The interactive encyclopedia has fallen into the “flow shortage”.
The acquisition has been settled, let’s talk about the interactive encyclopedia.
The founder Pan Haidong probably did not expect that after the “three questions Li Yanhong” in 2010 and the first shot of the 3.15 party in 2017, the interactive encyclopedia that ushered in the third high-light moment of his career is no longer surnamed Pan. .
Doing business is a good thing. From cooperation to acquisition, the byte jump took only four months.
In April this year, Interactive Encyclopedia announced a long-term strategic cooperation with today’s headlines; on August 14, the byte jumped through Beijing Quantum Technology Co., Ltd. holding 22.22%, becoming its largest shareholder; again on August 27 Beijing Interactive Extreme Technology Co., Ltd., which was registered on August 9th, acquired the remaining 77.78% of its shares.
Although the bytebeat has already entered the “buy, buy and buy” rhythm, the acquisition of interactive encyclopedia is still given strategic significance by the outside world.
According to a late PostPost report, Zhang Yiming said in an internal speech: “If there is no expansion of the search scene and high-quality content, the headline’s growth space may only have 40 million DAU left.” Then the “headline search” went online, and the form changed from the station to the whole network search.
At the end of 2018, after knowing that F-round financing was initiated, byte hopping was still among the competitors. However, because Zhang Yiming is not willing to raise the price further, he knows that he has chosen to complete the investment by the fast-handed, Baidu and investment, and the original investors such as Tencent and Today Capital continue to invest 434 million US dollars.
Obviously, Interactive Encyclopedia has taken on one of the puzzles to complement Zhang Yiming’s “Quality Content”.
It is yet to be seen that the interactive encyclopedia can help the “bumpout” of bytebeats. This time we talked about it as a “fossil-level” product, how the interactive encyclopedia has not been popularized on the public level, but it has been today’s.
Interactive Encyclopedia has also tried to match Baidu Encyclopedia and define itself as “the world’s largest Chinese encyclopedia.”
In a sense, this formulation has also been established. Compared with Baidu Encyclopedia, which was officially launched in 2008, it was launched in 2005.The interactive encyclopedia in November did have a first-mover advantage.
Interactive Encyclopedia is also a product of the vent. At the beginning of the century, the C2C (Copy To China) model became popular. For example, the UGC video pioneer YouTube has a bunch of “disciples” led by potatoes, and the portal ancestor Yahoo has spawned the next four portals.
The success of Wikipedia at the time was a time for Chinese entrepreneurs to see the potential of the WiKi model.
It is important to note that WiKi is not equal to Wikipedia. The former is a multi-person collaborative writing system. It was once translated as “wiki” in China, essentially “a struggle between one person and a group of people”, while the latter (Wikipedia) is the product of the former.
Anyone can edit a webpage, but while the edit is successful, other creators of that page will also be notified. Once identified as a malicious modification, participants can use the Version Control of the WiKi system to retrieve the correct version in time.
Compared with one-way information transmission, WiKi products, as an early form of UGC, have realized the low-cost, fast and efficient production of content by mobilizing the wisdom of the user community, thus largely compensating for the high-quality content of Web2.0 early Internet. Missing.
The characteristics of WiKi determine that it fits better with the C-oriented products at the time of landing. Around 2004, China has successively created a network of Tianshu, Weiku, and interactive wikis (later renamed interactive encyclopedia), and ALLWIKI and Tianke wikis, which are perpendicular to computer expertise.
However, the entrepreneurs at that time were more advocators of the classical Internet spirit. They were deeply inspired by Wikipedia’s “open, free, neutral” initiative to “C2C” and did not have enough enthusiasm for commercialization. .
For example, the founder of Weiku, Bao Minghao, said in an interview in 2006:
“I started as a wiki as a hobby. The wiki represents a trend in the development of new Internet technologies, and culturally, it is one of the most open, shared, and free cultures of the Internet. Way.”
Ye Qunfeng, who founded the first Chinese wiki website “Network Tianshu”, has always placed “public welfare” in the first place:
“If a site survives, the problem is not too big. Just like our online book, this kind of site is completely maintained by the enthusiasm of some entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial teams. After all, the maintenance cost is not high, everyone is Can hold on.”
In a sense, if you use WiKi as a business, you can hardly find an opponent at the time.
Before the creation of the interactive encyclopedia, Pan Haidong was not a WiKi fan.
During the pre-2002 Boston University Ph.D., Pan Haidong began to participate in Sino-US non-governmental exchange activities, contacted a large number of Internet practitioners, and eventually took the Internet as a career direction. In the beginning, he intended to do a local search, but the fiery business of WiKi projects at home and abroad changed his mind.
For a long time, Interactive Encyclopedia was the only WiKi startup with a professional business operations team and commercial exploration.
This is largely inseparable from the professional influence of Pan Haidong, who said in an interview:
“Because a lot of learning is about operations management, operations research, this is also a good help for the future business process. Because system engineering is very important, how do you manpower, financial resources, Achieving a good balance in all aspects of material resources, optimizing the results, and finally having the lowest cost of your business output, this gives a lot of guidance in terms of thinking.”
Compared with his peers, “using love to generate electricity,” Pan Haidong began to seek capital assistance and commercialization early in the morning.
In the half year after the interview of the peer in March 2006, the interactive encyclopedia announced the completion of the $3 million financing led by DFJ. The interactive encyclopedia calls it “5 minutes to convince DFJ investment”.
Shortly after the launch, Interactive Encyclopedia introduced YELLOWIKI and its own HDwiki for commercialization. The former is a classification information similar to 58 cities; the latter is for the small and medium-sized stationmasters open source Chinese Wiki station system.
One side is the first commercialized interactive encyclopedia, and the other is Baidu Encyclopedia, which holds the traffic entry of the PC Internet era. The early generation of technology enthusiasts’ “power generation with love” will soon be unable to support.
The Internet Tianshu officially stopped on October 7, 2007. The Chinese wiki annual conference hosted by the company has never been able to run the second session, and Weiku, who has been lingering for many years, is also insisting until February 2010. It will not open again after 25 days.
In a sense, the era of independent encyclopedia products has ended.