Behind the decline of Post Bar is the sorrow of Baidu’s high-quality content pool.

Author | Yu Songye Editor | Han Qing

Produced by | Internet circle

Recently, official website, the National Network Information Office, announced the third batch of problematic websites investigated and dealt with according to law in the 2020 "Clear Lang" special action and the special rectification activities of online class platforms. In addition to some live broadcast platforms, Baidu Post Bar is also impressively listed.

The reason why Baidu Post Bar was named this time: "LOLI Bar", "CQY Bar" and other post bars and accounts published pornographic information of underage "Welfare Ji", and sold pornographic selfies, videos and other resources of minors in the name of accompanying play and chatting.

In recent years, Baidu Post Bar has been paid attention to by the public every time, either because of rampant black production or because of malicious speculation, and there are few good things. At the end of September, a malicious phishing post "Brother, our family is rich" in Baidu Post Bar caused widespread discussion on the Internet because of the anxiety of selling bride price, which led a large number of angry netizens to rush into Baidu Post Bar, find the original post and accuse the landlord of being "selfish".

In the end, the incident took a surprising turn, and the posting party saw that the incident was getting worse and worse, so they had to admit that the post was fabricated and apologize to the public, but the poster also stressed that the post could not be deleted because of unknown reasons. The reason why this incident has become a hot topic is that someone has led the way and pointed out that the initiator is "Anti-stress Bar Team 1".

The reason why the incident successfully went out of the circle is unknown, but people can’t help but sigh that Baidu Post Bar, as one of the founders of the Internet community, has fallen to the point where it can only be remembered by maliciously fabricated public opinion events.

At that time, Baidu had money and resources. Even now, it is still a "skinny camel is bigger than a horse". However, Baidu Post Bar has gradually declined and lost its advantage in the community track.

The decline of Baidu Post Bar is not only attributed to the rise of competing products, but also to Baidu’s own strategic problems. Baidu’s attitude towards the light operation and light control of Post Bar makes the high-quality content of Post Bar languish day by day. Baidu Post Bar was born to improve the user’s stickiness, but Baidu seems to have forgotten for a long time that the loss of high-quality content pool will eventually lead to the shrinkage and collapse of the core business-search engine business.

From popularization to minority

Baidu Post Bar, launched in 2003, is a veteran Internet community. The idea of Post Bar came from Baidu CEO Robin Li. At that time, the search engine was considered as a "run-away" product, but Robin Li wanted to break this shackles, so he thought of making an interest community with keywords as the core, so Post Bar was born.

From the end of the 20th century to the first decade of the 21st century, online forums such as Maopu, Tianya and Post Bar jointly created a brilliant BBS era. However, the good times didn’t last long. After 2010, the barbaric growth of the mobile Internet created the rise of Weibo, and the old-fashioned communities that clung to the remnants suffered a huge impact, and Post Bar was no exception, and gradually declined.

The decline of communities such as Post Bar also lies in the high decentralization of these established communities. For example, each netizen’s post can be exposed relatively fairly according to the timeline. However, since its launch, Weibo has continuously highlighted the role of operation, taking the topic of stars and hot events as a gimmick to attract users to join. With the help of stars and hot topics, Weibo has become a new generation of Internet darling.

On the other hand, in the face of the rise of Weibo, Post Bar did not seek mutation, still stuck on its laurels, did not iterate frequently, and never made a big breakthrough in function and operation. A few years later, Zhihu rose. Zhihu, which is problem-oriented, is equivalent to a dimensionality reduction blow to Post Bar, because people will not only search for words but also search for questions on the search engine side, so that when people search for a certain question in Baidu, the more relevant search results are often the questions in Zhihu.

Although Baidu also has its own Q&A product, Baidu knows that it can complement the Post Bar in content, but it is still broken by Zhihu. Zhihu and Weibo are similar, with heavy operation and KOL as the core, so they successfully went out of the circle, further dividing the time and attention of netizens.

In early Zhihu, the invitation system was implemented, and there were many professionals and intellectual groups in various fields, and the atmosphere of seeking knowledge was strong, which laid the community tone of "knowledge first" in Zhihu. Therefore, a large number of outstanding creators were successfully precipitated, forming a differentiated competitive advantage with Baidu Know and Baidu Post Bar.

Post Bar and Baidu know that it is still a straggler, and there is no professional operation and integration of high-quality creator resources, which makes it difficult to form a high-quality content pool and thus it is difficult to retain high-quality users.

In June, 2016, something happened that dealt a further blow to Post Bar, that is, the launch of Weibo Chaohua. Before the introduction of Chaohua in Weibo, Post Bar has always been the main gathering place for fans. Fans can discuss stars in Post Bar, and even support activities can be organized through Post Bar.

Baidu Post Bar, which has a huge groupie user, has no star resources, but there are many stars in Weibo. After Weibo used his own star resources to launch Chaohua, Chaohua quickly became the core base for fans to discuss idols. As a result, a large number of fans have left the post bar.

What makes Baidu Post Bar even more embarrassing is that the bar service team, the core resource of Baidu Post Bar, is also moving closer to Weibo. For example, the most famous post bar "Li Yiba" (Diba) opened its official micro-blog in Weibo.

At present, Diba Guanwei has 1.17 million fans and has played a positive role in many sensitive events. Last August, Diba organized a massive "expedition" activity, which was highly praised by a number of official media. However, the traffic generated by the activities of Diba is not directed to the Post Bar, and it is still Weibo who enjoys the heat bonus.

At present, the hottest posts in Baidu Post Bar are mainly games, animation, digital and sports posts. Games and animation belong to the secondary subculture, while digital and sports are the favorite of straight men, and the diversity of users is relatively poor. Without the resources of stars and high-quality creators, groupies and high-quality users are constantly losing, and the audience of post bars is getting narrower and narrower, gradually sliding from the public to the minority.

Baidu’s mistake

The early post bar can become a phenomenal community product, and Baidu’s traffic blessing is very important. However, the decline of Post Bar is not only due to the rise of competitors, but also due to Baidu’s decision-making mistakes in products and strategies.

Li Yanhong’s continued contempt for the mobile Internet has led Baidu to miss the era of mobile Internet and lose its advantage in the mobile battlefield. When Baidu was aware of it, it had already given away its own traffic.

Baidu had many high-quality post bars in its early years, such as various post bars for postgraduate entrance examination and skill learning, which contained many dry goods and self-study tutorials. However, Baidu, which was weak on the mobile side, lost the favor of users, and people flocked to various learning classes in Weibo. There are also many young people who flock to bilibili to study. With the help of video, a more expressive medium, bilibili has a unique advantage in learning resources.

On the other hand, Baidu’s social strategy has always been to integrate social elements into core products, rather than developing a social product alone. Based on this idea, Baidu Post Bar failed to seize the opportunity of transformation and became a semi-community and semi-social product like Weibo.

In addition to the topic discussion, Baidu Post Bar has another identity, which is the "answer library" of Baidu search engine business. Because Baidu Post Bar is deeply bound to Baidu’s search engine, when users use Baidu to search for keywords, corresponding post bars will appear in the search results, and when users search for multiple keywords or sentences, posts with high relevance will appear in the search results.

Post Bar is born for interest, but for those who have no specific interest and just want to find the answer to the question in Post Bar, Post Bar is still a disposable product with poor user retention rate. However, the identity of "answer library" is not completely without benefits for Post Bar. For people who are not deeply exposed to the Internet, Post Bar located in the front row of Baidu search results is an important way for them to obtain information.

"Last spring, when I was Baidu’s mushroom farming skills, I found a post in the post bar to promote mushroom farming supplies, and the price was a little lower than the market price. Feng Yuqin is a mushroom farmer in the northeast rural area. She shared her experience of being cheated on Baidu Post Bar with "Internet insider". "Later, I added the post owner’s WeChat and bought more than 500 yuan of mushroom farming supplies through WeChat transfer. Later, the courier reminded me that the parcel was collected and the postage was more than 300 yuan. If you refuse, you won’t get your money back, because the seller has blacked out my WeChat, so you have to bite the bullet and pay the postage.

For Baidu Post Bar, there are not a few sinking market users like Feng Yuqin, who make it difficult to distinguish all kinds of information in the post bar. Over time, Baidu Post Bar has become a popular place for some unscrupulous traders.

There is no doubt that the UGC attribute of Post Bar is strong. If it is not re-operated and re-controlled, the community tonality will develop in an uncontrollable direction. Post Bar, however, is a product of Baidu’s "stocking". Post Bar is created by an individual application, and the bar staff has extremely high permission to post it. Baidu’s official operational role has been greatly weakened.

Baidu Post Bar’s official limited regulation of Post Bar has also been criticized as "three views are touching". In the emotional column of Baidu Post Bar, there is a classification of "beauty". Under this category, there are many post bars that cater to the preferences of diaosi groups, such as "black silk bar", "beautiful legs bar", "stunner bar", "connotation map bar" and "student girl bar", and these post bars are undoubtedly hotbeds for black production.

The recent exposure of "LOLI Bar", "CQY Bar" and other post bars selling underage "Welfare Ji" pornographic resources is the tip of the iceberg.

The prevalence of black products also shows that users of Post Bar have great value, but Baidu is "lazy" and has not explored a diversified profit model. For a long time, it has been realized by advertising, membership and selling Post Bar. At the beginning of 2016, the "hemophilia bar" was sold, which once caused Baidu to fall into a major public opinion crisis.

Due to the obvious community attribute, Post Bar is the most dynamic and advantageous product in Baidu’s own content pool, but now it has become Baidu’s "time bomb", and negative news will be exposed every one or two years, hurting Baidu’s vitality. It can be predicted that Baidu’s search business will become increasingly depressed if all kinds of ills of Post Bar are not removed.

Baidu urgently needs high-quality content pool.

As a search engine, Baidu’s nourishment includes its own content and external content, and building its own high-quality content pool is the key to enhance its competitiveness. Around the search engine, Baidu has developed a series of content products to expand Baidu’s content pool, including Baidu Post Bar, Baidu Know, Baidu Experience, Baidu Library, Baidu Encyclopedia and Baijiahao.

Baidu knows that the status quo of Baidu’s experience, like a post bar, has been largely replaced by Zhihu, a professional creator. After cracking down on piracy in China, Baidu’s library will no longer be brilliant. Baidu’s expectation of revitalizing high-quality content is pinned on Baijiahao, the benchmark WeChat WeChat official account.

However, the overall content quality of Baijiahao has been difficult to compete with WeChat WeChat official account. On the one hand, Baijiahao is different from WeChat WeChat official account’s "Hundred Flowers Bloom". Baijiahao is more inclined to recommend short information, and the long and in-depth content is not the main support object of Baijiahao, which hinders the development of high-quality content in Baijiahao to some extent; On the other hand, Baidu has a large user base and a high proportion of sinking users. Due to the influence of recommended algorithms, it is inevitable that low-quality content will prevail; Moreover, Baidu does not have a strong application ecology, which leads to the poor liquidity of Baijiahao, so few high-quality creators regard Baijiahao as the main position of content creation.

Baidu has not made efforts on specialized high-quality content, but this force target is Baidu Encyclopedia. Baidu Encyclopedia started the operation of high-quality content matrix around 2014, and derived content sections such as featured encyclopedia, second encyclopedia and V encyclopedia, and introduced authoritative creators in various fields to output high-quality content. However, the entrance of these high-quality content is deeply hidden and difficult to be found and used by users.

Encyclopedia of science under the classification of characteristic encyclopedias

Baidu’s planning mistakes in the high-quality content pool have caused the loss of users, the decline of word of mouth and the shrinking of core search business. StatCounter statistics show that in 2018, Baidu’s share in the domestic search engine market was 70.3%, and by 2019, this figure fell to 67.09%. The market share of sogou search and Shenma Search is rising steadily.

Sogou, backed by Tencent, launched the WeChat channel in 2014, which opened a huge pool of high-quality content, and launched the Zhihu channel in 2015, which means that sogou search has captured another city in the pool of high-quality content. Users who are increasingly eager for high-quality content are gradually migrating to sogou.

In addition to sogou, a strong rival, all mobile rivals are also eating into Baidu’s search business. The Shenma search created by UC and Ali has thrived under the protection of UC browser; Wechat and today’s headlines also started their own search business, feeding the growth of mobile search business with the application matrix of their own camp as nutrients.

Giants have built their own search businesses, and their confidence comes from their own layout in various content tracks. Wechat Search contains WeChat WeChat official account, video number, applet, Tencent video, WeChat reading, QQ music, JD.COM Mall and other channels, which is enough to support the basic disk of WeChat search; Headline search also integrates the resources of content products such as headline number, micro-headline, Tik Tok, headline question and answer, and has strong strength.

In contrast, Baidu’s content is short-lived. Baidu, which is centered on search engines, does not have a fist-level content product. When competitors are mainly based on their own content pools and supplemented by external content pools, Baidu products represented by Post Bar are gradually declining.

In the face of all kinds of big moves by competitors, such as holding a strong group or integrating the application matrix, if Baidu can’t make great progress in high-quality content, it will eventually lose the throne of the first search engine. If the search engine business loses its advantage, it will not be far from the total collapse of Baidu Empire.

(Feng Yuqin is a pseudonym in the text)