Sina's life has just gotten better recently. Through their active promotion outside, the traffic that was blocked by Makino Technology began to be gradually recovered from other channels, making up for the previous negative impact bit by bit. At this time, Chen Tong was not at all He didn't dare to relax. He always thought that Makino Technology would build a portal, but he didn't know when it would be launched. However, this time Makino Technology warmed up the mainland trip of three celebrities, which gave him some clues.
Chen Tong went to Sina's senior management and expressed his concerns. Chen Tong has been thinking about a question during this period: once Makino Technology launches the portal, what should Sina use to compete with it? But in the face of Makino Technology's strong ecological foundation, The core giant, he really can't think of any effective way. Sina cannot be compared with Makino Technology in any aspect. The only content advantage is only established under the premise that Makino Technology has not started to produce content. Once Makino Technology has also begun to produce content. Chen Tong feels that with Li Mu's ability to do things, his portal may not be worse than Sina in terms of content.
Faced with Chen Tong's concerns, Sina's senior management did not immediately realize the hidden dangers and hidden dangers. The CEO asked Chen Tong: "From the current situation revealed by Makino Technology, it seems that this time it is mainly Zhang Guorong and Mo Wenwei who follow 3321’s charity cooperation, right? You also know that 3321 and Makino Technology are both Li Mu’s industries. He will definitely want Makino Technology to take this opportunity to lend some light, but it may not necessarily be to build a portal."
Chen Tong said: "Following reports must have a suitable carrier. Makino Technology currently does not have a suitable carrier for this kind of information dissemination. The portal website is the most likely!"
The CEO asked him: "Could it be Tieba? Li Mu has recently made celebrity Tieba very popular. Now the traffic and user stickiness of Tieba have greatly improved. If he takes this opportunity to do a series of activities in Tieba , Tieba’s traffic will definitely hit a new high.”
Chen Tong said: "He has already got hundreds of celebrities to stay in Tieba. At this time, it would not be very meaningful to use Tieba as a carrier for follow-up reports. I think he will definitely not be that simple."
With that said, Chen Tong was worried that the CEO would make the mistake of underestimating the enemy again, and couldn't help but remind him: "Don't forget, before everyone thought that Li Mu would not and could not retaliate against us because of UC, but we were still caught by him. Take advantage of your weakness and let him trick you hard once."
The CEO nodded awkwardly and said, "If Li Mu really wants to become a portal, how do you think we should deal with it?" He said, without waiting for Chen Tong's answer, he said, "Actually, I have also been worried about this problem. , maybe the entire Internet industry has been worried about this problem. If one day Makino Technology does the same business as mine, how should I respond? I have thought about it for a long time, but I don’t have any clue. I think if Makino Technology really does a portal For the website, we can only place our hope on two things, one is the differentiation between users of Sina and Makino Technology, and the other is Sina’s die-hard users. Relying on these two points, we can still hold on to at least half of Sina’s power.”
Chen Tong nodded and said: "At the moment, it seems that we really have no good way to deal with the threat of Makino Technology, and Li Mu has too many resources, and the number of users is very large. Now with so many Celebrities have established relationships.”
Speaking of this, Chen Tong suddenly had an idea in his mind. He was inspired by Makino Technology's actions and came up with a new content model.
After sorting it out in his mind for a moment, Chen Tong suggested to his leader: "Can we do an online celebrity interview show on Sina.com?"
"Celebrity interviews?" The CEO frowned and asked him: "You mean to imitate Makino Technology and do follow-up reports?"
"No." Chen Tong said: "I think it would be best for us to create a special topic channel and a special column. For example, we can invite a celebrity to Sina every once in a while to visit Sina company and communicate with Sina employees. Interact, accept interviews with Sina, and finally Sina publish text, pictures and video news on Sina.com, so that the influence of celebrities can be used to continuously attract users' attention and maintain traffic."
The CEO asked in surprise: "Isn't this what Li Mu is good at? He has such powerful star resources. If he imitates you, you will have no way to survive!"
Chen Tong said hurriedly: "It is impossible for any model to eliminate copying, but we can find ways to improve the content of the model itself, on the one hand, we can use our strengths and avoid weaknesses, and on the other hand, we can create our own unique content."
Saying that, Chen Tong continued to explain: "I think if we make this show, the categories of stars we choose are not limited to the entertainment circle composed of singers and movie stars. We can completely develop different themes based on the current hot topics in society. For example, this year's World Cup is very popular, so we can invite a few stars from the football world; in the future, we can also invite relevant well-known athletes to be interviewed at various world championships in gymnastics, swimming, and table tennis, and we can even invite famous Directors, screenwriters, writers, in short, we have to adjust according to the hot spots. Makino Technology currently only has a good relationship with the singer group, but there are too many singers. If we only work as singers, the homogeneity will be serious, and users will also be tired of aesthetics."
Sina's senior executives are quite interested in this suggestion. According to Chen Tong's idea, his plan is an Internet light variety show. It is not as large and complex as TV station variety shows, nor as formal as TV station variety shows. However, because the overall operation is simple, , so it is much more flexible.
Chen Tong started thinking at this point and thought that the interaction between celebrities and audiences could be done simultaneously in this special channel. Current technology cannot support live video broadcasts, and he did not plan for live video broadcasts. What he thought of was to let celebrities follow them first. Fans come to have a text interaction. The mode is basically the same as the micro-interview on Weibo in later generations. Users ask questions in text, the host selects the questions, the celebrity answers based on the questions, and then releases the produced video for users to watch. If it can be done every week Inviting a celebrity to come over, live text, and record a video interview should be quite a gimmick.
Sina CEO didn't have any specific opinions. After all, Chen Tong was an expert in the field of portal content. He knew what kind of content could attract users' attention, so he verbally approved Chen Tong's idea and asked him to prepare a specific action plan.
Chen Tong immediately enthusiastically summoned his subordinates and key people from several other departments for a meeting. After the meeting, he realized how difficult it would be to advance this matter.
The first is technology development. All the page technologies currently developed by Sina do not include protocols that support online video. In other words, if you want to broadcast celebrity interviews online, the page must be redeveloped.
Although there are some online Flash, MV and film and television drama viewing websites, the experience on these websites is mostly poor, especially for watching current film and television dramas. For those websites with low traffic, it is also difficult to watch online film and television dramas. To ensure smooth viewing for users, on the one hand, it is due to the bandwidth limitations of its own servers, and on the other hand, it is also due to the shortcomings of streaming media technology.
Sina has a lot of traffic. Although it has been severely tortured by Makino Technology, it is still one of the top 10 in domestic traffic. With such a huge traffic base, if you want to support them to watch videos online, the server bandwidth requirements are too high. At least it must be available now. Basically doubling it would cost a lot.
In addition, Sina does not have the talent to deal with streaming media. If you want to do this, you need to at least form a small, vertical development team dedicated to streaming media development. In this case, the cost will undoubtedly increase.
However, Chen Tong feels that if we can solve the bandwidth and technical problems and provide the video content of celebrity interviews for netizens to watch online, then it will be a very advanced and unique product in the portal website. Relying on this product, Sina can All portals on the market have been left behind. If they want to catch up, they must go through the same process as Sina, solving bandwidth problems, solving team problems, and solving technology problems. In this case, they will be surpassed by Sina for an era. As long as Sina Maintain high-speed development, and it will be difficult for opponents to catch up.
Therefore, Chen Tong planned a detailed implementation plan and estimated cost investment that day. However, what he did not expect was that the CEO, who had been very interested in this plan before, saw a budget of at least tens of millions a year. It exploded all of a sudden.
"Your cost is only the cost of solving bandwidth problems and technical problems. Let me ask you, how do you calculate the cost of celebrities? How do you calculate the cost of content planning and video production teams? If you have to produce one program a week, it will be five times a year. For more than ten issues, if the cost of each episode is controlled at 200,000 yuan, this will be another expenditure in the tens of millions!"
Chen Tong explained: "We can discuss cooperation with celebrities. When they come to record programs with us, we can help them with free promotion. It is mutually beneficial for everyone. If we want to tighten the budget at the beginning, we should not invite too many big-name celebrities. I don’t think there’s much of a problem. We don’t need a multi-million budget, and if our show does well, the cash cost of hiring celebrities will continue to decrease.
Moreover, once the popularity of our program reaches a certain level, we can also sell sponsorships, sell advertisements, and attract sponsors. It is not impossible to make a profit! The key is that we now need a new product that others will not be able to imitate for a while. Just like Makino Technology did with Happy Farm, the pioneer will always maintain the technological lead and the imitators will not be able to surpass it. As long as we remain the first to provide online video viewing portal status, then we will definitely succeed! "
(End of chapter)