"Internet sports" can have a good sports year?

In fact, there is a lot of data that proves that the "Big Year of Sports" is not just a concept created by the media circle, but it is indeed a well-documented wealth code.

For example, the National Bureau of Statistics predicted that the development of a series of related industries driven by the 2008 Beijing Olympics would boost China's GDP growth by an average of 0.3 to 0.4 percentage points per year over the next seven years, and that Shanghai, which is hosting 12 major sports events in 2019, would do similarly, finding that the "Big Year of Sports" would bring in 30.5 million people. The "Year of Sports" brought 3.09 billion yuan of direct consumption and boosted the growth of related industries by more than 10.2 billion yuan.

The Internet industry also seems to follow this pattern of cyclical wind: around 2008, Mint Health and Gudong have been on the line, the former launched a weight management APP to measure metabolic levels, query the calories of food and record calories, etc., and the latter's center of gravity gradually shifted from smart hardware to online platforms to become the country's first cell phone software focusing on sports socialization; in 2014, the Internet sports field has once again seen a surge of activity, and the Internet is now the most popular platform in China. Before and after, the Internet sports field once again ushered in the outbreak, the circle of pleasure, Keep has become the meat and potatoes of the investment circle.

So at the beginning of this year, many people applied the experience, that in 2021, "sports big year = wealth code" formula will work again. After all, from June, the America's Cup, the European Cup, the Tokyo Olympics, the Paralympics, the 12-team tournament, the National Games and a number of other events have been carried out one after another, coupled with the Beijing Winter Olympics, which has entered the event cycle and will be held at the beginning of 2022, the development of the sports economy requires "event hotspots" is extremely rich, practitioners basically only need to consider how to "convert". The only thing practitioners basically need to consider is how to "transform" the problem.

So is this judgment correct?

It's hard to give a positive answer to this question. On the one hand, standing in 2021 has been half of the timeline to review, this year looks like a pile of "events" is actually full of uncertainty, such as in the recurring epidemic, originally scheduled to be held this year, Chengdu Universiade was forced to postpone a year, the national football team of the 12 strong will be relocated to West Asia, the Chinese Super League and the CBA is still the choice of the tournament system The silver cross-country race accident has a more far-reaching impact, thousands of offline races every year have also encountered approval problems, including the 2021 XTRAIL Kanas Super Cross-Country Race, Jiangsu Suzhou Wuzhong Four Seasons Cross-Country Race and other events have been abruptly suspended.

In this case, although the traffic dividend brought by the "event" is there, whether it is possible to obtain the effect of "piling up" - that is, by continuously breaking through the circle - will form a stable incremental source. The formation of a stable source of incremental growth, it seems to be a question mark - and even added additional distress, such as the silver race accident, there is no shortage of social media on the "marathon", "cross-country", "running

On the other hand, compared to 2008 and 2014, the gap left by the sports economy seems to be small. Especially for the Internet industry, which emphasizes the importance of "pulling new life", in the sports monitoring, smart hardware, online tournaments and other conventional product forms have been developed quite mature premise, market demand is saturated usually means two things: to do a more difficult business, or to find a more remote users.

In fact, for the sports industry, the benefits of 2021 don't just come from events.

For example, some time ago, the State Council issued the National Fitness Plan (2021-2025), which highlights the direction of development of China's national fitness program during the "14th Five-Year Plan" period. The Plan indicates that by 2025, the proportion of people who regularly participate in physical exercise will reach 38.5%, the three levels of public **** fitness facilities and community "15-minute fitness circles" in counties (cities and districts), townships (streets) and administrative villages (communities) will be fully covered, and every 1,000 people will have 2.16 social sports instructors, leading the national sports industry to reach 5 trillion yuan in total scale. The total scale of the national sports industry has reached 5 trillion yuan.

For most people, national policy documents are boring, but if you understand the huge opportunities behind this paper, then you may find it especially kind.

From a timeline perspective, the National Fitness Program (2021-2025) is not the State Council's first plan for the "sports economy". Before that, the State Council issued the National Fitness Program (2011-2015) in 2011 and the National Fitness Program (2016-2020) in 2016, which parallels the National Fitness Program with a five-year plan to guide national economic and social development.

Driven by a series of policies, the scale of China's sports industry continues to grow. Data show that from 2016 to 2019, the total scale of China's sports industry grew from 1.9 trillion to 2.948 trillion. By the end of 2019, the total number of sports venues in China even reached 3,544,400, and the area of sports venues reached 2,917 million square meters, with a per capita area of 2.08 square meters.

These figures correspond to the continuous improvement of China's sports infrastructure, people's participation in sports is more convenient, creating conditions for the popularization of sports for all and the enhancement of the social atmosphere of sports - for the sports economy, it corresponds to the expansion of the scale of the consumer, the enrichment of the image, the enhancement of the willingness to consume, the increase in consumption frequency, and the increase in the time spent in the consumption scene. For the sports economy, this corresponds to the expansion of consumer scale, the enrichment of their profiles, the enhancement of their willingness to consume, the increase in the frequency of consumption, and the increase in the time they spend in the consumption scene.

Returning to the content of the National Fitness Plan (2021-2025), the figures mentioned above have basically been "positively continued", which means that the most important variables in the sports economy, such as the size of the consumer, the consumer profile, and the willingness to consume, will once again grow, which is theoretically inevitable. That means that the most important variables in the sports economy - consumer size, consumer profiling, and consumer sentiment - will grow again, which is theoretically inevitable.

Of course, there is an important difference, and that is that the National Fitness Plan (2021-2025) gives higher weight to keywords such as "online" and "smart". These concepts appear very frequently in interviews with relevant departments after the release of the Plan, and are sometimes even put in the direct headlines by the media, becoming the "theme" of the entire discussion.

For example, Zhao Jun, director of the Group Division of the Henan Provincial Sports Bureau, has introduced in an interview, the future of Henan Province to continue to improve the infrastructure coverage, strengthen the national fitness facilities, intelligent and big data application system construction, to achieve the national fitness resources integration, data **** enjoyment, interconnection and interoperability.

Wang Renwei, director of the Shanghai Changning District Sports Bureau, also told the media that Changning District, in addition to realizing the full coverage of the streets and towns of "15-minute community sports life circle", will also accelerate the process of Changning sports public **** service intelligence, to achieve the venues of online booking, online management, big data analysis, and online registration of sports events, etc.

In the future, Henan Province will continue to improve the infrastructure coverage and strengthen the national fitness facilities intelligent and big data application system construction. The first is to make sure that you have a good understanding of what you are doing and how you are doing it.

Therefore, theoretically, if 2021 is a great year for the sports economy, the biggest beneficiaries in this round of the sports economic cycle are most likely to be those who have completed the online transformation of the original demand and accumulated enough online users of the "Internet + Sports" industry.

From the data available, this trend seems to have made a start, and is highlighted in two points: one is that people's favorite sports seem to be more and more affected by "social networks"; the other is that a lot of niche sports are beginning to rapidly complete the breakthrough through the dissemination of social media, and have accumulated sufficient resources to support the commercial operation. The other point is that many niche sports are beginning to spread through social media to break through the circle quickly, accumulating a sufficient market base to support the commercialization of the operation.

(On what aspects of the Internet industry can participate in the sports economy, I simply made a chart)

In the past Olympic cycle, for example, according to a report by CCTV.com, before the start of the Olympic Games, fitness, fishing, yoga and other "non-contact" sports consumption accounted for a significant increase in the proportion of users, with a large number of new "fishing guys". A large number of new "fishermen" are loyal fans of Deng Gang and Liu Zhiqiang, and make the "Pan Boss" as the decisive factor of the whole fishing experience; accordingly, all kinds of sports training, tournament registration and venue booking on behalf of the rapid growth of sports services.

Nanjing Olympic Sports Center ice sports club staff said in an interview, the Olympic Games during normal business, every day over the sports customers have two to three hundred people, close to the same period in previous years twice.

Similarly, the rise of slimming meals, light meals and healthy eating programs.

Although there is appearance anxiety, body anxiety controversy, but in recent years on social media to set off fat loss and slimming, local shaping and other "new fashion" is indeed an established fact, the public on aesthetic grounds of the demand for body modification is stimulated more and more intense, and transformed into a real consumer demand. Yin Zheng relies on weight loss as a persona 2021 took #Yin Zheng I don't deserve to eat a burger #, #Yin Zheng what he ate in the third week #, #Yin Zheng ineffective weight loss #, #Yin Zheng drunkenly stealing lunch meat and forgetting the taste #, #Yin Zheng after losing weight to eat the expression of the rice # and so on more than a dozen hundreds of millions of readers of the hot searches, and then "Yin Zheng the same style" became the The main sports and fitness bloggers and e-commerce platforms are popular choices for copywriting.

In short, the tournament drove consumer enthusiasm, and the "Internet sports" industry is no longer limited to "sports" as a hardcore scenario in this process, but is closer to the broader concept of "health". "

According to Foxconn, the company's website is not only a source of information about the company, but also a source of information about the company.

According to FastData's Aurora data, in 2020, China's regular sports players will reach 435 million, an increase of 27 million over 2019. According to QuestMobile data, as of February 2021, more than 780 million users online "cloud sports", the use of vertical professional fitness APP sportsman scale close to 60 million.

So the Internet sports companies must be able to continue this trend? The answer is also full of uncertainty.

First of all, as the scale of the sports industry grows, especially when offline sports programs are stagnant due to the impact of the epidemic, Internet sports companies can really eat the growth dividend.

The director of GooDong's tournaments told us that the number of offline tournaments, which used to be around 1,000 in previous years, has shrunk dramatically due to the epidemic, but the demand for tournaments from the sports crowd hasn't diminished, so a lot of users are flocking to online tournaments - which still have medals and certificates of participation, but don't require fixed venues, and accordingly aren't subject to the same level of scrutiny as online tournaments. There will still be medals and certificates of participation, but they don't require a fixed venue, and accordingly they won't be subject to more anti-epidemic work - so as an alternative, online users of GooDong events are also showing relatively good growth.

The overall Internet sports landscape is also growing. According to FeatData Aurora data, by April 2021, the domestic sports health APP active user size and open rate points from 48.36 million in 2019, open rate of 8.4% growth to 54.79 million, open rate of 11.5%.

However, through the previous discussion, it is not difficult to find that the tournament economy, sports year, although it will bring fire to people's enthusiasm for sports, so that more people converted into consumers in the field of sports, but after being converted consumers will not be evenly distributed in the various segments of the sports field, but by the impact of the threshold of participation presents an obvious order of priority, growth is first driven by the regular

Specific to each enterprise, this means that if they do not want to become a large platform of aggregation, then the dividends are very limited. And this relates to some of the pervasive issues that are preventing the industry as a whole from scaling.

For example, the products on the market that focus on sports, health, and fitness labels basically lack a deep enough moat. Mint health, for example, since 2007, it has been plowing a healthy diet for more than a decade, under the banner of the heart of the mint (efficacy of food), mint on the selection (healthy snacks), mint material (healthy fast food), mint of the Sen (children's nutrition) four major sub-brands of health food, the number of SKUs of more than 200 - according to the official announcement of the round of D According to the official announcement of the D round of financing release, investors generally believe that "the user assets and good reputation precipitated since the creation of more than ten years provides a solid foundation for the long-term development of its brand.

But from the point of view of market performance, Mint's "ten years of precipitation" can be replicated. For example, in January 2019, Keep's healthy food business "Keep Light Food" was officially launched, and today it is also divided into three series of light truck staple food, healthy snacks, nutritional conditioning, and more than 70 SKUs, in other words, it only took more than two years for Keep to break into Mint's health base camp.

Secondly, due to the lack of a deep enough moat, many services in the field of sports and health also show the status quo of homogenization, for example, Gudong, Yuet Run Circle, Yuet Dynamic Circle, and other products in the page section set up basically follow the same logic.

(Because the main scenes overlap, the extended sections are also similar.)

Of course, having a similar product form among peers is not a bad thing, nor is it new. In addition to sports and health, music, animation, short videos, and long-form videos are basically the same, and it doesn't hurt that these industries are blossoming.

But the problem is that in the tool-oriented product framework, even if the product as far as possible to the platform development, trying to socialize, e-commerce, live so that users in the operation of the closed-loop "play up", sports, health, fitness, and ultimately there is no way to change as a "clear demand, the path to achieve quantifiable behavior". The essence of the quantifiable behavior, the user is still a large number in the state of exhaustion.

Coupled with the more complex needs of professional users, in-depth users, independence is also stronger (with more professional knowledge, basic sports assistance is no longer a necessity), so whether it is from the operational level from the beginning of the development of cost-effective considerations, "so that the end of the walk to happen more, so that the end of the walk to a little more people!

Their most active users are hard to define as a "sports audience" - they have a need to be active, healthy, and thin, but don't need to grow too much - commonly known as "white users".

The needs of white users can easily be characterized as episodic, which may be used frequently for a certain period of time, but also may not be used for a period of time. So for these sports products, it is difficult to form a scale effect on the one hand, and on the other hand, it is difficult to form a precipitation and transformation of the flow of users.

Therefore, in order to better distinguish Internet sports products from competitors in the industry, as well as in the market to form a "sports" "health" in addition to the more pleasing to the ordinary user's memory, the current performance of a trend is: we are all As far as possible to make their own "bias", the field of their own expertise to achieve a kind of "overabundance" of the state.

For example, Gudong specializes in running and has developed a series of products such as race operation, smart equipment, and running shoes and apparel. Mint Health has also generated healthy food, dietary content, healthy recipes and other services around healthy eating, and Keep is based on indoor fitness and has developed an independent mall, fitness courses, sports equipment and other sections.

This verticalized operation solves part of the problem of product features, but at the same time, it is also because the core function of the product is too vertical, which leads to a narrower range of target users.

To solve this problem, these sports products have developed their own unique user cultivation path in the market.

Gudong's tournament director told us that Gudong has a whole set of tournament system and operation method from shallow to deep, which can gradually cultivate users' love and persistence of sports from the moment they enter the platform.

Specifically, when a user first enters GooDong, the platform will first recommend some professional sports content to cultivate the user's sports mindset and awareness. As the user's exercise data gradually accumulates, the platform will slowly recommend some events, which are relatively simple at first, and the user can usually get a good ranking and gradually gain a sense of accomplishment in the exercise.

In addition to this, Gudong's series of operations include customizing medals for each race, organizing official running groups in each city, and creating a series of IP races such as Chinese Zodiac and Constellation races, as well as co-branded races with movies and brands. The purpose is to enhance the fun and cultural connotations of sports events, and to increase the user's sense of participation in running, sense of belonging, sense of atmosphere, and even a sense of honor, and ultimately form the user's adhesion to the platform.

This logic boils down to the fact that the platform is not providing a solution to a demand, but rather it is cultivating a demand and then providing services and solutions for these demands. That is, the platform to cultivate the user's sports habits, the user after the habit of consumption to support the platform's revenue.

This logic is fine as a whole, but when the platform wants to expand its business, it realizes that because the users it cultivates are too vertical, their consumption needs are fixed.

As we mentioned earlier, in the internet sports industry, it's actually quite easy for each company's services and products to converge on others in the same industry. But the problem is that even if a platform to increase the product services, but the users on this platform may not need what you added, which forms the you may have a lot of products, but make money is still the core business of the early days.

It is for these reasons that there has always been an invisible limit to the development of sports apps, so much so that there has not been a unicorn company for a long time.

As the saying goes, success is also the user, and failure is also the user.

But in the past two years, the Internet sports health field does appear some new changes. And these changes are from the model innovation, product innovation, technological innovation and other dimensions to promote the development of the Internet sports health industry.

For example, the super gorilla, founded in 2014, has been loved by young users because of its new fitness model of no annual card, no sales promotion, professional coaches, and pay-per-use fees. In May of this year, the super gorilla completed hundreds of millions of yuan E round of financing, and the valuation is close to 1 billion U.S. dollars. Today, Super Gorilla has opened 123 directly-managed stores in 8 cities, including Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing and Chengdu, with another 80 stores in the pipeline.

Super Gorilla's way of doing business is considered to be a subversion of the traditional gym annual fee model, which belongs to a model of innovation. Similar to Super Gorilla, Lekue, which is also popular among users, focuses more on technological innovation.

Founded in 2015, Lekue is mainly through the digital management of the gym, online operations, coaching and course supply chain, digital user assets and other dimensions of the digital transformation of the gym.

After the completion of the transformation, the daily management of the gym and the user in the gym card purchase, class appointment, store and all other links will be realized online through the APP. Lekue will also be able to collect, analyze and optimize the overall operation data of the gym, which will ultimately be fed back to the store supervision, coaching services, product development and other specific business levels.

Simply put, like Rachel's Coffee, Lekue has digitally transformed the entire gym industry chain through the establishment of a data center, standardizing services that were originally non-standard products through standardized management, and improving efficiency while guaranteeing the stability of quality. Now, according to the official website of Lecce, Lecce has more than 600 stores, 6 million registered users and more than 9,000 contracted coaches.

Unlike Lekue, which focuses on the digital transformation behind the gym, the "for power" launched in 2020 is dedicated to creating a mobile Internet sports and fitness platform that links coaches, gyms and users. In the forging power, the user can not only their own situation to choose the right fitness venues, but also in the case of not limited to a certain gym to realize the coach and the course of the arbitrary collocation.

Simply put, the power of the fitness industry chain on the fitness venues, coaches and courses of the three key factors dismantled, through the platform of the way so that users can be randomly collocation, which not only provides users with more choices of services, but also to the venues and fitness instructors to bring more sources of income.

Of course, in addition to focusing on technology and model innovation in the gym, the Switch game fitness ring, which has been popular since last year, has also made home fitness scenarios based on hardware devices a new possibility.

In 2020, a sports fitness mirror came out of nowhere in Shanghai. This is a smart hardware launched by a new company founded in 2019 and newly focused on the home fitness scene. Since the product has been listed on the capital market is loved by the capital market, in just two years, Fiture has completed three rounds of financing, and now the post-investment valuation is up to 1.5 billion U.S. dollars, formally ranked among the ranks of unicorns.

After the success of Fiture, various brands of fitness mirrors have sprung up. In May of this year, Gudong launched its own membership fee-free fitness mirror brand Fit more, which was described in the release as "an important step towards expanding the indoor fitness scene for Gudong, which has been long in the outdoor fitness scene".

Almost simultaneously with Gudong, fitness goggles from companies such as Dynamic Technology, Lekue Sports, Yijian, and Digital Intelligence Gravity have also been launched. In addition, Huawei, Suning, Haier and other technology companies or traditional home appliance manufacturers have also released products with similar features into the market.

In addition to new products like fitness mirrors that follow the trend, in the new market environment, the traditional modules in those Internet sports products have also entered the cycle of being transformed.

For example, "online tournaments" have seen the emergence of "betting on tournaments", that is, users and users agree on a target tournament, users need to pay a certain amount of money to participate in the tournament registration fee, the registration fee of all participants to form a prize pool. The user needs to pay a certain amount of registration fee to participate in the tournament. After the expiration of the agreed target, the participants who finished the race divide the registration fee of the participants who did not finish the race.

This kind of gameplay was previously popular in WeChat punch card communities, self-organized by netizens, each other's supervision, and therefore through small programs and other ways to briefly realize the product.

(You must have seen this kind of community, which also has the highest dissolution rate)

Theoretically, Internet sports products can form a kind of incentive for users through this kind of activity, and gradually cultivate users' sports habits.

Overall, in the post-epidemic era, especially when epidemics persist, people pay more and more attention to health, and world sports events continue to promote people's enthusiasm for sports. Home fitness, which distinguishes itself from the public**** sports scene, and online events, which distinguish themselves from aggregated offline events, are fostering some brand new services and market opportunities.

In this process, some companies catch the wind and dividend, of course, there are more companies in the special market environment did not have time to react. But these are actually not important.

Not to mention the Winter Olympics, the National Games and other events, just take Chengdu as an example, in February this year, Chengdu won the 2024 Thomas Cup and Uber Cup tournament hosting rights; in March, Chengdu won the right to host the 2022 International Shooting Federation (ISSF) World Cup (Rifle and Pistol) event. In addition, Chengdu will host the World University Games and the World Table Tennis Championships in 2022, the Men's Asian Cup in 2023 and the World Games in 2025.

In addition to the abundance of sports events, quality education has become the new direction of development after the education and training business double-decrease policy has been implemented, and extracurricular sports training is also becoming a new wind mouth in some provinces and cities.

In short, new sports scenarios and needs have emerged, and for a long time to come, frequent world sports events and policy-oriented will continue to drive more people into the ranks of sports and health. So for the current Internet sports enterprises, polishing products, improve service, at any time still have the opportunity to independent tide in the tide of the times.