A few days ago, when Tantan founder Wang Yu answered "Why did Momo buy us instead of us buying Momo?", he made a lot of witty words, and the quotations came out frequently:
"Momo is a major shareholder."
"For face, I don't think it matters who buys who."
"After the merger is completed, Tantan and Momo will not communicate with each other."
"We do what we love to do."
……
However, is such a "love" socializing with strangers really the AA system?
Does this really allow strangers to socialize and find a reason to live?
Let's review the history first:
Earlier, Momo announced that it will acquire 100% equity of Tantan by issuing shares and cash to Tantan. The consideration includes about 2.65 million ADS shares and about US$600 million in cash. The acquisition is expected to be completed in the second quarter of this year.
As a result, the first Internet M&A case in the Year of the Dog was settled in the social field of strangers. Although this $700 million deal is nothing compared to BAT's multi-billion mergers and acquisitions, for social applications, it seems to confirm the need to stay warm.
Is it really necessary? Stranger social has entered the era of oligarchy? Or into a dead end?
Male to female sex ratio imbalance? Momo came to Tantan to "talk"
The answer is actually no. Although Momo, which has already used live streaming as its main profit model, is entering the pan-social field, in this merger and acquisition, Momo has shown expectations for Tantan’s differentiated user structure.
Data shows that Momo has more than 300 million users, and the ratio of male to female users is 4:1; on the contrary, Tantan, which has a total of 110 million users, maintains a male to female ratio of 1:1. Others believe that a 3:2 ratio of males to females socializing with strangers is ideal.
Therefore, in the words released by Momo and Tantan executives, there is such a public opinion orientation: Momo is a product that focuses on the needs of male users, while Tantan is a product that focuses on high-quality female users. , the sum of the two is exactly neutral. Moreover, Tantan's users are younger than Momo's, just forming a generational alternation to ensure the continuity of strangers' social interaction...
"We also recognize Tantan's product concept centered on female user experience." Tang Yan, founder of Momo, declared that the user overlap between Momo and Tantan is not high, and the latter's higher proportion of female users will make up for it Momo has too many male users.
But the truth may not be so simple. The differences in users and Momo's extensive exploration in the field of pan-entertainment have indeed caused its own blurred positioning on the basic point of socializing with strangers, and it may encounter rising stars as a result. Such as Tantan's counterattack.
This was originally Momo's route to successfully break out of the WeChat encirclement, and it was also an unavoidable and avoidable problem in pan-entertainment social networking. Of course, acquisition was the simplest and most rude solution.
"We met Tang Yan for the first time on January 26. We didn't know each other before, and we didn't meet each other. We were preparing for a new round of financing at the beginning." Tantan founder Wang Yu said when reviewing the acquisition process. The entire acquisition, from the time both parties realized the results were announced, took less than a month.
For Tantan, acquisitions are also a form of financing, and there is nothing too much about it. Because for the two stranger social applications, they have not many actions to choose from on stranger social.
Socializing with strangers in a narrow sense will only fall into the pit of pan-entertainment
In the social field, it seems unrealistic to want to defeat Tencent's hegemony. Although Momo and Tantan have successfully opened a gap.
But there is one thing that has to be thought-provoking: when they get nutrients from "strangers" and grow, they often end up in live broadcast, games and other pan-entertainment profit ecosystems.
The results of it! It looks more and more like WeChat. But once it grows into a WeChat model, it will be a big problem.
There is a somewhat biased view, but it is not necessarily wrong: Tencent has completed the generational change through QQ and WeChat, and they are mutually continuous, and the post-00s are more willing to use QQ, which is an example; Similar changes.
Therefore, the AA-system status that Wang Yu said after the mergers and acquisitions actually originated from this.
However, these are still considered in the narrow sense of strangers’ social interaction. In other words, the key point to consider is not strangers or acquaintances, nor socializing, but chatting, and thus fall into the anxiety of aging social users and product changes. .
The most typical performance is the live broadcast, which is the most profitable business of Momo.
Before the launch of the live broadcast business, Momo's monthly active user growth rate fell sharply for two consecutive quarters, and even experienced a negative month-on-month growth. However, after catching up with the live broadcast in 2015, Momo's user data bottomed out and rebounded. With the help of the next month, the monthly active users will move towards the level of over 100 million, and the growth rate of the performance in 2016 will reach 271%. However, at a time when the live broadcast dividend is already thin, the figure has now dropped to 16.65%.
When live broadcasts are not enough to stimulate users, they can only go back to the way of stimulating new users.
Socializing with strangers in a broad sense makes verticals promising
Socializing with strangers in a broad sense is actually more common, but it is often not recognized as socializing. For example, Zhihu, which takes the knowledge sharing route, Douban, which has literary and artistic feelings, B station of the second dimension, and Xiaohongshu, which has overseas purchase experience and product experience, are actually a kind of strangers socializing in essence.
Only from the point of view of posture, there is no point-to-point communication, but groups of people with the same interests, across ages, industries and classes are gathered in a large community, and people are more unfamiliar and lack realistic intersections. . But on the contrary, because the characteristics of pure physical desire are removed, it makes its stickiness more lasting.
This is the constant state of platform and vertical, the Internet twin.
While WeChat and Momo are peer-to-peer, they are popularized and become platforms; Zhihu, Douban, and Xiaohongshu are one-to-many, but they subdivide users and call them vertical; but in essence, they are just a kind of community.
It can be seen that due to the combination of Momo and Tantan, the debate that there is no latecomer in the social field of strangers triggered by it is a wrong proposition in itself. The key is only how each social form finds a way to monetize in its own field.
Momo chose Tencent’s pan-entertainment monetization path. Although the specific routine is different, it still causes anxiety because it is more and more like WeChat.
How can such anxiety be cracked? In addition to the acquisition of Tantan, there are two ways, and they can be combined into one:
One is to get rid of purely physical desires, and to follow the generalized socialization of strangers to explore the aggregation and realization of more vertical communities;
The second is to follow Tencent's path and maintain profitability while exploring more ways to monetize strangers in a narrow sense, and it is less entertaining.
In fact, this is also a common way of socializing with strangers, whether in a broad or narrow sense.
(Published in the April 2018 issue of Computer Applications Digest)
Zhang Shule People's Network, People's Posts and Telecommunications columnist, Internet and game industry observers