China's portal trends and development history

The Evolution of China's Portal Websites

By Dr. Lu Feng, Internet Research Institute, Saidi Research Institute, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT)

(Introduction) Over the past 20 years of China's Internet development, one after another great Internet world's best has been created, and portal websites are one of the cases.

In the experience of the Nasdaq pursuit, survived the sudden attack of the Internet bubble, facing the search engine and Web2.0 brought serious challenges, out of an unusual path of development.

Budding: Three major websites that started the history of portal development in China

The concept of a portal first originated in Internet commerce as an ICP (Inter Content Provider).

Generally speaking, a portal is a website that categorizes, organizes, and provides a search engine for the huge variety of information resources on the Web, allowing different users to quickly search for information.

Portal Troika

In 1993, software engineer Wang Zhidong received a HK$5 million investment from the Siktong Group, founded Siktong Leefang Information Technology Limited, and opened the SRSNET website.

In 1997, SCT introduced 6.5 million dollars of international venture capital, becoming the first enterprise to introduce venture capital in the domestic IT industry.

In 1998, Lifang revamped SRSNET to "Lifang Online", and introduced the concept of "Chinese Portal", which is an application system that provides access to certain types of comprehensive Internet information resources and provides related information services.

At the end of 1998, ClearConnect announced the acquisition of the largest overseas Chinese website company, Huayuan Information, and the establishment of Sina.com, which is the first Chinese portal in China.

In July 1999, Sina was ranked the top Chinese website by CNNIC.

In May 1995, Ding Lei quit his job as an engineer at Ningbo Telecommunication Bureau and came to Guangzhou to join Sybase, which had just been founded.

A year later, he quit his job and came to Guangzhou to work for an ISP, where he set up the first BBS "Firebird" in China.

In May 1997, Ding Lei jumped ship three times in two years to set up his own business, and NetEase BBS ran up in a blaze of glory.

In November 1997, NetEase independently developed the first all-Chinese free email system, and boldly use the numbers to register a domain name, February 16, 1998, 163 officially open for use.

In August 1996, Dr. Zhang Chaoyang of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) returned to China and used venture capital to establish AIT Information Technology Co.

The categorized search on the site was initially called "Aitken Compass" and was later renamed "Sohu".

When Aitken raised its second round of funding, Sohu was renamed Sohu.

In February 1998, AIT officially changed its name to Sohu, and China's first large-scale categorized search engine was launched.

"Go out and rely on the map, find Sohu on the Internet", Sohu opened the magical door to the Internet world of Chinese Internet users.

In 1999, Sohu launched a news and content channel, laying the foundation for a comprehensive portal.

In 2000, Sohu acquired ChinaRen Alumni, the largest community of young people in China, and established itself as the largest Chinese-language website in the country.

"Chinese concept stocks" encountered the Internet bubble

Sina, NetEase, Sohu and other portals in the development of the initial stage of the development of a complete imitation of the development of foreign portals Yahoo! The portal is a comprehensive ICP based on the search engine, providing platform services for users, and adopting the business model of "venture capital + network advertising".

At the end of the last century, with the rapid development of the global Internet economy, the development of China's portal in full swing.

With "China" and "Internet" two hot concepts at the time, in April 2000, Sina went public in the U.S., becoming the first domestic portal listed overseas, raising a total of 78.2 million U.S. dollars in initial public offerings.

In June and July of the same year, NetEase and Sohu went public in the United States, raising less money than Sina, but also $69.75 million and $59.8 million respectively.

However, the good times didn't last long, and shortly after the domestic portals went public, the global Internet economic bubble emerged, and all the Chinese conceptual Internet stocks, including Sina, NetEase, Sohu, and China.com, fell one after another.

After November 2000, the stock market, layoffs, mergers and acquisitions, and other events brought the Internet industry into a downturn.

In 2001, NetEase fell into an operational and financial crisis, with its stock dropping below one dollar from its opening price of $15.3 on the listing date, and facing a delisting crisis.

As the capital market questioned the portal's business model of using online advertising as a single source of revenue, and as e-commerce made it difficult to generate significant profits in the short term, it was widely expected that China's conceptual portals would face an even more difficult situation than before.

Rise: diversification, media status established

The exploration of the profit model and the expected time of profitability has become the most urgent issue facing all portals, Chinese portals have realized that the pressure to adhere to the "content is king", and to adhere to the advertisement profit will be more and more.

The three major portals in China after the capital operation stage, in front of the pressure of profitability, no longer as before to adhere to the concept of portal, began to gradually differentiate.

Clear profit model

In the severe situation, portals began to think about and adjust their own development model, launching such as online games, wireless value-added services, consulting value-added services, value-added services, fee-based services, e-commerce, online media and other new businesses, and gradually diversified.

Sina and Sohu launched their .NET platforms for enterprise customers, and NetEase also targeted online games.

In December 2001, NetEase launched its first self-developed large-scale network role-playing game, "Liar's Journey to the West Online"; in August 2002, "Liar's Journey to the West Online II" was officially operated and became the first domestic online game successfully operated in China.

And in terms of wireless value-added services, through the portal site sent out each of the 0.1 yuan SMS, telecom operators and portals according to a certain proportion of the structure of the split.

In the third quarter of 2002, Sohu's total revenue reached $7.5 million, up 111% year-on-year, and it achieved full profitability three months ahead of schedule.

Subsequently, Sina and NetEase also released their second quarter financial reports, announcing in different ways that China's Internet has bid farewell to the era of money, and began to enter the profitability stage, which drove the Chinese conceptual stocks in the Nasdaq soaring red.

After three years of painstaking transformation, China's three major portals have transitioned from mere imitation of Yahoo to a period of self-innovation and growth, with their own new positioning: Sohu has chosen to diversify, aiming for "a new media, e-commerce, communications and mobile value-added services company. Sohu has chosen to diversify, aiming at "a new media, e-commerce, communications and mobile value-added services company"; Sina has concentrated on "online media and value-added information service provider"; NetEase has chosen value-added services and online games as its breakthroughs in strategic transformation.

The three major portals have a clear profit model of SMS, online games and online advertising.

Since 2004, China's portals have entered a stage of stable development.

Emerging portals

Between the second half of 2000 and 2002, when the three major portals were scrambling to get out of the Internet winter, a number of new portals gradually emerged in China.

For example, 263, which has a telecom background, TOM, which has a cross-media strategy, and FM365, which was built by Lenovo, were gradually known and recognized by netizens, and were called the new three portals.

They are no longer like the first generation of the three portals with the concept of news and community, but from the beginning to increase the return on investment, so their services are clearly characterized by "focus on functionality".

FM365 positioned itself as a "product portal", 263 as a technology-supported positioning, and TOM as a basic point of access to services, along with the development of cross-media platform strategy.

Tencent, which developed the instant messaging tool QQ in 1999, was not to be outdone, and officially launched QQ.com in December 2003, entering the Internet media industry.

In 2004, Tencent launched its news, education, entertainment, and fashion channels.

Despite the skepticism from both inside and outside the industry, Tencent was recognized as one of China's "Top 5 Websites with the Largest Market Capitalization" that year, thanks to its strong overall strength.

These new websites, by virtue of their own strength, broke the encirclement of the three major portals at a time when they were struggling to develop, rewriting the pattern of China's Internet portals to a certain extent, especially Tencent's rise to the top, with Sina, NetEase, and Sohu as China's four largest portals.

Fourth media status established

January 10, 2000, only 16 years of history, 15,000 employees of America Online (AOL) company announced 181 billion U.S. dollars to buy 79 years of history, 70,000 employees of the Time Warner Inc. to become the "21st Century media instead of the 20th Century media of the history of witness! ".

In China, from the 2000 Sydney Olympics news competition, to the major terrorist attacks in the United States "9.11" online breaking news coverage, online media gives people a new reading experience.

In 2002, the domestic online media participated in the "two sessions" coverage for the first time, the significance of which has far exceeded the field of journalism, and plays an irreplaceable role in promoting the construction of democratic politics.

It can be said that the network media with its own timeliness, interactivity, openness, vividness, easy to save, easy to retrieve and multimedia, etc., get more and more netizens recognized.

Portal sites, with content as their main mode of development, have become the "fourth media" alongside traditional media such as newspapers, magazines, and television.

Challenge: to cope with the impact of Web2.0, self-innovation

Starting in 2004, Web2.0 and other new concepts have emerged, the site provides users with a platform, the right to choose and disseminate to the user to act as a disseminator, the site according to the user's behavior to the organization of the information and arrangement, and the pursuit of more personalization and interactivity, which led to the emergence of blogs, SNS, RSS, Wiki, TAG, P2P, YouTube, microblogging and other new business models.

User-produced content

In 2002, Fang Xingdong, the "godfather of Chinese blogs", founded Blog China, which opened the Internet 2.0 era in China, and was called the revolution of the online world.

The increasingly personalized and interactive network allows traditional portals to realize that one-way communication and lack of interactive information dissemination has become a bottleneck in their development, and that blogs, podcasts, and other open resource **** enjoyment platforms, will become a strong competitor for portals.

In the face of the "2.0 portal" of the surging trend, several major portals have responded by launching "blog" columns and other, and playing the "celebrity blog" banner. The banner of the "Celebrity Blogger" not only provides material for its content, but also attracts a large number of fans to gather and create a huge flow of traffic.

The "2.0 portal" puts the power of choice and communication in the hands of the user, providing a platform for the user to act as a communicator and to dominate the source of content on the Internet.

After 2005, Sina strengthened its content with blogs, and one-third of the content on the home page was linked to Sina blogs, which gathered more users and increased the stickiness of the site.

After 2005, Google, Baidu as the representative of the search engine to create the stock market legend, portals have launched their own search engine: Sohu launched the "Sogou" search, Sina launched the "Aiqi" search, Netease The search engine has been launched by Sohu, Sina, and NetEase, and the search engine has been launched by Yodao, which integrates a huge amount of valuable information through keywords for users to query.

Although the search engine is a small part of the portal's business, and Sina, Sohu search engine is not very successful, but to a certain extent to solve the traditional portal can not solve the problem of the Internet information explosion, the dissemination of the increasingly interactive and two-way.

The rise of mobile portals

As a major invention in the history of human communication, the emergence of smartphones is a very important milestone in the development of cell phones.

Due to the limitations of network speed and the processing power of the phone itself, most of the smartphones in the early days could only use WAP mode to access the Internet.

In 2001, Ericsson launched the world's first WAP-enabled smartphone, the R380sc, and Nokia and Motorola also launched their first smartphones with Internet access.

Subsequently, China's three major telecom operators have announced the opening of WAP services, almost all the websites have launched WAP services, such as Sina in May 2000 launched the Sina WAP station, in February 2005 in the Sina WAP station on the basis of the launch of the 3G era of WAP portals - cell phone! Sina, Sohu also launched a mobile Sohu site in January 2005, but WAP did not really drive the large-scale application of wireless Internet.

After 2007, this situation has fundamentally changed.

In 2007, Apple launched the first generation of the iPhone, which changed the market pattern of smartphones, and also changed the history of the development of portals.

Because of its simple appearance, simple touchscreen Internet access, and smooth operating system, which greatly facilitates mobile Internet access, the iPhone is extremely popular with the majority of users.

Mobile Internet users have become important access to the portal customers, the major portals pay more attention to the mobile portal, mobile portal has become an important channel for portals to seize the mobile Internet users.

In April 2009, NetEase launched the mobile version of the website, mobile NetEase.com integration of news and information under the NetEase and advantageous products, to provide mobile users with comprehensive information, comments, search, mailboxes, game information and other services.

Borrowing from microblogs to break through

After blogs, videos, and SNSs, microblogs became the hottest topic on the Internet in 2009.

Microblogging has rapidly become the hottest application on the Internet by virtue of its short, fast communication characteristics, as well as the variety of web pages, cell phones, anytime, anywhere, and China's Internet has formally entered the microblogging era from the era of the blog, and microblogging has become an important means of responding to the impact of Web2.0 on the portal site.

The originator of microblogging is Twitter, founded in 2006.

In China, Twitter has a large number of followers, initially mostly entrepreneurial companies, such as whether the meal, muttering, what to do, twitter, and so on.

After a period of operation, these sites were shut down or struggled to stay afloat for a variety of reasons.

Sina is the most reliant on ad revenue, and the one that is most eager to transform itself.

In August 2009, Sina launched Sina Weibo, using t.sina as its main domain name.

With its customary celebrity effect, it quickly gained a large number of users, and its products are characterized by atmosphere and comprehensiveness.

Sina Weibo has a relatively strong technical and operational team, and it has been very popular for a while, and it is difficult to meet its rivals.

In the face of Sina Weibo's rise to prominence, the major portals are betting big on the microblogging economy, and in 2010, NetEase, Sohu, and Tencent launched their microblogging services one after another.

For a while, the microblogging field had a group of heroes, the trend of deer in the Central Plains, and became the battlefield of the portals close to the battlefield.

As a sharing and communication platform, microblogging is extremely popular because it focuses on timeliness and randomness, and expresses the thoughts and latest developments of every moment.

According to the official statistics of Sina Weibo, in March 2013, the user scale of Sina Weibo reached 536.5 million, with a year-on-year growth of about 65.5%; the active user scale was 60.2 million, which was nearly doubled in one and a half years.

Due to rising expectations, in April 2013, Alibaba Group acquired an 18% stake in Sina Weibo for $586 million.

Sina Weibo was valued at $3.3 billion at the time, and Sina's stock has since risen by a third.

On April 17, 2014, Sina Weibo officially landed on NASDAQ, becoming the first Chinese-language social media company to go public globally.

Personalized information production and organization

In the Web 1.0 era, the mainstream of information dissemination is the major portals, which have the largest discourse and information resources, although the emergence of BBS to achieve a limited public discourse, but did not form a climate.

And Web 2.0 gradually changed all this, the role of the user began to be repositioned and change, through Web 2.0 technologies, such as Blog, RSS, Wiki, Digg, Bookmark, etc., the user can get on the Internet more and better dissemination, the freedom to share information, the cost of information dissemination has become low and efficient, the new information dissemination. This new information dissemination is a strong challenge to large portals that are still stuck in Web 1.0.

Self-media, social media, social networking ...... new concepts are emerging, completely changing the way the media and information is disseminated, anyone can use social media to disseminate first-hand information around them in real time, which directly subverts the pattern of the past by the mainstream media domination.

The traditional clear line between communicator and receiver has been completely broken, and the "equalization of power" has become a possibility, and the traditional mass media in the traditional society no longer exists in the era of social network.

The way out: mobile Internet is coming, where is the portal

With the 3G and WiFi network coverage continues to expand, access to the network through the traditional 2G network has been a declining trend, and the end of 2013, the issuance of 4G licenses and the gradual popularization of mobile terminals for the development of the mobile Internet injected a huge amount of energy.

By April 2014, the total number of mobile Internet users in China reached 848 million, with a penetration rate of 67.8% among cell phone users; the number of mobile Internet users reached 500 million, accounting for more than 80% of the total number of Internet users, with cell phones maintaining the status of the first major Internet access terminals, and the development of China's mobile Internet has entered the era of the whole population.

With the development of mobile new media, users enter the Internet in an increasingly convenient and diverse way, mobile clients, microblogging, microblogging, traditional desktop pop-up windows, search engines and their automatic promotion of messages and other seemingly haphazard way to enter the Internet, access to online information and services, based on the development of the traditional Internet portal site situation has become embarrassing.

In the past, the Internet has become the main portal for people to access online information and services.

Over the past decade, portals have continued to meet the information needs of hundreds of millions of users, unknowingly from the new media into the "old media".

Mobile news client power

After 2009, due to the rapid development of cell phone APP, smartphone processing speed greatly improved, as well as the obvious increase in Internet speed, the news content in the mobile terminal presentation is also more and more diversified, the major portals have launched a mobile news client APP, and constantly and quickly update the version, for the value of the user and marketing value to bring more imagination. The new version of the mobile news client APP has been rapidly updated, bringing more space for user value and marketing value, and enhancing user stickiness.

The 2013 China Mobile News Client Market Research Report released by AiMedia Consulting in March 2014 shows that the scale of domestic mobile news client users has reached 344 million, an increase of 48.3% compared to the same period in 2012, and the penetration rate of mobile news clients in the domestic mobile network users has reached 60.4%, which means that mobile news clients have become an important tool for netizens to get news information. The mobile news client has become an important tool for netizens to get news information.

According to the report, the user scale of mobile news clients has entered a stable development stage.

Among them, Sohu News Client, Tencent News Client, NetEase News Client ranked the top three, with 31.2%, 29.4% and 27.6% of active users respectively, and Sina News Client, which ranked the fourth, accounted for 21.8% of active users.

With the use of big data, cloud computing and other new-generation information technology, mobile news clients are no longer as "complex" and "bulky" as traditional portals, and have become more "accurate" and "lightweight". ", "lightweight" and "intelligent"; also no longer like the traditional portal to the massive amount of information to boast, but to take the "personalized" route, that is, for the user's

These are the most common features of a web portal, such as the ability to customize the content of a web portal, the ability to create a web portal, and the ability to create a web portal.

Specialized vertical competition

As the Internet enters the Web2.0 era, more specialized, segmented vertical portals quickly use Web2.0 technology to enhance their own attractiveness, the emergence of a new force, there is a subversion of the traditional pattern of the site's momentum.

Vertical markets that are relatively large in scale, such as travel, recruitment, securities, automotive, and real estate, or have companies that have gone public, such as AutoNavi and eCar, or have attracted large amounts of venture capital, such as Finance and Silicon Valley Dynamics, have directly challenged the portal's big, all-encompassing model, which is reflected in the size of its user base and advertising revenue.

Take advertising as an example, in the second quarter of 2014, the motor home advertising revenue of 59 million U.S. dollars, although far lower than Sina's $ 155.8 million, but the latter's volume, the pressure on the operating costs borne by the former is also several times.

Accelerating verticalization is the biggest challenge facing portals today.

In April 2013, Sina clearly divided the portal's channels into media channels, general channels, and commercial channels, the latter two of which have to bear the task of sales.

In more and more verticals, the traditional content production model is starting to weaken relatively, and the business model is more challenging than the content operation.

Content is no longer the only "king"

With the development of mobile new media, the user access to news and the way has changed.

On the one hand, users can access information through news clients, microblogs and social networking products such as Weibo and WeChat, instead of relying on portals and search engines.

On the other hand the role of editors in filtering information has been weakened, as users can access information directly through their own social chains.

With this change, content is no longer a scarce resource.

Compared to content operation, traditional portals may have felt more obvious pressure on technology and business model innovation.

Especially in the business model, most of the current news clients are still mainly display ads, and after the cell phone has become the first terminal for users to access the Internet, the traditional ads have caused harm to the user experience, but also unable to meet the requirements of advertisers on the effect, and portals in the advertisers' resources and the presentation of the "left and right wrestling each other "

With a microblogging site, you can easily find a lot of advertisers.

Sina, with its microblogging, may still be able to make a breakthrough in social advertising, while other news clients are facing greater challenges.

"Today's headlines" almost overnight to break the monopoly of the portal years of precipitation obtained by the industry, by virtue of just "technology + social".

If the rise of search engines, social networking sites, e-commerce sites and other newcomers, Sina, NetEase, Sohu and other portals to take advantage of the implementation of diversified strategies, through the development of blogs, microblogging, online video, online education, browsers, input methods, and other applications, seems to be in the cracks of the survival of a slight chance, but with the arrival of WeChat, Tencent WeChat connector 2011! But with the arrival of WeChat in 2011, Tencent has connected everything through the connector of WeChat and reconfigured a powerful business model for the connectivity era.

Sina, Sohu, NetEase, and other portals used to be an upstart force that brought the same impact to traditional media, and the traditional functions of portals such as spreading online news, pushing online ads, interacting, and developing e-commerce seemed to lose not only their loyal users, but also their future, in front of WeChat.

In October 2014, the departure of Sina's editor-in-chief Chen Tong was seen as a farewell to the portal era.

Under the sweeping tide of the mobile Internet, the transformation of traditional portals is imperative.

The future of the portal transformation and development of the road far away, it is difficult to see clearly.

The direction of evolution of Chinese portals in where, but also need to continue to explore the Chinese portal.

(Contact email: mellowmelon@163)