From BBS to online education leader: 13 years ' journey of the Net

The intermediary transaction SEO diagnoses Taobao guest stationmaster buys the Cloud host technology Hall

21st Century Economic Report reporter Wang Shanpeng Shanghai Report

August 15, the 13 anniversary of the network, online activities under the overwhelming.

Born in 2001, the network has now become the influential radiation 200 million learners, nearly 80 million registered users, 3 million students of the domestic largest Internet education enterprises.

From doing the community to do the electricity business, and then to the school, and then to mobile terminals, 13 years to focus on online education, can be said to be a pioneer, but also the industry leaders. With the development of online education and investment in the last two years, the company has become an indispensable sample to understand the online education enterprises in China.

13 Growth Road

2001, when the Shanghai Polytechnic University Junior Students of the Arnold (NET founder of the Voyayary) founder of the Lin Forum, and all the success of the BBS, 2002, gathered a large number of free learning foreign language resources of the community soon become the national learning foreign Language one of the hottest community.

At that time, Chus gave birth to a flourishing of language training. After in-depth communication with netizens, Arnold according to their different needs of learning foreign languages, in the BBS targeted to increase listening, translation and other practical modules. And in 2005 on the line of "Jiang Blog", for the needs of users founded 46, Japanese, postgraduate, IELTS and other channels, and launched the "Web2.0 Tribe" Community Edition, strengthen the user's in-depth social.

"Do users need products" become Arnold insisted on the idea, after his continuous efforts, to graduate, that is, 2006, the Hu has gathered about 200,000 users.

Obviously such a large number of users, as well as the stickiness of the site, all show that it will be a great wealth. And Arnold also logically chose to start a business, the net from "initial interest" to the business operation.

The network still defines itself as the internet media. Like many online media, they initially chose the path of advertising revenue. For a long time, advertising from publishers, various training institutions and language schools has become the main revenue of the network. "Because of the large number of users, the most start to feed their own practice is to rely on advertising to eat, most of the domestic training institutions are the advertising partners, so more like a network media." Yuje, who co-founded the co-founder of the Network, told the 21st century economic reporter.

In order to break the excessive reliance on advertising, coupled with the rapid development of Taobao and other electric dealers, but also because of the user to learn, learning materials and curriculum needs of a very high degree of correlation, the network began in 2007 to open the business, the BBC, the VOA official content authorization, become Casio, Good easy access Electronic dictionary official authorized network sales channels, and New Oriental online, China Accounting school to become partners, online sales of their courses.

Electric business has once become the main source of revenue, but not long, after the 2008 financial crisis, advertising and electric business decline, Arnold frankly was the most difficult time, he has been looking for the next can bring profits, more sustainable development of the expansion of new products.

Based on the millions registered users, the network began to seek to change from the public service to the charging mode of operation. You know, as long as someone pays, the company can make a profit.

2009, the mobile phone WAP online, at the same time will be the tribal change into SNS learning platform, the introduction of the mobile end of the market in 2011, 2012 to promote platform value-added services ...

Interestingly, the growth process of the UGC almost absorbs and draws on all forms of China's Internet industry since its inception, from portals to blogs to video, to electronic business to micro blogs to mobile, but they always revolve around community and community learners ' learning needs.

All based on the needs of community users, coupled with a cautious style, so that the users will soon grow to the million, then the annual millions growth. 2009, the company moved into the Zhangjiang High-tech Park, when the staff of nearly 70 people. Today, the network has nearly 700 employees, nearly 80 million registered users, 3 million students of the large-scale Internet education enterprises.

Find directions through user needs

2009, the domestic online education is still in hibernation, the overall atmosphere of the industry has not formed. Another interesting background is that the employment situation caused by the financial crisis is so weak that the demand for more competition is rising, and there are many different kinds of courses on the line of the community.

Arnold once again through the needs of users to find the direction of the network. At that time, many organizations have vigorously developed the field of video education, hope that the offline education scene as true as possible to copy to the line. But Arnold chose to take a different route.

"Through the survey, we found that users of the teacher's voice and the clarity of the courseware requirements higher, the teacher's uncover, teaching scenes not much to look forward to." Therefore, we use multimedia Rich Text technology, highlighting the voice of teachers, and flash to present a clear and orderly courseware. "This innovation has gained a lot of positive feedback," said Xu, co-founder and vice president of the network.

Obviously audio rather than video, there is also an important reason, that is, to save costs, compared to those who burn money video education website, in the same section of online courses, video recording, storage, bandwidth, etc. are much higher than audio.

Xu that, to do education products, the core competitiveness is also the original content, on the basis of thick accumulation of thin hair.

At the beginning of the line, the network dedicated to employing more than 100 teachers as their full-time staff, the production of various courses. The net is the start of language learning, now the course content has included primary and secondary school curriculum, vocational education, early education and piano and other interest courses, but language learning still accounted for about 70% of its share.

However, another problem has been puzzling the online education industry, that is, online education client A few mandatory, users can start or terminate the service at any time, but also for any reason to leave the client, so online education products user stickiness has been a problem.

In the course of operation of the products, the network tries to improve the stickiness of the users while trying to break the "result oriented" iron law of the education industry to some extent through the social interaction of online education.

In addition to the low price of training courses, the Web courseware is not a simple video, but contains teaching teachers, class teachers, teaching assistants, teachers, teacher, class leader, cultural members, study members and the same table such elements.

Open the Web page, a wide range of online courses dazzling, Arnold also clearly know that all content is produced by the Hu himself is not a wise, rich curriculum behind the 2000 people in the company's part-time team.

This includes the university teacher, the English outstanding University student as well as the depth netizen user and so on. Their part-time role also includes teachers, teaching assistants, class teachers and so on. This also gives the network the ability to extend language training courses to more niche areas in the short term. Today, in addition to English, Japanese and Korean, the network also covers more than 10 other languages, a total of more than 200 courses.

Today, the 5 years of the online net, the income has been equal to the electricity quotient, each accounted for the annual revenue of the 40%, the original advertising model now accounts for only 20% of the revenue. Also benefited from the online business, the registered users of the net from the original 5 million quickly climbed to the current 80 million, the industry no one can reach.

Create an online education ecological circle

At the end of 2013, the network was widely reported to have received about 20 million U.S. dollars in the B-round venture capital, its brand valuation also reached 200 million U.S. dollars.

There have been concerns in the industry about the financing of the network, pointing out that it is a higher valuation and another fact: there are no online educational institutions to establish a training system that really finds a profit model.

Although the development of the most recent two years can be said to be "wind", but the low-key Arnold in the past two years rarely appear in the media, so we have been unable to know the current status of the network.

According to the figures provided by the network, the company's overall revenue in 2012 billion, according to its external annual growth rate of 100%, can be estimated in today's net revenue scale or more than 300 million yuan.

Looking back on the development of 13 years, we can clearly see that the Hu actually started from the BBS to do one thing: to seize the Internet learning Portal, its essence is to form a large-scale user and cooperative platform construction.

The network attempts to exploit the data accumulated by the technology to discover more requirements and improve the user's experience. Meet the needs of users, but also attract more users to register, so repeatedly, the formation of closed loop.

At the end of June, the first experience shop of Jinkolu opened in Shanghai Metro line Line 2, and in the future, there will be 10 shops opening in Shanghai's busy subway station.

Although it is impossible to estimate the subway experience shop can bring a lot of user conversion, but the network hope that online and offline integration, the idea of promoting on-line education, save advertising cost of the intention is obvious.

In addition to the online experience shop This innovation, the network in recent two years in the mobile end of the exerting force also brought an unexpected breakthrough.

In 2012, with three platforms for iOS, Android, and WP8, the network launched a total of about 80 apps that did not overlap, generating nearly 50 million mobile users.

The construction of the mobile end was identified by the Arnold as the top priority of the network, although 2014, mobile business is not the largest investment in the network, but the next 3 years will certainly become the most important platform.

According to Yuje, the mobile end of the web has been profitable, and this is far from being available to many online education companies that are still in the state of burning money.

At the same time, the content of the support is also very important, as described before, he did not choose his own lump sum, but chose to expand resources as far as possible, multi-party cooperation, which can be regarded as the core of network learning portal, can be regarded as a shortcut.

Earlier this year, Arnold made a restructuring of the network, set up a partner department, dedicated to those who cooperate with the company to provide services, and push the department responsible for the "Internet Whampoa Military Academy."

The Whampoa Military Academy provides free training to our partners and shares its experience in Internet education and management over the years. According to Yuje, a domestic university requires all of its teachers to attend the "Huangpu Military Academy" to adapt to the new normal Internet education, and the "Huangpu Military Academy" training in a university has decided to use the curriculum as a credit courses.

"The most important task since we started our business is to develop more users so that new users can get access to Internet education more quickly," he said. "said Arnold.

For online education, Arnold Frankly, he can not give an accurate answer, so can only be down to do some "practical things."

"The idea is to do the Internet education can not only consider simple transactions." In Hu, every aspect of education needs to be broken and reconditioned to find an Internet learning experience that transcends offline learning. "Arnold proposed that in the next five years will invest not less than 1 billion, build online education ecosystem, rather than a single profitable product."

Obviously the story is just beginning.

(Trainee reporter Han Yue fly to this article also has contributed)