Fengrui Capital Li Feng: Why is the booming "content entrepreneurship wave" happening today?

Words, sounds, pictures, videos... Content production has been in full swing in recent years, and the explosion of "new" content has made content several orders of magnitude more than before. Why does this current wave of "content entrepreneurship" occur today? Why didn't it happen in the blogging era and Weibo era?

Original title: Why is this hot wave of "content entrepreneurship" happening today?

Words, sounds, pictures, videos... Content production has been in full swing in recent years, and the explosion of "new" content has made content several orders of magnitude more than before.

So, have users spent more time consuming content, and are users more willing to pay for content? In other words, how do content entrepreneurs make money?

Why does this current wave of "content entrepreneurship" occur today? Why didn't it happen in the blogging era and Weibo era?

Who will pay for the content?

In

the past year, I have been frequently asked how to start a business based on content in various speaking occasions. I think the most important thing is still to answer two questions from a general logical perspective: Why did content entrepreneurship happen and why did it happen today?

In 1074, a Bavarian priest held a sheepskin scroll and returned from a new vineyard. You may ask why the parchment scroll is so valuable? You must know that the skin of a sheep can only make pages 12.5 of a sheepskin scroll (Note 1). To make a "Xinhua Dictionary", you have to kill an entire hillside of livestock.

Later, with the popularization of papermaking and printing, media costs dropped sharply to 1% from sheepskin to paper (Note 2), and content producers and recipients that could afford the cost gradually expanded from monasteries to universities and local lords. 200 years ago, the emergence of steam printing presses reduced costs to at least 20% of the previous level (Note 3), reducing the costs of content production, dissemination and consumption for the first time to a range acceptable to the public. This is the basis for the emergence of the last wave of modern media industry that we are familiar with.

Twenty years ago, the emergence of the Internet digitized content for the first time, making today, whether it is various WeChat official accounts, today's headlines, or "get", the channel cost is basically zero. Today, we live in the mobile Internet era. The use of mobile phones as a medium has achieved another revolutionary improvement in efficiency through multi-dimensional annotations of audience location, social relationships, and real-time online.

Changes originating from the media determine the major premise and pattern of new content entrepreneurship/production in each era.

Five years ago, I invested in a company called Station B, and we were its first-round investors. At that time, we were still thinking what the hell was this, how could anyone watch videos in such a weird way? In December of the year before last, I chatted with them again, and they talked about such a thing. Among the daily active users, the number of 4G online users increased to 20% of the daily UV.

This wave of switching China's basic mobile network infrastructure from 3G to 4G has created this significant change and the extremely popular live broadcast throughout the year until last year. This is another small example of media change.

Here's an interesting topic. Why didn't the current "content entrepreneurship boom" in the blogging era and Weibo era? I won't say my opinion in this column. I want to hear your opinion.

Second

, after talking about the major premise of a cliff-like decline in media costs, let's talk about changes in producers.

Not everyone has a mountain full of sheep, so in the "sheepskin scroll era", only large institutions such as the state and the church can be content producers.

But with the invention of the Gutenberg printing press, Martin Luther, the new media giant at the time, appeared. He found that booklets printed on the printing press could be disseminated to a wider audience, making them easy to circulate and affordable to ordinary people. With this, he launched the religious reform and successfully "attracted fans" from the eyes of the Pope in the Scroll era.

We can see that the cost of media has dropped, the threshold for content producers has been lowered, and the country and the church have been relegated to another big V. Or, local intellectuals like Martin Luther have been "upgraded" and they have poured in. Become a new group of main content entrepreneurs/creators.

This is not an accident, Martin. Luther was the Mimon of that era. While the Pope and cardinals still preached their teachings in Latin, which no one could understand, he used German, the "emerging Internet language" that was then emerging and had a wider audience.

But more important than technique is that the unit of content producer is getting smaller. It used to be that you needed to rely on a large organization or a large group to enter the original information channel to spread, but now you can rely more and more on small unit organizations.

In the past five years, countless media people have left their original organizations to start their own businesses. Countless people who were not originally considered qualified to produce professional content have founded very powerful content organizations. This is also the case in terms of large logic. It can also be verified from every stage of a very long historical dimension.

Three,

you might ask, is advertising the biggest contributor to modern content producers?

This is a very important topic. There was no advertising business model when media was born. What triggered the advertising business model to enter the field of media?

The emergence of steam printing presses has expanded content consumers to the public level for the first time, which means that content products such as news have become an industrial product for the first time. Another superimposed factor that occurred during the same period was that human beings greatly improved production efficiency at the same time, and material richness greatly increased. Everyone had the need for "consumption upgrades" at that time, and as producers, they also needed to think about how to sell things. The rapid convection between supply and demand gave birth to the modern advertising industry.

The Sun, founded in 1833, first put forward the slogan of "Shine on Everyone" and reduced the price to 1p for the first time. Prior to this, there were 1200 newspapers circulating every day in the United States. In less than half a year, the Sun's own single-day circulation reached 5000.

Penny newspapers can be sold so cheaply because of the support of the advertising industry, and the result of the journalism industry's low-cost and efficient expansion of readers has further amplified the advertising value. These two events occurred at the same stage of history, forming a virtuous cycle of each other, causing the media to begin to carry the business model of advertising.

Each round of "new" content explosion adds several orders of magnitude more content than before.

Fourth

, the biggest questions will always be these two:

1. Can users spend the same amount of "money" to consume content? On the other hand, where does the huge amount of content that is created make money?

100 years ago, it brought the advertising industry to become a payer of incremental content. Twenty years ago, with the emergence of effect advertising represented by search engines, the advertising effectiveness was measurable in part. At the same time, some small and micro enterprises also participated, which brought another wave of market growth.

So as this wave of new content rises, where does the increase come from? Is it better than effects advertising? Can the effect be quantified based on sales? Personal charges that are larger and of greater magnitude than the total subscriptions to magazines and newspapers that year?

2. The time of content consumers grows linearly and has a limit. If content entrepreneurs create ten times or more content (including video and audio content that cannot be browsed quickly), where will the time come? Ten times longer reading time? Spend time with other things (originally non-reading)? (Whose time does it take?) Improved reading efficiency tenfold?

If nothing works, then 90% of content startups will fail.

Fifth

, I met Liu Jiang, the head of Fashion Group China, a month ago. I gave an example when I held an investor board meeting with him.

I said "Fashion" is a very good representative of the media genre. The content in it is its advertising, and advertising is basically its content. It mixes these two things well in one media form. This kind of thing emerged after the last wave of advertising was introduced into the media.

After the advertising industry entered the media industry, two phenomena emerged:

the first is that header content with very high quality still receives continuous payment from users.

The second phenomenon is that when the business model of advertising entered the media, some new media categories emerged, so that content and advertising were well turned into one thing.

In the past few years, whether it is text, sound, pictures, videos, or live broadcasts, the production of these content has been in full swing, with some entering e-commerce and some realizing knowledge. Will there be a new business model that can be combined with content creation entering this industry and supporting its development? If there is, it is probably the same as what happened in the previous cycle, and some new business models that mix content and monetization based on this new business model will be born, becoming a relatively perfect and more consistent new business model.

Where "new retail" and "new content" creation occur today, it may also be somewhat similar to that of 100 years ago.

This is my guess and an open-ended question. All content entrepreneurs will have their own observations and answers. They look forward to having more discussions with you and seeing more Mimons and Martin Luther in this era.

Note 1: At that time, the sheepskin of 12 sheep was used for the 150-page manuscript. Source: "Material Civilization, Economy and Capitalism from the 15th to 18th Centuries"

Note 2: This is only a rough estimate. Compared with manual copying, the efficiency of the Gutenberg printing press is 240 sheets per hour, and the efficiency of the latter is 2 sheets per hour. If you add in the decline in paper costs due to the popularization of printing presses, the cost will drop even more.

Note 3: The efficiency of the earliest steam printers was 1100 sheets per hour. This does not add in the large-scale decline in paper costs.

Editor: Nancy