Chen leave Sina: Farewell of the traditional portal era

Chen, who has been "left out" many times, is really gone.

The founder of the Chinese Internet portal era, the iconic figure of China's Internet news, chose to leave when the mobile tide came, perhaps the best portrayal of the transformation of traditional media.

Sina once as a new media, leather a lot of traditional media life, and now turn to the mobile internet to leather portal life. From the frequent departure of the editor-in-chief, the traditional Gateway era is indeed the fate of the three fork.

Veterans never die, they just fade away.

It is not uncommon for nearly two years to leave the top door. Only in the post of editor-in-chief, NetEase in three years, two of the editor-in-chief of the resignation, Chun last year also from Sohu. Of course, the above influence in the Internet field, and the impact of its departure on the company, can not be compared with the Chen in Sina, but behind it reflects the pressure on the portal site-in the process of mining new business models, the editor-in-chief of the post is not good.

Open your eyes a little more. It will be found that in recent years, media turnover has become a trend. "China entrepreneur" magazine President Liu Donghua leaving the island, 21st Century Media founder Liu Zhouwei left the former sea media, especially the latter's impact on the financial media industry, and no less than the Chen departure on the internet industry shocks. But in many people's view, Liu Donghua, Liu Zhouwei and other people leave because of the impact of new media, traditional media prospects are seen light and its platform can not provide enough to turn space. While Sina itself is the most influential portal on Chinese internet and has Weibo, the world's largest Chinese social media, Chen seems to have no good reason to leave.

Along with the development of mobility, vertical and social, whether we admit it or not, portals are becoming traditional media. In this sense, Chen's departure may be in line with MacArthur's sentence: Veterans never die, only slowly fade. This is not to deny Chen's contribution to Sina and China's internet industry, but it must also address the shifting pressures facing Sina and all its portals.

The role change of editor-in-chief in the context of portal vertical

Every age will have its own hero. Sina, Sohu and other portals of the rise of the media industry for the first change, and in recent years, auto, financial and other vertical web sites, the all-inclusive model of the portal has formed a direct challenge, this challenge in the user size, advertising revenue have performance. For example, in the two quarter of this year, auto advertising revenue of 59 million U.S. dollars, although much lower than Sina's 155.8 million U.S. dollars, but the latter's volume, the cost of operating pressure is the former several times.

Accelerating the vertical transformation is the biggest challenge facing the portal site at present. Last April, Sina clearly divided its portal channel into media channels, integrated channels and commercial channels, both of which were responsible for the sales tasks. According to Sina insiders, the change is to make Sina's influence and flow better into income. As early as 2005, or NetEase editor-in-chief of the Lee Colling to the Channel independent of the subsidiary. Sina in 2008, the property and home channel split, and easy to live in China to form Sina and borrow shell listed, Sohu in 2009 also will be the car channel upgraded to auto division.

In the process of vertical transformation, the role orientation of the editor-in-chief has changed inevitably. Before Sina's revision, some of the channels, including entertainment, had begun to discuss the issue of commercialization in-house. It also suggests that the pressures of commercialization are much greater than the pressures of content operations for portals that urgently need to be transformed. In the process, the editor-in-chief's administrative authority is also declining. In Sohu, the editor-in-chief is responsible for only news, finance, military, culture, reading, history and other channels, cars, entertainment and other channels have long been operating independently. In Sina, with the financial, automobile and other channels of independent operation of the process of acceleration, its independence is increasingly strong.

Mobility and socialization make content no longer the only "king"

The development of mobility and socialization is as much a challenge to portals as technology and operations. Today's headlines almost overnight broke the portal of many years to obtain the industry monopoly status, by virtue of only "technology + social". In the door of the controversy behind Sina's Sohu and NetEase, all at the expense of the promotion of mobile clients. An important change in Tencent's 2012 revision of its technology and financial channels is that it requires that edited articles be able to simultaneously user portals, videos and mobile terminals. Weibo, as the leader of the social media era, can also be seen as Sina's own life.

In this process, the user access to the news and the way the portal has changed. On the one hand, users can get information through social products such as news clients, micro blogs and micro-letters, without having to rely on portals and search engines. On the other hand, the role of editors in information filtering is weakened, because users can get information directly from their social links. Under this change, content is no longer a scarce resource, and technology and business models naturally become as important as content operations.

Traditional portals may feel more pressure on innovation in technology and business models than on content operations. Especially in the business model, the current news client is mostly based on display advertising, and in the mobile phone becomes the first terminal of the user access to the Internet, the traditional advertisement not only causes the user experience harm, also cannot satisfy the advertisement main to the effect request, and the portal in the advertisement main resource also presents "The Left and right mutual stroke" the tendency. Sina, which has Weibo, may also have a breakthrough in social advertising, while other news clients face greater challenges.

Under the sweeping tide of mobile internet, the transformation of traditional portal website is imperative. As the pioneer of the Gateway era, Chen may be leaving at this time not just Sina, but a farewell to the portal era. Whether the mobile age will appear Chen such a landmark figure, this problem can only be given time to answer.