Shut down! Shut down! Shut down! Douban "Awakens" and is aggressively listed

The moment we shut down Douban, we shut down Douban things, and we shut down Douban FM... People suddenly discovered that "Slow Company" Douban was suddenly radical and the elimination of those non-profitable products was coming to an end.

On August 10, a "Douban Dongxi Offline Notice" lay in Douban users 'in-station mailbox, announcing the death of "Douban Dongxi".

Since its official launch on September 17, 2013, it has been shut down. The logo of Douban has always had the word beta. This is the only e-commerce attempt in Douban's history, with a survival period of 3 years and 11 months. The announcement shows that after a week, Douban will "enter read-only state" and will be closed after user content migration is completed.

This is not the first or only product to be shut down. "Douban Moment" will be shut down on August 16; people close to Douban also confirmed to reporters that "Douban FM" will definitely be abandoned.

On August 10, a message was posted,"Douban fans who are sad because of Douban moments and Douban things being cut, tell you something even sadder: Douban FM is going to be gone!" The broadcast "dropped a bomb" in Douban community and was broadcast more than 700 times in a few hours. The comment area was suddenly filled with wailing.

Douban, which is seeking to be listed overseas, has begun to make drastic business adjustments.

In fact, Douban founder and CEO Yang Bo (Abei) already issued a decision on business adjustments in an internal letter released earlier this month. "This marks that Douban has entered a pragmatic stage," Abe said in an internal letter.

Just before the press was released, the person in charge of Douban Market and Brand told,"We will close some products and businesses that have not improved for a long time or have generated small-scale revenue, including Yiqiyi, Douban Things, Tongcheng Ticket Transactions and Douban Moment." Next, the entire team will focus more on the core business."

The so-called "core business" here refers to the Douban mobile product "Douban APP" and the "Douban Time" for paying for water testing content.

While the outside world is praising and gratified that Douban is planning to go public overseas and is about to shed its label as a "slow company"; when Douban is paying for water testing content and getting closer to money, in the Douban community, those people called "worthless" by the outside world also bid farewell in mourning.

People suddenly discovered that Douban was not slow and even a bit radical in this adjustment. When Abei announced the adjustment, the new business core had already been established and the product downsizing was nearing completion.

For those products that were once placed on high hopes, Douban is "ruthless"; for those users who are unwilling to change together, Douban no longer cares about them.

This time, everyone saw a Douban that was "not afraid of opposition".

As an Internet observer, the author is willing to trace the life trajectory, causes and consequences of products that are about to disappear, and is also willing to look forward to the future destiny of those products with important responsibilities. This Douban, which broke the old and created the new era, is a rare object of observation for us.

Douban's offline notification that Douban sends to each user

is intended to form a product discovery community by integrating a large amount of product content that Douban users have shared and enter into e-commerce shopping guides. As said in the online blog post: The emergence of "things" stems from a large number of discussions in the community about food, clothing, housing and transportation. Among Douban's 380,000 groups, more than 20,000 groups are directly related to shopping, making it the largest category in the group.

The launch of Douban is regarded by the outside world as the closest Douban has ever been to money. It may become a fruit warehouse version of Mushroom Street and a shopping guide website exclusive to literary and artistic youth. However, watercress gradually became another lukewarm fruit warehouse and good warehouse.

As the author once wrote: Douban is rooted in an "anti-consumerism" community and does not have the atmosphere of sharing shopping experiences like Xiaohongshu. As a result, it has become a place where a group of cultural youth po and fo "wishlist" has been born. A group of people have shared hundreds of "good-looking but not useful" creative products and accumulated a group of 999+like shopping guides.

Fundamentally speaking, watercress is incompatible with the community atmosphere of the "spiritual corner", and the "alienation" of the grass planting guide has become a wish list.

Moreover, Douban things cannot form a synergistic effect with books, movies, and sound. On the mobile side where users are divided into more than a dozen applications, Douban does not enjoy much of Douban's user dividends, and is almost on the same starting line as the fruit libraries. As for the content in the 20,000 shopping-related groups, it is endogenous in the group community and will not be transferred to things.

This is like although "33 Days of Lovelorn Love" and "My Friend Chen Bailu" were born in the Douban group, such popular articles will not appear in Douban reading.

Users cannot transfer or share between different products-Douban is just a loose channel alliance, and users are scattered in a parallel universe of different channels."People who watch broadcasts, mix in groups, play small things, and run markets, never communicate with each other."

Douban Square, Alpha City, and Douban trivial matters that Douban had previously been offline were all trying to inspire users to walk out of the parallel universe, out of the barriers of books, movies, music, and groups, communicate in the square, and meet in new topics. However, such attempts ended in failure.

If the gloomy end of Douban is due to deviation from its "main business", then Douban FM, which is also about to press the pause button, exposes Douban's inability to enter the content industry.

"Internally, it has been notified that it will be closed, but it has not been officially announced." A former Douban employee told reporters that Douban FM's team is also currently laying off employees. However, some Douban insiders said,"FM will not be shut down, it just has its own music library offline and will link to third parties because it doesn't want to spend money to buy copyright. "Even in this case, Douban FM will exist in name only.

Among the 1571 red hearts songs marked by reporters on Douban FM, only 397 were left on Douban'

s "abandonment" of FM that had been traced two months ago. In Douban FM's Douban group, some users reported in June that songs once marked with "Red Heart" had been removed on a large scale. Of the 1406 red star songs marked by users on Douban FM, only 190 could be played, leaving only 13.5%.

This also exposes Douban FM's "soft spot" that is hard to say-the pain of copyright.

Although Douban FM has briefly tested the paid subscription model of "10 yuan per month, 50 yuan for half a year", this income is nothing compared to the copyright fees it has to pay to major record companies. Due to its inability to spend a lot of money on copyright, Douban FM's music library has been stagnant. Later, under the cover of the safe haven principle, it could only open up the creation of megahertz by bean friends to enrich the songs. However, the sword of copyright has always been hanging high at the top.

Douban FM, which was officially publicly tested in November 2009, was once one of the earliest streaming media services on the market based on interest-based recommendations. Based on users 'interest data and active training, Douban FM's evolving algorithm is praised, bringing the experience of unexpected encounters to the extreme.

However, as Douban FM users who once interned in Douban said: Music and video businesses are both content industries. IP is too important. Product form, user experience, and algorithm optimization must all be based on content. Otherwise, they will just sacrifice the original and pursue the last.

When the music industry entered the second half of the "copyright arms race", Douban FM was already out.

Of course, Douban FM is paranoid about the streaming media model recommended by algorithms, and has never extended to the music library mode, has delayed adding the search function, and insists on not making editing recommendations... This makes it unable to cover all users 'listening scenes after all, thus turning to a music App that can "listen to whatever you want, and both active and passive are suitable".

It is a particularly pity that Douban, which started as music criticism, allowed Douban FM and Douban Music to be divided and ruled, missing the opportunity to build a music community. However, if you think about it further, Douban couldn't do it even if you wanted to.

Once upon a time, the "Douban" created by Douban was deeply loved by young Internet users, and their social life relied on product forms based on interest map sharing such as "movie Douban" and "reading Douban"; today's young people are more willing to listen to Netease Cloud Music's "song list" like a few treasures...

Douban Music, an album based comment unit and the experience of separating listening to songs and commenting, has long been revolutionized by the new music community-Netease Cloud Music is one of them.

Brush comments while listening to songs has become the habit of a new generation of users. The decline of Douban Music, a place where only comments but not instantly listens to songs, is inevitable. And a single radio station like Douban FM cannot match the album reviews of Douban Music.

In addition to Douban Moment, Douban Things and Douban FM, it is said that there are also Yipi and Tongcheng ticketing that are about to be pressed by Douban.

As Douban's women's photography service platform launched in 2016, Yipai was once regarded as the only photography O2O project that may be successful. However, currently, all photographers on the platform are in a "suspended appointment" state, and the closure notice is only waiting to be announced. Since Douban has almost withdrawn from the movie ticketing market, it is not uncommon for Douban to give up ticketing in the same city.

Douban turns around and gets rid of "worthless old users"

In addition to the obvious drastic changes in the side business, Douban has been quietly turning around its own positioning and operation methods since last year.

In March 2016, shortly after Douban launched the promotional video "Our Spiritual Corner", it began to "invade" users 'spiritual corners.

From paper books to Douban time, mouth opening, and interviews, the content of "Douban Products" began to appear on users 'opening pages, personal homepages, book audio-visual pages, and even directly inserted into the broadcast information stream. No matter which parallel universe you are in Douban, there will be an official "tweeter" echoing overhead.

For content products, Douban devotes its efforts to promote them to every user-this is the correct idea for doing content e-commerce. It also means Douban's transformation from a literary product evaluation and shopping guide website to a content e-commerce.

In the past, Douban could only serve as a "shopping guide website" for books, movies, and music, delivering traffic to book e-commerce and video websites and earning meager commissions. As a startup company, Douban does not have the strength to become a book e-commerce company, video website, and music website at the same time, just as its more than a dozen apps had no chance of winning against competing products in various categories.

The knowledge-based payment products allow Douban to see the fate of getting rid of the "shopping guide website" and become the hope of cultural e-commerce. They allow it to avoid direct competition with book e-commerce and video websites, and can directly convert users into its own consumers."Fat water does not flow to outsiders."

It is no longer just a public comment in the field of books and videos, but has become an e-commerce company for cultural products with 150 million users. Moreover, unlike the separation of books and videos, Douban's different content products are already forming synergy effects: the cultural search program "Ru Shi" is actually promoting the Douban Time column, and even "Yao Qian's Ci Writing Class" It specifically mentions "Poetry Classes with Beidao and Friends".

To complete such a transformation, in addition to decisively shutting down and merging irrelevant businesses, in addition to breaking the community division formed by Douban for a long time, there is also "ignoring""" worthless old users."

As many observers have concluded, this group of old users who have been "entrenched" in Douban for many years have almost "kidnapped" Douban. They will resist every small change made by Douban, they will feel offended by Douban's attempt to cater to new users, and lecturers invited to Douban's time to teach classes will also question their level and whether the materials are suspected of plagiarism.

Just like the knowledge-based payment platforms such as Get, Himalayas, and Division-Answer, the users that Douban needs in the future are fanatical fans, payers who do not nitpick and decisively buy, and people who "accept everything" Douban products according to the order. However, the reality of Douban is the complete opposite: a group of old users who have read some books, think highly of themselves, and no one buys it.

For Douban, the wise thing to do is to let them slowly fade away and automatically fade out after they have a family and have a baby.

In fact, when Douban paid for water testing knowledge and explored KOL in the cultural field, the KOL bred in the soil of Douban had long since left sadly.

Five years ago, Douban was once a platform for KOL to express their value. Around 2011 and 2012, there was a significant increase in Douban users. The fan level of Douban KOL quickly increased from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, and began to reach the public. Before that, Douban gathered a large number of so-called "high-profile" cultural people (film critics, music critics, and text workers). The voices of these people in Douban have no influence on the market, and are even reverse indicators, opposing the public.

Since then, the loss of high-quality users has directly led to the "desertification" of Douban community. "The large number of migration of native KOL on Douban began around 2010. The more representative ones are Liushou (Weibo retains a few tricks), tiger forcing girl trotters, Qidian, etc. The destination of their migration is Sina Weibo." A senior Douban user (now a Weibo celebrity) told reporters.

Content e-commerce, Douban's last hope?

After intergenerational rotation, Douban's main users are now mainly born in the 1990s.

What kind of people are this? They prefer to consume content instantly rather than just reading reviews. The decline of Douban Music is precisely because user comments have been transferred to music apps. The reason why Douban movies have not diminished is that cinemas cannot send bullet screens and post comments. The rise of content payment also satisfies the habit of direct content consumption of the younger generation.

The question now is, will the market capacity of these "useless" content that teaches people to understand poetry, appreciate lyrics, and taste calligraphy and painting be greater than practical content that teaches people to grow themselves, advance in the workplace, and speak well? Although Ah Bei pointed out in his internal letter that "Douban has entered a pragmatic stage," Douban's positioning determines that its content must follow the "retreat" route.

If users of "pragmatic" content products are buying "effects"(or illusion of effects), what are "Wuxu" content products selling? Spiritual satisfaction?

Can Douban Time support Douban's dream of listing? Let's distinguish the sustainability of content producers and consumers.

From the content producer side. If we say that knowledge comes from the big V in the station, and the gain comes from the underestimated knowledge masters, the Himalayas comes from the reuse of the sound resources of the big V of knowledge, Douban Time mainly comes from producers such as Utopia, movable type culture, and simple psychology. At the same time, it also produces its own columns ("Take a Good Photo·Learn Life Photography from Qiqi" and "The Chronicles of Evil Movies"). The columns of the producer are mainly famous literary and artistic masters, while Douban itself launches people in the station.

For cultural institutions such as publishing houses that hold author resources, there is no more suitable paid content platform than Douban. The author resources in their hands are enough for Douban to develop inexhaustible. The key lies in product design, packaging and promotion. However, the phenomenon of "no big V in the station" prevents the columns launched by Douban from having their own fan effect, and their attention and subscriptions are not optimistic.

From the perspective of content consumers, Beidao, Bai Xianyong, Ye Jiaying, Yao Qian and other big names have "parachuted" Douban, which is breaking the original popular system and gameplay of Douban, turning it into a place where content is consumed rather than comments are posted.(The ratings and comments in the Douban Time column are lacking).

This may attract users who didn't know what they were doing on Douban before, but it will not affect the normal use of Douban books, movies, audio, groups and other users. In the future, they will have further interoperability and interaction with Douban Time.

From this point of view, Douban can become a sticky content e-commerce company by gathering users with books, videos and communities, and "harvesting" users with Douban time.

Editor: Xiongwei