Chapter 27 Growing pains and outrageous charging strategy

Quietly changing the standard has not had a big impact on Tencent.But Ma Huateng's QQ charging strategy is an unsuccessful attempt in retrospect. The charging made some netizens abandon QQ. This fee attempt seems to be a glimpse of Ma Huateng's pragmatic side: after becoming the leader of domestic instant messaging, how to convert the number of users into economic benefits.The background of trying to charge is that as the number of users increases, the number of servers required by Tencent continues to grow.The huge number of registered users makes Tencent tired of frequently adding millions of servers.

Not only do netizens not support QQ fees, but the media also criticizes this.Especially in the middle of 2001, a report titled "You should learn how to register your mailbox by charging Tencent to play tricks" and another online article titled "Tencent QQ, you did a great job" were published in the "Boutique Shopping Guide". Extensive reprinting has finally made many QQ users understand the truth. The disappointment of QQ users is spreading, and it also gives other instant messaging tools the opportunity to take advantage of it. Regarding the invasion of other instant messaging tools into the market, I will not expand here. There will be a detailed analysis in later chapters of the book.

Between June and July 2001, with the vigorous promotion of QQ audio application and mobile phone application, QQ registration fees gradually attracted widespread attention from netizens.An article "Tencent QQ, you did a great job!" written by an anonymous netizen set off a crusade against QQ. The full text is as follows: Tencent QQ, you did a great job! In China's online instant messaging market, Tencent's QQ has almost occupied the entire market. QQ has become a popular fashion in the past two years, and things must be reversed. Some recent actions of Tencent can't help but make people shout like Sammi Cheng, "Be careful of women! "That way you have to exclaim "Be careful QQ!"

If you want to register a new QQ number in the last week, you will continue to get a disappointing result - "The server refuses to register, please re-apply", you will not waste your energy, and you will not be able to re-apply at all, because Tencent recently launched 168 Voice Station and mobile phone registration. Tencent's own statement is: because the server is too busy, it may not be possible to register new users through the Internet during the time period from 8:00 am to 2:00 am.The author tried to register Tencent's new number at 9:00 am, 3:00 pm, 11:00 pm and 3:00 am, and the results were all - "The server refused to register, please re-apply", and this result was displayed very quickly, which is definitely not like The server is too busy, otherwise there will be a long delay before the results are displayed.

At the same time, I dialed the 16899168 voice station announced by Tencent. After a lengthy prompt, I wrote down a QQ number and initial password. It took about 2 minutes, that is to say, I spent 16 yuan to get a QQ number. If the guess is correct, Tencent may have shut down the service of free registration and application for new numbers on its network, otherwise no one would use telephones and mobile phones that require payment and are very troublesome to register for QQ numbers.In the future, if a user wants to apply for a new QQ number, he may only be able to register through 168 Voice Station and a mobile phone. The result of free online registration through the Internet may always be that the server refuses to register.At present, the fee for dialing 168 Voice Information Station is 0.8 yuan/minute, and the fee for registering by sending a short message via mobile phone is 0.5 yuan/minute during the current discount period, and 1 yuan/minute outside the discount period.

In other words, Tencent can earn a net profit of about 1 yuan every time a new number is registered. At present, Tencent’s daily registration volume is said to have reached about 300,000. If these registrations are all registered by phone or mobile phone, Tencent There are at least millions of registered users in a month. After that quarter, after deducting the share for telecom operators, the registration fee for new users alone is more than 10 million. It can be said that Tencent has set a precedent for Internet fees in China, and there is also a fee for registration. Then why don't other Internet service providers, such as Lianzhong Online, follow Tencent's example? This is because they have not obtained the monopoly position like Tencent. If there is a second An online instant messaging software that can compete with QQ, Tencent's launch of this unwelcome registration method represents suicide.

At the end of last year (Note: 2000), Tencent began to launch various measures to increase revenue, such as developing mobile QQ, QQ Club, adding various advertisements to QQ, etc. Although adding advertisements to QQ has caused dissatisfaction among netizens , but still within the tolerable range. However, Tencent has recently blocked free application for new number registration, forcing users to use toll phones and mobile phones to register new numbers is a bit too much.It is conceivable that after countless failed registrations, the user can only pay to make a phone call or register a new number with a mobile phone.

They have no other choice now, because their friends all use QQ, and there is no other way of online instant messaging, so for most new users, they will still grit their teeth and pay such a dollar to register a new number.Assuming that everyone has another online instant messaging method, just like people have an average of 2.6 mailboxes, Tencent's fee-based registration will definitely not attract new users.In contrast, ICQ, which is also the overlord of online instant messaging, has exceeded 100 million users in May of this year (Note: 2001), with an average of 10 million users online every day, and the average online time of each user is 3 However, ICQ did not dare to launch various fee-based services like Tencent, such as online advertising and fee-based registration.

Because of the power of competition, if ICQ can grow exclusively like Tencent in the global market, its charging hands will also frequently hit its more than 100 million users.It is because Microsoft's MSN has been blocking ICQ. According to the survey results of the instant messaging market released by Gartner, AOL continues to maintain its leading position in the market share with 52% of individual users and 51% of enterprise users, while Microsoft The corresponding shares are only 36% and 40%.Although Microsoft's MSN cannot be compared with ICQ in the instant messaging market, Microsoft's share is not large enough to form a deterrent force that may pull ICQ down at any time. As long as ICQ is a little lax, Microsoft's MSN may Riding on the trend.

At this time, no one dares to offend users, and no one can afford to offend users. Without competition, users cannot afford to offend service providers.For example, some time ago, in the e-mail fee craze, many netizens threatened angrily, I don’t use yours for your fee, and I’ve changed places, but if QQ launches a fee-based registration, can you still say that I don’t use yours? Even if it requires If you use it for a fee, you may have to use it, because you think that dozens or even hundreds of friends or customers want to contact you, and it’s not a problem to pay a few or dozens of dollars. This is the essence of China Telecom’s monopoly phenomenon. it's the same.

The reason why Tencent dared to deliberately stop online free registration (the implicit argument is that the server is too busy) and push all users to the "Huashan Road" for fee registration is because it is determined that new registered users can only Choose Tencent's QQ, its number of users has reached nearly 40 million, and each netizen has an average of 15 QQ numbers. In the domestic online instant messaging market, it is estimated that Tencent has occupied at least 95% of the market. China's online instant messaging market needs to create strong competitors for Tencent. For users, only competition can enable them to obtain better service quality. Although this kind of competition is cruel for service providers, look around in China , OMME, PICQ, etc. have almost withdrawn from the stage of online instant messaging. From the current point of view, in the recent period of time, China's online instant messaging market is still a one-man show of Tencent. This may make Tencent go further on the road of charging. In the future, you may have to pay a certain fee for logging in to QQ once, or even charge for sending a message. If no one can snipe Tencent, this is not impossible. Possibly, a monopoly can breed a firm's endless desire to rip profits from users. For the time being, we can only pin our hopes on AOL and Microsoft. In the online communication market, only they have enough strength and influence to fight against Tencent in the Chinese market. We hope that the Chinese online instant messaging market will emerge as soon as possible. A "multi-polar" world , instead of Tencent's own "unipolar" world, which is equivalent to locking users and letting them pay consciously. On August 20, 2001, the "Boutique Shopping Guide" published an article titled "Learn to learn how to register for an e-mail account, and Tencent plays a role in imitation", which triggered a war of words between Tencent and the media. To learn how to register for an email account, Tencent is acting like a fool Editor's note: Registering a new QQ number from the Internet has been tried and failed, and it takes less than 10 seconds to register with a mobile phone.After a period of silence, Tencent finally admitted that the registration failure was caused by their technical limitations.However, I am afraid that Tencent has not calculated which is more important, the income brought by the restriction or the loss of popular support. Maybe it's because the current websites are too eager to make a profit, and Tencent even started the idea of ​​​​registration, restricting page registration, and trying to push people to use mobile phones to pay for registration.But Tencent has overestimated itself and its users too much.Want to learn how to charge for e-mail registration, but it turns out to be a mere imitation. Page registration failed Mobile phone registration is too fast After repeated attempts and failures in page registration, the reporter decided to try it with a mobile phone.There are two ways to register a mobile phone. The reporter chose the second method, which is to enter the mobile phone number online.After entering the number and clicking Confirm, the newly opened page has not yet been displayed, that is to say, in less than two seconds, the reporter’s mobile phone received a number asking for confirmation. Did not open, the reporter has received a new QQ number and password from Tencent.In total it took less than 10 seconds to register with a mobile phone. Restricted registrations have been in place since February Tencent's restriction of user registration has actually started in February. At the beginning, it was limited to 800,000, and then it was gradually limited to 600,000, 400,000, and finally 200,000.Even since the start of the mobile phone registration business, the number of users who send registration requests from the page every day has exceeded 800,000, and even reached millions on weekends.Zhu Daxin from the marketing department of Tencent said that some similar foreign companies such as ICQ have a daily registration volume of about 100,000.If there are not so many people applying for registration on the page every day, the number of page registration will be gradually relaxed, and the number is 200,000 to 300,000. The restrictions are more than that. In addition to restricting registration, it also restricts the number of friends that users can join.In the past, there was no limit to the number of friends list, but recently only 200 people can be reserved in the friend list, so if you have many friends, you can only apply for a new number, and you need to pay for a new number, and the list is full , re-apply, re-pay, and so on, Tencent's income is really a steady stream.Some people ridiculed that Tencent is really generous. Each list gives 200 places. If there are 20 places, wouldn’t the income be more! Page registration doesn't go through at all According to Zhu's introduction, we seem to be able to understand that in addition to registering with mobile phones, there are still some users who can register through the webpage every day, but the actual situation is that it is impossible to pass the webpage registration.The reporter took 20 minutes to register from the page in the morning, afternoon, evening and night, but all failed.Therefore, there is reason to suspect that Tencent has already imposed a comprehensive restriction on page registration on the server. If you want to apply for a new QQ number, you can only spend money to register with a mobile phone or call 168 voice calls. What's more, there is no registration button on Tencent's homepage at all, only the mobile phone registration button is placed in an obvious position. "Resume page registration" can only be regarded as an empty phrase to deal with reporters.Tencent may want to completely cut off the idea of ​​users registering through the page. Tencent takes the bulk of the share According to Zhu Daxin, since Tencent started the mobile phone registration business in early July, the number of registered mobile phone users per day is about 10,000, and the number of registered users through 168 is several thousand per day.If according to the standard before September 20, the fee for registering a mobile phone number is 5 cents, the daily income is 5,000 yuan, and the monthly income is 150,000 yuan.However, according to statistics from industry insiders, after Tencent launched mobile registration, its monthly income was 10 million yuan. When the reporter asked about the share ratio between Tencent and operators, Zhu said that it was not convenient to answer.However, the reporter learned that in the process of user registration number, the confirmation short message sent by Tencent to mobile phone users also needs to pay to the operator, and the proportion of the two is determined after removing these costs.Therefore, from this perspective, Tencent still takes the bulk of the share. But even if all the monthly income is given to Tencent, it is only a few hundred thousand.Perhaps Tencent’s calculations are different from our calculations. Tencent’s bottom line is 200,000 to 300,000 users per day. On average, based on 250,000, the daily income is 1.25 million yuan, a month (30 days) )'s income is 3.75 million yuan, which is quite impressive.But the actual income is obviously far from the data calculated by Tencent.Tencent has overestimated the loyalty of its netizens, and also overestimated the psychological endurance of its netizens.People may not really care about the 50 cents for registration, but they care about reputation and emotion. Tencent overestimated the charm of QQ Netizens are very sad and annoyed by Tencent's actions. Some netizens said that we have tolerated Tencent's pop-up advertisement banners and windows flashing advertisements, and now we use this method to increase income without any prior notice. Not aboveboard anymore. Some netizens have made it clear that they want to give up QQ and use ICQ instead.If QQ is really so necessary for netizens, then the number of users who register with mobile phones every day should be as many as those who register with web pages every day. Therefore, Tencent has also overestimated the role of QQ in people's lives. QQ does play a role in instant communication and brings convenience to people, but for most people, it is only a tool for chatting and entertainment, not to mention you charge, I can choose other types of entertainment Even if it is the same kind of chat software, there are many at home and abroad.Sina and NetEase have similar software.Therefore, Tencent's approach is undoubtedly to push out its potential resources and push them into the hands of others. Tencent's emergency restrictions and "mandatory" charges started after major websites announced mailbox charges, which seemed a bit impatient and reckless.It seems that websites with a mailbox system have already started to make a lot of money, and I can’t wait to follow up immediately. If you have a mailbox, I have QQ. If you register for a fee, I can also register for a fee.The result of Dong Shi's imitation ended in failure. There is reason to speculate that Tencent will use any means that can be charged, so the simplest thing is to charge for sending messages in the future. If this trend continues, will you still use QQ? Tencent charged fees for inappropriate projects in an inappropriate way at an inappropriate time, which was criticized by netizens.Maybe it's time for Tencent to reflect. In response to the doubts, Tencent responded quickly. Two days later, the "Boutique Shopping Guide" published Tencent's statement on the previous article: To the "Boutique Shopping Guide" Magazine Office: On August 20, 2001, your publication C1 digital weekly published a report titled "Tencent staged an imitation". The content of the article contained many inaccuracies, distortions, and conjectures, which caused unnecessary damage to Tencent's reputation.In view of this, Tencent is highly concerned about this report, especially the series of inaccuracies in the report. The author of this report made wild speculations without fully investigating the relevant business. Without verification, he took out of context after interviewing relevant personnel of Tencent, misinterpreted the original intention of Tencent, and drew wrong conclusions, which caused inconvenience to readers. Little misleading.In view of this, Tencent believes that it is necessary to clarify some facts and minimize the negative impact of false reports.At the same time, Tencent also hopes that this report does not represent the final attitude of your magazine, and will not affect the broad prospects for future cooperation between Tencent and the "Boutique Shopping Guide" magazine. First of all, we must understand Tencent's behavior of controlling number registration. This point was repeatedly emphasized by Tencent staff in telephone interviews, but it is a pity that the author did not take a serious and responsible attitude towards the readers and misinterpreted Tencent's original intention.Tencent itself is a private enterprise, and the operation of the company must be placed in a very important position for Tencent.After careful research, we found that a considerable part of the daily more than 800,000 new registered users are repeated, invalid or even malicious registrations.After referring to the number of new registered users of other foreign Internet instant messaging service providers, we have every reason to believe that the excessive growth of registered users is a great waste of free resources.In view of this, Tencent began to limit the number of registered users, and controlled the number of daily allocations at around 200,000 to 300,000.This number is the result of full verification and comparison. It is a fairly scientific number and an indicator of healthy user growth.Just imagine, when CNNIC reports that the number of Internet users in China is only 26.5 million, QQ has more than 800,000 new registered users every day, which is unbelievable in itself.Tencent has developed services such as mobile phone registration and dialing voice channel registration to provide a feasible channel for users who really need it.It is a pity that the author did not fully understand Tencent's difficulties, and simply interpreted this behavior as an extreme measure taken by Tencent in pursuit of income, thus making a wrong understanding and evaluation.Tencent expresses deep regret for the author's behavior. Secondly, with regard to sensitive data related to the company's operations, the author made blind predictions and miscalculations of Tencent's actual revenue figures based only on speculation and rumors, which caused disastrous damage to the cooperative relationship between Tencent and its partners. Necessary Negative Effects.The loss caused to Tencent and its partners due to the author's speculation and prejudice is a situation that Tencent is very unwilling to see. Thirdly, based on some irresponsible rumors circulating on the Internet, the author made false reports about the functions of Tencent QQ, such as "the number of friends is limited to 200".Tencent is unwilling to comment on this obviously false text. Regarding the current situation of China's Internet industry, negative publicity and false reports will not bring any benefits to the healthy development of the industry. On the contrary, such measures will seriously affect the mentality of users, provoke confrontation, and affect the commercial operation of China's Internet industry. The establishment of patterns is fundamentally damaging.This situation is of no benefit to anyone.I believe that your journal can take an objective and responsible attitude, proceed from the overall situation, and realize the damage caused by false reports to readers and Tencent; I also believe that your journal can fully understand Tencent's position, turn hostility into friendship, and create new opportunities for future cooperation between the two parties. A more favorable prospect.Tencent very much hopes to establish a good relationship of mutual trust and mutual benefit with the media including your journal, and to use Tencent's advantages and resources to create a win-win cooperation situation for both parties, rather than the current situation where both parties lack Effective communication and understanding cause unnecessary misunderstandings. I sincerely wish your journal better and better! Shenzhen Tencent Computer System Co., Ltd. August 20, 2001 However, no matter how fierce the voice from the media or users is, QQ's charging plan has not stopped because of this.In fact, the earliest thing about QQ charging can be traced back to December 18, 2000, when Tencent officially launched the charging service "QQ Club". From February 2001, Tencent began to restrict free user registration, and reduced it month by month until it was almost impossible for users to register a new number; The business of selling the right to use QQ numbers (not ownership); in May 2002, rumors began to spread on the Internet that QQ would charge all employees. In July, Tencent CEO Pony Ma Huateng stated that Tencent would guarantee some free and one-time sources of accounts.He emphasized that in short, the rights and interests of current QQ users are absolutely guaranteed, and there will be no compulsory charges.Ma Huateng's explanation for the fee is that it is because of the fee-based service that Tencent has the funds to provide better free services to existing QQ users.At the end of 2002, free numbers and one-time application (payment) long-term use numbers basically stopped being issued, and QQ mainly focused on QQ line numbers with a monthly rental fee of 2 yuan. Tencent's fee-charging campaign started "vigorously" and ended quietly.By 2003, some netizens discovered that QQ numbers could be applied for free again.Industry insiders speculated that Tencent's suspension of charging business was due to pressure from competitors.