While running on the treadmill, Chen Feng thought. In the past two years, users have been saying goodbye to free: payment of balance withdrawal fees, hearing that Jay Chou is going to buy a membership, takeaway shipping is getting more and more expensive, shared bicycles have increased to 2 yuan, popular dramas have become exclusive to members, and e-commerce members are selling better and better...

What exactly happened?

Is the user's willingness to pay stronger?

Or is the free logic of the Internet failing?

I have to say that, especially in China, free has always been the most effective business strategy. First attract people through free things, and then select the right products to sell them to you.

The essence behind it is a kind of cross-subsidy: using high-gross profit products to subsidize low-gross profit products, and using paid products to subsidize free products. The Internet world has long become a big stage for cross-subsidy.

In offline specialty stores, buying one get one free yellow price tags can always keep consumers’ hurrying and buy non-discounted products.

Online e-commerce platforms, countless coupons, flash sale, and limited-time discounts, make people enjoy it. Shopping passionately will also buy non-shot products.

Payment institutions have launched various payment cuts and completed a closed-loop revenue through financial management and loans...

To put it bluntly, free is a marketing strategy. The platform still cares about the money in the user's pocket. After all, the wool comes from the sheep. Of course, the wool comes from the pig is also a different way to find a way.

Free search, free social networking, free news reading, free antivirus, free email sending and receiving...

Who did not rise up with the first generation of Internet giants by relying on free strategies?

Of course, no one is stupid. Free is a transaction. It is not currency, but attention.

When you visit Zhihu, browse Weibo, and chat with WeChat, the content is free to be open. What the platform likes is no longer the money in your pocket, but your attention.

In this chain, Dav produces content to share fans and revenue, the platform is responsible for operation promotion and advertising investment, and the advertiser is the last person to buy.

Otherwise, where will Volkswagen spend 14 billion yuan in advertising expenses per year?

Chen Feng stopped, took a sip of Eyun water, and continued to wipe the sweat. The marginal cost in the information world is zero, and the physical world has no zero cost. Except for air and sunlight, any resources in nature are scarce, so products in the physical world cannot be truly free.

At this moment, a pioneer appeared, and Rebs' Xiaomi made a brilliant debut.

Equivalent cost-price sales with free!

It has turned out to be a hot topic that is hard to find, and created a precedent for domestic mobile phones to pursue cost-effectiveness. For a long time, hardware free and software charges have become the standard logic for the Internet to empower manufacturing.

Then there is the rise of group buying, which means that paying money to acquire customers has become a new variant of free thinking, and subsidies have become a radical version of free.

Compared with the free economy in the attention economy, subsidies in the o2o field consume more real money and silver. Start-ups cannot afford it. Venture capital is becoming increasingly indispensable and their voice is becoming stronger and stronger, becoming the behind-the-scenes driver in a series of hot wars.

This is the typical bilateral market for group buying. The platform must attract both buyers and sellers, which a classic problem of "there are chickens first or eggs first" arises.

Only by gathering buyers first can you attract sellers, but without sellers, how can you attract buyers?

The answer is to burn money!

It's hard to find someone who wants to spend money.

People who want to make money are everywhere.

There are more than 6,000 companies at the peak, and those who can survive have become small giants.

Immediately afterwards, a wave of new players continued, such as mobile payment, shared travel, takeaway, etc., and everyone deeply realized the importance of first-mover advantage.

Without saying a word, he tried his best to burn money, billions, billions, billions...

Internet entrepreneurship is slowly becoming a proxy game for giants.

The mobile payment war has made Alipay and WeChat payment... The shared travel field has made Didi... Takeaway has made Meituan and Ele.me...

Of course, the knowledge trend has also made millions of winners.

What a pity Zhihu!

Chen Feng stopped, took the towel from Lei Li, and sat down to rest.

I have always believed that subsidies are not the purpose, and one day no subsidies are the purpose of subsidies. Many companies only see subsidies, and their operations are as fierce as tigers, and finally they still go wrong.

In the end, I played myself to death!

For example, shared bicycles are neither a bilateral market nor a free and paid double-layer structure. They do not rely on both sides and blindly subsidize them. Now they are in a mess.

The bilateral market for shared travel involves both drivers and passengers, and there are real money and money to make money.

Your shared bicycle is not aware of it?

To put it bluntly, it is a rental economy, with only paid business and no free business. Any forced free strategy and pursuing scale growth are all about quenching thirst.

It just depends on when to die?

He neither dared to resume normal pricing, was afraid of driving away users, and his capital would not continue to transfusion. The capital chain continued to be tight, and eventually he fell into the quagmire of embezzling consumer deposits and owing suppliers payments.

A bad business model does not mean that no one makes money. Once you commit yourself to a giant, will the founder of Mobike be financially free in an instant?

I am safe to expand the traffic diversion tool in the ecosystem, and I magically discovered that there is a free-cost double-layer structure?

The high interest pricing of p2p in the past two years is also in a sense subsidy. As an information intermediary, p2p, which matches lenders and borrowers, originally belongs to the bilateral market.

But lenders are not attracted by the network effect, but are attracted by high interest rates, and as a result they are in a dilemma. Reduce interest rates and lenders run away. Maintaining high interest rates can only find low-quality borrowers and bear the consequences of rising bad debt rates.

It forced many platforms to simply embark on the Ponzi scam, forging fake assets to deceive users. Some platforms with conscience insisted on finding real assets, but ultimately lost to the downward pressure of the economic cycle. Now...

It's absolutely right to be free,

It goes to the extreme and charges.

Free brings abundance, and each abundance creates a new lack, and users are willing to pay for it.

Look at the two hottest trends now: the free information in the content industry is vast, is it right for users to pay for real knowledge?

The price of free videos is getting longer and longer advertising. Users are willing to pay for the ad exclusion experience and pay for popular dramas in advance, right?

You don't even have to do your best,

Do users cry and shout and deliver the money to their door?

Cheap things are worth the price when you place an order, and you don’t have a day to worry about when you use them.

Good quality things hurt when you spend money, but you are happy every day when you use them, and you feel like you have made a lot of money!

Who said that the loser will win the world?

They are all going to die!
Chapter completed!