Knowledge payment is so popular, will it become KFC? (Turn)
Sentence / South Road Seven
In "A Brief History of Humanity," Yuval Harari makes an unprecedented point: gossip and storytelling make human beings the ultimate master of all things. An accidental genetic mutation brought about a cognitive revolution in Homo sapiens, the ancestor of modern humans. Get them to think like never before and communicate in completely new language. Gradually, humans learned to gossip, and later learned to tell stories, so Homo sapiens eventually became the top of the food chain among many human races.
If cognition is to establish a preliminary physical impression of things, then language is the output of this impression, communication is the dissemination of events, stories are the packaging and processing of events, and knowledge is a logical synthesis of the first four Summarize, extract, sort out. More importantly, the continuation, inheritance, upgrade, and iteration of knowledge have brought the entire human society into a new stage. In the era of mobile Internet, the integration and dissemination of knowledge has taken on more forms. The hottest thing right now is paying for knowledge.
Why did the spring of knowledge payment appear in China?
Looking back at the development of the entire human civilization, it is actually a process of discovering, sorting and applying knowledge. Aristotle said that there are generally two types of knowledge: one is technical and the other is non-technical. Technical knowledge is used to solve substantive problems and is very important for economic development. Non-technical knowledge is the spiritual guidance and enhancement of human nature. The synergy of the two kinds of knowledge together promotes the development of human civilization.
The current Chinese Internet, whether it is technical such as learning Mandarin, managing money, tasting wine, or non-technical such as poetry and drama, has suddenly exploded, reversing the previously unpopular status of knowledge. In the past ten years, domestic users have been developing with money on the one hand, and knowledge is useless on the other hand. This anti-intellectual trend directly leads to the cheapness and unpopularity of knowledge.
However, with the upgrade of consumption and the completion of external conditions such as online payment, the individual consciousness is unprecedentedly strong, and the pursuit of self-realization and value is increasingly pursued. Therefore, whether it is due to various psychological needs such as self-improvement, vanity, or a sense of security, the demand for knowledge has appeared a small spring, and the wave of knowledge payment has followed. The Internet community, which has always advocated freeism, began to discover that new business opportunities could be found in the field of knowledge, and began to enter together. Knowledge payment has reached an unprecedented level of popularity.
Starting from the tide of paying for knowledge in the second half of 2016, including Get, Zhihu, Himalaya, etc., have launched a number of products and courses for paying for knowledge, including Li Xiaolai, Ma Yunhupan Classroom and many other big names have joined in the form of columns and speeches, setting a record of one by one. Astonishing records, such as Li Xiaolai's record of the most expensive personal pay column of more than 25 million.
Zhihu Zhou Yuan once said that we believe that in the sea of Internet information overflowing with garbage, truly valuable information is absolutely scarce, and knowledge (systematized and organized high-quality information) still exists in individual brains It is far from being effectively tapped and utilized. We encourage everyone to share knowledge, bring everyone's knowledge together and make it available to everyone.
The "2016 White Paper on the Development of China's Knowledge Payment Industry" published by the third-party organization Analysys shows that users' willingness to pay for "content" and "knowledge" and their consumption concept are changing, from unwillingness to pay to paying for significantly higher quality and better services. Good similar products are willing to pay; the way of user information acquisition is also changing, from receiving information aimlessly to actively acquiring knowledge, and the choice of information is more mature, thus promoting the outbreak of the knowledge payment industry.
From a platform point of view, a community-based product like Zhihu, which focuses on knowledge sharing, has already accumulated a large number of knowledge experts from all walks of life, including popular industry V’s and “knowers” in unpopular niche fields. , Paying for knowledge has great advantages and convenience. If the previous value is considered to be a satisfactory product, then Zhihu Live, which was launched later by Zhihu, is a paid breakthrough after fully combining the accumulation of its own platform, and can also be extended to physical books, e-books and copyrights. sales and other business models.
Why hasn't there been a boom in paying for knowledge in Silicon Valley?
On the other hand, Europe and the United States on the other side of the ocean, on the premise that users' payment habits are better than domestic ones, did not go smoothly. Quora, the largest knowledge question and answer community in the United States, is also making some new attempts in addition to the traditional advertising business in its current business model. For an existing credit system user, after answering the question, the system will adjust his credit score according to the number of likes and comments he gets, and the credit between users can also be transferred. In the future, on the one hand, you can pay to get more promotion opportunities for your answers, and on the other hand, users can attract other users to answer questions by offering rewards.
In January 2017, Quora launched a new knowledge prize function. Questioners can offer cash rewards to attract relevant experts to answer questions. Finally, the best answerers will receive the money. The reward is completely open. For example, a recent answer that took $250 was an answer to Amazon’s e-commerce strategy in India. Quora can also provide paid special editions, such as a Quora for white-collar workers or a Quora for entrepreneurs, which will focus on high-quality questions and answers in related fields. But so far there are no particularly dazzling results.
Back in 2010, News Corp charged £2 a week for its electronic editions of The Times and The Sunday Times. But the results of the fees were astounding. Half a year later, the number of hits on the homepages of the two newspaper websites had dropped by 43%, and the number of users had dropped by nearly 90%. In early 2016, The Times Weekly, owned by The Times, charged $3.99 a month. As a result, the door was also stagnant and forced to close. And Medium, the largest blogging platform in the United States founded by Evan Williams, launched a paid subscription service starting at $5 per month. Provide paid users with exclusive article content without advertisements, offline downloads, etc., but the data is not good, and it is currently adjusting the direction.
The reason for such a big difference includes, on the one hand, the social development stage and the difference in people's understanding, and also includes the maturity of conditions such as network hardware payment. When Apple CEO Cook visited China this time, he specifically mentioned the difference between Chinese and foreign payments. He believes that the reason why China is more prosperous than the United States and Europe for mobile payments may be partly because of payment traditions. "Mobile payment can be used in Silicon Valley of the United States, but when you go to the hinterland of the United States, many people do not know what mobile payment is, and they are more accustomed to spending with credit cards. China's credit cards are not as popular as in the United States and Europe, and some start-up Internet companies have made changes. China People are more willing to accept new changes, and mobile payments can be used anywhere."
On the surface, knowledge payment is a form of large-scale knowledge purchase, but at a deeper level, it creates new possibilities for people-to-people connections and ways to gain recognition and benefits. In foreign countries, there are no similar products and models. The more popular payment model before is a relatively traditional news subscription and specialized education platform training. There is still a big difference between this and the existing domestic knowledge payment.
The essence of traditional course training is to increase skills, it is a method of skills and practicality, and knowledge is a systematic, dynamic and continuous behavior that is higher than skills. New Oriental's Pan Xin said on Zhihu that if the paid knowledge market is viewed according to Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory, then online training actually solves more of the primary physiological and safety needs, and solves the problems of further education and employment; this In the wave knowledge payment market, more needs to be solved are the needs of high-level respect and self-realization, and the problems of face and well-off will be solved.
Will KFC appear in the payment of knowledge?
At the Two Sessions last month, Ma Huateng mentioned a change in the phenomenon. China's previous Internet model was called C2C (Copy To China), but it is now called KFC (Kaobei From China). The Chinese model has gradually begun to influence Europe and the United States. Internet mode. It is said that when entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley first heard about the concept of China's popular knowledge payment, most of them did not understand it. Because this is relatively unfamiliar territory, they have been accustomed to paying for valuable information through paid subscriptions and other forms. In addition, other foreign paid knowledge products mainly focus on one-to-one consultation, and their volume and popularity are also very small.
Up to now, foreign countries have not started to do this on a large scale, mainly in the more old-fashioned forms such as advertising and education and training, and models like Zhihu Live are still in a blank area. The knowledge market system built by Zhihu seems to be doing the opposite. It does not focus on harvesting Internet celebrities, celebrities, and big IPs, but gives every ordinary person with knowledge the opportunity to participate. Similar products that meet new user scenarios should have a large market space. Therefore, for Europe and the United States, this form of large-scale knowledge payment is not only a new concept, but also a new opportunity. It creates a possibility to create new people-to-people connections, while gaining recognition and benefits in a very different way than before.
Knowledge payment, like e-commerce and other models, meets the basic needs of user attributes and should be fully globalized. It is conceivable that in the future, there will inevitably be knowledge providers from various countries across language barriers to help others solve problems. Take Zhihu Live recently invited Nobel Prize winner Joseph in economics to share about the economic development trend of Trump coming to power. Now that China's bicycle-sharing and other models have begun to be exported overseas, and it has been deployed in places such as Silicon Valley in the United States, knowledge payment is a popular domestic model, and it is only a matter of time before it expands overseas and becomes a KFC.