SNS social networking site Hot Flash industry Shuffle who is the last winner

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For Chinese internet companies, the winter of 2008 is certainly not as good as in previous years. In the face of the global financial turmoil, most of the SNS sites rely on venture capital to face the dilemma of Duanliang

Social-networking Facebook is a really beautiful place in the US presidential election, which ended on November 4, but in the face of an uncertain financial crisis, those sites that rely on venture capital for their livelihoods are in jeopardy.

In the U.S. presidential election, Facebook helped Mr. Obama win over 2.5 million netizens and made a great contribution to defeating rival Republican candidate John McCain, U.S. media reported. Apparently, the SNS social networking site's image has gained a full boost after the U.S. election. Nonetheless, Facebook's value for investors is still slipping. The latest figures show Facebook's market capitalisation has plummeted from $15 billion trillion to $3 billion trillion. In China, the same websites that copy the Facebook model are no longer in view.

Industry insiders believe that SNS leisure dating site Product characteristics determine the number of its users and browse the number of pages are higher, because users have to visit the site frequently to understand the latest news of friends, or focus on the changes in small games. However, the low effective browsing time reflects the lack of lasting attraction for users of such websites. Users of all types of plug-ins are not lasting freshness, after a few months can still adhere to only a few. Venture capitalists, who are also on the tight days, are no longer "crazy" about this simple, easy to copy business model, but rather hiding behind them.

In the face of the gradual alienation of venture capital, how far can SNS go in the future? will not be like the Rage blog model, in the flash after the short-lived began to wither.

Financial turmoil accelerates industry shuffle

Global capital markets are already in a serious crisis, and observers believe the current situation is even worse than the 2001 dotcom bubble.

Beijing Qing Branch of the October 20 launch of the "third quarter 2008 China Venture capital Research Report" shows that the current quarter of the investment pattern changes and characteristics: The basic pattern of investment in the industry has not changed at the same time, the number of investment cases and the amount of investment accounted for less than 35%.

The above information has been endorsed by Dow Jones, a leading venture capital research agency in the United States, with Dow Jones ' data showing that the pace of takeover, merger and listing of VC-funded companies has fallen to its lowest level since 10, and in the third quarter, VentureSource These companies raised only 4.57 billion dollars from IPOs and mergers, down 66% from a year earlier.

For social networking sites that are still in infancy, it is clearly difficult to grow up in such a hostile environment. Up to now, this year only the net, 51.com, Kaixin has been invested, but compared with many similar sites this is only a few. A large number of Facebook followers may have to close down without a rice pot. Ji Yue, director of Sequoia Capital China Fund, said in an interview with our correspondent, "SNS is in fact a very early stage, now affected by the environment, VC will be more cautious investment." ”

Horizon Network CEO Lintingham told it Times: 2008 is the beginning of the SNS integration year, in the next 18 months the industry competition will be more intense. "And this year's global financial turmoil will accelerate the industry reshuffle, rely on venture capital to maintain the livelihood of the SNS in the days after the money will be bad."

Industry experts predict that a large number of social networking sites will be beset by financial problems and even a massive collapse from the start of the year. Companies that have been financed, because it is not yet possible to predict how long the financial crisis will last, should not be taken lightly.

IDG Global Executive vice president and Asia Pacific President, IDG Venture Capital fund founding partner Shong also said that now WEB2.0 companies, basically are still burning money, so the crisis also forced everyone to find a profit model.

Profit Model first

SNS huge user resources if can not effectively transform into income, it means to pay heavy price, the enterprise will not think further.

According to the characteristics of SNS users, the industry believes that precision advertising will be the future SNS social networking site, one of the main profit model. This kind of human behavior pattern of accurate positioning, will make advertising more accurate launch.

It is reported that 2006 global dating network advertising market income of 450 million U.S. dollars, of which the United States, accounting for 350 million U.S. dollars, is expected to 2010, the global network of online dating site advertising revenue will reach 2.9 billion U.S. dollars.

The above view has been a net CEO Xie, "Although SNS social networking site registered users of the relatively small number of real effective information, but this does not affect the social network analysis of their users behavior, so the future of precision marketing may become a social networking site one of the profit model." ”

By positioning users as "professionals and business people" on the horizon, they have begun to try to use precision marketing to profit themselves. Lintingham just for a luxury watch did the promotion, it is learned that the customer is very satisfied with the effect. He believes the skyline is gradually being embraced by high-end consumer-goods advertisers, such as automobiles and luxury goods, with high-end crowds and the ability to accurately qualify people for advertising. "While it will take some time for all advertisers to accept this emerging advertising model, we have confidence in the future," he said. "Lintingham said.

Thousand Oak CEO Chen also expects to be able to make ends meet by advertising at the beginning of next year. But he is more bullish on e-commerce models. "You can sell anything, sell a house, sell a car, etc., but we now only sell some small gifts and advertisements." "Chen said.

and rely on the network small game quickly popular net also enough to give the industry some new enlightenment, perhaps the "open SNS platform is a good solution to the current short life cycle of the web game, and can also effectively reduce the cost of the promotion of the game, such a model is also promising," a person in the industry told the IT Time magazine.

But Xie to this view and disagree, "This model is nothing new, as early as I founded the Ho-side game platform has been thought of, now happy Net is simply the Chinese to the Facebook model, including its popular ' competition parking ' and ' trading slaves '. ”

The key to success is keeping users

Another important factor in the success of social networking sites is how to retain users, in addition to funding.

Facebook boasts a large number of adult users, but that is history. Now many netizens believe that this site does not bring them any valuable things. Some tech people are also starting to tire of Facebook, which they used to be active users.

One of the most representative examples is that Microsoft founder Bill Gates is fed up with Facebook for only a few months in February 2008. He was 53 years old and was overwhelmed by more than 8,000 "friend applications" every day, and finally withdrew.

The withdrawal of the SNS Circle does not stop the gates. The number of people on MySpace has fallen by 14% in the last four months, according to comscore, and the world's biggest social networking site has fallen from 72 million to 68.9 million in just two months.

Chinese Facebook imitators face the same experience. For example, a large number of users have been tired of the daily parking and bought to buy the life, they gradually away from the happy net, away from the SNS.

Industry insiders pointed out that the follow-up service loss is the main reason for the loss of net users, only two games is not enough to maintain user stickiness. However, the implementation of follow-up services (open app platform, the application of Third-party company Plug-ins) to try to retain users of the campus network has also suffered a user churn problem: Third-party Company's products are mixed, users use inconvenience, of course, do not buy.

But some industry insiders believe that SNS social networking sites should be more prominent in their social value rather than through games and other models to temporarily gather users together. Internet analyst Shen said, The total number of community service users in China reached 165 million in August 2008, the number of leisure dating service users in the community service ranked fourth, but its monthly total number of visits and monthly total browsing page in the community service ranked first and second, especially the monthly browsing page of 8.76 billion pages, leading the second blog nearly 2 billion pages. But leisure dating service in the monthly effective browsing time performance is not outstanding, only 7,379 hours in fourth place, and blog, community and other services have a big gap.

"Compared with the 10 years ago when the internet started with 30 dollars for a registered user, SNS is obviously much cheaper now." The emergence of SNS significantly reduced the number of registered users to the enterprise costs, so for today's internet to burn money far less than more than 10 years ago. Lintingham told our correspondent.

SNS sites in each vertical area can only survive the last one, who can better mobilize the enthusiasm of users and better promote their interactivity, who will become the final winner.