Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1621
At the beginning of 2023, a Meituan employee posted a question on the internal forum “Meituan Family Affairs”: Is Dianping the “content seed” that Meituan missed? It means Dianping missed the opportunity to become a content platform.
Since the past two years, more and more content platforms have expanded into the field of life services. Douyin has now grown into Meituan’s biggest competitor . In 2023, Douyin Daodian + Liquor Travel has set a goal of paying GMV of 300 billion yuan, which is comparable to Meituan’s 2021 level.
Kuaishou’s life service business added three pilot cities, Shanghai, Qingdao, and Harbin earlier this year, and entered Hangzhou in April; Xiaohongshu opened invitations for merchants to settle in, and named its official account for life services “Tilbo” Potatoes” is intended to help users “dig” good stores and “grill” good products.
Dianping, as the closest product of Meituan to the content platform, began to be constantly mentioned internally at this time.
Since it was acquired by Meituan in 2015, Dianping has undergone several revisions. So far, only 15 million people open it every day, which is not much different from before the merger. Its daily active users are less than 2% of Douyin’s and Xiaohongshu’s. 1/6. Users regard it more as a search tool for eating, drinking and having fun.
Dianping can’t be transformed casually, because it is too profitable-good search tools are money printing machines. Dianping now brings Meituan over 10 billion yuan in revenue a year. Meituan’s annual revenue is hundreds of billions, but the profit margin of the food delivery business, which accounts for the highest proportion, is meager. Most of the profits come from the in-store and hotel tourism business. Nearly 1/3 of this income comes from Dianping.
In 2018, Dianping made a revision to transform to content: the original restaurant directory collection on the homepage was adjusted to a collection of graphic notes created by users, and displayed in the form of a double-column information flow. But this time the change only stayed on the product side, and the investment was not large, and in the end it did not change the existing usage habits of users. In the minds of most users, Dianping is still a search tool for finding restaurants, scenic spots, and reading ratings and reviews.
Since then, Dianping has continued to cautiously try to transform, including introducing stars against Xiaohongshu to create more non-catering content; planning to launch an independent content application; in 2020, under the leadership of Meituan co-founder Wang Huiwen Under the circumstances, Dianping even thought about changing the name and product form more completely. But these attempts came to nothing in the end. Today, Dianping still only has about 30% of users who swipe the information flow twice a day, intentionally or unintentionally.
At the end of 2022, Dianping was handed over to Zhang Chuan, the head of Meituan’s in-store business department, and started the content transformation again. A person from Dianping told LatePost that Zhang Chuan once said in an internal meeting: “If Dianping does not transform into content and video, it will definitely be subverted in the next few years.”
It is understood that the annual budget obtained by Dianping is less than 1 billion yuan , which is not much different from previous years. On April 12, 2023, Dianping ushered in its 20th anniversary, and the interior was as peaceful as ever. “Transformation must be done, but it is also extremely difficult.” A public opinion person said.
A cautious attempt at content
The management of Dianping has long seen the opportunity of content. In 2017, the 5-year-old information platform Jinri Toutiao’s revenue is close to 1/5 of Baidu’s; the domestic first short video content platform Kuaishou’s daily activity is about to exceed 100 million, and the number of users of Douyin, which has been incubated for more than a year by ByteDance, is about to exceed quick worker. At the end of the year, Dianping also clearly put forward the idea of content transformation internally.
Under the leadership of Huang Hai (internal name “Dylan”), the person in charge at the time, Dianping launched a new version in May 2018, adjusting the original restaurant directory collection on the homepage to a collection of graphic notes created by users. It is displayed in the form of column information flow; the “Notes” function of Dianping is added at the bottom of the homepage, hoping to guide users to produce more personal content.
Left: Before the revision in May 2018, Right: After the revision, it is close to the current style.
In terms of content ecology, Huang Hai tried to learn from Xiaohongshu comprehensively, invited popular stars to settle in, and introduced trends, fashion and other content. As a result, a large number of photos of women dancing and taking selfies appeared on the product homepage. Users who came to find restaurants and check restaurant reviews felt baffled. In less than half a year, the strategy of comprehensively learning Xiaohongshu was abandoned.
“The expansion of content categories must be done slowly under the premise of ensuring that users’ existing mentality does not undergo drastic changes.” A public commentator said that the team reflected on it at that time. Dianping quickly shifted its focus to expanding the content of “food”, which is also the area where Dianping has the most advantages. “The need to find a restaurant has been well solved. Next, can we help users solve the problem of what to eat at home?” said the above-mentioned person. “Recipe” was established as the new direction.
In the past, Meituan used to do business in a small-scale pilot to obtain awareness, calculate the industry scale and calculate the unit economic model, and then consider whether to invest in large-scale. But the content is different. This is never an immediate thing. Whether it is to obtain sufficient content supply or let users form the habit of consuming content, it will take a long-term process.
When expanding the content of the recipe, the team was first asked to demonstrate clearly: Compared with those who have not read the content of the recipe, the retention of users who have read the content of the recipe is higher. Also answer: What is the monetization method of this kind of content? These are the prerequisites for obtaining more resources from the Group. After trying for a while, they didn’t get the answer they wanted. At the same time, Dianping is also considering launching a separate Xiaohongshu-like product “Zaoya”, but the new product requires a lot of investment to make a sound. Ultimately the project fell through.
With limited investment, Dianping’s daily active user scale has been hovering around 15 million per day. At the same time, the number of daily active users of Xiaohongshu continued to rise, reaching more than 30 million by early 2020.
In February 2020, Huang Hai, the person in charge of Dianping, resigned, and his superior Wang Huiwen took over Dianping for a period of time. Wang Huiwen is the No. 2 person in Meituan and Wang Xing’s college roommate. He was also the person in charge of Dianping who directly led the team at that time, the highest-ranking and most prestigious person.
Although Wang Huiwen had decided to retire at the end of the year, his arrival was still considered by Dianping internally as the closest opportunity for him to obtain more group resources and achieve a thorough reform.
Wang Huiwen spends one day a week in meetings with people in charge of Dianping’s products, operations, and content. He is aware of the embarrassment of Dianping when making product adjustments: most users use Dianping to find restaurants and read reviews. With such a clear mind, the effect of any fine-tuning on the product side is not obvious.
Wang Huiwen made a bold suggestion: change to a new name. “Only by changing the name can the outside world realize that Dianping is really different, and new users will be able to re-understand this app.” A Dianping employee recalled that the team came up with new ideas such as “Miaoshou” and “Miaoji”. name.
However, the idea of changing the name and transformation failed to materialize. At that time, Meituan was investing heavily in community group buying, which was described by CEO Wang Xing as “a high-quality opportunity that only takes five or ten years.” At the end of 2020, Wang Huiwen officially retired, and the content transformation of Dianping is also over.
An average user brings in 667 yuan a year
Dianping generates considerable revenue and profits for Meituan.
Previously, Meituan did not separately split the revenue ratio of Dianping and Meituan in the store and hotel travel business in the financial report. “LatePost” learned that according to Meituan’s internal calculations, the commission income and advertising revenue of Dianping will exceed 10 billion yuan in 2021, which is close to 1/3 of Meituan’s in-store business income.
According to the 43.3% operating profit margin of Diandian, Liquor and Travel in the financial report, it contributed about 4.3 billion yuan in operating profit, which was close to the total operating profit of Meituan in the previous year, and its operating profit margin was 7 times that of the food delivery business.
Dianping’s revenue generated by a single user is rare in the industry—each daily active user brings in an annual revenue of about 667 yuan. Compared with Douyin, the most profitable Internet platform in China, according to “LatePost” calculations, the revenue contributed by each user in 2022 (“advertising revenue + live broadcast revenue”/dau) is 14% lower than that of Dianping.
Nearly 60% of Dianping users live in first-tier and new first-tier cities. Residents in these places have stronger spending power, and merchants have higher willingness and budget to advertise on the platform. It is understood that Dianping established an advertising platform earlier than Meituan.
Being able to make money has become the most direct obstacle to Dianping’s difficult transformation—once the product is completely reformed, the existing business model will be affected, and income will inevitably decrease.
In order to allow users to browse more user-generated content in the information flow on the homepage, Dianping once conducted a small-scale test to hide some category entries (food, scenic spots, hotels, etc.) Frequency of reviews.
The team responsible for commercialization is also challenging such changes. The commercial affairs of Dianping are in charge of the Meituan team, and they have a higher say in the group. “People in two departments carry out reforms in two directions, and it is easy to fail.” A public Review employee reviews.
After Wang Huiwen left, Yu Jianlin, who had worked at Dianping for 12 years, took over the product. Long before Meituan and Dianping merged, Yu Jianlin joined Dianping and was responsible for the transformation of Dianping from PC to mobile and the expansion of comprehensive categories in stores.
Between maintaining “income” or creating “imagination”, Yu Jianlin chose the former. He gave up the idea of transforming to content-based products, and instead expanded to the field where Dianping has the most advantage-helping consumers find “places to go”. In March 2021, Dianping changed the brand slogan from “discover quality life” to “discover good places”.
If there are no new changes, Dianping will most likely follow the existing path of “finding a place to go”. But external changes came quickly and violently.
Just over a year after Dianping gave up its content transformation, Douyin’s life service business has grown rapidly at a speed far beyond Meituan’s imagination. In 2022, the turnover of Douyin’s life services will be close to 90 billion yuan. This year, they have also opened up most of the general industry and entered the field of food delivery; Xiaohongshu is also deploying life services, inviting merchants to settle in, online group buying and coupon.
Douyin has spent more than a year planning to incubate a merchant evaluation system that is benchmarked against Dianping. This is the most critical ability for Meituan to achieve in-store business. It can directly affect users’ consumption decisions; it can also be used as a management tool to force merchants to provide better services.
Douyin’s capabilities from content to transactions are constantly being verified. Dianping has once again returned to the road of content transformation, but compared with the past, the situation this time is more urgent.
limited radical
At the end of 2022, Zhang Chuan, head of Meituan’s in-store business group, took over Dianping. Yu Jianlin, the person in charge of Dianping who originally reported to Wang Xing, was transferred to report to Zhang Chuan.
Zhang Chuan joined Meituan in 2017. At the beginning of joining, he was briefly in charge of Dianping, and later transferred to be in charge of Meituan’s in-store business group (merchant introduction, product commercialization, etc.). This adjustment also means that Dianping has ended the years-long product and commercialization dispute, and the two major businesses and core resources have been completely brought together in the hands of one person in charge.
In 2023, Dianping also ushered in the most aggressive year after being acquired, and set a goal that had never been reached in the previous seven years-to reach 25 million daily active users before the end of the year. Since 2015, the product has had few clear growth targets.
Regarding the introduction of content categories, the content team was required to fully benchmark Xiaohongshu and learn Douyin. “The content categories on these two products must be included in Dianping,” said a Dianping source. At the beginning of 2023, the team also launched the “Chunsheng Campaign”, chanting the slogan “Staying upright and surprising, and winning a hundred battles”, and plans to introduce 20,000 off-site creators and 100,000 contributions.
In order to quickly let users develop the habit of watching content in the product, Dianping gave users original graphic and note content instead of the exposure position originally reserved for “surrounding stores”. The recommendation of the homepage information flow began to distribute “non-going” content, including but not limited to daily life, career choices, emotional content, etc.; the weight of users’ graphic notes and video content in the homepage information flow was further increased. Per capita usage time has also become a higher priority target for Dianping.
In the past, 26% of Dianping users browsed the information flow content on the product homepage every day, and now the team hopes to increase this number to 50% by the end of the year. Currently, this figure is already around 30%.
The content transformation of Dianping is still in its very early stages. Even the 30% of interested users only spend about 4 minutes a day on average; the content supply is far from sufficient; the creator ecology is far from mature, and the introduction of creators outside the site depends entirely on spending; The new investment is not too much.
However, Dianping cannot defend Douyin alone. Meituan, with more than 100 million daily active users, bears a greater responsibility.
In March, Meituan launched the “God’s Hot Deal” project in the takeaway aggregation live broadcast room, which means “God’s low price, grab it immediately”. At present, “God’s Hot” has been piloted in Shenzhen, and Meituan has also given great resources to it.
“LatePost” learned that the merchants participating in the project are all merchants from Meituan, mainly merchants with better sales on Douyin. The prices of the products they launch in the Meituan live broadcast room are much lower than those sold by Douyin Waimai, and the difference is fully subsidized by Meituan to the merchants. For example, the regular price of a cup of SeeSaw coffee is about 33 yuan, and the price of two cups of “Hot Sought” is 30 yuan.
In 2022, Meituan tried live broadcasts in Chengdu, Chongqing and other cities. “A lot of exposure was given, but almost no one clicked in to watch it.” A person familiar with the matter told “LatePost”. A single user opens the Meituan app for about 33 seconds, and they have long been accustomed to “going away” in Meituan.
“Low price” may be a good entry point for Meituan to start a new round of live broadcast attempts, that is, to use the absolute cost performance of high-quality products to attract users into the live broadcast room, and then develop their habit of watching live broadcasts on Meituan. But this is not a long-term solution. Every order in the live broadcast room requires Meituan to pay a lot of subsidy costs, which will further affect the already meager operating profit of Meituan Food Delivery.
For Meituan, the contest with Douyin is a bottom-line competition. The extent to which its defense can be effective will directly affect the boundary of its survival.
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