Chapter 49 Ma Huateng grows up in a low-key manner

Although the portal has a clear profit model, when Ma Huateng started the portal, the pattern of the three major portals had stabilized.A very realistic question before Ma Huateng is: how to do it? How do the three mature portals grow? What are the core elements? Above we listed the advertising revenue of the three major portals, but the corresponding advertising revenue is The strength of news content between portals. Therefore, it is easy to understand the intention of Ma Huateng to recruit talents after he decided to become a portal.In this newly established special team, most of the people used by Ma Huateng were those used by Ding Lei and Wang Leilei. "Chinese Entrepreneur" made the following description: For example, Sun Zhonghuai, the general manager of Tencent's website department, once served as the content director of Tom Online and Netease respectively.This person was ordered to build a large portal three times.Sun Zhonghuai said that Ding Lei is a genius.Not only have "precise foresight" for the future, but also be able to implement it resolutely until "every detail is thoroughly understood".Wang Leilei, on the other hand, belongs to the "passionate" school. This top athlete in college can work until midnight, go for a run when he gets tired, and then come back to work, go home to sleep at 5 am, and return to the company at 10 am.When talking about Ma Huateng, Sun Zhonghuai compared him to "Zhuge Liang" in the chaotic times of the Three Kingdoms. He is humble, but "sitting in the office can have the world in mind."

Tracing back the road of Tencent's portal, it is only a little later than the three major portals. In June 2000, when the Tencent website was established, it was the time when the three major portals, Sina, Sohu, and NetEase, echoed each other.At that time, some good media asked Ma Huateng whether he would operate the website as a business focus in the future, and the answer he got was naturally no.At that time, all the purposes of Tencent were to serve QQ.After three years, in early November 2003, Tencent launched its own portal website qq.com.On the homepage of the website, there are complete channels of news, entertainment, education, sports and finance, etc., and the page production is very mature. In addition, the homepage also sets up a survey on the requirements of viewers for the newly born qq.com.

"Our goal is to become a mainstream Internet portal focusing on entertainment. Our user base and our messaging service are already developing in that direction," a Tencent Technology spokesman said in an interview with Reuters.In the communication with foreign media, Tencent has great confidence in entering the portal.But when facing the domestic media, Ma Huateng, who has always been low-key, showed a consistent low-key, "We are different from the traditional Sina, Sohu, Netease and TOM. It is not accurate to say that Tencent enters the portal."Ma Huateng seems to be intentionally or unintentionally avoiding a direct collision with the three major portals and the rising TOM.

When Ma Huateng launched an attack on the portal, TOM also launched a new round of attack, but soon contracted the content compilation.Most representatively, in November 2005, Yahoo China, under the helm of Jack Ma, suddenly announced that it would abandon the portal and focus on the search business. In the previous April, China.com, the first Chinese portal website, officially announced that it would change its name to CDC, abandoning the portal website and switching to software development. and online games. Ma Huateng stated to the media the whole story of Tencent’s entry into the portal: the preparations for the portal began in 2003. At that time, the company’s business began to diversify, and it was no longer possible to rely solely on the software on the client. Several senior executives of the company felt that they needed a platform to enter. The best way back then was the portal.Moreover, the price-earnings ratio for advertising in the capital market was relatively high at that time, and this income was quite stable. Once it rises, the risk of falling down is relatively low.According to Ma Huateng's understanding at the time, the reason for having a portal is not only because of the need for advertising revenue, qq.com has risen to a basic platform as important as the IM platform.

Of course, Ma Huateng's low profile seems to be related to the domestic media's dislike of Tencent's entry into the portal.A common view in the industry is: given the established portal structure in China, it will be difficult for qq.com to break out of the encirclement.Because, after several years of development, the top three companies, Sina, Sohu, and Netease, have formed their core competitiveness.Sina's news and reviews, Sohu's urban life section and Netease's virtual community all have a good reputation and influence. Some experts pointed out that Tencent's portal road will be doomed to be long and tortuous.The reason is: "In the past few years, there were about a dozen comprehensive portals across the country, all of which dreamed of becoming one of the best portals, but failed to change the competitive landscape. Sina, Sohu, and Netease have always been in the top three. Looking back on the development, we will find that the first Advantages and incumbent advantages are very important. After the forerunners are successfully locked in, it is difficult for latecomers to surpass. On the one hand, because of the intensification trend of new online media, it is difficult for latecomers to launch unique skills to attract loyal users of Sina; on the other hand, there are risks The intervention of investment and the successful listing have made Sina abundant in cash. In addition, the scale of the ICP market is relatively small. If the growth of advertising revenue is not as fast as expected, the confidence of latecomers will be shaken.”

The cold water in the industry does not seem to hinder Tencent's pace of entering the portal.In this process, Ma Huateng showed extraordinary caution and meticulousness. Traffic has always been one of the important measures of Internet influence.For all Internet companies, once there is traffic and browsing rate, to some extent it means that the service has captured the needs of users.At the same time, it also brings profits and commercial value to the website.Portal websites also face this problem. Therefore, traffic has become a vital lifeline for portal websites and a "hole card" for them to demonstrate their influence and competitiveness.In terms of traffic statistics, domestic websites pay more attention to Alexa data. Alexa is a third-party statistical agency known for publishing global website rankings. It was founded in the United States in April 1996 and is mainly engaged in category navigation.Like many websites at that time, it was an imitator of Yahoo, but it quickly stood out by virtue of its outstanding ability in search engine technology and Web site traffic statistics and analysis technology.

There are two main types of Alexa rankings for global websites: comprehensive ranking and category ranking.Comprehensive ranking is also called absolute ranking, that is, the ranking of a specific website among all websites. Alexa publishes a new website comprehensive ranking every three months, which is based on the cumulative geometric mean of the number of user links and page views for three months.As for the classification ranking, one is classified by content theme, and the other is classified by language.At present, Alexa divides the websites it collects into 16 categories, and each category is divided into multiple themes; and the language classification is divided into 21 languages.For Chinese websites, it only publishes the list of top 100 websites.In view of the scarcity of similar third-party organizations and the fact that Alexa has the longest history of publishing rankings, it has a certain industry influence in the world. In the Chinese Internet market, its ranking is regarded as the honor list by many websites.

In the early days of being a portal, Tencent even gave up the huge traffic that the QQ client could bring.It is well known that when QQ sends a system message, it can be seen by tens of millions of users in an instant, which is undoubtedly beneficial to the page views of the portal.Xu Chenye, CIO of Tencent, said in an interview with the media that when an emergency occurs, the first time the news is conveyed to users through the QQ client, of course it can attract users' attention, but if the team cannot That speed can be a disservice when it comes to fast and thorough reporting. Before making sufficient preparations, Ma Huateng seems to intend to allow his qq.com to grow freely in the world of portals.For the time being, he has not used the advantage that his client can bring huge traffic.At this time, the competition among the heads of the three major portals to increase website traffic has been going on: On January 5, 2004, Sina's "Top Ten News Selection of the Year" was announced; On the same day, Netease announced the revision of its homepage. Ding Lei, who is worth 7.5 billion yuan, announced that Netease has recruited a large number of news talents and is starting to build "the largest news center in China's Internet industry." "Content is king" has gradually become the theme in the increasingly fierce news competition among the three major portals.In the relatively stable camp of the three major portals, how did Ma Huateng shake off the tip of the iceberg?