In addition to bilibili, Zhihu and Douban, Kuaishou, Douyin and even Xiao Hongshu Taobao are all building their own communities, and the future is pinning their hopes on the community to create a better future.

If we go back to a few years ago, the domestic Internet market is booming, and many high-quality platforms and enterprises have emerged. At that time, in a well-known Internet platform, bilibili, Zhihu and Douban, the three smaller platforms, have always been the white moonlight in the hearts of many users, and even the "spiritual Pure Land" of many people.

At that time, the atmosphere in these three platforms was so beautiful and harmonious that many people thought that the community atmosphere would never change. But as bilibili first went to the capital market, Zhihu followed by the US stock market, Douban became more and more "Buddhist", and the good times seemed to have disappeared.

Bilibili escaped from bilibili

In recent years, bilibili has undoubtedly been on the fast track of development, growing obviously in terms of revenue, user level, platform content, and tonality. The "small broken station" of that year is no longer there, and it has been replaced by a diversified platform where a hundred flowers blossom.

Recently, bilibili successfully landed on the Hong Kong stock market to complete the second listing. Although it was broken on the first day of listing, the enthusiasm of investors remained unabated, with a market value of more than 300 billion yuan in the Hong Kong stock market. In addition, bilibili's performance in the US stock market is also bright. Although he is in a downturn recently, he has still increased more than tenfold in the past three years.

This naturally has a lot to do with the stable content community built by bilibili. Because of the "content + community + user" model, let these three links promote each other, continue to stabilize bilibili's community in the cycle. This also makes even if bilibili has been stuck in a loss whirlpool, but the outside world also continues to be optimistic about it.

The reason why we are able to build such a stable community is also because bilibili has been "escaping" bilibili in recent years.

On the one hand, it is the "escape" at the user level. Starting from the second dimension, bilibili gained a very stable group of core users in the initial stage, but if the platform wants to continue to develop, it must constantly expand the types of content and attract more diverse users. This will cause conflicts between new and old users and reduce the stickiness of platform users, but bilibili, who wants to grow, must "escape" the original user comfort zone.

On the other hand, it is the "escape" at the content level. To attract more users, they need to provide their favorite content in order to retain users for the platform, and bilibili's circle-breaking move in the past two years has expanded bilibili's content in a very short time, and with the help of UP's main incentive, let more and more users contribute content to the platform, but also "escape" the original content on a certain level.

However, whether it is the user or the content level of "escape", all helped bilibili to complete the transformation from a "small broken station" to a large platform, but also made bilibili's community more diverse and stable.

"latecomers" Zhihu

Not long ago, it seems that Zhihu, who woke up after several years of confusion, finally defined his position, and successfully landed in the US stock market, becoming the "first stock in the knowledge community."

Zhihu, who started as a knowledge question and answer, still needs to be invited to enter when it was first founded. And at that time, there were many industry leaders in Zhihu community, and the Q & A content was of high quality. But later, because of the desire for users, Zhihu gradually opened up the entry mechanism. It is true that the number of users has increased significantly in a few years, but the quality of content has also declined.

This makes Zhihu embark on the same path as bilibili. If you want to grow, you need traffic. For the sake of traffic and growth, you have to make a compromise on content. But Zhihu is very aware of its own situation, if the content quality is completely allowed to decline, then the loss of users in the future is also inevitable, so Zhihu also attaches great importance to the content.

The first is the incentive at the level of content creators. As the name suggests, the question-and-answer community has to answer questions, and the answer is the key to the construction of Zhihu content, so Zhihu attracts content creators through supportive policies. According to the prospectus, as of December 31, 2020, Zhihu had a total of 43.1 million content creators and contributed 353 million pieces of content, including 315 million questions and answers.

The second is the diversification of content presentation form. Relying solely on graphics and text to display content, although it will have advantages in logic and accuracy of expression, it will also lose some interest, and in this era of entertainment, more acceptable presentation forms such as audio and video are the first choice for users. therefore, Zhihu has also made a lot of efforts in the form of content presentation.

Finally, there is a change in the tone of the content. If the previous Zhihu is defined, the "elite knowledge community" may be fine, but the elites are after all a minority, and Zhihu cannot expect the elites to survive. Therefore, today's Zhihu is no longer an elite community, but has a wider range of users and content, and has become a "mass knowledge community".

Zhihu's emphasis on content also deepens the relationship among content, users and platforms, helps Zhihu create its own content community, and promotes its stable development.

"Buddhist" Douban is in no hurry to be commercialized.

In the face of bilibili and Zhihu successively compromised and embarked on the road of commercialization, many people made sounds like "bilibili has changed" and "Zhihu has fallen". With the closure of Xiami music, it seems that only Buddhist Douban is still "holding fast" in the "spiritual Pure Land" in the Internet world.

Throughout today's Internet platform, Kuaishou has been labeled as "Buddhist" by the outside world before its listing, but compared with Douban, Kuaishou's Buddhist system is negligible.

He refused to accept the advertisement because the advertisement did not match the tone of the platform, and gave up the second position in the industry because he felt that the movie ticket business was "too dirty". These are all the actions of Douban in the development of Douban. It is precisely for these reasons that the outside world has the argument that Douban is not a company and A Bei is not the boss.

From this point of view, Douban does not seem to be in a hurry to commercialize, let alone participate in the battle for traffic on the Internet platform. But even if Douban is not in such a hurry to commercialize Douban, its platform atmosphere is unexpectedly hierarchical, which is also in line with Lin Abei's original idea of Douban's "urban atmosphere."

The upper layers of the city are built by users who regard Douban as a trace of their spiritual world. They are keen on movies, art and books, and Douban is just a tool for them to record their spiritual world. Their comments on books and movies support Douban's most appreciated scoring system.

The middle level of the city is built by users who use Douban as a content platform. They enter Douban just to gain some knowledge and growth. for them, the content produced by the big and small celebrities in Douban platform is the nourishment for them to study and pastime in their spare time.

The lower level of the city is built by tens of millions of users in the Douban group. For them, friends who find common fun through different likes and dislikes can meet their social needs by eating melons and posting posts again and again. They are the most active existence in Douban platform, and they also provide Douban with endless vitality.

It is through the construction of this "urban atmosphere" that the community of Douban platform is also growing slowly and steadily, slowly attracting users to enter the city.

The community is the last priority.

From this point of view, whether it is the radical bilibili, the late Zhihu, or even the "Buddhist" Douban, although the three platforms have different development directions, they attach equal importance to the construction of the community. this also shows that the current focus in the field of content platform is the community construction with characteristics.

This is because, for the platform, the construction of the community will bring a lot of help for the future development.

One is to ensure stable development in the future. Building a community in line with its own tone can accelerate the cycle of "content + platform + users", let more and more users become the core users of the platform, and create better revenue for the platform from the user level. In addition, the construction of the community is also to lay the foundation for the future ecology of the platform, so that the development of the platform is no longer water without a source.

The second is to increase more diversified ways of realization. The community accelerates the conversion of users, and users with a certain sense of identity will naturally be more likely to "recharge their love", and the number of consumption occurring in the platform will also be pulled up. And the construction of the community can help the platform to find business value from every link of the cycle and create higher revenue for the platform.

In this way, the community has become the focus of these content platforms, and in addition to bilibili, Zhihu and Douban, Kuaishou, Douyin and even Little Red Book Taobao are all building their own communities, and the future also depends on the community to create a better future.