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Chapter 174 0171 [ByteDance Makes Another Big Move]

When Chen Guiliang returned to his hometown, iResearch Consulting Group ranked China's top four social networking sites.

These are: Xiaonei.com, Zhanzuo.com, Tianji.com, and Ruolin.com.

The first two focus on campus social interaction.

The last two focus on business networking.

These four companies were brought together because they all received venture capital funding.

On June 5th, Xiaonei.com received $5 million in funding from IDG and DFJ.

On June 21, Ruolin.com received $5 million in funding from UCI and SIG.

On June 26, SkyNet secured $3 million in funding from Gobi Ventures.

On July 5th, Zhanzuo.com received $2 million in funding from Sequoia Capital.

Despite being crippled by Chen Guiliang, Zhanzuo.com has managed to survive by leveraging its Yiyou email service to attract a massive influx of users, and currently boasts over 50 registered users.

I don't know why Sequoia Capital invested in it.

But it's not too outrageous. In another timeline, people voted for the third-ranked seat-reserving website, and it's only ranked second now.

It can only be said that Facebook's extremely high valuation in the United States has spurred many investment institutions to pour money into China.

Some media outlets exclaimed that the spring of Web 2.0 has arrived!
……

At night, Chen Guiliang lay in the courtyard looking at the stars.

While he was looking at it, his secretary called: "Mr. Chen, our Kaixin.com is now online."

"Understood." Chen Guiliang hung up.

If there's only one campus network, there's no need to expand ByteDance to a hundred or so people.

After much deliberation, Chen Guiliang decided against following the path of "Xiaonei.com → Renren.com". Instead, he planned to create a sister website, Kaixin.com, while simultaneously developing Xiaonei.com.

Renren and Kaixin have some overlapping functions.

However, Kaixin001 allows anonymous registration and is not limited to students; it will also invite celebrities to register and get verified.

The biggest difference is that Kaixin.com allows users to "follow" others unilaterally, while Renren.com uses a mutual friend-adding system.

The one-way "follow" function is technically easy to implement, but no one in China is doing it yet.

Because the current logic of internet social networking emphasizes "authenticity + small circle interaction" rather than "public sharing + strangers following".

Chen Guiliang didn't know if he could succeed, but he could give it a try.

If Kaixin001 succeeds, it can pave the way for future microblogging.

……

Two months ago, Su Ping graduated with a bachelor's degree.

She is currently using two websites simultaneously.

One is the school's intranet, where you can communicate with your university classmates.

Although her classmates had all graduated, the class relationship was still maintained on the school's intranet. Whenever she logged into the intranet, it felt as if her class still existed and her college days had not gone by.

The other one is Ruolin.com.

This is a website she discovered while looking for a job; it has many job postings. Many of her current colleagues also use Ruolin.com.

After a long day at work, Su Ping returned to her rented room and instinctively opened the school's intranet to see what updates her old classmates had made.

While I'm at it, I'll steal some vegetables.

She then saw an in-app message: "Xiaonei.com's sister website, Kaixin.com, is now online. You can log in with your Xiaonei account (you can change your nickname at any time), or you can re-register an anonymous Kaixin.com account."

Curious, Su Ping clicked the link and was redirected to a page where she could change her nickname.

After thinking for a moment, she changed her Kaixin.com username to: Pingping Loves Meat Buns.

Next, she selected interest tags, choosing 【Literature】, 【Food】, and 【Entertainment Celebrities】.

As a result, the website recommended three accounts for her to follow.

One is the well-known writer Cheng Cun.

One of them is Liu Yiwei, a former food host.

One is He Jie, a contestant from the Super Girl competition.

"Wow, there really are celebrities here!" Su Ping quickly clicked to follow all of them.

Actually, there aren't many celebrities who have joined yet; it's mainly due to Chen Guiliang's personal invitations.

ByteDance sent people to contact the Super Girl contestants, and after much persuasion, they finally convinced more than ten people to register accounts. Some even made outrageous demands, saying that joining Kaixin001 was possible, but only if they received a certain amount of money.

Since Kaixin.com has just launched, of the dozen or so Super Girls who have registered, only He Jie and Zhou Bichang have updated their statuses so far—uploading photos of their daily lives.

Kaixin.com randomly recommends one of them.

Su Ping searched everywhere for the option to add friends, only to find that she couldn't add friends; she could only follow others.

However, there is a "Contacts" feature. This allows you to add followers to your contacts, which is essentially a way of adding friends.

Su Ping quickly switched back to the school's intranet and chatted with her old classmates in a group chat.

"Has anyone gone to Kaixin001? That website is so weird."

"I went to check it out, and six of the top ten Super Girl contestants are here. I followed them all. But so far, only He Jie and Zhou Bichang have posted photos."

"Where can I find Super Girls? Kaixin.com only recommended He Jie to me."

"There are more recommendations in the upper right corner of the page. After clicking, select the category tag, and the corresponding accounts you can follow will appear."

"What's your nickname? Add me as a friend quickly." After a while, Su Ping asked, "I can't add you to my contacts. It says you're not following me."

"That means we need to follow each other to add each other to our contacts. What's your nickname?"

"Pingping loves to eat meat buns."

"Yes, I've followed you and added you to my contacts."

……

Chen Guiliang was lying under the starry sky, texting with Bian Guanyue.

The veteran writer Cheng Cun called: "Does the number of followers equal the number of my fans?"

“Yes,” Chen Guiliang said.

The old man was overjoyed: "Am I that famous? I have over 1500 followers!"

Chen Guiliang said, "That's because some websites automatically recommend it."

“Haha, it’s all the same,” Cheng Cun laughed heartily. “I’ll hang up now. I’ll quickly write a little poem to share with my fans.”

Limited by technology, internet speed, and cost, Kaixin001 is somewhat of a hybrid.

It cannot directly forward content; it can only forward the title and URL. Users need to click the URL to be redirected to another user's homepage before they can comment on the post.

Chen Guiliang was also unsure whether the users would accept it.

They may even soon launch a partial version of Weibo, allowing users to register their mobile phone number and receive 70-character (or less) plain text updates from their followed accounts, received via SMS.

MMS phones can also receive photos sent by people you follow.

However, users who post updates also need to pay to publish mini-blogs, which are then viewed via SMS.

However, no agreement has been reached with China Mobile yet.

Because if there are too many people to pay attention to, ordinary users simply cannot afford it under the current charging method of China Mobile—for example, China Mobile QQ charges 1 cents for each message received.

ByteDance is negotiating a monthly subscription plan with China Mobile, hoping users will pay 5 yuan per month for unlimited access to Kaixin001 SMS messages. However, it's estimated that the deal will be difficult to finalize, and the final price may be at least 10 yuan per month.

Additionally, users can choose to receive messages only from a select group of followers. Otherwise, if a user follows too many people, the barrage of text messages becomes unbearable.

This is a completely new attempt.

Next year, the US will release a similar service that uses SMS to receive updates. It's called a "mini-blog," and it's considered a prototype of microblogs.

Don't find text messages annoying; in this day and age, mobile phone users will scroll through each and every text message.

Once they reach a cooperation agreement with China Mobile and increase the number of Kaixin001 users, this will become ByteDance's most profitable cash cow.

……

Kaixin.com was launched the day after it went live.

Yang Shuqi, an employee recruited by ByteDance in June, came to Tangren Media in Shanghai.

"Let all the actors from Tangren Media join Kaixin.com?" Cai Yinong didn't understand the point.

Yang Shuqi said, "President Cai, we live in the internet age. Online promotion is just as important as print media promotion. Print media still needs to go through a detour, but the internet is where celebrities directly face their fans."

Cai Yinong asked, "Our company's artists are charged for appearing on shows. How much is your company planning to pay?"

“We can help Tangren’s celebrities attract traffic. When new users register, we will randomly recommend them to follow Tangren’s celebrities,” Yang Shuqi said. “Right now, Kaixin.com is still in its early stages. When the number of users reaches several million, if celebrities still want to be recommended to follow us, we will charge them.”

Cai Yinong laughed in exasperation: "Celebrities have to pay you to visit your website?"

“Yes,” Yang Shuqi said, “Super Girl is pretty popular now, right? More than ten Super Girls have joined Kaixin.com, and six of them are in the top ten. The remaining four were rejected because they wanted money.”

"In the future, we will also cooperate with mobile carriers. Celebrities only need to post a few dozen words on social media, saying when their TV series will premiere, and their fans will immediately receive a text message. Just think how much advertising money this can save?"

“Even Tangren Media can create an account on Kaixin.com under the company name and post information about new dramas.”

The last few words made Cai Yinong a little tempted: "How many users does your website have now?"

Yang Shuqi said, "Kaixin.com went online at 8 pm last night and already has more than 120,000 users."

Many of these 12 users were brought over from Renren.com.

However, a significant number also came from online forums and message boards. Especially the Super Girl forum; after a few advertising posts were published, members heard that the Super Girls were joining Kaixin001 and flocked to register accounts.

Cai Yinong was very surprised that there were 12 users in less than a day.
She quickly realized the business opportunity there.

Yang Shuqi continued, "Your company's celebrities can post photos and write articles themselves, and if they are too busy, they can have their agents handle it. It doesn't take up any of the celebrities' time."

"Let me take a look at your website first," Cai Yinong said.

Half an hour later, ByteDance and Tangren Media reached a cooperation agreement.

As soon as Yang Shuqi stepped out of the elevator, he called the company: "It's settled. Not only are Tangren's stars willing to join, but this company has also registered an account."

Xie Yang said, "Well done. I'll arrange for verification immediately and allocate manpower to post promotions. With Brother Hu and the others, our user base will explode again."

"I'm going to the next company tomorrow," Yang Shuqi said.

Xie Yang said, "I'll celebrate with you when you get back!"

Kaixin.com, which Chen Guiliang had turned into a hodgepodge, could very well have exploded like a nuclear bomb in the summer of 2005.

You know, even blogs don't know how to proactively invite celebrities yet.

Sina Blog is still over two months away from its official launch, and they'll only start actively inviting celebrities to join then. Once the celebrities arrive, they'll instantly crush all the other blogs!

Kaixin.com not only has logs (long blogs), but also a partial version of microblogs, which allows users to send short text messages of a few dozen characters using mobile devices.

-

(If I hadn't read the chapter description, I would have always thought the conscription age was 16. Because three of my junior high school classmates joined the army at 16. And my cousin joined at 17...)
(End of this chapter)