Flow is not a substance, but a life. It has its own name and its own emotions.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “ What does keso think of ” (ID: kesoview), by keso.
The mainstay of Nyingchi, Tibet. May 27, 2007
In the past 20 years, housing prices have risen the most, and prices that have risen faster than housing prices are traffic prices. Many people are lamented that the demographic bonus has been consumed and the traffic bonus has finally been consumed. But even if there is no traffic bonus, one of the users who is not a lot of fans, “Second Brother Review Car”, can sell 288 new cars at once by organizing car group purchases for fans, which exceeds the monthly sales of most 4S stores. Why is that?
Li Jiacheng said: Lot, lot, or lot. On the Internet, this sentence is: traffic, traffic, or traffic.
But at first, the Internet did not have the concept of traffic until the Web appeared.
1. Browser
A web browser is required to access the web. Founded in 1994, Netscape positions itself as a software company. Its flagship product is a Web browser, a basic tool used to access the Web. At that time, the Web was just a simple graphic page with hyperlinks, and it had not yet shown the wild momentum to replace everything.
Netscape was the world ’s largest user web browser, controlling the largest amount of traffic on the Internet at that time. Almost all web access was sent from Netscape, but Netscape didn’t seem to think of making money by diverting others.
Netscape is so popular that it stunned software giant Microsoft. Windows 95 did not include a browser when it was released. The famous Internet Explorer 1.0 was placed in an extension package called Microsoft Plus !, which was released at the same time as WIndows 95. The package cost $ 49.99.
Released from IE 1.0By the time Netscape sold AOL, in just 3 years, Netscape had completely lost the battle with Microsoft’s browser. Years later, Firefox, the successor of Netscape, chose to make money by diverting search engines and other services, and Google has been its biggest goldsmith for many years. Unfortunately, Google’s Chrome browser is also Firefox’s biggest competitor.
The tragic history of Netscape’s defeat to Microsoft has taught latecomers that you should avoid giants, play a giant that you do n’t play, and also play bad games. For example, become an Internet company and make full use of the traffic you have. Resources.
In 1994, the Web flourished and new websites are born every day. Yang Zhiyuan and David Ferro, who were doing research at Stanford University at the time, were particularly passionate about surfing the Internet. They felt the need to collect and organize a directory of their favorite websites, just like running a TV show newspaper, so that They are the same surfer. This was “Yang Zhiyuan’s World Wide Web Wizard”, and later Yahoo. The navigation station quickly caught Netscape’s attention, and a direct button was added to the Netscape browser. At this moment, Yang Zhiyuan’s World Wide Web Wizard broke out instantly and became the website with the most traffic at that time.
Microsoft never considered Yahoo as a competitor, and even later wanted to acquire Yahoo, because in Microsoft’s view, Yahoo is not a technology company and does not conflict with Microsoft’s business.
Yamohoo ’s first CEO, Motorola-born Timothy Kugel, said: “Our goal is to become the largest media company in the world.” In 1996, Yahoo went public, and its business expanded rapidly, becoming the first in history. A portal website generates a steady flow of traffic through rich content, and the steady flow of traffic brings a steady stream of advertising revenue.
In 2001, after the dot-com bubble burst, Yahoo invited Terry Semel to be Yahoo’s CEO. Semel is a Hollywood big man, and Hollywood is essentially a traffic business, which has allowed Yahoo to go further and further on the road to media companies.
Yahoo, whose technology is not as good as people, later declined and eventually sold, but this does not obliterate a series of far-reaching effects on Internet commerce. For example, free is a business model, and content is traffic. Of course, the original navigation station can also be regarded as a kind of content, but it soon exited Yahoo’s core business.
Yang Zhiyuan probably wouldn’t think of it. Ten years later, the navigation station model that had been abandoned by Yahoo has found its second spring in China across the ocean, hao123, 265, 2345, 9991, 360 navigation … A large number of seemingly similar navigation stations (everyone in China is accustomed to calling them web sites) are struggling to compete for users ’browsers.Start page. It is said that the prosperity of Chinese websites is because Chinese users have a relatively low level of education. They do not lose websites and do not search, so they can only give them a dense menu for them to click, no matter where they click, traffic is all over. Users are valuable because they can contribute traffic.
The involvement of large companies, such as Baidu’s acquisition of hao123, Google China’s acquisition of 265, 360 made 360 navigation by itself, making URL sites with low technical barriers look more attractive. These big companies don’t necessarily really recognize this low-tech model, after all, they still recognize traffic. This has further exacerbated the scramble for browser start pages.
Each browser has only one start page. This contention will inevitably be accompanied by gangsterization of the website—forcibly setting and locking the start page. Those with strong technical strength will also adopt various technical means to modify and replace competitors Settings, and prevent your settings from being replaced by competitors.
This rogue has begun as early as the 3721 era of the end of the 20th century, but with the intensification of competition, the business ethics and moral bottom line have been repeatedly penetrated. Later, rogue software became a major public nuisance in China’s Internet. A large number of prominent companies have become developers and users of rogue software, and finally triggered government intervention.
Chinese Internet entrepreneurs have a particularly strong traffic awareness. From the beginning, they did not consider the browser to be a software business, and even the operating system was not a software business. Do you remember the tomato garden? Distributing pirated Windows is the same as competing for the address bar, start page, and even the entire browser for traffic. Therefore, it is not difficult to understand why China has the most browser brands in the world. From the browser that gave IE a shell in the early days to the dozens of browsers developed based on the open source project Chromium, they want to control the users from the source. flow.
Traffic represents the scale of the business, the potential returns, the venture capital, and all visible and invisible benefits.
2. Content
The earliest emerging Internet business model in China is not a navigation station or rogue software, but a portal site copied from the United States. At the end of the last century, a lot of portals appeared in China, Sina, Sohu, Netease, China.com, TOM … They are all Yahoo’s disciples, not the same. They moved the contents of traditional media to the Internet at extremely cheap or no cost, thus breaking the original time and geographical restrictions of these contents and bringing huge traffic to themselves.
This model is called a news supermarket, and everything in the supermarket is sold by others. So the story of the portal is actually a story of borrowing chickens to lay eggs. Later, the chickens also realized that the transaction was a bit lossy, wondering how they became portal workers.
However, portal traffic patterns have n’t been around for long.