Controversy Project
Management Research - Why Can't Many Self-Powered Platforms Become Bigger and Stronger? 》
Hi everyone! I am a researcher of "economic management", and my creative motto is: "Interpret economic phenomena and see the essence of the economy".
In the Internet era, enterprise competition is not only the competition of capital power (including technology, products and services), but also the competition of business models (including management models). So today I want to talk to you about a topic of business models in management: "Why do many self-leading platforms have capital, technology, and background, but they just can't become stronger and bigger?" If you like my articles or **, please remember to like and follow me! Because your likes and attention are the biggest motivation for my creation!
In China, many large companies have their own self-leading platforms, such as: the company's Baijia account, ByteDance's today's headlines, Douyin, watermelon**, Tencent's Penguin, **, etc., Sohu's Sohu, Alibaba's Big Fish, Sina Weibo, Alipay's life account, Sina's Sina Kankan, as well as Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu, Zhihu, Douban, etc., but why are there only a few truly successful self-** platforms? For example: Douyin, Toutiao. What is the reason for the failure of these self-leading platforms? Let me make a specific analysis from the perspective of business model:
The self-leading platform relies too much on artificial intelligence (machine) review.
In order to save labor costs, they are reluctant to hire more manual or expert scholars to review works, and rely too much on machines to review the content and quality of articles.
Many of the articles published in the self-published articles are social science articles, and social science articles have a characteristic that there is no unity and standard answer to its opinions and arguments. So no matter how powerful artificial intelligence is, it can't judge the level and quality of the article?
Machine audits are easy to misjudge.
Creators will inevitably cite other people's opinions or data when writing, but machine review will determine that you have plagiarized or copied. Quotation and plagiarism and copying are not the same nature at all, because the citation has clearly informed the content of the **, there is no problem of plagiarism and infringement. For example, some self-leading platforms, if your article cites other people's content or data, it will automatically determine that the quality of your article content is insufficient, and then limit the number of your posts, or even directly ban your account, which is a very unfair and unjust behavior for creators.
There is an error in the positioning of the self-leading platform.
Excessive and excessive review of the content of the work is a serious positioning mistake of the self-leading platform! Because this restricts the innovation and creative vitality of many creators.
The self-leading platform is a platform for information distribution and sharing, not a platform for political and content quality review. The political review of the creator's work should be handed over to the ** to judge, and the review of the quality of the creator's work should be handed over to the majority of users of the platform (articles or **) or experts and scholars to judge and score, rather than the "life and death" of the work that is retained or recommended by the ** platform. On the self-leading platform, as long as the creator's articles (works) do not have obvious illegal acts (such as: piracy, plagiarism, manuscript washing, copying and anti-party and anti-national, etc.), then the self-** platform has no right to impose various restrictions and penalties on the creator (including deprivation of various legitimate rights and interests). The positioning of the self-leading platform should be more of a neutral role than a judge of politics and content quality.
Why should you oppose judging the quality of the content of your work on the self-** platform?
First: the reviewers of the self-leading platform may not have the professional ability and level to judge the creator's work.
Since the creators of the ** platform, the number of people is very large, and there are all kinds of people. There are both average-level people and many experts and scholars.
If you were to judge a farmer on how good a mathematician was? Isn't that ridiculous? If you want an illiterate person to comment on the ** level of an economist, isn't this nonsense?
For example, if an economist writes a high-level article, but the reviewers have never studied economics, if they do not agree with the views and arguments of economists after reading them, then they may directly shoot the high-quality article or not give traffic recommendations during the review. If high-quality articles are not recommended, then how can such a self-leading platform have its core competitiveness? Without the support of high-quality works, how can the platform attract users' browsing and attention? Without the user's ** and attention, how can the ** platform get revenue and traffic?
Second: If a self-leading platform (reviewer) has the absolute power to review the political and content quality of the work, this will cause a large number of corrupt or wrongful behaviors within the self-**. If this kind of corruption and wrongdoing is serious, it will directly destroy the development and profitability of a self-leading platform.
Corrupt behavior, for example: if a self-leading reviewer likes a person's work, even if the quality of their work is very low, but because he likes it, he may give priority to these inferior works to give more traffic recommendations, this kind of bad money drives good money, it is very likely to directly destroy a company's profitability and brand awareness.
Wrongful behavior, such as: a work that is considered inferior by the platform's reviewers to be a low-quality work is directly killed or ignored; But in fact, the majority of users may like it very much, and it will be considered a high-quality work. For example: Stephen Chow's nonsensical movie, if it was in the 70s and 80s, no one would have watched it, but now many people like it, which is the difference caused by different aesthetic concepts.
Third, if the platform reviewers make too much subjective judgment on the creator's work, it will make the relationship between the platform and the creator tense and rigid, and in serious cases, it may destroy the friendship and cooperation between them.
, since the ** platform has not figured out the relationship with the creator.
The relationship between the creator and the self-leading platform is a win-win cooperation, not a relationship between the boss and his subordinates.
The majority of self-leading creators and self-leading platforms are a win-win relationship, creators are responsible for the production and creation of articles, **and**, and then the self-** platform is responsible for the distribution of works and advertising and marketing, after there is revenue, the platform and the creator share the revenue. Therefore, in the whole process of cooperation, the creator keeps creating wealth for the platform.
In real cooperation, many self-leading platforms have not thoroughly figured out the relationship between the platform and the creator, and they are putting on a boss's shelf at every turn, punishing the creator at every turn, and deducting credit points or banning accounts at every turn, which is a very wrong corporate behavior! Because it is sometimes difficult for creators to know exactly what the eligibility criteria for platform creation are? Sometimes it is inevitable that there will be violations of the work, no one is perfect, who can be without fault?
When the platform finds that the creator has violated the rules, as long as the work is not illegal, the platform should give the creator more tolerance and help. When the self-leading platform machine reviews the work, if the creator's work is found to have illegal information or violations, then the manual review procedure can be added. When reviewing, you can increase the number of manual reviewers, find out the problems of illegal works, and then help creators correct mistakes and deficiencies.
Why help creators correct mistakes and deficiencies? Because these mistakes and deficiencies are manifested in the process of creating works and wealth for the platform. It doesn't matter if the creator has all kinds of problems in the creative process, as long as you can correct it with an open mind, this should be the normal mentality of an excellent platform. If a creator's work violates the rules for some reason, and the platform directly bans and kills him, then who will create wealth for the platform? Isn't it a huge loss for a company to blindly kill the people who work for it and generate revenue? Killing a creator is also killing a user of oneself, which will seriously damage the brand awareness and profitability of the platform.
The incentive system of the self-leading platform is unreasonable.
In the long run, high-quality works are the basis for the brand awareness and sustainable development of the platform, as well as the profit and income. If the incentive system is unreasonable, then many excellent creators will leave the platform, without the support of a steady stream of high-quality works. Talk about two motivational issues:
The first one: the number of posts.
Many self-leading platforms limit the number of articles posted by creators per day (for example: Baijia is limited to 15 articles per day), I think this kind of regulation and restriction is not in line with the law of market economy development (of course, if the server of the self-** platform is limited or the review capacity and economic strength are limited). Because creators post more works, which is to create more value and wealth for the platform, what reason does the platform have to limit the number of articles it publishes? If the platform restricts the number of posts posted by creators, this is a cocoon, which is to restrict and hinder the development and progress of the platform. As long as it's a high-quality work, I think the more works you post, the better.
So how do we restrict creators from publishing low-quality and useless works? That is to use the means of market competition, if the works are of high quality, our platform will give a higher unit price and more traffic and recommendations. For low-quality and useless works, the platform will give fewer recommendations and traffic and lower unit prices. Such an incentive system can allow more excellent works to be produced continuously, and at the same time, inferior works can be gradually eliminated and disappeared.
The second: the unit price of the work.
The works on the self-** can be divided into two categories: one is entertaining works, for example: many of the works recommended by Douyin are purely entertaining and relaxing works, and the audience of this type of work is very large. Whether it is an elite person or an ordinary person, everyone has a need for entertainment and relaxation. One category is intellectual works. The audience of this type of work is mainly elites, so the audience is very small, because the elites are a minority in society after all.
Although the intellectual works have few audiences and few clicks, they have a great impact on the value of the society and users, and they can bring huge brand awareness to the platform, and brand awareness is also a huge intangible asset! Therefore, its unit price should be a little higher. Although the number of elites is small, but its impact on the society is very large, if there are many elites to learn from the platform, it can greatly expand the brand influence of the platform. At the same time, if there is a crisis in the company one day, it can also win the support and users of many elites! For example, if an elite person has studied economics or management for a long time on the platform, and finally one day has succeeded in running a business, then he may place a large number of advertisements on the platform, which is intangible wealth. Another example: Lei Jun, the boss of Xiaomi, has donated more than 1 billion yuan to Wuhan University because of his success in studying at Wuhan University.