While running on the treadmill, Shen Feng thought. In the past two years, users have continued to say goodbye to free: paying the balance and withdrawing cash, I heard that Jay Chou is going to buy members, the takeaway shipping is getting more and more expensive, the shared bicycle has risen to 2 yuan, the popular dramas have become exclusive to members, and e-commerce members are selling better and better......

What's going on?

Is it that users are more willing to pay?

Or is the free logic of the internet out of order?

It has to be said, especially in China, free has always been the most effective business strategy. Attract people with free stuff first, and then pick the right item to sell to you.

The essence behind it is a kind of cross-subsidy: subsidizing low-margin products with high-margin products, and subsidizing free products with paid products, the Internet world has long become a big stage for cross-subsidization.

In offline stores, the yellow price tag of buy one get one free can always keep consumers in a hurry and buy non-discounted products by the way.

Online e-commerce platforms, countless coupons, spikes, and limited-time discounts make people happy, shop passionately, and buy non-spike products.

Payment institutions have launched various payment reduction activities to complete the closed-loop revenue through wealth management and loans......

To put it bluntly, free is a marketing strategy, and the platform is still interested in the money in the user's pocket, after all, the wool is out of the sheep. Of course, the wool from the pig is also a different way.

Free search, free social, free news, free antivirus, free email......

The first generation of Internet giants, who did not rely on the free strategy to rise?

Of course, no one is stupid, free is a kind of transaction, and it is not currency that is traded, but attention.

When you visit Zhihu, brush Weibo, and chat on WeChat, the content is free and open, and what the platform values is no longer the money in your pocket, but your attention.

In this chain, the big V produces content to get fans and revenue sharing, the platform is responsible for operation and promotion and advertising investment, and the advertiser is the last buyer.

Otherwise, where will the public spend 14 billion yuan on advertising every year?

Shen Feng stopped, took a sip of Evian water, wiped his sweat and continued. The marginal cost in the information world is zero, but there is no zero cost in the physical world, except for air and sunlight, any resources in nature are scarce, so the products of the physical world cannot be truly free.

It was at this time that a forerunner appeared, and Rebus's Xiaomi made its debut.

Equate cost sales with free!

Open the popularity of a hard-to-find machine, and create a precedent for domestic mobile phones to pursue cost performance. Even for a long time, free hardware and software fees have become the standard logic of the Internet-enabled manufacturing industry.

Then there is the rise of group buying, which means that subsidizing money to get customers has become a new variant of free thinking, and subsidies have become an aggressive version of free.

Compared with the free in the attention economy, subsidies in the O2O field consume more real money, startups can't afford it, venture capital is becoming more and more indispensable, and the right to speak is getting stronger and stronger, becoming the driving force behind a series of tuyere wars.

This is a typical two-sided market for group buying, and the platform must attract both buyers and sellers, which leads to the classic problem of "chicken or egg".

Gather buyers first to attract sellers, but without sellers, how to attract buyers?

The answer is to burn money!

It's hard to find people who want to spend money,

People who want to make money are everywhere.

At the peak, there were more than 6,000 bloody storms, and those who could survive became small giants.

Immediately after a wave of new players, mobile payment, shared travel, food delivery and other outlets have emerged one after another, and everyone is deeply aware of the importance of first-mover advantage.

Don't say anything, burn money desperately, 100 million, billion, 10 billion...... Guangxi

Internet entrepreneurship has slowly become an agency game for giants.

The mobile payment war has made Alipay and WeChat Pay ...... Achievements in the field of shared mobility...... Takeaway makes Meituan and Ele.me......

Of course, the knowledge outlet has also achieved millions of winners.

It's a pity that I know it!

Shen Feng stopped, took the towel from Lei Li's hand, and sat down to rest.

I have always firmly believed that the subsidy itself is not the goal, and one day no longer subsidize is the purpose of the subsidy, but many enterprises only see the subsidy, and the operation is as fierce as a tiger, and finally the road is crooked.

In the end, I played myself to death!

For example, shared bicycles are not a two-sided market, and there is no free + charged double-layer structure.

The two-sided market for people to share travel involves both drivers and passengers, and some of them make real money.

You don't have a lot of pressure in your shared bicycle heart?

To put it bluntly, it is a rental economy, with only paid business and no free business. Any strong promotion of free strategy and the pursuit of scale growth is to quench thirst.

It's just a matter of when you're going to die?

Neither dare to resume normal pricing, afraid of driving away users, but capital will not continue to be transfused, the capital chain continues to be tight, and finally falls into the quagmire of misappropriation of consumer deposits and arrears of supplier payments.

If the business model doesn't work, it doesn't mean that no one makes money, and once committed to the giant, isn't the founder of Mobike an instant financial freedom?

Feel at ease to make a drainage tool in the big ecology, and magically find that the double-layer structure of free + paid is actually there?

The high-interest pricing of P2P in the past two years has also been subsidized in a sense. P2P, as an information intermediary, matches lenders and borrowers, and is originally a two-sided market.

But lenders are not attracted by network effects, but only by high interest rates, and end up in a dead end. Lower the interest and the lender will run away. To maintain high interest rates, we can only look for low-quality borrowers and bear the consequences of rising NPL rates.

Many platforms are forced to simply embark on the road of Ponzi schemes, forging fake assets to deceive users. Some conscientious platforms insist on finding real assets, but after all, they are not defeated by the downward pressure of the economic cycle, and now they are ......

Free is absolutely right,

It goes to the extreme and is charged.

Free brings abundance, and each abundance creates a new kind of scarcity, and users are willing to pay for it.

Take a look at the two hottest outlets right now: the content industry has a huge amount of free information, and users are willing to pay for real knowledge, right?

The price of free in the video field is longer and longer ads, and users are willing to pay for the ad-free experience and pay for popular episodes in advance, right?

You don't even have to contribute,

Is the user crying and shouting to deliver the money to the door?

Cheap things, only the moment I place an order, I feel that it is worth it, and I don't have a day of worry when I use it.

Good quality things, the moment you spend money, it's painful, but it's fun to use every day, and I feel like I've made a lot of money!

Who said that whoever gets the dick silk wins the world?

They're all going to die!