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Text / Li Xia
Source: Bohu Finance (ID:bohuFN)
On the morning of May 18, all Sohu employees got up and received an email titled “Notice of Employee Wage Subsidy for May” from the Finance Department. If you want to stay in other Internet companies, the first reaction of employees should be fraud, but Sohu, which has 15 days of annual leave and is full of employee care in subtleties, sure enough, some employees have been recruited.
A week later, Sohu CEO Zhang Chaoyang responded on Weibo that the cause was the theft of internal employee accounts, posing as financial managers and sending emails to defraud, but the loss did not exceed 50,000 yuan.
(“Charles” is Zhang Chaoyang’s English name)Afterwards, some netizens with tricky angles found more interesting things in the announcement. 24 employees were defrauded of more than 40,000 yuan. After a set of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, each person was deceived less than 2,000 yuan.
Just a month before all the employees were defrauded, there were rumors of Sohu delisting in the media. Zhang Chaoyang got up and responded, “Some self-media authors know one thing and don’t know the other, and they write articles and criticize Sohu badly.”
However, this cannot be completely blamed on the media. In recent years, Sohu has gradually faded out of the public eye, which is much smaller than that of Sina and NetEase. In addition, in 2020, its subsidiaries Changyou and Sogou delisted successively, and then Tencent wholly acquired Sogou, which made the sense of decline even stronger. Today, Sohu’s single-digit total market value is inevitable.
The golden decade is closed
There is no harm without comparison. Think of the time when Zhang Chaoyang founded Sohu, which took three years to list on Nasdaq and became one of the three major domestic portals.
Netease Ding Lei said that before 2000, Zhang Chaoyang was the most influential person in China’s Internet industry. Zhang Chaoyang is also known as the “Godfather of the Internet in China”. I remember that when Pony Ma heard that Zhang Chaoyang was going to give a speech in Shenzhen, he rushed to the crowd to take notes.
(Source: Network)The ten years of the new century are the ten years of Sohu’s unlimited development. Soon after its listing, Sohu acquired ChinaRen, the largest youth community in China at that time, and Sohu became the largest Internet portal in China in one fell swoop.
Since then, Sohu’s diversification has been overwhelming, doing mailboxes, blogs, search engines, browsers, input methods, and entering games and e-commerce. In 2008, Sohu won the exclusive online live broadcast rights of the Beijing Olympics, and the bus was covered with “Watch the Olympics, go to Sohu”. This year, Sohu’s performance and stock price surpassed Sina for the first time.
The first decade of the new century is also a highlight moment for Zhang Chaoyang. In 2003, Zhang Chaoyang ranked third on the Hurun China IT Rich List, and at the same time started an unruly life.
Climbing with celebrities, appearing on the cover of fashion magazines, hanging out in bars, drinking and dancing, having a party in the Sohu headquarters building, skateboarding in Tiananmen Square wearing a peaked cap, and buying the largest luxury yacht in China at that time. Everyone knows, the scenery is infinite. He once released rhetoric, “I am the most famous and rich man in China” and “I hope to become the richest man in China one day”.
Without waiting for Zhang Chaoyang to realize his dream of being the richest man, in 2011, because of a snow-capped mountain climb that “caused hypoxia in the brain”, Zhang Chaoyang became depressed.
However, for this depression, there are several versions on the Internet.
At that time, it was a critical period when the PC Internet turned to the mobile Internet. Sina and Tencent launched their own Weibo products. On April 7, 2010, Sohu Weibo was launched for public beta, and it fought head-to-head with Tencent Weibo and Sina Weibo. After the Weibo war broke out, Zhang Chaoyang said internally that he would build Weibo regardless of the cost. Although Zhang Chaoyang was exhausted, the final result was unsatisfactory.
Another way of saying that Zhang Chaoyang was indignant at that time because he was surpassed by Li Yanhong.
At that time, Baidu search was already a tyrant in China, and just in 2010, Google search withdrew from China. So this year, Sogou became independent from Sohu, with Wang Xiaochuan as CEO. Zhang Chaoyang’s expectation for Sogou at that time was to challenge Baidu. For this reason, he also proposed a plan to “rebuild Sohu” and identified four businesses including search. For this purpose, Sohu introduced Alibaba as a strategic investor at that time, enriching Sogou content with Taobao’s e-commerce data.
However, in March 2011, Baidu grabbed the title of No. 1 Internet market value in China from Tencent for 5 years with US$46 billion. In the 2010 Hurun IT Rich List, Li Yanhong once again became the richest man in the IT industry with a worth of 31.5 billion – Zhang Chaoyang ranked 43rd in this ranking.
Seeing that the descendants are so outstanding, this 47-year-old unmarried man who punished himself for winter swimming in Tsinghua University and ran 5 kilometers in Yuanmingyuan if he didn’t get the first place in the exam, found his brother, an eminent monk at Famen Temple in Shaanxi, and went into seclusion for more than a year.
Video, The Last Glow
When Zhang Chaoyang came out in 2013 and re-entered the earth, what he felt the most was not how Sina Weibo, which he lost to that year, flourished, but that everyone was using WeChat.
The mobile Internet has brought about changes in social networking, mobile payment, e-commerce, live broadcast, short video, and the sharing economy, but Sohu basically missed it. The diversified business that Zhang Chaoyang has high hopes for, the market share of search, games and browsers is too small, and the portal website and news client are also declining.
In those years, Zhang Chaoyang had high hopes for Sohu Video.
In 2013, Sohu purchased the webcast copyright of the second season of “The Voice of China” for a sky-high price of 100 million yuan, setting a record for the copyright fee of an Internet variety show. However, this time Sohu made a lot of money from it, and Zhang Chaoyang, who had tasted the sweetness, put down his bold words, “We must make Sohu Video a success and surpass our competitors in terms of data.”
However, the success of Sohu Video’s introduction of copyright has attracted the jealousy of its peers. The third season of “The Voice of China” was won by Tencent Video, and some popular variety shows such as “Where Are We Going Dad?”, “I Am a Singer” and “China’s Got Talent” were bought out by iQiyi, LeTV, and Tencent.
Copyright competition led to high costs. Sohu ran away and devoted some of its energy to self-made. In 2014, it was named the first year of self-made by Sohu, and some self-made dramas “Men of Diaosi”, “Ladies of Need” and “The Year in a Hurry” have successfully appeared in the circle. This year, Sohu Video also acquired 56 videos and added video.
At the end of 2016, the copyright fee was further pushed up. Sohu stopped the purchase of high-priced copyright content, took self-made as the direction, and made profit as the first goal. In 2018, due to the difficulty of monetizing long videos, Sohu experienced another “small but beautiful” direction adjustment.
After several adjustments, Sohu Video has become a pioneer in the copyright field from the beginning. Nowadays, in the field of video, everyone only knows “Aiyouteng” in their hearts. Sohu’s last straw was gradually lost.
Looking back at the decline of Sohu in the video field, which has its own advantages, it is inseparable from the changes of the Internet wave. If the turn of the new century is the era of portal websites, then from the second decade of the 21st century, the Internet has shifted from BAT to Meituan and Douyin. In the replacement of the tide, Sohu was squeezed to the edge of the Internet.
From the perspective of the stock market, in addition to Zhang Chaoyang’s comeback in 2013, Sohu had a “J”-shaped return, and then started a long-term decline for 6 years. During the same period, the BAT stock market started a ten-year high-speed climb until the outbreak.
Funds have flowed to BAT, and the corresponding “Aiyouteng” has been extravagant and has been emphasizing growth. On the contrary, the cash-strapped Sohu has always emphasized cost and profitability. This determines Sohu’s position in the video field.
At the Wuzhen World Internet Conference in 2016, Zhang Chaoyang said: “In three years, Sohu will return to the Internet Center.” During this period, Sohu also made some new attempts outside of video, including Qianfan Live, social product Fox Friends, and Zhang Chaoyang was also there. There was a lot of publicity in front of the stage, but the results were unsatisfactory.
So there is Wang Xing’s sigh on Fanfou in 2018: God, I haven’t paid attention to it for a long time. Sohu’s market value has dropped from about 4 billion US dollars to 680 million US dollars.
In 2020, Changyou, which had been listed for 11 years, was delisted, and soon after, Tencent wholly acquired Sogou. Today, Sohu’s most valuable asset is the Sohu Internet Building, located 300 meters away from Tsinghua University.
Physics teacher Zhang Chaoyang
In April of this year, Zhang Chaoyang told young people in an interview to “don’t try too hard”, which is very unlike what a listed company CEO should say, but it is very “Zhang Chaoyang”, and then it became a hot search.
(Source: Network)But on the other hand, since 2018, the “roll king” has started his own exclusive sleep method, sleeping 4 hours a day, and sleeping for 2 hours at night, awake for 1 hour, and then sleeps for 2 hours.
In an interview with Shenwang in 2019, Zhang Chaoyang said that in the past, he felt that he had made enough money, and he would not do anything he didn’t want to do, but now he wants to be a good CEO, “This is one of my duties, I have to get up early and be in the dark. Do this well.”
Since 2016, Zhang Chaoyang has been reading newspapers under Sohu’s Qianfan Live at 8:00 every day, 6 times a week, rain or shine. In 2020, Zhang Chaoyang started the live broadcast to bring goods, danced and turned somersaults in the live broadcast room, and the hobby of disco dance had a new use.
On November 5, 2021, 57-year-old Zhang Chaoyang gave his first physics class on Sohu. In March this year, “Zhang Chaoyang’s Physics Class” was moved offline. In a spacious classroom, Zhang Chaoyang filled 6 blackboards with a piece of chalk, explaining Einstein’s mass-energy formula “E=mc²” .
Zhang Chaoyang said that as early as at Tsinghua University, his dream was to become a scientist, and for this goal, his crazy study burned his brain.
In the first quarter of this year, Sohu’s revenue was US$193 million, down 13% year-on-year. Zhang Chaoyang said that Sohu Video will continue to implement the “dual engine” strategy (self-made long videos and self-media short videos), and strive to expand the value live broadcast to a wider range of scientific fields. Today, the Sohu App reads, “Not only watching dramas, but also live broadcasts.”
Zhang Chaoyang’s past life was like the hero in the script. He became famous as a teenager, and he was unruly. Now that the post-60s generation, who is about to enter the age of hearing, is still waiting for the Internet to make a comeback under the tide of “from virtual to real”?
Reference source:
1. Beijing Times: Zhang Chaoyang is satisfied with Sohu’s third quarterly report, Sogou’s rise wants to challenge Baidu
2. South Wind Window: What is Zhang Chaoyang doing?
3. Tencent Deep Web: Interview with Zhang Chaoyang: Life is a sea of misery, and happiness cannot be chased. How to live a story?
4. Chief Business Review: The live broadcast starts and replies to netizens, Zhang Chaoyang’s Sohu is still profitable
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