Since they are reborn, they must be supported by the school beauties.

Chapter 257 Successful Soft Landing

On Christmas Eve, Renren.com launched a series of activities.

The campus fashion show launched a large number of Christmas decorations, which were popular among netizens and set a sales record. On this day, Chen Cheng launched a gift item called "Peace Apple" in the mall. In his opinion, this item had epoch-making significance.

It is considered epoch-making because Chen Cheng was the first to implement virtual gift recycling on the school's intranet.

A "Peace Apple" costs 1.99 campus coins. Once received, this bright red apple will appear in the user's cartoon avatar wearing a Santa hat.

And this gift can be given away in unlimited quantities.

In other words, if you like, you can give your sweetheart a hundred or even ten thousand "peace apples".

The system stipulates that once you receive a "Peace Apple," you can hand it over to the system for recycling.

The system offers two recycling options: one is an 80% discount on campus coins, where 1.59 campus coins are directly credited to the user's campus account; the other is a 50% cash discount, where each coin is worth one yuan.

The recycling method was simple. Chen Cheng didn't want Renren.com to participate in the recycling itself, so he handed it over to all the distributors to be responsible for.

If you receive 1,000 Peace Apples, you can directly find the offline distributors who act as agents for Xiaonei Coins. As long as the user enters the distributor's ID number on the recycling page, they can submit a recycling application to the distributor.

After receiving the recycling application, the distributor clicks to confirm, and the apples submitted for recycling by the user will disappear from their account. The distributor is responsible for paying the user 1,000 yuan for the recycling. However, in order to make the distributor profitable, the system will give the distributor a 65% discount based on the pricing in campus currency after the distributor completes the recycling.

In other words, a user spends 2,000 yuan to receive 1,000 "Peace Apple" props from a distributor, the distributor earns 300 yuan, and Xiaonei.com receives 1,700 yuan.

Next, the distributor spent 1,000 yuan to buy back these 1,000 Peace Apple props, and exchanged them for 1,300 Campus Coins at the price of 2,000 Campus Coins.

Selling campus currency yields a 15% profit, and buying back campus currency also yields a 15% gross profit.

In this way, distributors can make money from both ends, while the school becomes the biggest beneficiary.

Chen Cheng introduced this feature mainly to help Renren users get used to the basic logic of tipping and gifting. Since the ultimate goal is to make money, it can't be hidden. The conversion logic needs to be made smooth, like Douyin and Kuaishou, to encourage users to give and receive gifts.

On Christmas Eve alone, Renren.com sold over 100 million yuan worth of "peace apples," with the top spender on the entire network spending 2 million yuan.

However, the top-ranked player is a true gamer. He owned an internet cafe and directly purchased two million campus coins through the cafe's partnership with the school. This gave him a 15% discount, and he then used these campus coins to give two million "Peace Apples" to hundreds of girls.

This move saved him 300,000 yuan in channel fees.

On Christmas Day, the campus Facebook gaming platform officially launched its public beta test.

Because most users were already playing Lianzhong and had established habits and gaming partners, they weren't initially interested in this gaming platform.

In the internet industry, having a large user base doesn't guarantee that new products will attract users. Tencent's success in gaming relied entirely on its social network. Currently, the chat function on the Renren platform is a lightweight application and cannot be well integrated with the gaming platform, so its start was not as easy as QQ Games.

However, Chen Cheng had his own methods.

He planned to skip the formalities and go straight for the money. After all, the school's currency was highly valuable, and using it as an incentive would surely lead to a resounding success.

So he directly introduced a policy: during the public beta, players can get 1.88 school coins for every hour they play, with a maximum daily cumulative time of 8 hours. The system has sufficient anti-AFK detection, and users must actually participate in the game and not be AFK or complained about for the reward to be effective.

Combining the "Peace Apple" gift with the cash redemption function, it's like the official platform is directly giving users a small chance to "earn money".

These days, an overnight stay at an internet cafe usually costs between five and eight yuan. Playing games for eight hours will earn you 15 campus coins. You can then buy seven "Peace Apples" (a type of virtual gift), which will recoup seven yuan, covering the cost of the overnight stay.

Since you're playing games anyway, why not play games that can make you money?
Furthermore, the campus Facebook gaming platform has launched a policy that increases the reward to 2.88 campus coins per hour if you play Happy Landlords or Guandan.

If you've never heard of Happy Landlords or Guandan, that's okay. You can pick them up easily with a few tries; they're not difficult.

Since everyone is playing games, they naturally want to earn more money, so a large number of users flocked to the rooms of these two games.

As a result, Happy Landlords and Guandan quickly became games that many netizens played frantically in internet cafes to gain experience.

To their surprise, these two games were so captivating that they quickly became addictive.

Card and board games are inherently designed for social interaction. After Guandan became popular, it was as if friends hadn't eaten at all if they didn't play a few rounds of Guandan before gathering at a restaurant.

This strong social aspect will encourage users to spontaneously recommend it to their friends and form card game groups with them.

Tencent's QQ Games was originally planned to launch on New Year's Day.

They are currently conducting intensive internal testing and do not plan to hold a public beta test. They will launch the game directly on New Year's Day, using QQ as the pop-up window.

To everyone's surprise, Renren.com also launched a gaming platform, and even started its public beta test five or six days ahead of schedule. Even more surprising was the direct and aggressive incentive policy employed by Renren.com.

With tens of millions of users, hundreds of millions or even more of Xiaonei coins may be given away in the next few days. What's even more frightening is that Chen Cheng has also opened up a channel for exchanging Xiaonei coins for cash. This is equivalent to putting up to 50% cash cost on the virtual currency that originally had almost no cost.

But Chen Cheng didn't care.

The Christmas promotions and the giveaway of "peace apples" have already earned the school hundreds of millions in gross profit. He didn't plan to keep this money; he used it directly as a subsidy.

Moreover, not every user has enough time to play for eight hours every day. Most users can only earn a few dollars, and they may not withdraw those few dollars. Most of them may just spend them as campus currency.

The Tencent team downloaded the games immediately and tried both of them. After playing them, they felt they should throw their own games in the trash.

These two games are more appealing than all other card and board games combined.

More importantly, Renren.com published the trademarks and original rights of these two games on its gaming platform. The two games are entirely original gameplay. If any platform dares to copy and paste them, it will likely face a lot of trouble in the future due to lawsuits.

This series of actions left the Tencent team feeling utterly hopeless.

How can you possibly catch up if a competitor is always going further and faster than you?

Sure enough, on New Year's Day, the launch of Tencent QQ Games received a lukewarm response and barely made a splash.

Not to mention QQ Games, even Lianzhong has lost at least 80% of its daily active users. These users have all gone to the campus Facebook gaming platform to play Dou Dizhu and Guandan.

The instant hit of Renren Facebook QQ Games has sparked a craze for card and board games, but it has also made many people curious about one thing: why is the game platform launched by Renren called Renren Facebook instead of Renren Game Platform?
Just when everyone was puzzled, Facebook was officially launched.

In my past life, changing my name from Renren to the school was the most foolish hard landing.

Its management and operations team underestimated the immense pressure a large platform would experience during a hard landing, which could not only cause serious damage to itself but could even directly lead to a devastating accident.

Chen Cheng naturally wouldn't allow himself to repeat the mistakes of Renren.com, so he decided to make Facebook a soft landing.

Although Facebook has launched, it did not actively seek to attract its existing user base. Instead, it launched a massive advertising campaign on other online websites, as well as in offline commercial areas and on public transportation.

Existing users will remain campus users, but new users will all become Facebook users.

This means that Chen Cheng will no longer actively use the school's name for publicity.

Of course, it's impossible to keep this dual-track system secret from both sides. If users on Renren also want to switch their homepage to Facebook, Renren can give them two months of Facebook membership. However, Renren has also explained that everything on the website is interconnected except for the name. Once a user chooses to receive the switching reward, it is assumed that their homepage will be permanently switched to Facebook and will not be switched back to Renren.

The logic behind this is to install a one-way valve in the user pool connecting the school to Facebook.

In the future, only users on campus will gradually become Facebook users; no Facebook users will become campus users.

This is to ensure that the number of users of "Xiaonei" will decrease in the future, until the name is completely forgotten.

Of course, Chen Cheng does not force users to do anything; the choice is in the hands of the users.

With a two-month membership as an incentive, nearly half of the users switched within a few days.

Active switching is completely different from passive switching.

It is widely accepted.

Some people don't like the name Facebook and haven't chosen to switch, but Chen Cheng isn't in a hurry. Right now, Facebook hasn't become a trend, but once it becomes mainstream, users will rush to switch.

Chen Cheng believes that if Facebook truly wants to become mainstream, it must go global and flourish in Europe and America.

Now, I have a complete product, a technically supported team, and strong cash flow to back me up.

The next step is to take the products and the money directly to the United States, set up an operations team there, and start the Americanization of Facebook and take the international route.

Moreover, it's better to do this sooner rather than later. If it's too late, and Zuckerberg gets inspiration from Renren.com and launches Facebook ahead of time, wouldn't we be doing all the work for him?
If a product like Facebook were made in the country, it would never reach even half of Tencent's later market value.

However, if done overseas, a market capitalization of hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars is just around the corner.

In the early days, most Chinese internet entrepreneurs learned from the US and brought American products to China. However, most of them could only reap the benefits of the domestic market and not gain a share of the international market. This was true for Baidu, Renren, and even Tencent's QQ.

So Chen Cheng secretly resolved to take Facebook to teach the Americans a lesson!
(End of this chapter)