Feelings are worthless? After the bankruptcy puzzle , the end of the world restart was postponed

Image source @Visual China.

Text |Interesting Business, Author |Zeng Xianyu, edFun about business.

A few days ago, a news that "Tianya community has been filed for bankruptcy review" once again attracted the attention of the outside world, and the last time Tianya caused such a big move was the "nostalgia tide" caused by the closure of Tianya community in April last year.

Screenshot of Weibo.

March 1, 2024 is the 25th anniversary of the birth of Tianya Community, and it is also the day when Tianya officially restarted; However, that night, the Tianya community announced through its official *** that it would resume access to the Tianya community by May 1.

What will be the fate of Tianya, the former "top stream of the Internet"? Is it to slide into bankruptcy, or to be reborn?

It's been nearly a year since the Tianya Community** was closed. Not long ago,Xing Ming, chairman of Tianya Community, once announced that Tianya Community will start the official live broadcast after New Year's Day in 2024, and will officially restart on March 1, the 25th anniversary of the founding of Tianya Community - although the official live broadcast has not been seen after the year, at least it has left the outside world with a little conjecture of "Tianya Rebirth".

But unexpectedly,On February 26, the national enterprise bankruptcy and reorganization case information network disclosed a piece of information that "Tianya Community Network Technology Co., Ltd. was applied for bankruptcy review", which detonated the Internet。The applicant is Zhang Xin, and the court accepting the case is the Intermediate People's Court of Haikou City, Hainan.

Screenshot of Qichacha.

Subsequently, "Tianya was filed for bankruptcy review" also once appeared on the social ** hot search, and many netizens were lamenting "Qingjie" (the end of youth).

But Tianya denied the rumors that he was about to go bankrupt. On the evening of February 28, Xing Ming, founder and chairman of Tianya Community, said in an interview with "Southern ***".It was a former employee who was owed wages (i.e., the applicant Zhang Xin) filed a bankruptcy application with the court, which was a normal legal process, and "Tianya Company was not greatly affected".

Xing Ming did not comment on the employee's application, saying only that "this is not a company filing for bankruptcy, and any creditor has the right to file it," and said that the Tianya community is still working on restarting.

Screenshot of Weibo.

According to "Qujie Business", Du Lei (pseudonym), a former employee of Tianya who participated in the "restart live broadcast" last year, also confirmed the matter: "Previously, due to business difficulties, Tianya Community had owed wages and social security to many employees, and some employees filed arbitration or lawsuits, and Zhang Xin was one of them. ”

According to Du Lei, ".Zhang Xin was owed more than 200,000 yuan in wages, and despite several efforts, he still did not get the arrears, so he filed an application with the court

This is not the first time that the Tianya community has encountered rumors of "bankruptcy".

In April 2023, the Tianya community began to shut down with "technical upgrades and data reconstruction", and then external access began to have problems; On May 27, 2023, Tianya Community officially announced that it would not be able to provide external browsing and access services due to difficulties in capital flow.

As the representative of the first generation of Chinese Internet platforms in the rising tide of the Internet in the 21st century, Tianya Community, founded in 1999, was once China's "top Internet stream". It didn't just once have 1With 300 million registered users, it reached 25 million daily active users in 2003, and is known as the "No. 1 Chinese Internet Community", and has become popular with many Internet celebrities, such as Mingyue and Tianxia Ba Sing all over the country through Tianya

Because of this, the news that was inaccessible to the Tianya community in May last year triggered a wave of "nostalgia". Subsequently, former employees of Tianya and netizens launched a live fundraising activity of "Seven Days and Seven Nights to Restart Tianya"., with the intention of "rescuing the ICU" of the Tianya community in this way.

Screenshot of Weibo.

However, due to various reasons, the fundraising effect of that live broadcast was not satisfactoryThe fundraising goal of $3 million was only $150,000 in the endIt did not play much role in the Tianya community, which had dried up liquidity, broken banks, and was in operational difficulties and in debt crisis.

At the same time, according to the donation channel of Tianya Community*** to help TianyaAs of 19:30 p.m. on March 1, a total of 93,427 funds had been raised82 yuan, all of the above funds are used to pay for telecommunications companies

And the historical writer Song Yan is more concerned about whether the large amount of original content she wrote in Tianya can be reproduced. "I registered a Tianya account around 2003, and then I started writing historical articles on it, which gained the first wave of readers, and later some of the articles were collected and published, and the response was not bad. Because of this, I never thought that Tianya would be closed one day, so many articles were not saved. ”

Song Yan said that although she didn't use the Tianya community much later, she still often logged on to Tianya to look up old texts and used it as a database; As a result, the sudden closure of the Tianya community caught her off guard, and she was always worried that her articles would be "completely lost".

A situation similar to Song Yan was not uncommon among Tianya netizens in the past. In this regard, Xing Ming also publicly stated to ** on February 29"The issue of data is our top priority, and we have raised funds to ensure data security under extremely difficult circumstances for most of the past six months."

And in 2023, when Xing Ming participated in the live broadcast of "Restart Tianya", he also promised that "the data of the Tianya community will not be lost".

It is worth mentioning that for the issue of original works and data preservation that many Tianya users are particularly concerned about, on the evening of March 1, the official *** of the Tianya community released a message saying"One-to-one exclusive data ** and storage services will be launched", and the "99 yuan Tianya Shen Paste Service" and "299 yuan one-to-one data ** service" services will be opened；and called on more netizens to join the action of "restarting Tianya" to ease the financial pressure.

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However, after the news of payment** came out, some Tianya user netizens said that it was difficult to accept "spending money on their own data", and Tianya self-help should be based on normal and sustainable business logic, rather than the wool of loyal users, which will chill the hearts of old users, and I hope that Tianya's senior management will make prudent decisions.

The Tianya community has given birth to many popular posts, ** many situations and events, and these posts are called "Tianya God Posts" by netizens. Nowadays, there are still bloggers on Xiaohongshu who use "Tianya Shen Post" to attract traffic to attract attention, and there are also many Tianya users who are willing to pay for Tianya's content (old posts).

Screenshot of Xiaohongshu.

In fact, with the glorious past of the Tianya community, the current situation is somewhat unexpected. In this regard, some industry insiders believe thatTianya believed too much in the so-called successful experience in the past, and has been holding on to the BBS model of the first-generation Internet platform, but missed the great development of the mobile Internet later。One wrong step, one wrong step, is the biggest regret of the Internet companies represented by Tianya.

Du Lei also thinksTianya's generation of Internet platforms paid more attention to the so-called feelings, lacked business sense, and even rejected commercial development, and as a result, when the new wave of development came, they quickly lost the foundation for survival, even if you try to break through, it is difficult, and the Xici Hutong and Renren Network of the same era as Tianya have experienced similar scenes.

Screenshot of Xiaohongshu.

In fact, the Tianya community has received the attention of capital at a very early stage.

According to the ** report, Tianya has previously tried to go public twice without success: around the most prosperous 2005, Tianya has successively received investment from IDG, Qingke, Lenovo, Google and other parties, and plans to go public overseas; In 2005, Google subscribed for 1 million shares of Tianya at $1 per share**, accounting for 667%。

According to "Fun Solution", when Google withdrew from Chinese mainland in 2010, Tianya Community dismantled the VIE structure by buying back Google shares and other actions, and at the same time abandoned the overseas listing plan. According to the end of the world at that time 2The repurchase of $9 shares** puts Tianya at $43.47 million in 2010.

In addition, Sina, Sohu and other leading domestic Internet platforms have also thrown olive branches, hoping to invest in Tianya, but Tianya has refused to "maintain independence".

According to "Fun Solution", in 2009, when the domestic GEM was launched,The news of the impact on the GEM was once reported in the Tianya community, and it was considered by the market at that time to be the "first stock on the GEM"., but in the end, it also failed to do so, and some analysts believe that this was due to the legal structure problems at that time, which caused Tianya to miss the opportunity.

Around 2010, the tide of mobile Internet rose, and social platforms such as Weibo, WeChat, and Xiaohongshu appeared successively, and the attention of the Tianya community began to be affected.

According to Analysys Qianfan data,In April 2016, the number of monthly active users of Tianya Community APP reached a peak of 2.93 million, which has since started all the way down; By September 2022, the monthly activity of Tianya APP has dropped to 59520,000

It was not until 2015 that the Tianya community finally made substantial moves in the capital market - in August of this year, Tianya login***。According to Tianya's "prospectus", in 2014 and 2013, Tianya's main business income was 10.4 billion and 10.7 billion yuan, and the loss amount was 4465$820,000 and $3,161330,000 yuan.

As for the reason for the loss, Tianya explained it as:The impact and impact of competitors such as Weibo, WeChat, Maopu, and Zhihu on Tianya's original advantages

And according to public reports, in more than three years after logging in***,Tianya only obtained 100 million yuan of financing through additional issuance, but due to the failure to publish the 2015 annual report in time, Tianya was suspended after 6 days of listing, and has been suspended since the end of 2016；In April 2019, Tianya Community, which had been suspended for more than two years, was delisted from ***.

Although Xing Ming believes that the "bankruptcy review" filed by employees with unpaid wages does not contradict Tianya's efforts to resume operations, it seems uncertain whether Tianya, which is facing heavy debt pressure, will be able to restart as desired.

On February 29, Xing Ming revealed to the "Daily Economic News" that Tianya still has about 100 employees, and the total debt is not too high, and after the efforts of debt restructuring for most of 2023, Tianya "will reduce debt on a large scale".At present, the total debt of Tianya community is about 200 million, which can be reduced to less than 100 million through debt restructuring

Screenshot of Weibo.

And Xing Ming also said before,New Tianya will rely on the resources accumulated by the Tianya community to reconstruct a new "membership-based social e-commerce platform".

Xing Ming believes that Tianya community is a platform that carries the memories of many users, which is Tianya's greatest wealth. In the new Tianya business layout, "there must be live content", but "this is not a simple live broadcast platform, live broadcast is part of the platform".

We do live broadcasts, and the probability of a Dong Yuhui appearing is very low, but we will design the Tianya living room and invite old netizens over, because Tianya has no shortage of cattle and content, and dig out these contents and talents, I believe that the new Tianya will also have a good number of users. Xing Ming said.

Regarding Xing Ming's vision of the new Tianya, Du Lei, who personally experienced last year's "restart Tianya live broadcast", was a little worried: "This form is very similar to last year's restart of the live broadcast, and many celebrities were invited to come at that time, and everyone has some feelings for Tianya, but the effect is not very good." The most important thing is that this model is difficult to sustain, after all, feelings alone cannot solve the problem of debt and survival

As of now, the main station of Tianya Community is still closed.

On the evening of March 1, the official *** of the Tianya community released a message sayingTianya will raise funds by introducing strategic investment, resuming advertising business, launching social e-commerce platforms and vigorously developing value-added services for members. On the premise of ensuring data security and compliance, Tianya community access will be resumed within 2 months, that is, before May 1

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After the Tianya community resumes access, the new international domain name tianyanet, strengthen the Chinese online community service for overseas Chinese, and further consolidate the positioning of "global Chinese online home".

In addition, Tianya Weibo and Douyin accounts are still being updated and operated normallyIts Douyin content is mainly a review of "Tianya God Post", "Tianya Cow", etc., and still focuses on nostalgic cards; In addition, Tianya Douyin store also has a certain sales, but compared with other similar accounts, it does not have too obvious advantages

Screenshot of Douyin.

Can the Tianya community survive this existential crisis? Can the new Tianya community be reborn? We'll see.

What are your impressions of the Tianya community? Leave a message in the comment area to chat!