Finding the right posture to make money, Internet radio stations end their dark history of fighting each other

Paying for knowledge has opened a new door for online radio stations troubled by monetization. The payment model has four advantages. First, paying will increase fans, and they are all high-quality fans; second, it is more direct, third, it is more sustainable, and fourth, it is more monetization than the advertising model.

Original title: Internet radio stations have ended their dark history of fighting each other. They have found the right posture to make money

. On Baidu Encyclopedia,"FM" has 18 meanings, but its most widely known meaning is the abbreviation of the English word "FrequencyModulation", which means FM. In public perception, FM and FM radio are almost synonymous.

Dragonfly FM, which was born in 2011, and Himalayan FM and Litchi FM, which were born in 2013, unanimously use FM as the suffix of their names, because these applications were initially positioned as Internet radio, but after several years of development, Dragonfly, Himalayan, Litchi and other Internet FM have long broken through the scope of radio.

Just this Monday, Dragonfly FM held a press conference in Shanghai. Gao Xiaosong was the protagonist of this press conference because his first audio program will soon be broadcast on Dragonfly FM.

The audio program called "Shorty Big Tight Points North" consists of three columns-"North Points Ranking","Cultural Youth Handbook", and "Leisure Occasional Mail". It will be broadcast on Dragonfly FM every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. This is not an audio program that can be listened to for free. If users want to hear Gao Xiaosong's "avatar" chatting casually, they need to pay 200 dragonfly coins, which is equivalent to 200 yuan. Dragonfly FM's page says: It is expected to update 156 issues, and each issue only costs 1.28 Dragonfly coins. But in fact, users can only listen to the full version of the program by paying 200 Dragonfly Coins in a lump sum. Dragonfly FM does not provide the option of purchasing on schedule.

This is a typical paid product in the trend of knowledge-based payment, and it is also an important business that Internet radio stations are making great efforts to promote today-knowledge-based payment, opening a new door for Internet radio stations who are troubled by monetization.

The new business of Internet radio

began last year. In Yu Jianjun's public speech, knowledge payment became a new keyword.

As the co-founder and co-CEO of Himalayan FM, since last year, Yu Jianjun has led the Himalayan team to start a new attempt on the road of knowledge-based payment.

Back in time a year ago, Himalayan FM launched the "Speak Well" audio program brought by Ma Dong and "Qi Qi Tiantuan" on June 6, 2016, and opened the "Paid Boutique" special area. This is the beginning of Himalayan FM's entry into the knowledge payment field.

Just a few days before Dragonfly FM announced the launch of the "Shorty Big Tight North" column, Himalayan FM took advantage of its 66th member days to release a set of data: "Speak Well" has more than 180,000 paid subscribers, generating nearly 40 million sales: The "Paid Boutique" zone currently has 2000 knowledge Internet celebrities and more than 10000 paid courses; Since 2017, the average monthly ARPU value of its paying users (the average revenue the company receives from each user) has exceeded 90 yuan.

Judging from the data, the paid audio effect is good. The direct effect of this result is Ma Dong's team's continued investment in audio content: Ma Dong revealed in "The Wonderful Man" that the new season of "Talk Well: Kang Yong Is Coming" will be launched on Himalayan FM on June 19, and Cai Kangyong and Yan Rujing have confirmed joining.

It is not easy to retain top resources such as Ma Dong, Cai Kangyong and Gao Xiaosong. According to Gao Xiaosong, when he reached a cooperation intention with Dragonfly FM, many platforms tried to contact him, but he refused.

The appeal of head resources to content payment services is self-evident. The popularity of the keynote speaker has brought exposure and spread to paid audio programs, and fans 'pursuit of stars also means that their paying propensity will be higher. At the same time, head resources themselves do not lack channels to spread. Therefore, how much benefit the platform can bring to head resources will affect the retention of head resources.

It can be seen from Ma Dong's team's willingness to continue to add "Speak Well" that after a year of trying, Himalayan FM's achievements, this star team in the field of content production, is willing to stay. This is good news for Internet radio stations.

Internet

radio stations have gone through a chaotic road through hard work. In 2015, the Internet radio industry staged many games against each other.

In February 2015, Yang Yue, a senior DJ and founder of the original online radio station NewRadio, published an article entitled "Walking gracefully from a thief". Yang Yue said in the article,"Listening to FM and stealing all NewRadio's programs completely... This is not the first time NewRadio has been stolen."

Then in April, Internet radio staged a bloody drama that was taken off the air in turn. In November of that year, the farce reappeared, and a post appeared on Zhihu that exposed the falsification of Dragonfly FM's data. The incident subsequently turned into a mutual struggle between Dragonfly FM and Himalayas. Dragonfly FM called the so-called falsification a malicious slander by "friends" who hired water soldiers, while Himalayas asked Dragonfly FM to thoroughly explain the fraud incident.

The war of words finally ended, but behind the brutal competition between the industries was the fact that Internet radio once had difficulty surviving.

After gaining enough users to generate platform effects, making profits through advertising, value-added services, and copyright distribution was the most common business model for Internet radio in the past. Under this model, like video websites, Internet radio's profitability is based on user growth and activity. Obtaining users requires funds, and hoarding content also requires funds, but the income is limited, which means that Internet radio stations spend more money than they receive, and the industry inevitably needs to burn money. Yu Jianjun once publicly stated his attitude: "This industry must burn money a lot. We are ready."

However, 2015 was a time when Internet entrepreneurship encountered a cold winter of capital. Investors gradually changed their styles, shifting from focusing on user size to focusing on profit. Internet radio stations were under the heavy pressure of copyright and other costs, making it difficult to make profits. The fierce competition and difficult survival in the industry finally passed through the lively battle. The scuffle became apparent.

The arrival of the wave of knowledge payment has changed this situation.

The direction of the tide

"When Dragonfly is commercializing and monetizing, the first thing Dragonfly does is definitely advertising." At Gao Xiaosong's paid audio conference on June 12, in the face of media questions about the commercialization of Dragonfly FM, Dragonfly FM Chairman Zhang Qiang said so, but he immediately said,"Payment will definitely be the mainstream way for our platforms in the future."

This judgment is made for the following reasons. In Zhang Qiang's view, advertising competition is ultimately a competition for traffic, which means that when platforms grab the cake of the advertising market, the competitors they face are everyone. At the same time, the advertising chain is relatively long and the funding process is relatively long. More importantly, the payment model can give content producers better feedback.

"If it is advertising, it is difficult to distribute benefits because the advertising chain is relatively long, but if it is paid, it is very simple and very direct. For closer cooperation with upstream content parties and a better closed loop, this model is actually more beneficial and easier to form a benign ecosystem."

Although there have been fierce mutual pinching, Yu Jianjun and Zhang Qiang hold similar views. Yu Jianjun once said in a public speech,"If the advertising model is the sun at four or five o'clock in the evening, then the payment model is the sun at eight or nine o'clock in the morning."

He believes that the payment model has four advantages. First, advertising is afraid of losing fans, but paying will increase fans, and they are all high-quality fans; second, it is more direct, and good content is directly realized; third, it is more continuous, and the advertising model is sometimes non-existent, content is to continue to make money while lying down; fourth, the amount of monetization of knowledge payment is more than the advertising model, and content payment can be booked to 100 yuan per person. The one-time charge for this advertisement is completely different.

It can be seen that for Internet radio stations who have just entered the field of knowledge-based payment for a year, the prospects of knowledge-based payment are attractive, and the market to be developed is large enough. According to data released by Himalayan FM, as of now, there are still 97% on the platform. Users have not purchased paid content yet. How to make them become paying users requires further exploration.

In addition, whether it is Dragonfly FM or Himalayan FM, when showing their report cards to the public, they all emphasize the platform's top resources. For example, Himalayan FM's signboards are "Talk Well" and Wu Xiaobo Channel brought by Ma Dong and "Qi Qi Tiantuan", etc.; while Dragonfly FM's signboards are Jiang Xun and Gao Xiaosong, who had just joined the company.

As mentioned earlier, the benefits that head resources can bring are obvious, but retaining them is not easy. More importantly, if the important task of platform knowledge payment competition ultimately falls on the head resources, it means that as the competition deepens, the scarcity of the head resources themselves will become more intense for content, thereby increasing content costs. How to activate the potential of long-tail content is a difficult problem to be solved.

Under the story of pay-for-knowledge, Internet radio stations are ushering in their second spring. How to tell the story bigger is the next problem that Internet radio stations need to face after finding the right business model.

Editor: jessica