Text | Zhenxin Editorial Department Li Xiaonan
Editor | Yang Zhenxin
In late September, 2020, a user of "Anti-pressure Back Pot" of Million Bar told a story in his post that his mother sold her house to raise money because she couldn’t afford the bride price, and her sister who went to high school was not distressed, but also excitedly told the landlord "Brother, our family has money" on WeChat. The post quickly formed a high popularity in the bar, and the screenshots in the article were widely spread in major platforms. Countless netizens were moved and called "broken defense".
This is Baidu Post Bar’s latest outing, and the Chinese Internet has once again seen the powerful cultural creation and communication power of this ancient behemoth in the online community.
But many years ago, the post bar didn’t need this kind of broken circle, it was the biggest circle itself. At that time, half of the online buzzwords came from post bars every year, and their monthly activities accounted for half of the total number of netizens. Time has passed, and the king of the PC era has gradually declined in the era of mobile Internet. The reason is the evolution of the environment and the limitations of the product itself, but more is the blind pursuit and evil thoughts of the product leaders.
Now, it’s old, can you still eat?
The pinnacle of grassroots culture
On December 3, 2003, Baidu Post Bar was officially launched. Some people said that it was inspired by Li Yanhong’s idea of "building an online interest exchange platform with search engines". Others said that when Jun Yu searched the logs, he found that many users were searching for the same keyword, so he conceived to aggregate these people into an interest community.
As soon as it went online, Post Bar became popular because of its simple interface, low speech threshold and unique product form. At that time, Baidu’s main business was search engine, but search only grabbed and presented the existing information on the Internet, but it could not create content itself. The appearance of Post Bar made Baidu have the ability to produce its own content, which made up for the lack of Internet content at that time, and its proportion in Baidu traffic quickly increased from 1% to 11% later.
In 2004, the player Li Yi became popular because of the phrase "I protect the ball like Henry", and was called "Li Yi the Great". Li Yi Bar, the largest bar in Baidu Post Bar named after him, was also established. Later, due to Li Yi’s flamboyant style, more and more black powder poured into Li Yi Bar, and a unique "connotation" culture was formed, that is, various PS pictures, jokes and pranks were used to express their views on social current affairs.
The real rise of Post Bar was in 2005, when the phenomenal talent show "Super Girl" exploded, and fans began to hold a group discussion in their idol bars after the show was broadcast. At that time, there was no Weibo, and fans who had nowhere to go poured into Post Bar, which formed a huge flow. At the beginning of 2005, the number of users of Post Bar exceeded 10 million, and at the end of the year it soared to 30 million, surpassing Sina to become the largest Chinese website in the world.
On June 21st, 2007, a conflict broke out between Li Yi Bar and Chris Lee Bar. A large number of users of Li Yi Bar rushed into Chris Lee Bar to brush posts crazily, which caused Chris Lee Bar to explode more than 2,000 pages of meaningless content, making it paralyzed for a time. In the end, Chris Lee Bar suspended posting, and several bar owners members of Li Yi Bar were withdrawn. This is the first "expedition" of "Diba" and the first explosion in the history of Post Bar.
In the next few years, Li Yiba organized several "expeditions", but unlike the first "fighting" in the circle, most of the later explosions were just. For example, in August 2007, Rainie Yang Bar was exploded because Rainie Yang was suspected of insulting China and Nanjing Massacre martyrs. In May, 2008, some dance troupe players insulted the victims of Wenchuan earthquake, and the dance troupe bar was exploded.
From 2004 to 2010, the post bar at this stage was at its peak, and a large number of netizens from grass roots gathered in different post bars with their interests, producing numerous high-quality posts and settling them down, hence the name "Louvre on the Chinese Internet".
At this time, the post bar is the representative of the grassroots culture of the Internet. In this highly decentralized community where everyone is equal without hierarchy, countless lonely souls have found a sense of belonging. Bar friends are highly creative and enthusiastic, and these online buzzwords, such as diaosi, baifumei, Xi Da Pu Ben, Pipi Shrimp Let’s Go and Ignorance, are all born out of post bar culture.
Li Yanhong once said in an interview: "We just want to do our own thing in a down-to-earth manner and build Baidu into a place that can bring a sense of belonging to netizens." At this time, the post bar was really done.
When the giant slowly falls
No one thought that the infinitely brilliant post bar in the PC era would be "dead" in the era of mobile Internet.
In 2009, "God of Products", Baidu Post Bar and Jun Yu, the father of Baidu Know, left Baidu. In 2010, when Google left China, Baidu quickly ate Google’s market share, and a year later, its market value surpassed Tencent to become the top Internet company in China. Baidu, which has fallen into unprecedented loneliness, urgently needs to tell a new growth story, so it internally puts forward a long-term strategic goal of reaching 100 billion revenue within ten years.
After this strategic goal was put forward, it was widely valued by high-level and investors, and the long-term goal was continuously subdivided into KPI and distributed to various departments. At that time, Post Bar was a typical "traffic, no revenue", coupled with the high server cost due to high user volume and high activity, Baidu hoped that Post Bar could bear more responsibility for growth, and even put forward the slogan "How can it become an independent business unit without revenue?" Everything was in line with KPI. Post bar has thus embarked on its decline.
In the fourth quarter of 2011, the new version of Post Bar was released for public beta, and the bar owners audit system was cancelled when it was originally added to Post Bar, and it became click attention; At the same time, the hierarchy and experience system are introduced, and users can increase their experience value by logging in, posting, replying and other operations, so as to improve the level of posting.
A series of revisions have greatly improved the number and activity of users. However, the product logic of Post Bar is very unique: unlike today’s content products that use subscription system and recommendation algorithm to achieve the effect of "thousands of people and thousands of faces", the post bar pages are sorted according to the latest reply time of posts. Different users enter the same post at the same time and see the same content, which makes the post bar very public, and some stalks are very easy to form explosive points, resulting in great influence and even out of the circle.
However, this model also causes crowding and competition among contents. When many users start posting meaningless posts and pictures for experience, the content quality of the post bar will also decline.
In 2012, with the popularity of mobile Internet, Post Bar officially started its "self-destructive commercialization" process. Baidu requires bar owners, who has no salary, to bear the KPI of user growth and activity, and not to be dismissed or airborne in bar owners; In September, it was officially launched to promote the Post Bar, namely, the advertisement of the headline, the advertisement of the topic list page and the advertisement of the electronic details page. However, the excessive force led to too many advertisements on the page, which further reduced the visibility of the page. Since then, the content quality of Post Bar has been declining, but the overall afterglow still exists. In 2012, the number of netizens in China was 564 million, and the monthly activity of Post Bar was 200 million, accounting for more than one third.
In 2015, Baidu found that the commercialization attempts in recent years did not change the loss situation of Post Bar, so it finally made the worst decision in the history of Post Bar and even Chinese Internet: sell it.
An insider of Baidu once said when recalling this period of history: "Then, some people began to focus on the authority of bar owners. At first, there was a fierce internal argument, saying that this thing could not be sold, but the final outcome was known to everyone. Anyway, there are many internal objections, but let’s take advantage of the word. "
In March 2015, the infamous Baidu partner system was launched. When a merchant becomes a partner of Post Bar, he can have all the rights of bar owners, such as deleting posts, monitoring public opinion and initiating activities in the bar.
Baidu chose the former between interests and morality, which also brought bad consequences to society and Post Bar itself. In January, 2016, the news that "Hemophilia Bar" was sold gradually spread. The original bar owners was removed, and the airborne bar owners paid for the right to operate. A place where patients gathered for warmth for nearly ten years became a victim of over-commercialization. Later, netizens found that many medical-related post bars were sold by Baidu. Coupled with the Wei Zexi incident that occurred in the same year, the public image of Baidu and Post Bar plummeted and has not recovered yet. The Baidu partner system was also cancelled after the incident.
A series of events in 2016 marked the decline of Baidu and Post Bar, and since then Post Bar has never recovered. Later, with the admission of the regulatory authorities, Post Bar strengthened its internal audit management. In 2019, Post Bar officially banned all posts before 2017 on the grounds of "data system upgrade", and some of them were unsealed after a period of time, but some early posts that had settled down were deleted.
In March 2015, an organization gave data: the user activity of Post Bar is 1.8 times that of Weibo, and the number of monthly users is 300 million, exceeding Twitter; By February 2019, its monthly activity was only 46.08 million. One year later, this figure became 37.43 million, ranking 101 on the APP list. Post Bar completely lost its former glory.
Does Baidu still have a choice?
The direct reason for the decline of Post Bar lies in its extremely failed commercialization, but the root cause of commercialization failure is not only the deviation of Baidu’s values, but also the limitations of Post Bar itself. To be precise, the product form of Post Bar determines that it must face many difficulties in the process of commercialization.
There are two types of social interaction, one based on "relationship" and the other based on "theme". The core of the former lies in the construction of interpersonal relationship, and WeChat and Momo are typical products. The core of the latter is to gather a group of people who are interested in this topic by relying on the "theme", so as to generate communication and form interpersonal relationships. Post Bar is the leader of this kind of products.
When the recommendation algorithm continues to push the highly homogeneous information flow named "thousands of people and thousands of faces", Post Bar is truly "interest-centered". Any niche hobby can find its own gathering place and partner in Post Bar, and most users in the bar have a certain understanding of the theme, so it is very easy for anyone to get informative feedback when speaking in the bar. This product mechanism makes Post Bar have extremely strong content creation ability and high activity, and at the same time, it also produces a culture of absolute equality and high decentralization.
However, although this cultural atmosphere is conducive to content production, it is not conducive to product commercialization. Because a high degree of equality and decentralization means scattered traffic, it is difficult for KOL and professional content creators to stand out from ordinary users and get a lot of attention. Weibo, bilibili, Xiaohongshu and other content communities have a group of "big V" who rely on their own content to attract fans, and finally turn it into cash and undertake the commercialization function of the community. Advertisers and brands can easily carry out marketing activities by relying on them.
However, in Post Bar, high-level users and bar managers do not have much higher traffic and trust value than ordinary users. Coupled with the unique sorting mechanism by response time, brands and advertisers can hardly find a "central node" that can directly reach a large number of target users or provide trust endorsement.
Even if a commercial promotion post is specially opened, it is difficult to attract traffic and heat, and it will soon be buried in the information flow. What’s more, there are a large number of knowledgeable users in the bar, and they can see at a glance whether the promoted products are good or not. It is not a problem to spray inferior products for hundreds of floors in minutes. All these make the commercialization of Post Bar extremely difficult.
But does Baidu really have no choice?
The difficulty in realizing the content community has always been a long-standing problem in the Internet field. The unique product mechanism and community atmosphere of Post Bar make it more difficult to commercialize than ordinary content products by several factors, but does Baidu have no other choice but to sell it? I’m afraid not.
First of all, the traffic of Post Bar itself is large enough, and the aggregation logic based on interest also makes many Post Bar have a very active second-hand trading market. Baidu may refer to the model of Aauto Quicker and salted fish to establish an official trading platform to draw as the income base; Or social interest itself has a lot of imagination. When major dating apps are racking their brains to match users with the same interests, Post Bar has long had a unique advantage in this respect.
Furthermore, even if Post Bar is really unprofitable, it is of great strategic significance to Baidu. If Post Bar is not dead, Baidu will have a traffic treasure on a par with Weibo and bilibili, which will have a great synergy with other businesses, at the very least, it will not create a "hundred number" that it can’t afford.
Selling it is the last choice, because in the long run, the negative effect of selling it is far greater than the positive significance.
The current post bar is in a very embarrassing situation-it is a product with hope but no future.
Although the Post Bar has declined, the skinny camel is bigger than the horse. It still has a monthly life of tens of millions, a large number of high-quality content and old users scattered in every corner of the Internet. The incident of "Our family is rich" also proves that its powerful stalk-making ability is still there. If we can make some innovations, it may not be hopeless.
However, Post Bar, which hasn’t brought much revenue, has become a marginal business in all in AI and Baidu with smart cars. It doesn’t have much resources to make changes related to the underlying architecture, and it can only be like an old warrior. He died slowly and painfully in the corner alone.
The history of the rise and fall of Baidu Post Bar is worthy of reflection by all content platforms, to think about how to find a balance between user experience, content quality and commercialization, to understand the social responsibility that C-end products must bear due to their natural social attributes, and to reflect on the disastrous consequences when KPI becomes the only goal.
In 2016, an insider of Baidu once said after the hemophilia bar incident: "It’s not too late for Baidu to mend today, and even posting it is not necessarily a bad thing for Baidu. Tencent in that year was also openly written on the cover by an Internet magazine, which led to later reflection and Tencent’s open platform, and today’s Tencent."
It’s not too late to mend after it’s too late, but it depends on whether Baidu cares about the life or death of that sheep.
* References:
"A vivid history of the decline of post bars", nine commandments of pigs
Why has Baidu Post Bar become a "hidden corner" of the Internet? ",Leng Sizhen
"In addition to straight men, who still misses the post bar? ",alphabetical list
You don’t know the development history of "Post Bar", Lan Xi.
Listening to insiders reveal the realization of Baidu Post Bar, three lessons.
