Mobile internet entrepreneur look over: 5 factors affecting vertical market capacity

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Any mobile Internet enterprise is always in a vertical market, in a vertical market, it can accommodate several platforms to survive, whether to provide the opportunity for the latter, this is a very interesting question, because it determines the mobile Internet Platform service provider strategic choice. After research, we believe that the capacity of a vertical market is closely related to several factors.

First, the user's transfer costs.

The cost of user transfer here includes the depth of immersion in the use of Internet applications, the cost of time and intelligence required for conversion, and the cost of tool usage. In general, the greater the cost of transfer of users in the market, the number of platforms required is less.

For example, in the social relations platform, whether using SNS, instant messaging or microblogging, a user often has to devote a certain amount of time and energy to interact with their social contacts, the user's immersion depth is generally deeper. By comparison, the depth of user browsing through news portals is much smaller. In layman's parlance, users can casually change news portals, but if the network is built up over a long time, it is less likely to be discarded. Thus we can deduce a simple conclusion that the social relationship market platform capacity is significantly less than the online news market can accommodate the number of platforms.

Such a conclusion can be explained back to micro-reality. For example, a user who uses Weibo is similar to a person who publishes his or her own mood diary. Many users probably do not have the mood or energy, in a micro-blogging platform to express their feelings, and then switch to another microblogging platform to continue to publish, this "unwilling" constitutes the user's conversion costs. From this we can see that the Matthew effect is very obvious in the fields of social relations such as Weibo and instant messaging. Tencent QQ and Sina Weibo have a large number of users to verify this, which also makes it difficult to catch the leader on other platforms in the market, many of the subsequent entrants will also eliminate the idea of entry. This will create a relatively small number of such social platforms in the marketplace, with a high concentration of users.

But the news platform is different, in the early days, because each news portal platform's news content difference is big, the user often can form to see different news to enter to different news information portal to look the custom. However, with the continuous development of the news portal, the general trend of comprehensive, that is, you can see on almost any news platform on the comprehensive information, which is tantamount to reducing the differences between the various news platforms, so users in different news platforms, the cost of conversion is actually very low. One result of the market is that there will be large, small, and numerous news portals.

This type of vertical market platform capacity, which is affected by user conversion costs, is also reflected in the field of digital consumption. The behavior of users using different games is different, such as using Sony's PSP, Nintendo's Wii, or Microsoft's Xbox 360, which means that if a consumer wants to use a different game console, it needs to build different habits and behavior patterns. A game enthusiast who has established a fixed habit, often unwilling to accept other gaming platforms that make him feel uncomfortable, has decided that the number of platforms in the market is unlikely to be excessive.

And the opposite is the other kind of game, which we usually call the light game. The typical characteristic of this kind of game is, the time of the game is relatively short, basically all is based on the page game, the user can open a webpage very casually, close a webpage. So it also means that the user's conversion costs are actually very low. One result of this is that a lot of light games are being developed to meet the demands of a large number of users to switch freely.

In the middle of the two have a class of characteristics of the game, such as the war class, role playing class, chess and card class games. The feature of this kind of game platform is that it is not as high as the transfer cost, because it does not need some very solidified behavior habit, but it is not so low light game, in this kind of game the user's immersion depth is often relatively high. Therefore, it can be seen that the user in the process of concentrating on a game, rarely easily occur game platform conversion.

Therefore, we can also give the number of games in a large market inside the platform to accommodate the number of orders, that is, the number of game consoles is less than immersion depth of the role playing class or chess class game, while far less than the lightweight web-type game. When an enterprise decides whether or not to enter a vertical market, it is prudent for the user to transfer costs and the resulting market demand for the acceptable number of platforms.

Second, developer difficulty size.

The energy of any development team is limited, especially difficult to develop, which means a lot of resources for developers. Thus, if the application development in a market is very difficult, this determines that the developers in the market can not accept too many platforms exist, which indirectly determines that the platform capacity of the market is not much.

The most typical example of this is the operating system. Today, for almost any mobile Internet development team, there are at least three options for each of the mobile Internet apps they develop, based on Apple's iOS platform. Or is it developing on an Android platform? or based on WP platform for development? In such a policy selection process, Developers will generally consider the target customer base for their mobile internet application, the alignment with the mainstream people that the platform is facing, and more importantly the size of the users covered by the platform.

As you can see, the majority of mobile Internet developers today have a common choice, first of all, to build on the Android platform, because the Android platform covers a larger user base. At the same time, Apple iOS also covers a significant portion of the high-end user base, which some developers value. Microsoft, based on its inertia advantage in the PC field, is a developer unwilling to give up. Since the development characteristics of these operating system platforms are different, developers need to make great efforts around the differences in these platforms, and no development team can be developed based on too many operating system platforms. Therefore, objectively determines the mobile internet age of the number of operating systems can not be too much.

In addition to the few we mentioned earlier, the probability that other operating systems will survive is low, and we can see that in the past few years, including Nokia's abandonment of the Symbian system, including HP's abandonment of the Web OS system. In fact, it can be said that the global developers will be based on their limited energy and time for rational evaluation, their choice of the actual operating system of the fate. Even with the inertia of the operating system, Symbian currently has a relatively high market share, some of the development team will put a part of the focus on these operating systems, but the general trend, more and more development teams have shifted their energies to the main operating system, which determines that in this market, in addition to a few can win , most of them will face the fate of being eliminated.

Because the choice of the developer determines the number of platforms, this can explain an important phenomenon in the real world, that is why the operating system platform wants to maintain a very strong specificity, rather than improve the operating system platform compatibility. Because, if the mainstream platform to improve the compatibility between the developers, easy to develop, can run everywhere, which is equivalent to the relatively small operating system platform to provide opportunities, so all the mainstream platform providers will choose a high, or even closed strategy to ensure that the developer-specific, In fact it also blocked the entry of the backward entrants.

Third, the will of the capital market.

Capital markets are very picky about the number of platforms that can be accommodated in any market. For investors, of course, they want the less business models they invest, the better, or the belief that if there are too many of them, they won't get a good return on investment. As a result, it also determines that in the same vertical market, a few of the first listed platforms will most likely become the only remaining platform in the final market.

For example, as 2011 Youku and Tudou were listed in the United States, there were few opportunities for other video-type sites in China. Therefore, after the listing of Youku and Tudou, some video sites choose to sell themselves to other giants, which in a sense can be viewed as a default for the choice of capital markets. The will of capital will accelerate the Matthew effect of the number of platforms accommodated in such a market, concentrating on a few centralized platforms. In fact, 2012 is also under the will of the capital, even two of the leaders: Youku and potatoes have come together to combine to become youku potatoes.

It is also important for a start-up team trying to enter a vertical market to consider in advance the tolerance of the capital market to the number of platforms that can be accommodated in the market.

Four, market size.

In the field of E-commerce, especially in China's electric business sector, the entire market is still in the ascendant, the entire E-commerce accounting for social goods retail total 5% less than, which means that there is still a very large space for growth in China. At the same time, E-commerce itself also contains a variety of models, from the business, business-to-business to Consumer-to-consumer, from pure E-commerce transactions derived from E-commerce search engines, parity and other models. In addition, each electric business platform can also choose their own unique commodity category and unique target customer base, for example, in clothing, books, home appliances, 3C selection of different positioning. So it can be seen that when a market model is big enough to bring enough business model to subdivide, then the number of platforms that the market can accommodate is certainly relatively large.

The same principle applies to our study of local information web sites, such as in China, such as Bai, net, such as classified information social model, in fact there are a large number of small and medium-sized localized information Web sites. This is in fact due to the large size of the market, which can accommodate both large giants and small niche market followers. In other words, in this kind of platform business model, the scale effect is not so significant, so it will accommodate the existence of a large number of similar platforms.

The speed of platform profitability.

The player in this market, the ability to survive, the length of time to fight, also affects the number of platforms. This is a very popular truth, if a platform for the business model to convert to profitability is very strong, or under the support of the Giants can long-term burn money, the natural platform for the existence of a longer time. Conversely, if the conversion to the speed of profitability is slow, will automatically bring some platform to continue to exit the market.

In this regard, we can pay attention to the game platform, in fact, the profitability of many gaming platforms, that is, the ability to quickly return cash far beyond the other platform. In other words, a game company developed a game business, if it can bring a part of the revenue, at least to maintain its continuous rolling operation. From this, we can see a market result is, the game platform is very many.

Compared to another example, you can see the group buying platform, after the Great War, a large number of group buying site to end their own operations. The reason is that even in a very large market such as China, because of the vicious price war, resulting in the majority of group buy site income is poor, so when the funds consumed to a certain extent, they can not support, can only opt out of the market.

Again, we can compare real NX and Microsoft's different ways of playing on the media player. Because Microsoft is accustomed to the operating system bundled with free components of the strategy, because it can support its own multimedia playback platform for a long time free operation. But all of real NX's core business is on this player, and it's hard to be free, in fact, real NX has been holding on for a long time before he has had quite a few media players out of the market. Under the attack of the Giants ' free strategy, most of the multimedia player platforms in the market can not realize their profits very effectively, so they will choose to withdraw from the market.