What are the ways to realize sports apps and how to transform them?

Although sports and fitness apps are as closely related to us as mobile games and socializing, their tool attributes are too strong and their product extensibility is too weak, so that their hematopoietic realization ability is not strong enough, which makes "national fitness" look beautiful, but in fact, the word "no" is the first. Good business.

However, its own transformation and cross-border may provide a new idea for these sports apps.

Three ways to realize sports APP

1, an advertisement that can't afford to hurt.

It is natural to realize the flow, but it is not easy to realize the natural flow. The three major means of realizing the Internet: games, advertisements and e-commerce, are all "natural" for realizing traffic, among which advertising is the most "exciting". It seems that after the number of APP users reaches one million, advertisers will naturally come to vote for your home page, banner map and feed stream.

But unless advertisers are a little "stupid", this can only be the wishful thinking of APP entrepreneurs (different from hardware and technology entrepreneurs). After all, advertising is a technical activity led by BD on both sides. In addition to Party A's shrinking budget, Party B has to pay more and more for the addition and transformation brought by advertisements, while the user stock of medium and long tail products is indeed limited, and activities below one million days are almost doomed to the weakness of transformation.

On the other hand, sports and fitness apps, national attributes and GPS+ track records have become standard, and advertisements in APP+ location-based scene advertisements have become a considerable source of profit in the initial stage of the product.

Among them, according to official news, in 20 15, "Yuedong Circle" and "Youletong" signed an advertising contract with the literal name of 1 100 million yuan, and in 20 16, it was announced that the accumulated accounts receivable of its advertising business exceeded 1 100 million yuan, all from brand advertisements and online competitions.

In the same period last year, the advertising revenue of Tigers Sports (with Tigers Running APP) was 1.2 1 billion, but the proportion of Tigers Running APP should be small.

Advertising revenue is "in good shape". Under the good-looking paper data, sports apps are also trying to expand their marketing department and business department. However, in June 5438+10 this year, the eastern Guangdong area fell into a "default event". After being questioned about data fraud, the financial owners all expressed "nervousness".

In fact, relying on traffic (number of users, daily activities, monthly activities) to connect with the "road to riches" where advertisements are realized will inevitably lead to this problem. With the false high summary of advertising effect, advertisers will inevitably abide by the psychological black hole effect. They want millions of exposures, and there will inevitably be millions of exposures, but the real data of the products and the precipitated user trust simply can't keep up with the "escape speed" that the financier wants.

Therefore, advertising has become the flavor of the existing "seven-wound boxing", which has won the trust of users and improved the current value, but consumed the final value in the future.

2. Advanced mode (product payment)

This is very common in foreign countries. Runkeeper (acquired by Asics in February this year) and Runtastic both adopt the profit model of product payment. Although there are some differences, they are not the same. Runkeeper pays a monthly fee ($9.9/month), while Runtastic launches a Pro version of the App (packaged in 72 yuan RMB) and buys it once. Because Runkeeper's advanced functions depend on their servers, Runtastic can provide more accurate sports data.

As far as China is concerned, although the era of "content payment" has arrived, it seems that no big factory dares to charge users in the field of sports and fitness. They are more willing to develop a shopping mall in the APP and then sell shoes and medals, trying to get users to pay for their financial reports through e-commerce.

In fact, just as the market for content payment needs to be cultivated, the fitness data charges of sports and fitness apps also need to be cultivated. Although Nike+ has no commercial operation, in 15, only Nike's revenue through Nike+ (with the world's largest jogging club and 3 million members) was close to $26,543.8 billion, with Flywire technology and technology developed by users running big data through precipitation.

However, domestic sports apps always lack technical confidence and do not believe that sports big data can drive products to glow with new vitality.

Take the "luminous material" on sportswear as an example. Nike+ integrates interesting running data uploaded by users, so it adds luminous materials to running clothes, which is what domestic sports apps do-Nike has a luminous running clothes, so we have to plan a luminous running.

Therefore, it can be seen.

3. Towards the New Red Sea of E-commerce

E-commerce is definitely the Red Sea. There's nothing to question. The underlying logic of sports apps to be their own e-commerce is to win by category. Their idea is-you like running = you like to buy equipment in my app, or "you like running = you need intelligent hardware" and "you like running = you need personal education".

Intuitively, this analysis is correct, but it ignores the extremely important point, that is, what is the essence of running?

What is the essence of running shopping? Is the essence of running social? Neither.

The essence of running is an emotion, and an important emotional state revealed by running is the emotion completely immersed in action, which sociologist Mihaly Zikson Mihaly called flow.

In the state of flow, people will ignore time and external environment and integrate with what they are doing. Running, an emotion suitable for difficulty, can be carried out at any time and can provide enough challenges for us to continue to immerse ourselves in it. Running for a short time will not be too difficult and will not make us feel depressed and anxious. Running is the perfect flow scene.

So running has five characteristics. Starting from these five characteristics, it is far from the shopping state that e-commerce wants to achieve. They are: enthusiasm, concentration, clear goal, immediate feedback and sense of control.

Most runners who buy sports equipment are enthusiastic users, so running breaks through the first quadrant of traffic "enthusiasm". The immersion of running brings a focused and consistent emotional state to runners, which is exclusive before and after running, while the runner in the third quadrant clearly knows his goal (definitely not shopping), and can get immediate feedback and a sense of control over this activity through his physical state.

Therefore, the idea of doing e-commerce for sports apps is based on the first quadrant of traffic, which is actually a logical trade-off between "keen on running" and "shopping"-deceiving others in product design.

This has led to the fact that sports e-commerce must not be so desirable before it is opened. Compared with shopping, we go running to enjoy this emotion and forget the time and anxiety, but the anxiety under the time and purchase time limit is emphasized by shopping, which adds a learned obstacle to users psychologically. The more we let them go shopping, the stronger their depression will be.

Transformation and cross-border

In fact, at the end of 20 16, sports apps generally had a hard time. Therefore, priority should be given to transformation and cross-border transformation.

On the one hand, sports apps should not be just app startups. In fact, their essence should be a technology-driven company like today's headlines and a little information. At least today's headlines and a little information have always been self-sustaining by technology companies, and they never say that they are content companies and media companies in public. It's just that the two are different in technology-driven types. Headlines and a little depends on algorithms and content output, while sports apps should not rely on markets and businesses in the future, but rely on the mining of sports data and the ability to drive upstream industries (sports brand manufacturers and hardware manufacturers) according to big data.

In the second half of the Internet, technical strength has become a "bayonet" on the battlefield.

On the other hand, in addition to traditional advertising and e-commerce, cross-border integration will also become the key to boost sports apps, especially in the context of the upcoming sports industry, "sports+tourism" not only depends on the government's promotion, but also extends to new industrial integration modes such as "running+tourism", "cycling+tourism", "yoga+tourism" and "events+tourism".

At the beginning of September this year, the sports theme tourism report released by Ctrip showed that in the first half of this year, the number of people booking sports tourism routes through Ctrip increased by 400% from the previous month. At the same time, the State Sports General Administration also issued the 13th Five-Year Plan for the Development of Sports Industry this year, which mentioned that sports consumption will expand from physical consumption to participatory and ornamental consumption during the 13th Five-Year Plan period. "

Tourism has two natural problems-low season and low repetition rate, and sports just make up for this deficiency.

Similarly, the 20 16 Hunan Mountain Outdoor Fitness and Leisure Conference and the 20 16 China Jet Ski Classic both brought considerable income to local tourism in the off-season, and also improved the repetition rate of tourism for sports tourism.

Of course, there are offline marathon package tours and foreign leagues, which are also new ideas that can be brought to domestic sports apps.

Finally, high-net-worth people bring high mobility. How sports apps control these high-net-worth people who love sports and tourism may be the key to breaking the game.