Internet Product Market: The lowest user transfer cost online service

There was a saying that users convert a search engine in just 27 seconds, with little cost. The idea is to question the soundness of Google's business model. On the Internet, you change a mailbox, you need to notify all your contacts, the cost is very high. Another portal to watch the news, the cost is lower, but the habit and the level of editing will also stop you. In contrast, search engines may indeed be one of the lowest user-transfer-cost online services.

But I like to look at the problem in turn. The low cost of user transfer seems to favor the new search engine stand out, in fact the opposite.

In China, for example, now several second-rate search engines are trying to compete because Google withdrew to set aside the market space, they have increased the efforts to promote the market, in order to be able to seize market share. At this time, the low cost of user transfer began to play a role. You spend a lot of money and market means, not easy to attract users, just use one of your search engine, will not go back.

Due to the low cost of transfer, the search engine marketing costs can play a role, is often one-time. Only in the marketing period, your search engine traffic will rise, the promotion of a stop, traffic suddenly fall back to the level before the promotion, you simply failed to retain users. The situation is as shown in the following picture:



Therefore, the low cost of user transfer, for large search engines, not only is not a problem, but also a protection. The next time the user wants to search, it does not take 27 seconds, he will choose the first second he is familiar with the one, not the one he once fooled the new.

Because the user transfer cost is very low, so the new search engine promotion cost is extremely high. You see how much Microsoft has spent on the promotion of Bing (advertising 2 billion of dollars in the UK), almost entirely to pay for the low cost of user transfer. Instead, those services, which appear to be highly cost-shifting, tend to retain users, such as Gmail.