sharks” have also begun to compete for the traffic tributaries.
For example, the sinking market that has been sold more and more with fire. Two years ago, it was only noticed by e-commerce platforms. Occasionally, several mobile phone manufacturers went to the countryside to paint walls. 2019 has become one of the main battlefields of the traffic war. Taking the annual CCTV Spring Festival Gala as an example, Kwai spent 1 billion yuan for the top traffic moment in China, again refreshing the amount of red packets on the day of the Spring Festival Gala after Baidu’s red packet harvest sank to the market in 2019.
Another example is the popularity of the concept of “private domain traffic”. Since it is an indisputable fact that internet traffic has been divided up by giants, does it still have a chance to take a slice of the pie from the fingers of giants? It seems that the giants are also enjoying the re digestion of traffic. The immediate result is a fierce battle for small programs. Tencent, Baidu, Ali, ByteDance and others have joined the applet battlefield, and a large number of retailers have queued up to enter the “new world” outlined by the applet.
Either seizing possible growth opportunities or increasing the cash flow channels of existing traffic is basically the basic composition of this “traffic war”. It is this inertia of thinking that focuses on traffic itself that makes intelligent hardware a neglected “barbarian”. At least according to the data disclosed by QuestMobile, players such as Baidu, Gome, and Haier who have invested some of their energy in intelligent hardware have reaped significant gains in user growth.
The monthly life of Gome Intelligence achieved a year-on-year growth of 182% in 2019, which is a small miracle in the e-commerce circuit; Haier laundry, with a relatively vertical scene, has increased its monthly living from less than 2 million yuan before 2019 to 4.882 million yuan; Even if the APP end is divided into small speakers, small speakers, small speakers industrial version, small speakers at home and other versions of small speakers, there are many APPs that have achieved the goal of more than 2 million monthly live growth
The traffic battlefield in 2019 failed to breed new blockbusters, but reflected new opportunities.
02 A straightforward “dimension reduction strike”
Perhaps in terms of the volume of active users, the smart device APP is not enough to compete with the super APP like WeChat, but it has a better presentation of traffic value.
Smart speakers are undoubtedly the most direct example.
According to the market report released by the third party authoritative data agency Strategy Analytics, the global shipment of smart speakers in the third quarter of 2019 has reached 34.9 million units, up 54.5% year on year. Baidu, Alibaba and Xiaomi, the three giants of China’s smart speaker market, respectively achieved 4.3 million units, 3.9 million units and 3.3 million units. In the iron rule of “there is traffic when there is entrance”, the traffic value behind the smart speakers also begins to appear after the market scale rises.
The reason why smart devices are considered “barbarians” in the traffic battlefield is not only their high growth rate and explosive sales volume, but also their highly viscous interaction with users.
To understand the value of “interaction” for traffic, the dislocation competition between online celebrities and celebrities can be used as a reference.
In 2019, nearly 2000 film and television companies were canceled, and 65% of actors were forced to lose their jobs. However, when stars lose their “traffic bonus”, it is the internet celebrities from grassroots backgrounds who rise up. Although Li Jiaqi and Weiya are far more capable of “bringing goods” than first-tier stars, they are just the waistline celebrities of 3 million fans such as “Second Brother Reviews Cars”. During the live broadcast of a certain brand of car, 1831 orders were received in just three hours, almost half a year’s record for an established 4S store.
The same scenario also occurs in mobile applications and intelligent hardware.
Along with the monthly performance of Xiaodu APP, the monthly interaction times of smart devices equipped with Xiaodu Assistant increased from 1.6 billion at the end of 2018 to 4.2 billion in September 2019. At the same time, each voice conversation is accompanied by the satisfaction of user needs such as audio-visual entertainment, learning education, tool assistant, video call, etc. From the user stickiness data alone, the average daily viewing time of Xiaodu at home is 146 minutes for long videos and 54 minutes for short videos. The traffic value generated by this is probably far more imaginative than the short video that makes users addicted.
To borrow a “trendy” phrase from the internet, the magic weapon for winning online celebrities and smart devices is to launch a round of “dimension reduction attacks” in the traffic battlefield: the advantage of stars lies in the user’s duration
。 In the past, the longer the time users occupied, the higher the corresponding business value; The characteristic of online celebrity is to establish its appeal through interactive relationships, which can also be understood as an output of value, fundamentally reducing the purchase and selection costs of users.
Traditional mobile applications are focusing on the competition of traffic value, while smart devices aim at the people who generate traffic. Compared with pure user time, smart devices also occupy Q&A, entertainment, education, social and other scenes. Only when accurate scenes are found, traffic has greater value.
However, the reason why smart device APP is listed as a user growth case by QuestMobile and other institutions seems not limited to this.
03 The era of full scene
Perhaps the rise of smart device APP does not mean the end of the era of traffic, but is a signal of the arrival of the era of full-scene traffic competition.
Let’s start with the simplest flow formula.
In “Traffic=number of users × In the design of “user duration”, there are two kinds of logic for traffic growth: one is to increase the number of users, and the other is to increase the user duration.
The mobile internet has strictly followed this logic in the past 10 years: before 2016, the smartphone market was booming, and Apple, Huawei, OV and others made a lot of money. At the same time, the double-digit growth of users each year also guaranteed the traffic dividend of mobile internet players; When the growth rate of smart phones has increased from single digits to negative, live broadcast, short video and algorithm recommendation have become popular, with the purpose of increasing user duration.
So when the user volume is nearly saturated and the average daily use time is up to 6.2 hours, more and more people feel that the dividend era of Internet traffic has passed. On the premise that the giant controls the large flow, the consumer internet is unlikely to kill the new oligarch of elephant level.
The flow formula should be refreshed.
In recent years, many new words related to the “Internet” have emerged, such as the Internet of Things, the Internet of Vehicles, the Industrial Internet, and so on. People also habitually “isolate” these words from the mobile Internet.
The interesting thing is that the earliest traffic entry is browser, which can even be said to be synonymous with the era of PC Internet. Later, the rise of super APP overturned the status of browser in the Jianghu, and thus entered the era of mobile Internet. However, is there any possibility of “entrance” transferring from software to hardware? In particular, the intelligent speaker for voice interaction has greatly weakened the necessity of APP, and the hardware itself is the traffic entrance.
Then consider the calculation rules of the flow formula, the interaction between users and intelligent hardware, the connection between intelligent hardware and intelligent hardware, and the invisible data sharing. Should they become part of the calculation formula? After all, smart phones are no longer an indispensable way of networking, and people are living in a full-scene smart era.
At least the giants led by Baidu, Alibaba, and Xiaomi have taken the lead in smart speakers: smart speakers play a “central” role in the family scene, connecting audio and video and tool APPs, and realizing the interactive control with smart hardware such as smart air conditioners and smart lights, and then continuously exploring the business value of home entertainment, home education, home games, home medical care, home e-commerce, etc A new symbiotic relationship has been established between industries.
From a macro perspective, smart home, smart car, etc. are all potential trillions of blue ocean markets, and the commercial imagination space is far more attractive than the flow realization. The mobile internet competes for traffic, while the whole scene era competes for lifestyle and user emotion.
04 Write at the end
What is dividend? The answer is the profit depression generated when the economic structure changes.
The structural transformation of economic infrastructure by the Internet has come to an end, and intelligent structural transformation has set sail.
At this stage, it is undoubtedly the time window to seize the depression in the era of the whole scene. Especially for players who are in traffic anxiety, the competition is not only about the activity of mobile APP, but also about the comprehensive activity of mobile APP+smart devices. When the dividend of internet traffic is not obvious, we need to find new places to revel.
