In the wave of the Internet, the once glorious classical Internet platform is now facing unprecedented challenges. From Tiger Pounce to the Himalayas, these former unicorns have been acquired, triggering collective nostalgia for the classical Internet era. This article will delve into the rise and fall of these platforms, analyze why they are gradually losing their advantages in the mobile Internet era, and how vertical content platforms are finding new living space in the current era of giants.
Recently, the dead memories of old Internet fans have begun to attack again. In just half a month, two mergers and acquisitions broke out in the Internet field – Thunder swallowed Hupu for 500 million, and Tencent Music acquired Himalaya for $2.9 billion.
Although Hupu and Himalaya are unicorn companies in different segments, they both have one thing in common, that is, they both have the “taste” of the classical Internet. Unfortunately, these two vertical kings, which have been established for more than ten years and have hundreds of millions of users, ended up selling themselves to survive with a market value lower than their peak.
However, some netizens said that compared with the fate of the Tianya Forum being completely closed in 2023, it is already the best ending for Hupu and Himalaya to be able to “sell themselves to continue their lives”.
Earlier, content communities such as Maopu, Tianya Forum, and Renren had already been closed, and the remaining Douban and Hupu either lay flat and let users lose, or actively transformed and changed. The ebb and flow of the classical Internet is a foregone conclusion, and how much of the Internet memory belonging to a generation can be preserved?
1. The memory of a generation
In 2012, when Yu Jianjun founded the Himalayas, he may have imagined another ending. In 2021, Himalaya was valued at about $5 billion when it first sought to go public.
According to multiple media reports, Tencent contacted Himalaya in 2021, when the asking price was much higher than it is now, and the negotiations have reached the final round, but the final acquisition has not been reached. However, after going around in circles, Himalaya still “selled” itself to Tencent, but its valuation is no longer what it used to be.
The fate of the tiger pounce is even more tortuous. In 2019, ByteDance purchased 30% of Hupu’s shares for 1.26 billion yuan, and according to this estimate, the valuation of Hupu at that time was about 7.7 billion yuan.
To achieve these three challenges, product managers will only continue to appreciate
Good product managers are very scarce, and product managers who understand users, business, and data are still in demand when they go out of the Internet. On the contrary, if you only do simple communication, inefficient execution, and shallow thinking, I am afraid that you will not be able to go through the torrent of the next 3-5 years.
View details >
But 6 years later, Hupu was acquired by Xunlei for 500 million yuan, and founder Cheng Hang’s sentence “It is difficult to take money out of men’s pockets” has become a prophecy. However, from the perspective of user scale, the transaction price of Hupu does not seem to be unjust. In 2017, Hupu said that its monthly active users reached 55 million, but according to Analysys data, its monthly active users in 2020 were only more than 5 million.
From user scale to market valuation, the reason why Himalaya and Hupu “have the same destination” is the epitome of the classical Internet withdrawing from the market.
In the last month of 2024, Renren announced the suspension of service, and the official response was “please wait patiently for our new car to hit the road”, but there will be no more “new cars”, perhaps Renren and netizens have already tacitly agreed.
In 2023, the closure of the Tianya Forum is even more embarrassing. According to a number of media reports, the reason for the sudden “disconnection” of Tianya Forum is telecom arrears. Since then, Tianya Forum has also tried to raise funds for self-help through live broadcasting, but in the end it only raised about 200,000 yuan, which is still a long way from making up for the funding gap, and Tianya Forum can only be reluctantly closed.
But there are not only one or two websites that can’t go back. NetEase Community, Sina Community, Maopu, Baidu Tieba, Iron Blood, Douban…… Those social networking sites that were once full of memories have either disappeared into the depths of history or are no longer what they look like in memories, and no one can stop the torrent of the times.
However, these platforms are not without struggles to save themselves, and “live crowdfunding” like Tianya Forum is a minority, but most of them have tried to go public to raise funds, transform and develop, and even incubate new platforms, but there are few who have succeeded.
Taking Hupu as an example, it launched two IPOs in 2016 and 2019, both of which ended in failure, including high accounts receivable balances and large fluctuations in performance.
According to the data, from 2013 to 2015, the net profit of Hupu fluctuated greatly, 15.1802 million yuan, 7.5037 million yuan and 31.5761 million yuan respectively, which also means that its anti-risk ability is poor and cannot be listed, which seems to be expected.
After the failure of the two IPOs, Hupu also accepted the arrangement of fate. Yin Xuebin, the current CEO of Hupu, once revealed to the media that Hupu has been profitable since 2021, and its revenue and traffic are continuing to grow.
However, compared with the fate of “lying flat” without going public, the situation of Himalaya is much more severe, and it has hit IPOs four times but all failed, and the key is that the platform’s previous story of “burning money for scale” has become more and more difficult to accept by the capital market.
At its peak in 2021, Himalaya’s marketing expenses accounted for almost half of its revenue, and Himalaya, which was willing to burn money, did “burn” the market, but after 2021, the growth rate of its user scale slowed down significantly.
From 2018 to 2022, Himalaya’s cumulative loss was as high as 3.166 billion yuan, and it was not until 2023 that it finally climbed out of the quagmire of losses. Therefore, choosing to “sell yourself” when its book data is still “good-looking” may not be a bargaining chip for Himalaya to win a higher valuation.
2. Classical Internet “Ragnarok”
When the collective memory of the Internet became a digital heritage, the twilight of the classical Internet finally came in the sigh of a generation. But this is not because platforms are “not working hard enough”, but the modern Internet is indeed changing every moment.
First of all, the rise of mobile Internet has changed the way content is disseminated and the audience’s habit of receiving information. The rise of social media platforms such as Weibo, WeChat, and Zhihu has seized the right to speak in graphic content that originally belonged to the content community.
With the advent of the short video era, users’ time and attention have been further distracted, and video content has taken away the right to speak in graphic content. Since then, graphic content and video content have been in a complex relationship of competition and convergence, but in any case, the traditional content community has almost no place in it.
Users are gradually migrating to emerging social platforms, and talented and influential creators on the content platform are naturally leaving, and the “content quality” of the content platform is gradually declining, making it more difficult to retain users.
For example, Ning Caishen, the editor of “Wulin Gaiden”, and the author of the online novel “Ghost Blowing the Lantern”, Tianxia Ba Sing, were once writers of Tianya, but now such folk masters are rare.
Secondly, the business model is “limping”. Without a content community nourished by traffic, the ecology will inevitably continue to deteriorate, and monetization will become more and more difficult.
In the period when it was not impacted by the mobile Internet, content platforms have faced the pain point of a single revenue model. According to the prospectus, its advertising business has always accounted for more than 50% of total revenue, and once advertisers shrink their budgets, the platform can only barely survive.
The same is true for Himalaya, whose revenue model is highly dependent on membership subscriptions and advertising, which also means that its revenue model will be challenged once the membership size declines.
For Himalaya, which relies on content payment to make a profit, if you want to get more subscription revenue, either you have a sufficient user scale or the payment amount of a single user is high enough, but it is not easy to balance the two.
If you want to increase the scale of paying users, “price reduction” is the most direct way, but this will directly affect the profit scale of the platform; But if you blindly “increase the price”, it is easy to lead to a decrease in the user’s payment rate. This can also be applied to the advertising revenue business, if too many ads are loaded in vertical content platforms, it will also damage the user experience and “dissuade” members.
Taking Himalaya as an example, from 2021 to 2023, its subscription service revenue accounted for more than 50% of the total revenue, the overall revenue maintained a slight increase, and the scale of monthly active users also continued to grow, but the payment rate of paid members decreased year by year, which means that the proportion of users willing to purchase memberships has decreased.
Nowadays, the growth dividend of the Internet industry has long disappeared, for Internet platforms such as Himalaya and Hupu, if they cannot exchange growth for increments, they can only hope to reduce costs and increase efficiency, but the “saved” profits cannot keep up with the good life and draw the same sign.
Finally, Internet giants have overwhelming ecological advantages. Himalaya’s low user stickiness also brings a problem, that is, pan-content platforms such as Byte and WeChat overlap with long audio platforms in terms of content, but Internet giants not only have algorithm advantages, but also have more abundant traffic behind them, and Himalaya is more passive in the user war.
Moreover, Internet giants have a huge ecological matrix, and their user portraits are richer, for advertisers, investing a fee can cover graphics, long and short videos, audio, communities and other scenarios, and the focus on vertical content platforms is naturally less.
3. “Pearl picking” in low tide
Therefore, in the process of Internet giants constantly expanding their boundaries, competition and cooperation between platforms have also become the new normal. Tencent Music took over the Himalayas to add the last piece of the puzzle to the sound map; Thunder’s inclusion of tiger pounces also has the consideration of enriching the content ecology of Xunlei, which also means that there are still pearls waiting to be polished on the beach after low tide.
Bilibili’s animation content, Hupu’s sports content, Douban’s film review content, etc., these contents focus on subdivided user groups, although the overall scale is not necessarily large, but they have stronger user stickiness.
Therefore, although the classical Internet is ebbing the tide, this does not prevent vertical content platforms from continuing to exude charm in their respective fields, such as Xiaohongshu, which started with a community of sharing shopping experience, and its valuation has now risen to 180 billion yuan.
In the process of Xiaohongshu’s growth, it has also undergone many strategic adjustments. Xiaohongshu, founded in 2013, once pointed to the e-commerce market, but its e-commerce business has been tepid under the encirclement and suppression of competitors such as Taobao, Pinduoduo, and NetEase.
In 2018, Xiaohongshu adjusted its strategy back to the community, from “self-operated e-commerce” to “commodity grass planting”, and its positioning has also changed from “buyer e-commerce” to “lifestyle e-commerce”.
In addition, although Hupu only has a valuation of 500 million yuan, the valuation of the “Dewu” it incubated is 10 billion US dollars (about 70 billion yuan). Dewu developed from a sneaker information exchange section of Hupu, from providing product appraisal services to a trendy online shopping community, and now has nearly 100 million monthly active users, and can also rank in the e-commerce market.
The reason why these content platforms can successfully transform is because “things attract like, and people are divided by groups”. The shopping content shared by users can enhance the trust relationship of the community, thereby further improving the conversion rate of the platform.
QuestMobile pointed out in a 2020 report that among the four platforms of Douyin, Kuaishou, Weibo and Xiaohongshu, Xiaohongshu’s average conversion rate reached 21.4%, which is much higher than that of Weibo (9.1%), Douyin (8.1%), and Kuaishou (2.7%).
However, despite the value of social communities, the more content platforms that rely on content, the more likely they are to face the decline of community content and user churn, such as Zhihu, which has finally achieved profitability for two consecutive quarters, and the number of monthly active users is still declining.
This is because in the process of accelerating commercialization, Zhihu’s core positioning has also shifted from the Q&A community to the content platform, but with the increasing diversification of content layout, some high-quality content is inevitably diluted, and the value of Zhihu in the hearts of users has also begun to be greatly reduced.
From this point of view, even if a vertical content platform composed of users with the same interests and hobbies can survive the process of changing new and old media, how to balance content and commercialization is still a major problem.
Content communities are not a quick and profitable business, but no matter what era, the interaction and emotional connection between people will not disappear after all. As an important link to connect users, stimulate demand, and deliver traffic, the era of community-based content platforms has not yet come to an end.
