The writing method of competing products analysis report adopted in this paper is the third writing method I mentioned in the catalogue: take demand as the main analysis object, and then look at the way and ability of competing products to solve this demand in the market according to this demand. Analyze how different products can solve problems with their own product logic according to the same user's needs, how to reduce the difficulty of solving problems for users, and how to improve the user experience, so as to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of their respective products and operating strategies.
Information content products are a kind of products that use news information to let users know the new things that have happened in their own world recently. With the intensification of the Internet, the news updates faster and faster, and the degree of information asymmetry is greatly reduced, but it also causes content overload. The amount of information that users can access every day has far exceeded the amount that the original newspaper can cover. Therefore, with the upgrade of the algorithm, the current information products have not only considered what is happening in the world, but also paid more attention to users' curiosity about the world they live in. The more he cares, the more curious he is. These are the contents that users will read.
Information products are content products first, followed by news products.
Because it is a content-based product, according to my consistent thinking on this kind of product, we need to consider three parts: content producer, distribution channel and consumer, and the element that connects them together: information flow (see my other article "Some Thoughts on Content-based Products" a long time ago). Because it is a news product, it points out the problems to be solved and the characteristics of the content itself, but at the same time, news is also a kind of content product that I think is more difficult, because the content it touches is either not obvious or very different in the competition of content differentiation. In any case, it is difficult to establish this advantage, and product design itself has little role in this competition (because it is more important to look at news resources), which brings difficulties to product analysis.
The main positioning of information content products is to help users understand what ta is interested in in in their own world through real-time, true and extensive news information. Today's information content products are more broadly defined as pan-information products, because unlike traditional information, today's information has gone far beyond the scope of news, and more content from more content producers has been included in the scope of information products in various forms of presentation.
Under this positioning, the original media world gave birth to five types of information products:
The research report of iResearch shows that the users of mobile news information are growing rapidly, and the penetration rate is second only to audio and video, games and life services.
Because different information channels have their own advantages and disadvantages, and the news content is different, users often get news through various information channels:
According to the data of Analysys in 20 16, Tencent relies on products such as wechat for drainage, ranking first in the number of active users. However, although the number of monthly active users of today's headlines lags far behind Tencent, the number of launches and the average usage market far exceed Tencent News. I have to say that this is a noteworthy phenomenon. It can also be said that Tencent's advantage lies in the user base, and the advantage of today's headlines lies in the huge traffic.
It is also worth noting that Phoenix News has more than 40 million monthly active users, which is second only to Tencent News in startup times and usage time. Personally, I think these two phenomena can drive us to have a deeper understanding of such products.
It can be seen that the immediacy, universality, personalization and convenience of operation of content are all important factors that drive users to continue to use an information product.
It can be seen that when browsing information on the mobile side, users' needs are diversified, and the demand for content lies not only in content, but also in the form of expression.
Users read information content mainly for the following needs:
I have read a sentence, and I deeply agree:
Especially after watching Game of Thrones, the word Watcher gives people some real feelings.
In the book Thinking, Fast and Slow, the author mentioned a point to the effect that in this world with huge information and high asymmetry, we know very little about what is happening in the world, and a large part of what we know is shaped by the media. We only know what others told us (I remember the author called it exposure theory), which may be true, but it may only be part of the truth. Survivor bias is also an example. So if you want to know all the facts, you must either rely on personal investigation or rely on objective and neutral media. What Luo Pang mentioned in his New Year's Eve speech on 2016.12.31is not unreasonable. People sometimes don't care what the truth is. When they choose their positions, they often ignore the parts that are not told in the original story.
When people read information for entertainment, no one will be bored to do research to verify the authenticity of something, and at this time people will rely more on Pondo's accessible media.
I think the core element of information products is to obtain content sources that meet their own product positioning. The word content source is used instead of content producer because some content provided by information products is not produced by producers on their own platforms, but obtained from other places.
For example, the positioning of portal websites is comprehensive news, so their primary goal is to report the recent important events in all walks of life in the world immediately and accurately, and the definition of the word important is what their audience (the broadest masses of the people) care about;
Vertical information, taking 36Kr as an example, is positioned as "becoming an entrepreneurial service platform that entrepreneurs can rely on to provide the best products and services for entrepreneurs", so it is necessary to pay attention to its core audience (that is. Entrepreneurs are most concerned about the industry prospects of their own market and the dynamics of competitors. On the content source of information;
Aggregate news aims to provide personalized content recommendation for users, so it is necessary to cover diversified content on the content source of information, so that users can get enough content within their favorite range.
Like any other product, information products must consider the needs of their target users when positioning, so as to infer the content or service to be provided. But unlike other products, the content delivered by the media is not always what you want to see. Many times, as a social watcher facing this kind of audience, the media will think xxx is worthy of attention.
36Kr's article "Thousands of vivid and in-depth reports from the media that can't be communicated, who else cares" mentioned:
For the first time in history, content producers in the information industry have the opportunity to directly combine with a large amount of capital, which gives them the opportunity to provide high-value content output. Content Entrepreneurship and Traffic Realization: How will content and advertising develop in the era of media convergence? ",the author mentioned a valuable point:
But at the same time, there is another view, that is, when people are willing to pay for high-quality content, the producers of news content will gain real freedom and they will have enough power to decide the value orientation of their news products.
In addition, when talking about the content displayed by content products, there is always a view that when a content product has few users, the product displays high-quality content, but when it has a life of 1 100 million users1100,000 days, it is necessary to consider the concerns of the widest user groups and cater to the tastes of the audience, so as to ensure the continuation of the product life. Many people have explained the hydration phenomenon after the influx of BBS and Zhihu users from this perspective, which makes sense. This is a question worthy of consideration in the source of content, but more discussion will not be given priority and will be discussed in detail later.
But this also leads to my second focus: distribution channels.
In a mature content-based product, perhaps the distribution channel of content is the most important thing, because at this time, the product already has a sufficient number of content producers and a huge audience, and what determines the quality of the product is whether the high-quality content can get enough attention and benign feedback, giving content producers enough motivation to continuously produce content. However, for information products, I think the content source is the highest priority at any time. Because high-quality and valuable content will not lack audiences, inferior content should have no chance to appear.
The efficiency of content distribution is an important part of this priority. For news and information products, the distribution efficiency of app itself is much faster than traditional media such as portals and newspapers, so people who pay attention to news have a strong stickiness to such products, which is also the embodiment of news immediacy.
Maintaining explicit content is the second important link, which is the most obvious content that users will see when browsing. If the user sees all the content that he is not interested in, he will leave; If the user sees all the inferior content, he will leave. How to make high-quality content float, let inferior content sink, give priority to the content that users care about, and let the content that users don't care about occupy a small but reasonable proportion is the main consideration in this link.
Personalization or customization is the third aspect. Personalization is to mine and judge users' preferences through algorithms, and then provide content that meets their concerns according to users' preferences. Customization is to let users choose their own concerns, that is, the source of content. This can not only reduce information noise, but also increase the effective flow of information between people. Moreover, after producers generate content, products can also know where information should flow to play its value. Therefore, products can exert their efforts from the perspectives of themselves and users to maximize the efficiency of content distribution. On the other hand, users prefer personalized/customized products because these products filter out most of the content that they are definitely not interested in, and at the same time reduce the exposure probability of the content that users may be interested in, so they don't really understand users' preferences, which is also a point that distribution channels need to consider.
Traditional information (such as Tencent News, Netease News, Phoenix News) and aggregated news (such as today's headlines, a little information, and daily express) are more inclined to solve users' needs for information in their personal hobbies and lives, such as the right to know about events related to their lives, the desire to know more about information they are interested in, and the desire to share more information with friends. Such products are aimed at a wider user base. Therefore, most of the selected information is comprehensive information to cater to the taste of the audience. However, in the face of users' work needs, traditional information classes are relatively weak in this respect, while vertical information classes solve such needs well. Traditional information classes tend to let users know a message, while vertical information classes will explain events in order to better serve the work scene.
In terms of content sources, both traditional information and vertical information are created by professionals, and then the professional content team is responsible for editing, publishing and recommending the content, so users see the content after the inferior information is filtered out.
However, there are two standards to measure high-quality content. One is news quality, and traditional information is naturally guaranteed in this respect. The other is content preference, that is, good news may not be liked by users, so for users who don't like this kind of information, this kind of "high-quality" news is also information noise. Therefore, although there are essential differences between content production and aggregated news, if one of the problems faced by aggregated news is the uneven quality of content sources, then the problem faced by traditional information products is how to better solve the problem of users' content preferences. This is also a matter of content distribution.
In content distribution, the disclosure of high-quality information and the sinking of inferior information have been completed by the content team, so what remains is basically how to deal with the content that users like and the content that users don't like. As for the content that users like, according to my observation, Tencent News and Netease News have also added recommendation algorithms to make more types of information that users like, but how to treat the content that users don't like is a big problem. I think unimportant information that users don't like can also sink down. For information that users don't like but are important, I think products should help users "circle the key points". Tencent News's Tencent topic, 24-hour required reading and Netease's "highlights" are all functional manifestations of the circle. In terms of the connection between contents, traditional information applications mostly adopt diversified forms of content expression, but most of them make the forms independent of each other. Netease's product design reflects the basic needs and meets the same needs in various forms, so it not only designs two functions of "question" and "topic" to meet the needs of users to "understand the actual impact of something reported on themselves" in new forms, but also allows different forms to cross each other. Users can see the video or live broadcast information on the graphic page, and they can also see the professional recommendation of "Ask Me" and the recent news follow-up related to "topics" that users care about.
Although I think Netease News is the most worthy of reference in product design, it is not the best in market performance, so perhaps behind the traditional information products, the competition between professional content production teams is the key.
Compared with traditional vertical information products that focus on news quality, aggregation products provide another way of thinking, which uses a large amount of content generated by the media combined with personalized recommendation algorithm to allow users to keep reading their favorite content, so as to obtain good market performance (such as more startup times and longer use time). Aggregation products generally face two problems, one is news quality, and the other is how to accurately grasp user preferences.
As far as news quality is concerned, aggregation products mainly depend on the quality of content in the content pool. Each family actively collects high-quality content produced by its own media team, and also cooperates extensively with traditional information media to enrich its own high-quality news resources.
In grasping user preferences, aggregated products mainly rely on the observation and analysis of user behaviors: browsing, collecting, searching, subscribing/following, etc. Users browsing the content will trigger the tag of the corresponding content, and collection is undoubtedly the most direct way to express their preferences, while search means that users have specific needs for this information, and subscription/attention means that users are willing to continuously receive information about this kind of information, which is also a direct way to express their preferences.
In terms of subscription/attention, the product design of the three applications I analyzed (today's headlines, a little information, and daily express) has its own applicable logic;
In terms of search, today's headlines have the clearest classification of content forms and the richest forms (it even added relevant web search results and developed its own Q&A community); A little information on the search page will not only give the terms directly related to the keywords entered by users, but also recommend the terms similar to the keywords to users. The content forms of search results are also very rich, and the question-and-answer mechanism is associated with Zhihu, which makes it easier to import information, and the concerned content is directly displayed on the home page for easy retrieval; Daily Express will not associate the words typed by users when entering keywords on the search page, but it can pay attention to the entries corresponding to historical search. Personally, I think this is a little worse in product design, because it replaces the information that users may be more concerned about with a more trivial function.
Subscribing to information products belongs to customized information, and users can push whatever they want to pay attention to, so the news quality and content preference are selected by users themselves, so the information noise is relatively minimal, and users are most concerned about its content dynamics. Instant in this mode is also dubbed as "the product that users are most willing to open message push". But the disadvantage is that users only pay attention to what they see. How to make users see wider information and discover more possibilities is a problem faced by such applications. The direct way is to subscribe to subdivided topics, so that users can know more about what they can pay attention to by showing them more small topics worthy of attention and showing relevant recommendations under topics that users have already paid attention to. At the same time, in terms of content distribution efficiency, compared with subscription products such as Qingmang and Flipboard, the topic division of instant subscription is more refined. Therefore, instead of subscribing to all the content under a certain content source like the other two products, we re-screen the content under the content source like an RSS reader, so that the more subdivided subscription mechanism can filter out the best content under the content source like a sieve and filter out the noise.
Shi Ying is a new interactive form of fragmented news, with less content and longer interaction time. So if it is used for news reporting, it is not suitable for in-depth reporting, but suitable for short news or instant news. However, this function can increase the interaction between the product and the user, and make the user feel that this product understands me, so it will be more sticky to use, especially when the system has clearly judged the user's preferences, and presenting the content that the system thinks the user may like from time to time through the private message function can often bring surprises to the user.
In short, the ultimate pursuit of information products is excellent news quality and distribution mechanism to meet users' content preferences. Different product logics have their own weaknesses and problems. Through the analysis of several kinds of products, we can see that although the traditional information category is better than the aggregation category in overall news quality, it is not as good as the latter in content preference. Although the quality and content preference of subscribed products meet the needs of users, how to find more good content is a problem. So I think this product is particularly difficult to design, but it is worth studying carefully.