Baidu, byte jumped one by search, and one relied on the recommendation algorithm, but both sides inevitably went deep into the other territory.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Going to the net” (ID: China- Venture), author Wan Hao, editor Cai Yifeng.
After Baidu, fast-handed and knowing to establish a united front, the investment network was informed that Baidu had already invested in the shell network as early as June this year.
On the other hand, the byte jumped to the next city and invested in interactive encyclopedia.
Today, the mobile Internet has moved from incremental to stock competition, and content-based ecological warfare between platforms. An investor in the entertainment field said that “the integration of traffic is at the time, and will never stop.”
Baidu and bytebeat are entering each other’s hinterland. They are looking at information flow and search advertising together. The premise of grabbing the advertising market is to acquire enough users and occupy the mind, which is “quality content”. It is the key. But nowadays, the “big media platforms” are each in the same league. According to Zhou Yuan, founder and CEO, “the problem of information islands that people face and the increasing cost of users getting high-quality content are the same.”
The two founders have previously expressed their concern for information flow and search business. Li Yanhong said that he has personally led the information flow business; Zhang Yiming has emphasized the importance of the expansion of search scenes and quality content.
It’s hard to recreate a “vibrato”, and the giants began to use capital to push for a new round of content battles. The big and big giants are “rich” and need high-quality content and the traffic behind them is expected to become bigger, and companies with content have to rely on the giants to replenish capital and flow when the capital market is under downward pressure.
A cultural industry investor said to the investment network that this will also affect the layout of the content industry in the second half. The competition between platforms, platforms and content companies is a new normal. Knowing the investment, fast hand, Baidu entered at the same time, Tencent is also a shareholder, which shows that they are consistent against the determination of bytebeat.“
This is a confrontation between the old and the new. Baidu’s current market value is only 33.8 billion US dollars; the new giant byte jumped wildly, and the market rumored that the valuation reached 75 billion US dollars. It can be said that the byte hopping also challenged many established Internet companies such as Baidu, Tencent and Weibo, which made it expand into a “four sides of the song”.
1.Baidu shares in the shell Bytes beat in hand interactive encyclopedia
The big and big giants use capital to push for a new round of content battles. The investment network found that Baidu had become a new shareholder of Guohu.com in June this year. The specific transaction amount was not disclosed. Tianjinchao information shows that after penetrating the shareholding structure, it was found that Baiduxiang Venture Capital Management Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Baidu Investment M&A, holds 9.38% of Beijing Huqi Interactive Technology Media Co., Ltd.
The investment network failed to contact the official website of the shell. The Baidu side did not respond to this news, but the investment network learned that compared with the knowledge, the cooperation between the shell and Baidu is currently Did not go to a particularly in-depth stage, the content did not open up, the shell network only opened a hundred number on Baidu.
A fruit shell employee said to the investment network that Baidu is indeed one of the shareholders of the shell, but it is not clear about the details of the cooperation between the two parties.
The fruit shell network was established in 2010 and has 33 million monthly users. According to public information, there were 4 rounds of financing from 2010 to 2014. The investors have credit capital, IDG capital and a good future. From Baidu’s round of financing, Guohu.com has no financing for five years.
On the other side, Beijing Quantum Leap Technology Co., Ltd., a company with 100% holdings of byte hopping, has recently become a new investor in Beijing Interactive Encyclopedia Network Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Interactive Encyclopedia”), holding 22.2 shares. % became the largest shareholder. This confirms the rumor that the previous byte jumped to acquire the interactive encyclopedia. In this regard, the byte beats the official reply to the net and said it will not comment.
A person close to the interactive encyclopedia told Cast.com that bytebeat and interactive encyclopedia started to contact last year. Six months ago, they completed a very deep integration on the product. The data is already open. Zhou also has a weekly meeting on product cooperation. One obvious change is that “ the data in front of each other is very messy, but now I still have some feelings.” The encyclopedia content of today’s headlines is now all interactive encyclopedia content.
The Interactive Encyclopedia was established in 2005. It split the VIE structure in 2015 and listed the new three boards. The interactive encyclopedia did not perform well under Baidu’s “cut-off”. The last time it entered the public view was the name of the CCTV 315 party in 2017, because “the review is not strict, the entry can be bought and sold”. It was in court with Baidu in 2011, saying that its webpage was blocked by Baidu, and that Baidu’s move was suspected of unfair competition.
In addition to Baidu, the Encyclopedia market also has Sogou, 360 and other players. The above companies all have their own browser services and have traffic portals. The “interactive encyclopedia” of being alone is the result of being beaten by the bytes, which can be said to be the result of both sides.
2.Baidu, byte jumps into the hinterland
Baidu, byte hopping starts with search, and one relies on the recommendation algorithm to succeed. Both parties are inevitably going deep into the other territory based on their own business development.
One byte of beating executives once told Caijing magazine that the headline judges opponents: Baidu in 2016, Tencent in 2017, and Facebook in 2018, which correspond to information flow products, content social products, and internationalization. Stages.
But now, the headline’s entry into the search, Baidu’s obsession with the information flow, will undoubtedly make Baidu re-emerge as an important competition for byte beating.
During the Spring Festival of 2019, QuestMobile’s data showed that Baidu App’s daily users were between 130 million and 140 million, more than the 120 million of today’s headlines. Today, Baidu APP’s daily life has broken 200 million. According to “LatePost”, the headline of today’s headline is still 120 million. However, some analysts believe that users who rely on money to obtain money will still have to be tested later.
Baidu has been doing information flow since 2013, but the internal search and information flow departments have not paid much attention to it. The intermediate strategy has been swaying, and once again O2O: Li Yanhong said in 2015 that within three years The glutinous rice business continued to invest 20 billion yuan. In the end, the O2O strategy ended with a Baidu takeaway and was hungry.
When Baidu is still watching the search, the opportunity for the byte to jump to seize the mobile Internet grows sharply in the gap. What makes Baidu unprepared is that in the era of mobile Internet, advertisers are more interested in information flow advertising. According to iResearch, the share of search engine revenue in China’s online advertising revenue dropped from 33.4% in 2014 to 19.5% in 2018.
Baidu’s last quarter earnings report showed that total revenue was RMB 24.123 billion, up 15% year-on-year; net loss attributable to Baidu was RMB 327 million, a loss from the net profit of RMB 6.694 billion in the same period last year. Baidu’s chief financial officer, Yu Jun, attributed the impact to the CCTV New Year’s Eve party marketing campaign. Baidu’s traffic acquisition costs in the fourth quarter of 2018 increased 34% year-on-year to 3.4 billion yuan.
Decisive battle information flow, accumulated algorithm technology is a key advantage of Baidu, Li Yanhong believes that information flow is essentially based on algorithm recommendation, and this is just in line with Baidu’s genes. A former Baidu technical department employee said to the investment network that Baidu is the first in the industry for information flow technology, and the byte is second, but the real moat of the platform is not in algorithm technology, but in the construction of high-quality content.
But Baidu’s content has always been criticized, which directly affects the search experience. Baidu has had a content pool creation plan: In 2017, the Baijia number plans to accumulate inward.Capacity producers are divided into 10 billion yuan; in 2018, Baidu further launched the “Millions of Annual Salary” program, hoping to support more high-quality content creators; in addition, Baidu also laid out short video tracks, creating good-looking videos, national small videos and so on. However, this wave of content subsidies eventually attracted a large number of traffic to the number party, but instead made the 100 family name synonymous with low-quality content.
The investment network has previously learned that in order to tackle the information flow, this year is the year of Baidu’s solid content foundation. In the quality and quantity, we are catching up with today’s headlines, and we have made many improvements on the products. For example, the online “Baidu News”, the benchmark microblogging, the purpose is to reduce the content production threshold, increase UGC content, and strengthen the activity of the hand-applicable App.
The battle for information flow is not yet flat, and the search wars are starting again. When the byte hopping began to impact the market value of hundreds of millions of dollars, it was uneasy to stay in the information flow battlefield. It started the commercialization of search at the beginning of this year. Recently, it issued a job advertisement, saying that it should do a full-network search and cover it. Today’s headlines, vibrato, watermelon, volcano, know the car and other products, plans to create an ideal search platform.
Even if Baidu has been going downhill, the market value has even been surpassed by NetEase recently, but it is still the “big boss” in the search field.
According to statecounter data, China’s search engine market share in July 2019, including Baidu was 76.42%, Sogou was 11.35%, Shenma was 4.71%, Google was 2.85%, and Good Search was 2.4%. It should be 2.06%. A number of media analysts believe that the value of bytebeat search is to provide value-added services for users in the platform, and can not shake the basic disk of Baidu search, but the byte-hopping entry will definitely divide Baidu’s search advertisement.
The former Baidu technical staff said that from a technical point of view, “there is no gap between byte-hopping and Baidu, but users are accustomed to using Baidu.“
3.Li Yanhong and Zhang Yiming’s “Shopping Cart”
The integration of traffic and content is the main theme of the second half, because the increase of mobile Internet has reached the bottleneck, and only the amount of storage. According to QuestMobile data, the overall MAU growth of China Mobile Internet in the first quarter of 2019 was only 7.62 million, which was more than 3 million compared with the same period of last year. The year-on-year growth rate in March fell below 4% for the first time.
The “rich” giants began to use the hands of capital to draw “allies”. In recent years, Baidu has invested in content, including games, music, video sites, short videos, and information. It has invested in fast hands, Netease cloud music, everyoneVideo, pear video, 蜻蜓FM, Kay Uncle storytelling, etc. Baidu Investment knows that it continues its focus on content and small programs. After the cooperation, the 100 million questions and answers in the whole station will be connected to Baidu App in the form of smart small programs, and will be personalized to different users through AI technology in Baidu search and information flow.
Baidu layout content can also be connected to hardware such as intelligent audio developed by it. When Baidu invested in “Kai Shu storytelling”, it said that it would use intelligent voice interaction and other technologies to enrich and enhance the content and service experience of “Kai Shu storytelling”; at the same time, “Kai Shu storytelling” will be connected to Baidu App, Baidu products such as smart small programs and small smart speakers.
壹 观察 observation analysis said that the investment logic of byte hopping is mainly based on “content” as the core, and the strategic layout of output, social and advertising business. Previously, the byte jump has invested in star projects such as Tiger, Musical.ly, and Comic. By investing in mergers and acquisitions, the bytebeat has successfully hatched the vibrato, and it has also made great strides in overseas markets. Bytes has always been a favorite for content. It established a content investment fund for investing in early new media content startup projects in January 2018, with a scale of 200 million yuan. At the end of 2018, it was reported by foreign media. Byte Beat intends to set up its first 10 billion yuan (about 1.45 billion US dollars) venture capital fund, which will be mainly used to invest in high-quality enterprises in the field of artificial intelligence and content.
But the next content battle will be even more difficult. This is because Baidu’s husk, knowing, fast-handed and other companies are standing behind Tencent. According to CVSource’s investment data, Tencent is the company with the largest number of joint ventures in Baidu, with a total of 22 investments. This may mean that Baidu and Tencent will still be in the same capital camp in the future.
Because of the bytebeats that have challenged Tencent’s position in short video, social, games and other fields, Tencent’s attitude towards it is obviously not as friendly as Baidu. The two sides exchanged ideas from the founder’s circle of friends.About the war to the court, the duration lasted for a year, and Tencent’s WeChat still blocked the byte-beating system, but opened it to another small giant.
According to TechCrunch, Tencent was exposed in February this year to the D-round financing of Reddit, the US social news aggregator. At that time, the analysis said that if the transaction was successful, it would cut the byte hopping and replicate the possibility of successful Musical.ly in the overseas information field. This transaction will also become the beginning of Tencent’s strategic oppression of byte hopping overseas. Tencent’s attitude towards Tencent’s position in short video, social, games and other areas has obviously not been as friendly to Baidu. The two sides have gone from the founder’s circle of friends, the public relations debate to the court, and lasted for a year. Moreover, Tencent’s WeChat still blocked the byte-beating products, but it was open to the short. Another little giant in the video is fast.
In April this year, Livemint reported that ShareChat, a social content application in India, is in contact with Tencent and plans to raise $200 million. According to the report, ShareChat’s financing is mainly to cope with the challenge from the byte beating Helo. Tencent will use capital and strategic advantages to help ShareChat against byte jitter.
But on the other side of the coin, Baidu and Tencent’s challenge of bytebeat is also a normal phenomenon of technological change in the industry cycle. Whether it is a newcomer or an old-fashioned giant, the situation is the same in an extremely competitive environment. If you don
Yu Jun, vice president of Baidu’s original products, said that the change of the industry life cycle always starts with subversive new technologies. The spotlights have once shined through a new industry, making them the fastest growing economic engine. The focus is on search engines, but if one day, search engines can’t bring more value to users – no matter how hard to improve, the improvement of user experience is negligible, its light and limelight are replaced by another industry. It will also be a necessity.
This day seems to have arrived.