Is the ear economy a pseudo economy?
Editor’s note: This article is from the WeChat public account “Qioupai” (ID: jioupai), author: Tian Huanzi, editor: Wang Shi.
Himalayan, which has been frequently rumored to be listed, is finally going to be listed on the US stock market.
During the May 1st holiday, Himalaya submitted a listing prospectus to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Before it, lychee became the “first online audio stock”, but the unsatisfactory market performance of lychee gave the outside world a solid “early” The absurdity of the concept of “economy”.
The prospectus of Himalaya shows that from 2018 to 2020, Himalaya’s revenue will be 1.48 billion yuan, 2.68 billion yuan, and 4.05 billion yuan, respectively. Unlike lychee, Himalaya is diversifying beyond live broadcasting in order to get rid of the shackles of a single profit model. Business model exploration. Financial data shows that Himalaya’s paid subscription revenue accounts for about 40% of total revenue, and nearly 60% is obtained from businesses such as advertising, live broadcasting, and education services.
No matter which direction you are exploring, in general, Himalaya has not yet made a profit so far, with net losses of 774 million yuan, 773 million yuan, and 605 million yuan in the same period over the past three years.
From the company to the industry, there are many interpretations of Himalayas from the outside world, such as the weak liquidity of the business model, whether the content ecology has a moat, the old problem of copyright, and the low perception of capital on the ear economy. There is no doubt about these. It’s the secret pain of the Himalayas.
How did these problems spread from the UGC (User Produced Content) end to the user end in the Himalayas?
There are more anchors than players
“I am very happy today, our live broadcast room actually became a hit.”
At four o’clock in the afternoon, when the live broadcast was about to end, there were only 16 people online in the live broadcast room of Himalayan anchor Lin Yu, with 419 participants, but this was the liveliest time in her live broadcast room recently. In the last few minutes of closing the wheat, a listener joked in the live broadcast room, “This is the end of today’s show, let’s unforget it tonight”.
In the one-and-a-half-hour live broadcast, Lin Yu and the anchor opened a few “qualifying matches” and “PK”, but in the end Lin Yu all failed.
In addition to the live broadcast rooms where pure music is played, in various live broadcast rooms that require chat and interaction, most of the forms of competitions between the anchors are pure chat, singing, and storytelling.
The final victory depends on the gift assists of the listeners. If there are no local tyrant gifts, “careful” and “little praise” are very important, and of these two gifts, “careful” is You need listeners to reach a certain length of listening time to get it, and “Small Likes” requires listeners to spend money to buy.
Furthermore, the final decision on whether the host can obtain the gift assists from the listeners is also determined by the interactive atmosphere between the host and the listeners in the live broadcast room.
On the morning of May 20At 7 o’clock in the morning, Yu Yan, the anchor of the morning show, won a “Romantic Tree House” presented by an old fan in a handful of games, worth 3,000 yuan. “Thank you brother Yan for the tree house!” In the live broadcast room, Yu Yan expressed her gratitude to the fan one after another. After about half an hour, a fan gave another wishing bottle worth 110 yuan.
Yu Yan’s live broadcast room was relaxed and pleasant. The live broadcast was supposed to end at 7:30, but as she received the first “Romantic Tree House” since the broadcast today, she was happy and decided to hang it for another half an hour. For a long time, brushing teeth while applying makeup and listening to friends chattering. When the live broadcast room was closed at 8 o’clock, the number of online live broadcast of Yuyan was 10, and there were 883 participants in and out.
Yu Yan is the host who joined the Hima Live Guild, but without the live broadcast style of Doudou, the host who joined the guild, Yu Yan is not as vivid and smooth as Yu Yan.
Doudou told Oddity Pie that there are still some people walking in her live broadcast room. “I used to practice piano alone in the live broadcast room. Now I don’t know how to talk awkwardly. Therefore, the live broadcast room is relatively deserted and the number of people online is often Single digits.” Rather than choose to join the guild, Doudou has two considerations. “One is that I want to be free, and the other is that I don’t know how to ask for gifts. It doesn’t make sense to add a guild if I love it.”
Can the host make money on the live broadcast at Ximao?
After a live broadcast, Doudou can get a few dollars as a gift, “but soon these dollars will be sent back to other anchors.” Doudou said, between Hima and the anchor There are changes in the sharing mechanism at each stage, “Now it is divided into half.” But after joining Hima Live for three years, Doudou did not make any money.
In order to maintain their enthusiasm for the live broadcast, Doudou, Lin Yu and several other like-minded anchor friends held a group to warm up and volunteered to support each other. In their WeChat fan base, they often forwarded the link of their respective live broadcasts to Dian Live. Now, they will appear in their respective live broadcast rooms to help enliven the atmosphere in the live broadcast rooms.
Odd-Even Group entered the live broadcast room through these links, and found that some anchors were down after 10 minutes of broadcasting. Doudou said that this is normal.
On the interface of Xima Live, most of the anchors have participated in the range of tens to hundreds, and thousands of them are relatively few.
Doudou said, “The era of all the people is an anchor” is also being staged on the live broadcast of Hima. From a player to an anchor in a live broadcast room, there is no threshold, only registration is required. “Many people are just playing and playing. “This also leads to more anchors than Little Ears (pure players). Therefore, if the anchors don’t move with each other, the live broadcast room will be veryIt gets cold easily.
Other people came to live broadcast because they wanted to be audiobook anchors. In Hima, audiobook anchors have a threshold. “In the early stage, you must reach a certain anchor level, and the number of fans can reach 1000 before you can try. Sound.”
Lin Yu told the odd and even faction that her original intention of starting the live broadcast more than a month ago was to record audiobooks, so in order to upgrade the anchor’s level, she had some time every day, and she would hang up the duration to speed up, “Add a few more points, by the way. Fans.”
Limited by her strength, Lin Yu had not considered making money through live broadcast, so many guilds contacted her to join the guild, but she refused. Lin Yu said, “The main thing is to keep myself going, and then I don’t want my friends to give up.”
Doudou is different. She entered the live broadcast circle from the audiobook field, and there are other reasons that support her to continue to “talk” in the live broadcast room. “The live broadcast is to keep this circle open and receive some in time. News related to audiobooks.” For example, after the copyright of the book bought by the anchor himself is recorded, he will not be able to charge for it. “I didn’t know it before, because I knew other anchors on the live broadcast, and I only knew it after listening to others.” /p>
In Himalaya’s prospectus, Himalaya expressed support for this behavior, “Live broadcasts can have significant synergy with recorded content and enable content creators to expand their user base and seek new ways to connect with users. Method.”
The declining ear economy
The situation where there are more anchors than players, reveals that live broadcast alone cannot run through the business model.
According to CIC data, by 2020, the number of China Mobile’s online audio MAU will only account for 16.1% of the total number of mobile Internet MAUs. In contrast, the penetration rates of Chinese online music, short videos and long videos are 56.7%, 73.8% and 74.2%, respectively.
In the Himalaya’s content supply model, there have always been three pillars of PGC (professional production content), UGC (user-produced content), and PUGC (professional user-produced content). In 2020, the active creators of related content will be 2,100, 5.15 million and 4,600, the content accounted for approximately 0.16%, 99.67% and 0.17%. In terms of total listening time, Himalaya’s UGC business has always been far ahead of PGC and PUGC, accounting for 51.9% in 2020.
In terms of specific content forms, Himalaya has developed five forms, including audiobooks, audio entertainment (such as cross talk and storytelling), podcasts, advanced knowledge sharing, and audio live streaming.
Live audio is a UGC model, but UGC’s profit model has been plagued by major audio platforms.
Take the lychee rooted in UGC as an example. Its revenue is highly dependent on users who are willing to reward and pay. It once reached 98 in 2018 and Q3 quarter of 2019..3% and 99.1%, the single profit model is not optimistic by the market, which caused the stock price of Litchi to plummet.
Litchi suffered a break after going public in January 2020, falling from the lowest issue price of $11 to about $2. At the beginning of 2021, Clubhouse became popular overnight, which directly drove the stock price of related voice dating concept stocks to soar. Affected by this, the stock price of Litchi soared 350% in just three trading days, but it quickly fell from the highest point by more than 60%.
Therefore, in the business logic of Himalaya, PGC and PUGC content, whose content accounted for no more than 0.5%, are currently the key content sectors to increase the subscription rate. The prospectus shows that Himalaya has placed its strategic focus on top PGCs. As of December 31, 2020, Himalaya has established cooperative relationships with more than 140 publishers such as CITIC Press and Jinjiang Literature Net.
On PUGC, the prospectus shows that many PUGC creators on the Himalayas first started using them as users and uploaded UGC to the platform. With the training and cultivation of the platform, UGC became more high-quality and professional, and gradually Become a PUGC creator.
In order to avoid falling into the dilemma of a single profit model, Himalaya has diversified a variety of monetization models.
According to Himalaya’s prospectus, its revenue is mainly composed of five parts: paid subscription, advertising, live broadcast, education services, and other innovative products and services. Among them, paid subscription is the foundation of Himalaya’s revenue.
The prospectus shows that from 2018 to 2020, Himalaya’s revenue will be 1.48 billion yuan, 2.68 billion yuan, and 4.05 billion yuan, respectively. Among them, paid subscription revenue accounts for about 40% of total revenue, and nearly 60% from Acquired from advertising, live broadcasting, education services and other businesses.
In the 2020 revenue data of 4.05 billion yuan, paid subscriptions contributed 1.7 billion yuan in revenue, advertising and live broadcast services contributed 1.07 billion yuan and 720 million yuan in revenue, respectively, and the growth rate of advertising revenue was as high as 73.9% ; Education services, other innovative products and service revenues were 230 million yuan and 280 million yuan, respectively.
In the first quarter of 2021, Himalaya’s user payment rate reached 13.3%, an increase from 1.8% in the same period in 2018 and 4.3% in 2019, and 7.9% in 2020.
From the perspective of the proportion of costs from 2018 to 2020, most of Himalaya’s money is spent onMarketing and revenue sharing-In 2020, Himalaya has cooperated with more than 160,000 content creators and third-party IP copyrights, sharing a revenue share of 1.3 billion, and this cost has increased by 43.9% year-on-year. In 2020, Himalaya’s marketing expenditure reached 1.68 billion yuan, an increase of 40% year-on-year.
The traditional model of burning money for revenue is still playing out here in Himalayas. In the first quarter of 2021, Himalaya’s user payment rate reached 13.3%, compared with 1.8% in the same period in 2018 and 4.3% in 2019. 7.9%, both have increased.
In order to seek new profit opportunities, in 2019, Himalaya has incubated many educational services for users aged 0-12, and developed an independent “Himalaya Children” APP. The prospectus shows that the income of education services will increase from RMB 12.87 million in 2019 to RMB 228 million in 2020.
No matter which direction you are exploring, in general, Himalaya has not yet made a profit, with net losses of 773.7 million yuan, 773.3 million yuan, and 605.1 million yuan in the same period over the past three years.
The ear economy is difficult to restore the current decline.
Poor user experience
As a ToC audio software, Odd-Even has learned from digital consumers that the experience of Himalaya is not good for users.
An old user of the Himalayas, Lele, said that he paid for the contents of the Himalayas for nearly 4 years. Suddenly one day, his account was directly blocked, but when he took the initiative to contact customer service, he was only informed that it was involved If you crawl their paid content, if you don’t support unblocking, there will be no more audio.
Until the day of being blocked, Lele still has about 3 years of membership service that has not expired. Lele felt very puzzled, “What content did a paying user crawl on them?”
Without any channel of explanation and communication, Lele was directly judged by the platform as crawling paid content, and the unconsumed membership service was not told how to deal with it. “There is no result if you contact actively.”
Now, this APP of Himalaya has entered Lele’s download blacklist. “It can be seen that this company has serious problems with its attitude towards users, especially downstream users, and the way it handles things. Treat Himalaya with caution.”
In addition to the extreme blockade encountered by Lele, for the membership model, Himalaya still has the problem of double charges. Xiao Yang likes to listen to books. For convenience, he recharged the membership. “The more you listen, the worse you feel. You have to pay again, and don’t have to pay very little.”
Xiao Liu told the odd and even faction that he also encountered the same problem. In 2020, he bought a full-year membership of 178 yuan, but the quality courses are pitiful, and in addition, he has to recharge and pay. “It needs to spend money to recharge the so-called Happy point.”
And what made him most unacceptable was, “Be happyForget it, I also deliberately refused to recharge the whole number. I had to leave a few dollars in the account. I couldn’t take it out and couldn’t spend it. I could only keep piecing it together. In the end, the remaining money would always be in his account. “
Zlili downloaded the independent “Himalayan Kids” app developed by Himalaya, and finally found that the members are independent, but the accounts are not independent. “Himalayan members and children version members are sold in bundles.”
In addition to the above-mentioned blockade and membership issues, Oddity Pie learned from some post-95 users that as an old-brand audio software, the intuitive feeling of Himalaya is clutter.
A former user, Xiao Li, told Oddity that when she downloaded and opened the software again after a few years, various entrances, various dry goods, and advertisements appeared on the interface, which made her not sure that she should listen. What, “This has become a sound information explosion streaming software. Although the content above has a clear classification, there are too many categories and too messy. Unless the user has a clear goal and knows that he wants to What content to listen to, otherwise it will take a long time to filter out effective content.”
Xiao Li said that in the recommendation column of the Himalaya homepage, using big data algorithms to “guess what you like” can’t guess what she likes.
In this column, I slid down from the beginning, “I can’t slide to the bottom at all. What are the popular radio stations, Hima hot search list, humanities hot search list, voice room, popular radio stations, too many, not intuitive, and also judge No matter how the quality of the content is.”
Returning to the content on the Himalaya platform itself, a senior listener who has been exposed to audio novels on Himalayas told the odd-even faction, “To be honest, the audio quality of many novels is not good. If you make a better audio, it should be better. Popular.”
When there are more Himalayan anchors than players, do most audiobooks have professional recording equipment? Is the training for audiobook anchors in place?
The aforementioned audiobook anchor Doudou told the odd-even that the platform did not provide special recording equipment for the anchor. “I didn’t understand at first, but bought a set of more than 200, but found it was not very good, and then bought another set. More than 600, when I went to the platform to audition, I found some flaws that affected the mid-tone temperament. Then I bought a set of more than 2,000, so I spent a lot of money on the equipment.”
Recently, she, who likes to record audiobooks, has reached a bottleneck period. She often doesn’t know where to put the sound. “So now my recordings are a bit unstable and a bit erratic.”
A fan listener of Doudou told Oddity Pie, “Doudou works very hard, the more recording the better, the better the equipment, and the VIP level. At the beginning, the characters of Doudoulu were not obvious enough, like reading a book. Later, the interpretation is getting better and better.” The listener fan said that a qualified audiobook must be qualified for the most basic radio, and the characters in the interpretation are full of emotions, rich in layers, and distinctive character characteristics can be regarded as a good work. .
On the Himalayas, he often heard a lot of audiobook content recorded directly with his mobile phone, and the noise generated by the surrounding environment was also recorded, “It’s very noisy.”
Write at the end
An industry insider once said when talking about the realization of the audio economy, “This is not a good business. The industry chain is too long, the cycle of making money is too long, and it relies too much on upstream and downstream. Problems in any link will affect Monetize.”
The fact is also true. Whether it is the disclosed prospectus, or from the UGC anchor to the user level, you can already see the specific dilemmas faced by Himalaya.
The large amount of UGC content gathered on the platform does increase user stickiness to a certain extent and reduce the production cost of the content, but the drawbacks are also obvious. The huge UGC content will inevitably bring a lot of low-quality content.
The Himalayas, which has been marching towards the audio “content aircraft carrier”, has changed the way audiences listen to programs and broke the traditional radio station’s monopoly on the audio industry, allowing the audience to move from being a passive receiver of information to being able to actively search. User role changes in content of interest.
But from the feedback of user experience in reality, we see that in today’s information explosion, the advantages of the Himalayan “content aircraft carrier” are disappearing.
But in a difficult situation, apart from content, what else can Himalayas rely on to save him?
*The pictures in this article are all from the Internet
(The characters in the text are all pseudonyms)