Formation and bursting of station B foam

　　 Welcome to follow the WeChat subscription account of "Sina Technology": techsina

Writer/Pei Pei, Leader of the Strange Robber Group

Source: Internet Rogue Group (ID: MTphantom)

according to Previous notice When the share price of Station B hits or falls below $50, the Strange Thieves Group will release the in-depth study of the Formation and Burst of Station B Bubbles. Transaction data shows that this condition has been met on December 15, 2021, so this article is published. Readers are welcome to put forward valuable comments and suggestions.

　　 Wedge: two visits, two answers

I have visited Station B many times. The first time was to visit a friend in February 2018, when he just decided to leave Station B and join another Internet company. As we all know, Station B will be listed soon, and it seems not a wise choice to leave at this time. So I asked him, "What's wrong with Station B?"

He smiled at me and said, "There are both good and bad aspects of any company. It is difficult to describe them in detail."

I specifically asked: "Do you think, What is the biggest bottleneck restricting the long-term development of Station B? ”

After pondering for a moment, he replied: "The middle and senior management of Station B can't effectively control a large Internet platform company. I don't mean that one person is not good, but the whole management team is not mature enough. Some people may be confused by success, while others are not competent enough."

I said, "Talents can be trained and cultivated. They can't be trained now, but they may not be trained in the future."

He smiled and said, "Yes, but it was a long and painful process, in which many costs would be paid."

In November 2019, I visited Station B for the Nth time. This time, I met another trusted friend. At that time, the market was discussing the pace of station B, especially the problem of "de dualization". The friend said to me: "No, we will never cancel the answering mechanism for registered members; no, we will never alienate old users for new users. Going out of the circle will be a long and complicated process, and the important thing is that we never rush for quick success and instant benefit."

I asked him: "The veteran B site users are very dissatisfied now. They keep quoting Chen Rui's speech in 2016: "Station B may go bankrupt, but it will never deteriorate" It is considered that Station B has deteriorated. "

He answered very firmly: "In 2016, our resources were so few that they did not deteriorate for immediate interests; now, we have so many resources and can gather more resources at any time, so there is no need to deteriorate. Change is inevitable, and deterioration is impossible."

Today, in December 2021, after witnessing the whole process of station B's share price climbing to the high point and falling back to the low point, we can fairly believe that the answer I got in February 2018 is correct, and the answer I got in November 2019 is wrong. These two groups of Q&A are the best footnotes for the formation and collapse of the bubble in Station B. As the pace of going out of the circle is too fast and reaches the level of "deterioration", Station B gradually loses its uniqueness and faces increasing financial losses; Due to the lack of sufficient experience and control of the middle and senior management teams (including but not limited to the management), the execution of Station B has always been flawed, especially not good at doing some "heavy operation" businesses.

Now let's talk about the important time points in the development of Station B and the key businesses it failed to do well, so as to draw a clearer picture: How did Station B break a good hand of cards.

In June 1940, after the end of the French campaign, the victorious German cavalry walked through the Arc de Triomphe

　　 Autumn 2016 VS Autumn 2018: Two Time Nodes at stake

The whole process of station B's rise is a textbook of "choice is more than effort": it correctly chose the track of UGC and PUGC videos; Its main competitors (including but not limited to station A) have abandoned their martial arts successively; Its early free and unrestrained operation style is just conducive to the formation of content ecology. Whether luck is part of strength or not, The first contributor to the rise of Station B is indeed luck, not Chen Rui or Li Ni. In the autumn of 2016 and 2018, Station B got two biggest fortunes that can be called quantitative change to qualitative change: the former directly made it qualified for listing, and the latter cleared the important obstacles for further development.

2016 was the first year of the outbreak of China's second dimension games: crash 3 by Miha Youyou, girls' front line by Sanpao Network and Naruto by Tencent all went online that year and achieved good results. In September 2016, the Fate/Brand Order (FGO) national service represented by Station B was also launched, and quickly became one of the top two blockbusters in the secondary vertical category. FGO has not only significantly improved the income and cash flow of Station B, but also proved the game distribution ability of Station B, which has shown investors a huge commercial prospect. It is no exaggeration to say that without FGO, the listing process of Station B may be delayed for more than 2 years.

FGO was the best card that Station B could get at that time, and it was also the best card for emerging companies to learn game distribution business, which could be said to be an excellent "novice village level training task":

• FGO is a 2D turn weak online card RPG, which is not difficult to operate and has low technical requirements. Its primary competitiveness lies in IP, followed by numerical values, which are provided by the content side. As an agent, Station B doesn't need to have too much knowledge, just don't make big mistakes.

• FGO's national service timeline is more than one year later than that of the daily service. Station B can learn from the experience of the daily service and make preparations in advance. For example, the story of a certain chapter will lead to a surge in the number of online people, and a new card may cause disputes, which can be handled according to the experience of Daily Service more than a year ago. As the saying goes, if you have homework to copy, it will definitely be easier to get high marks.

• The Fate series is the top popular IP in Station B, and diehard fans are all looking forward to the FGO launch of Station B. At the beginning of the opening of FGO national service, a large number of traffic came from the spontaneous secondary creation of fans, rather than the official diversion of station B. Station B's "secondary community+secondary IP game" has formed a strong ecological closed-loop.

• At that time, there were few cases of the introduction of Japanese top tier, two-dimensional IP mobile games into China. Whoever acts as the agent of Fate series mobile games is expected to achieve good results; Station B captured the aircraft keenly.

After the success of FGO, Station B obtained the agency right of the domestic quadratic game "Blue Route" in early 2017. The Blue Route is not as successful as FGO, but it has a good record. These two successive victories have greatly enhanced B's position in the game industry and the circle of investors. The capital market began to imagine that perhaps Station B could become a "small Tencent" in the field of two-dimensional games: The cash flow provided by the game business can support the development of the video community, and the video community can provide high-quality flow for the game business. Before and after the listing of Station B, the advertising business was still very weak, and when the value-added services such as big members were just starting, investors focused most on the product line of the game business. Station B did list a large number of proxy game product names in the prospectus and PPT, including some very popular binary IP.

However, a series of major events took place in 2018, which dealt a heavy blow to the game business of Station B and forced the management of Station B to review its development strategy:

1. From March to December 2018, the distribution of game version numbers was suspended, and the import game version numbers were not recovered until March 2019. Many of the agent products prepared on the eve of the launch of Station B missed the best launch opportunity, and some simply lost the following. This directly restricted the game business performance of Station B at the initial stage of listing, and had a negative impact on the share price of Station B.

2. Some problems occurred in the operation of FGO, from the "conscience operation" in the players' mouth to the target of verbal and written criticism. In particular, the "B station anniversary without FGO" triggered very bad feedback on social media. The management of Station B realized that the money of the game was not so easy to earn, and the game distribution/operation team was still very immature.

3. The "secondary meta culture" tends to be stigmatized in the mainstream media, and the state's review of the secondary meta content is increasingly strict. In August 2018, due to the scale problem of some dramas on the platform, the B station APP was removed for review for one month. It is probably at this point that the management and investors of Station B are seriously considering that even in order to reduce risks, it is necessary to break away from the "secondary culture" and turn to a more mainstream content ecology.

Interestingly, just as Station B accelerated the process of "de dualization", the environment faced by the secondary industry in China has improved. In October 2018, after Prime Minister Abe's visit to China, China Japan economic and cultural exchanges entered a honeymoon period, a large number of Japanese films, dramas and games were introduced, and the criticism of the mainstream media on the secondary culture also eased. From 2019 to 2020, it has become the two years of the explosion of China's second dimension content: games represented by Tomorrow's Ark, Battle against Double Pamis, Original God, national creative films represented by Nezha's Devil Child Comes to Earth, and a large number of national creative dramas and cartoons have made great breakthroughs in commercial value and reputation. Until 2021, with the dramatic changes in the domestic and international environment, the "honeymoon period" of the secondary meta culture will come to an end and turn to comprehensive tightening.

Can we say that Station B missed the honeymoon period of the secondary industry perfectly because it was busy going out of the circle and playing down the secondary color? no Even if Station B did not make the decision of "going out of the circle" in 2018, it would also be difficult for it to enjoy the dividends of the outbreak of two-dimensional content. Because, in the "honeymoon period" from 2019 to 2020, the most profitable secondary content is still games, which are self-developed games of original IP, while Japanese imported games have retreated to a less important position. This trend is very unfavorable for Station B, which is weak in self research and mainly relies on imported games as an agent.

It's hard for a clever woman to make bricks without straw. Japanese quadratic games have gradually declined, while domestic game developers prefer to leave high-quality content for their own distribution; Even if it is given to a third party, it is also given to Tencent; Even if it is not given to Tencent, there are still bytes jumping around. In the past three years, Station B has only released "Princess Link", a real long-term blockbuster; The previous "Twin Vision" and the subsequent "Kan Gong Riding the Crown Sword" were both unsatisfactory. In front of such self researched secondary enterprises as Mihayou, Eagle Horn and Folding Paper, station B game has completely fallen behind. Now, most game manufacturers only regard Station B as a good intermodal channel.

In the autumn of 2016, the game business of Station B made a fantastic start, and investors were elated by the business model of "community+content" in-depth integration; By the autumn of 2018, the game business of Station B had been in decline, which prompted the management of Station B to strengthen its determination to "de dualization". The key to this turning point is that Station B can not do a good job in self research games. To be precise, station B can't do well in all the self research content, including games, which has been repeatedly proved by history. In August 2021, when the management of Station B announced that it "hopes to increase the proportion of revenue from self-developed games to more than 50% of the overall revenue of the game business", the capital market was not convinced.

This will form the basis of Station B's dilemma in 2021: The current Taurus business (also the only profitable business) is no longer growing, while the community business continues to burn money, This led to the uncontrolled expansion of losses. Many investors have correctly realized that what Station B needs most is a popular self research game. Unfortunately, it will not be available for a while, and it is likely that it will not be available in the next few years. Why is this? We will discuss it in detail in the next chapter.

　　 The enterprise culture determines that Station B can not do well in self research game business

First of all, we must point out fairly that most platform companies cannot do well in content. In China, Tencent is the only company that can take the lead in both platform and content; Looking abroad, there are only a few companies such as Microsoft, Nintendo and Netflix. In recent years, Google, Amazon, Facebook and other American Internet giants have tried to do game content, but they have not achieved much. Alibaba started playing games in 2014, and didn't come up with the first decent blockbuster until 2019; Byte jumping has invested heavily in the game since 2017, and so far, only a few blockbusters such as The One Piece have been produced. For a video platform like Station B, it is normal to fail to produce game content. There is no need to criticize its game team.

The problem is. There are always people who don't believe in evil. Many investors believe that Station B should "know more about content" than the general platform, and has already opened up the situation in the game release, so there is no reason why it cannot do a good job in self research. The management of Station B also attaches great importance to the game business and is still expanding the self research team by various means. If Alibaba Games took five years to develop its own products, why can't Station B start this year or next year?

My view is just the opposite: The corporate culture of Station B determines that it can create a thriving video community, but it just can't create a heavyweight self-developed content. In essence, Station B has never been a "content company" (although people often mistake it for "content attribute"), but a typical "platform company". Due to the lack of historical opportunities, Station B cannot naturally evolve into a "platform+content" company like Tencent more than a decade ago.

The corporate culture of Station B, in a word, is "Buddhism" - on the positive side, it is "freedom"; On the bad side, it is "lazy". The organizational structure of Station B is relatively loose and does not emphasize execution, unlike many Internet companies who work overtime abnormally. Its middle and basic level personnel have great mobility, and many business teams have been in the process of change and never reached a mature state. Its HR system will not instill the corporate culture and values from top to bottom like Alibaba; It will not attach great importance to training and organizational efficiency like byte beating. Some people may think that Tencent's organizational system is loose enough, but Tencent is actually "loose outside and tight inside" (especially the key departments are very tight), while Station B is "loose to the end". If you have dealt with the operation or commercialization department of Station B, you should agree with my above views.

The "Buddhist culture" and "loose organization" of Station B have just played a positive role in its content ecology. In fact, to establish a content platform based on UGC/PUGC, the operator does not need to do too much, especially does not need to actively struggle; The operator only needs to set up good rules, maintain a good community atmosphere, and give content creators enough space. This is the so-called "inaction" or "active non intervention". Before 2018, when the scale of station B community was not too large, "inaction" was one of its core competitiveness!

No wonder regular users of Station B always miss the good times before 2018 and think that Chen Rui has led to the deterioration of Station B. What they miss is not necessarily the "secondary culture" (many old users are not homestead men and women), but the atmosphere of natural selection and freedom. At that time, Station B did not create gods for a few top UP owners, nor actively introduced traffic stars, nor did it officially end up "creating stalks and playing with stalks"; At that time, the B station was really led by the majority of users themselves. Now, the community operation of Station B has become less and less free and lax, but the Buddhism of the organizational culture of Station B is engraved in the bones, which is difficult to change overnight.

Buddhists are not good at playing games. To be precise, any industrialized content (games, film and television dramas, animation dramas, etc.) needs the cooperation of the following factors:

• The creator of perfectionism, extreme thinking, and never stop talking. Behind every successful self-developed game, there is at least one "no madness, no survival" plan. If you don't have a strong sense of mission for your own content, it is impossible to make high-quality popular content.

• A production team with high discipline and strong execution. The game is a highly industrialized content business, and the devil is all in the details. Even if there is a talented planning team, if it cannot be implemented efficiently and high-quality, it is useless.

• The top management should give enough time and resources. This is especially important: Microsoft can succeed in developing its own games, while Google can't because the former is willing to invest for 20 years, while the latter can't survive after only two years. It is easy to generate three minute enthusiasm for the game business, but it is not easy to endure for more than three years without good development.

In the "chicken eating war" in the second half of 2017, Tencent and NetEase, the two most successful game companies in China, fully demonstrated the seriousness and discipline of content production: both sides carried out "death march" style overtime development, and even the developers' midnight snack was directly delivered to the office; A large number of other projects were cut off, and elite R&D teams were gathered in the "chicken eating" project; CEO/COO level management have devoted a lot of attention to the game of "eating chicken", giving them the highest priority in resource allocation; Both sides also carried out all pervasive reconnaissance and spying on each other's product development. This is not only a contest of organizational mobilization, but also a contest of willpower. In the end, Tencent won the game by a narrow margin, but NetEase also achieved some success.

Such things cannot happen under the organizational culture of Station B. Frankly speaking, even if we go back to 2018 and show the planning outline of "Original God" to the game team of station B, it will be difficult for the latter to develop it within 2020. With the mobility of personnel in the game business of Station B, it is hard for us to imagine that any large-scale project can get long-term and good development.

Of course, there is no way to overcome the above weaknesses. The most time-saving and labor-saving way is to build a large and independent game R&D team with strong combat effectiveness by corner digging or M&A. In fact, Byte Beat did just that. It not only poached a large number of talents from Tencent and Netease, but also carried out many large-scale mergers and acquisitions. The problem is, The scale of Station B is not so large, nor can it provide particularly attractive treatment for game R&D talents. Byte jumping or Alibaba may indeed spend money on some top game planners or producers, but station B is unlikely. This is especially true in terms of mergers and acquisitions - only game companies that have ignored Tencent and Byte Beat can get the investment or acquisition of Station B in turn. How high can such companies be?

In July 1941, German armored forces invaded Latvia in the Soviet Union

　　 The basic problem of station B: it is extremely difficult for UP owners to make money, and the distribution is uneven

Historically, the commercialization of Station B was underdeveloped, which led to the lack of money making opportunities for UP owners, who could only "generate electricity with love". Our survey shows that the annual income of the owners of B station UPs with 1 million fans (already close to the threshold of 100) often ranges from 600000 to 800000, and only a few popular categories can exceed one million. On the B station fireworks platform, you can see that for the waist UP owners with 100000 to 200000 fans, the advertiser's single quotation is often only about 10000 yuan - please remember, this is a single quotation, not a quotation every minute; It also includes the commission of station B platform.

You know, the difficulty of running fans on Station B is far greater than that on other platforms. The consensus of the video creators is that one fan of Station B is equivalent to 10 fans of Tiaoyin or Fasthand, and 15-20 fans of Weibo. Station B users have very strict requirements for content, and have very low tolerance for low-quality content. Being the UP owner in Station B consumes a lot of time and energy, but receives little income. In the process of standing out of the circle in station B from 2019 to 2020, many people are eager to join the ranks of the UP owners of station B; Many of them withdrew because they could not see the hope of self-sufficiency.

Therefore, in the past three years, the waist and quasi head UP owners of station B have been poached by various platforms: watermelon videos are very active in 2019-20, and the "Dawn Plan" of Tencent Penguin in 2021 has caused great controversy, and even Baidu Baijia can pry some B station UP owners. The content creation ecology of Station B is not fundamentally loose. It is not so much because of its own good work, but rather because its competitors are worse and less worthy of trust. The problem is that we can't rely on "worse"; As long as the problem of making money for the UP owner of Station B is not solved, the content ecology of Station B will not be stable. If the game business is not well done, it will only affect the financial performance at most; Once the main ecology of UP becomes loose, it will affect the foundation of the whole station B.

Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the problem of making money for the owners of station B UPs will be solved in the short term. The reasons are as follows:

First of all, there is no patch advertising in Station B, which leads to the inherent shortage of advertising inventory. Station B doesn't adopt an immersive single page information flow interface like Tiao Yin, which makes it difficult to insert advertisements naturally between contents. Therefore, Station B can only focus on developing two other forms of advertising: The in-depth customized ads of UP owners (commonly known as "meal video"), as well as embedded ads for major events such as the New Year's Gala. However, the efficiency of these two forms is low and the advertising space is limited. As long as the problem of advertising inventory is not solved, the commercial plate of Station B cannot be made very large, and there will be less for the UP owners.

It seems easy to solve the problem of advertising inventory: if we can add patch ads, or change the interface to an immersive information flow like dithering, wouldn't it be OK? Especially the former, many investors have been looking forward to it! However, the management of Station B knows better than anyone that "no patch advertising" is an important highlight for Station B to attract young users. Adding stickers not only means abandoning the commitment to old users, but also means significantly reducing the experience of new users. What's more, most of the PUGC content in Station B is short. How long can 5-10 minutes of video be advertised and how high can the conversion rate be? We believe that as long as the management of Station B keeps a clear head, it will not be easy to add stickers.

As for changing the interface to dithering, let alone the fact that Station B is, after all, a platform dominated by horizontal video, rather than vertical short video platform like dithering. Fast hand, micro vision and even WeChat video numbers can learn dithering, but learning dithering at station B is a bit pointless. In addition, the average length of the content of station B is far higher than that of dithering. Even if you learn dithering, there are not many advertisements inserted between the content.

secondly, The weak advertising sales ability of Station B is also due to the "Buddhist culture". Advertising sales is a physical work, which requires a high degree of initiative and an attitude of putting down one's posture to operate customers. The strength of the byte beating advertising business is largely due to the combat effectiveness of the sales team (including the agent team); After the overall restructuring of Tencent Advertising in September 2018, its combat effectiveness has also been greatly improved. Frankly speaking, advertising salesmen must work shamelessly like chicken blood to sell more advertisements and better prices. However, the working atmosphere of any department in Station B is far from "fighting chicken blood".

If the whole Internet advertising market is still growing rapidly, it's all right. Because the B station platform has certain uniqueness, advertisers will always come to us. The problem is that in 2021, as the education industry is restricted and the game industry suffers setbacks, the overall growth rate of Internet advertising will slow down significantly (or even may not grow anymore). Now, advertisers generally hope to shorten the transaction chain and directly create sales, which is the fundamental reason for the popularity of live video with goods. Unfortunately, Station B is essentially a media platform, which, like Xiaohongshu and Weibo, is not suitable for carrying goods. Since the end of 2018, when we tried to launch the window and goods carrying link function, until today, the goods carrying of station B is still in the initial stage.

Again, The current strategy of Station B is to attract advertisers by relying on a few top UP owners, This is indeed the most favorable strategy for the platform, but it is obviously not very friendly to the majority of waist UP owners. If you have launched in Station B, or participated in the advertising and investment promotion activities of Station B, you will find that Station B will give you priority to recommend super UP owners with tens of millions of fans (provided that your budget is sufficient), and may also launch some "packages", such as customized ads for top UP owners+official advertising spaces for Station B APP.

The logic of station B's support for the head is well understood: the head UP owners have a high passenger price. It is better to serve dozens of head UP owners than to operate thousands of waist UP owners. In addition, advertisers generally hear the names of the top UP owners, and are familiar with their characteristics, so they do not need sales staff to educate them. As a result, the top UP owners earn a lot of money, but it is difficult for the top and waist UP owners to get a piece of the cake. The uneven distribution among the top UP owners is becoming increasingly serious.

In theory, the waist UP owner of Station B can get the advertiser list through the fireworks plan, just like the Tiaoyin waist online celebrity gets the advertiser list through the star map. In reality, the coverage of the fireworks plan to advertisers is very narrow, and the matchmaking efficiency is very low; UP owners often need to find advertisers themselves and guide them to place orders through the fireworks platform. Why is the efficiency of fireworks so low? Maybe the algorithm is not good enough, or maybe the operation is not strong enough. In a word, it is impossible to solve the livelihood problem of UP owners through fireworks in a short time.

Finally, we need to point out that: The fact that Station B's user base is too young and relies too much on the operation idea of "creating and playing stalks" is not conducive to commercialization in essence. That is to say, the "out of circle" of Station B at the level of users and content just constitutes a radical attempt at commercialization. As a result, in many vertical categories, although UP owners get a lot of traffic and look very busy, they are not very attractive to advertisers. This topic is too complicated. Please allow us to discuss it in the next chapter.

German motorized infantry in the Kursk Battle in July 1943

　　 Consequence of the "out of circle" strategy: the commercialization potential does not increase proportionally with users

Different from the stereotype of the capital market, the user base of station B before 2018 is far less "young" than it is today. The old users of Station B are concentrated in the post-80s to pre-95 age group. Before and after the listing of Station B, most of them have entered the society, even become the backbone of the society. If Station B implements a steady "orderly circle", it is possible to cover all users and all ages, and it is also possible to make new and old users get along well. In fact, on the contrary, the "out of circle" of station B since 2018 has been too radical, which has squeezed out old users to a large extent and triggered endless conflicts among various users:

• Station B pays too much attention to user growth. In 2020 alone, MAU will increase by 55% (at the cost of nearly twice the increase in marketing expenses). Such drastic user expansion inevitably tears the original community atmosphere, making the "generation gap" between new and old users increasingly obvious.

• Station B is not good at algorithms. It failed to establish an "information cocoon room" through the algorithm recommendation mechanism to distinguish users at different levels. From this point of view, Station B is more like microblog, with so-called "all station topics"; Unlike dithering and quick hand, it can provide different topics for different people.

• In order to maximize the publicity effect of "going out of the circle", the operators of Station B are keen on "creating stems and playing with stems"; In recent years, the popular content of Station B basically revolves around the "hot spot" at that time. The problem is that not everyone likes playing with stalks, and not every "hot stalk" is applicable to most users.

• Since 2019, Station B has become more and more enthusiastic about introducing traffic stars to attract their fans. This has led to the growing "food circle" of station B, and the general hostility between the new food circle users and the second generation old users, so the community atmosphere can be described as sitting on a powder keg.

As a result, the users of Station B are getting younger and younger (the remaining old users are also becoming less and less active), changing from "all age platform" to "Generation Z platform". Although this can make the capital market exultant, it is greatly detrimental to commercialization. We just need to ask one question: How high can young people, especially those students who have not yet entered the society, have consumption capacity?

Obviously, young people all over the world, young people of any age, have a relatively low consumption capacity before entering the society and obtaining income. Of course, you can say that the future belongs to them, and sooner or later they will have money to spend; But far water cannot quench near thirst. Moreover, at the speed of changes in China's Internet industry, how much affection will this generation of young people leave for Station B when they grow up? This is a big question mark.

To give a very simple example: in station B (and in any video platform), the owner of auto UP is the most profitable; However, the number of auto UP owners in Station B is small, and the liquidity efficiency of fans is still not as high as that of competitive product platforms. Because the average age of B station users is too low, they are generally not at the time to buy a car, and their interest in car content is far less than that of games, funny, and singing and dancing. Perhaps it is precisely because of this that Station B has been focusing on "knowledge areas" since 2019, striving to increase the proportion of "pan knowledge content"; This has indeed produced some results, but it is far from enough.

Most advertisers have contradictory attitudes towards Station B: although they do not want to miss the opportunity to promote to Generation Z, they also clearly know that this kind of promotion is difficult to translate into sales. Therefore, Station B is just a brand promotion channel for them. In 2021, the community atmosphere of Station B becomes more and more unfriendly to many big advertisers (especially Internet giants), which further limits its commercial potential.

At the same time, "going out of the circle" also limits the efficiency of game cashing in station B. No matter in the past or in the future, the game business of Station B is centered on the secondary products, and the "secondary concentration" of Station B community is constantly decreasing, which will inevitably lead to adverse effects on the game diversion efficiency. Some people may think that even if the "secondary concentration" is reduced, the total number of users interested in secondary may still rise, so the game diversion efficiency will not decline; This logic does not hold water. The decrease of "quadratic concentration" is reflected in the decrease of the proportion of quadratic content, the decrease of UP owners' interest in second creation of games, and the collapse of the discussion atmosphere of the quadratic community. We only need to compare the secondary innovation activity of station B to the Fate series in 2016 and 2021 to see the changes clearly.

Don't get me wrong. Now Station B still has a certain quadratic game diversion ability. However, it can no longer rely on the UP main group to complete the diversion spontaneously through entrepreneurship and innovation, as it did five years ago; It has to rely more on hard advertising, official activities and official peddling to "push" the game. How can the efficiency of the latter catch up with the former?

In a word, the radical "out of the circle" of Station B has led to too young users, while limiting its own commercialization potential (including advertising commercialization and game commercialization). The commercialization potential of Station B failed to grow in proportion to the number of users. When the capital market is optimistic, investors are willing to ignore this point and think that Station B can solve this problem quickly; But when the capital market heat drops, investors tend to calm down and start voting with their feet. This led to a sharp drop in the share price of Station B.

　　 The execution of Station B cannot keep up with the growth of users, which is a problem

In the process of "out of the circle" in the last three years, the execution of Station B failed to catch up with the expansion of user scale, which caused a series of adverse consequences. You should know that when operating a community with 20 million DAUs, the platform manager can "Buddhism" a little and let the situation develop within a certain range; However, when operating a 60 million DAU community, "Buddhism" is a poison, which can easily lead to an uncontrollable situation.

At the beginning of 2021, the "LexBurner bombarded the" Rebirth without Duty "event" is a concentrated reflection of the low execution of Station B at all levels:

• "Rebirth without a job" is the key promotion of station B in January 2020, and has received a large number of official traffic. In principle, the content operation and audit team should make a detailed risk analysis and determine risk countermeasures in advance. In the current Internet environment, it is impossible for "Rebirth without Duty" not to cause controversy. The key is how to deal with it. As we all know, the content operation team of Station B seems totally unprepared.

• For a top UP owner like LexBurner, there must be a specially assigned person on the B station, or even more than one person dealing with all aspects of affairs. After making controversial remarks, Station B did not try to control the impact and reduce losses, but simply and rudely ended the matter and issued a very controversial announcement. I can hardly imagine that any other content platform would make such amateur response.

• In the process of external communication, the public relations and marketing teams of Station B have no sense of existence. Off the shelf "Rebirth without Duty" is just enough, but also comes to a "sudden technical reasons"; It's just enough to ban LexBurner, but it must be accompanied by "legal proceedings"; It's just enough to launch a special action to renovate the content, but it's just a matter of writing "We don't want to see people falling into endless anger and quarrels". This communication skill should be given a negative score.

• In order to suppress the topic, the community operation of Station B keeps deleting posts and taboos, hoping to make relevant discussions disappear in Station B. The problem is that Station B can't manage Weibo, Douban, and WeChat public accounts, and users who are irritated can still do great things when they go elsewhere. In the face of controversial topics, sometimes it needs blocking, sometimes it needs dredging, sometimes it needs blocking and dredging. This wave of station B is only blocked, and can not reach the pass line.

In fact, the "Rebirth without Duty" event is a concentrated reflection of the cultural conflict between the secondary meta users of Station B and the users of Fanquan. LexBurner, the anchor, originally started as a secondary content, has absorbed a lot of traffic from the food circle in the past few years. Therefore, his bombardment of "Rebirth without Duty" has aroused the dissatisfaction of the old secondary users, who believe that it is simply a case of destroying the bridge by crossing the river; Station B's ban on him has caused dissatisfaction among rice circle users, who believe that it is a pull off frame. Until December 2021, the matter finally ended with LexBurner agreeing to pay a fine of 20 million yuan in exchange for unsealing; The problem is that this will not be the last time.

To be fair, Station B is already trying to eliminate the cultural conflict between new and old users - it tries to label users as carefully as possible through algorithms, partitions, and social relationships, separating "old users" from "new users". The problem is that the algorithm of station B is inherently weak (weaker in the past few years). It relies heavily on manual operation, and the label accuracy is not high; In addition, the official of Station B has been stepping down to "create gods" in person, which makes it difficult to achieve real isolation between different types of users.

We will find that for businesses that need high efficiency and strong operation, Station B often develops poorly and cannot afford to pay. The problem is that the business that Station B focuses on now is almost the business that needs strong operation! According to this trend, the revenue growth of Station B is worrying, and the revenue ceiling must be lower than everyone imagined:

• Station B has been an e-commerce company for three years, and its revenue is almost negligible, because e-commerce needs strong operation;

• Up to now, the B station advertising is still brand oriented, supplemented by effect, because effect advertising requires strong execution;

• Self research of games and content, not to mention, is a very hard and tiring job, and it is not easy to do well if you are gentle and gentle.

From March to March 2020, during the epidemic period, Station B also experienced a spectacle that the audit channel was severely blocked and a video needed to be audited for more than ten hours. On the one hand, there are few reviewers in Station B; On the other hand, the audit team still has many people in Wuhan. Later, Station B learned from the bitter experience and expanded the audit team on a large scale. Compared with itself, it really made progress and was still much less efficient than its competitors. If you don't believe it, you can try it.

The low execution of Station B, on the one hand, may be due to the lack of experience or ability of the management, as mentioned at the beginning of this article; On the other hand, it must be attributed to the high turnover of middle and basic level personnel, which is also due to the low salary of employees. "B station salary is 20% off the average salary in the Internet industry", which is a popular joke in the market. Although it may not be true, it also reflects the lack of competitiveness of B station salary. However, the management of Station B seems to have noticed this problem and significantly increased the salary of middle and grass-roots employees in 2021. In the case that the overall environment of the Internet is not very clear, we believe that the staff turnover rate of Station B will decline significantly in the next few years.

However, can this solve the problem? The organizational culture of "Buddhism" has been deeply branded in the DNA of Station B for many years. It is far more difficult to change the culture over the years than to expand the user base. As long as Station B is still out of the loop quickly, it is difficult to solve the problem of low execution. Because the improvement of the battle effectiveness of the B station team can never keep up with the improvement of the user base; If we catch up, it may mean that the period of high user growth has passed. Is that good news?

In May 1945, Soviet soldiers planted the red flag in the German Parliament Building

　　 Conclusion: Xiao He is the winner and Xiao He is the loser

In 2021, the most valuable set of books I read was the National Defense Forces series written by the American historian Robert Chitino, which was divided into three parts: National Defense Forces: Broken (1942), National Defense Forces: Retreat (1943), and National Defense Forces: Dying (1944-1945). This set of books is dedicated to answering a question: Why did the German Defense Forces, which were so arrogant in 1942, dominated most of Europe, and reached Stalingrad and Alaman, usher in the fate of extinction within just two and a half years? Starting from Berlin, they easily won Warsaw, Paris, Kiev, and almost Moscow, Leningrad, and Alexandria; But why were they so easily pushed back to Berlin?

Robert Chitino's answer is: All this is the inevitable result of "German military tactics". Since Frederick the Great, the basis of Prussian German military strategy is to rely on internal lines, pay attention to the quality of grass-roots operations, and fight a series of short mobile wars and annihilation wars, so as to eliminate the enemy with powerful resources in a relatively short time. Therefore, from the very beginning, the Prussian German army did not attach importance to logistics and grand strategy, especially the protracted war of attrition. When World War I turned into a static trench war, the fate of the failure of the German Second Reich was doomed; When the Second World War evolved into a global total war in three continents and three oceans at the same time, even if the Third Reich of Germany could still fight a series of beautiful annihilation wars, its failure was doomed.

Over the past three years, the growth of Station B has basically followed the path preferred by the capital market in a bull market (or optimistic state):

• The capital market likes user growth, so Station B will expand its user base at no cost;

• The capital market likes young users, and Station B focuses on attracting "Generation Z" users;

• The capital market likes diversified content, and Station B emphasizes "out of circle" and "de dualization";

• The capital market likes diversified businesses. Station B will dilute the game business and concentrate resources to develop unprofitable advertising and value-added services;

• The capital market likes to achieve rapid expansion through mergers and acquisitions, and Station B has carried out a series of mergers and acquisitions and investments that are not good enough.

The problem is that the capital market cannot replace the company's management and business personnel to implement strategies. In most cases, the capital market is just a rearview mirror without foresight. Companies that only know how to cater to the capital market may achieve high valuations in the short term, but in the long term they tend to go the wrong way. Because in the short term, the market is a voting machine; In the long run, the market is a scale. All gifts given by fate are secretly priced, but we may not know it at the beginning.

We don't need to excessively criticize the management of Station B headed by Chen Rui. If one of us were to sit in his original position, we might not be able to make a better choice - because we can neither change the organizational culture of Station B in the short term, nor change the regulatory trend of game and other content industries, nor change the happiness of the capital market. It is unreasonable to completely blame Chen Rui for the problems facing Station B, just like it is unreasonable to completely blame the Supreme Commander for the German army's failure in the two world wars.

Station B will continue to exist as an important PUGC video platform. It has enough cash to survive in the short term. As long as it no longer aggressively expands its user base and blindly conducts mergers and acquisitions and content purchases, its loss rate can be narrowed. The management of Station B still has a clear mind, which determines that it will survive for a long time in the future and maintain its leading position in the industry segment, just like the status quo of Weibo, Zhihu, iQiyi and Xiaohongshu.

However, Station B may never return to the valuation level at the beginning of 2021. That level is irrational, and there is no regret for losing it.

(Statement: This article only represents the author's view, not Sina.com's position.)