What is the development trend and history of China's portal websites?

Author: Dr. Feng Lubo, Internet Research Institute, CCID Research Institute, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

(Introduction) In the past 20 years, the Internet in China has created one great Internet world after another, and the portal website is one of them. Portal websites represented by Sina, Sohu and Netease have always been a force to be reckoned with in China Internet, constantly meeting the information needs of hundreds of millions of users. After chasing Nasdaq, I survived the internet bubble and embarked on an unusual development path in the face of the severe challenges brought by search engines and Web2.0.

Germination: the development process of three major websites that open the portal of China

The concept of portal website originated from ICP (Internet Content Provider) in Internet commerce. Generally speaking, a portal website refers to a website that classifies and arranges all kinds of huge information resources on the network and provides a search engine so that different users can query information quickly.

Portal troika

1993 Wang Zhidong, a software engineer, received an investment of HK$ 5 million from Stone Group to establish Stone Li Fang Information Technology Co., Ltd. and the SRSNET website. From 65438 to 0997, Stone Li Fang introduced international venture capital of US$ 6.5 million, becoming the first enterprise in domestic IT industry to introduce venture capital. 1998, Stone Li Fang revised SRSNET to Li Fang Online, and initiated the concept of "Chinese portal" in China, that is, an application system that leads to some comprehensive Internet information resources and provides related information services. 1At the end of 998, Stone Li Fang announced the acquisition of Huayuan Information, the largest overseas Chinese website company, and the establishment of Sina. In July, 1999, Sina ranked first among Chinese websites published by CNNIC.

1In May, 1995, Ding Lei quit his job as an engineer in Ningbo Telecommunications Bureau and came to Guangzhou to join the newly established Sybase. A year later, he resigned and went to an ISP in Guangzhou, and founded the first BBS "Firebird" on Chinanet. 1May, 997, Ding Lei, who jumped ship three times in two years, started a business, and Netease BBS was in full swing. 1997165438+10, Netease independently developed the first free email system in China, and boldly registered a domain name with numbers. In February, 1998, 163.net was officially put into use.

1In August, 1996, Dr. Zhang Chaoyang from Massachusetts Institute of Technology returned to China and established Aitexin Information Technology Co., Ltd. and Aitexin website with venture capital. The classified search in the website was originally called "Aitexin Compass" and later renamed "Search Hu". When Aitexin conducted the second round of financing, "Sohu" was renamed "Sohu". 1Feb. 998, Aitexin officially changed its name to Sohu Company, and the first large-scale classified search engine in China was born. "Go out by map, go online to find Sohu", Sohu has opened a magical door to the Internet world for China netizens. 1999, Sohu launched news and content channels, laying the rudiment of a comprehensive portal. In 2000, Sohu acquired ChinaRen Alumni Record, the largest youth community in China, and established its position as the largest Chinese website in China.

"Chinese concept stocks" encountered the Internet bubble.

Sina, Netease, Sohu and other portals completely imitated the development model of foreign portals Yahoo in the early stage of development, that is, portals are comprehensive ICP, based on search engines, providing users with platform services and adopting the business model of "venture capital+online advertising". At the end of last century, with the rapid development of global Internet economy, China's portals developed in full swing. With the two popular concepts of "China" and "Internet" at that time, in April 2000, Sina went public in the United States, becoming the first overseas listing portal in China, with an initial total share capital of 78.2 million US dollars. In June and July of the same year, Netease and Sohu also went public in the United States. Although the amount raised is lower than Sina's, they also have $69.75 million and $59.8 million respectively.

However, the good times did not last long. Shortly after the listing of domestic portals, the global Internet economy bubble appeared, and all China concept network stocks, including Sina, Netease, Sohu and China, fell in succession. After June 165438+ 10, 2000, the continuous decline of the stock market, website layoffs, website mergers and acquisitions and other events brought the whole internet industry into a low tide. In 200 1 year, Netease was in financial crisis, and the stock once fell below one dollar from the opening price of 15.3 on the day of listing, facing the delisting crisis. With the capital market questioning the business model of portals with online advertising as a single source of income, and it is difficult for e-commerce to generate considerable profits in the short term, it is generally expected in the industry that portals with the concept of China will face a more severe situation than before.

Rise: Diversification and Establishment of Media Status

The exploration of profit model and the expectation of profit time have become the most urgent problems faced by all portals. China portal people have realized that the pressure of advertising profit will be increasing if content is king. After going through the stage of capital operation, the three major domestic portal websites no longer adhere to the concept of portal as before, and begin to differentiate gradually in the face of profit pressure.

Clear profit model

Under the severe situation, portals began to think about and adjust their own development model, and launched new services such as online games, wireless value-added services, consulting value-added services, fee-based value-added services, e-commerce, online media, etc., and gradually diversified. Sina and Sohu have successively launched. NET platform, and Netease also aimed at online games. 200165438+February, Netease launched the first self-developed large-scale online role-playing game "A Chinese Odyssey Online"; In August 2002, "A Chinese Odyssey Online II" was officially put into operation, becoming the first domestic online game successfully operated in China. In terms of wireless value-added services, telecom operators and portals share a certain proportion of each 0. 1 yuan short message sent through the portal.

In the third quarter of 2002, Sohu's total revenue reached US$ 7.5 million, up 65,438+065,438+0% year-on-year, and it achieved full profit three months ahead of schedule. Subsequently, Sina and Netease also released their second quarter financial reports respectively, announcing in different ways that China Internet bid farewell to the era of burning money and began to enter the profit stage, thus driving Chinese concept stocks to become popular on NASDAQ.

After three years of arduous transformation, China's three major portals have changed from simply imitating "Yahoo" to the growth period of self-innovation, and have their own new positioning: Sohu has chosen diversification with the goal of "a new media, e-commerce, communication and mobile value-added service company"; Sina focuses on "network media and value-added information service providers"; Netease chose fee-based value-added services and online games as the breakthrough of strategic transformation. The profit models of the three portals, which are mainly short messages, online games and online advertisements, have become clear. Since 2004, China's portal websites have entered a stage of stable development.

Emerging portals appear.

From the second half of 2000 to 2002, when the three major portals rushed out of the cold winter of the Internet, some emerging domestic portals gradually rose. For example, 263 with telecom background, TOM with cross-media strategy and FM365 created by Lenovo are gradually known and recognized by netizens, and are called the new three portals. They no longer start with the concepts of news and community like the first generation of three portals, but increase the recoverability of investment from the beginning, so their services obviously have the characteristics of "paying attention to functionality". FM365 defines itself as a "product entrance", 263 is based on technology, and TOM is based on access services, and at the same time, it cooperates with the development strategy of cross-media platform.

1999 Tencent, which developed QQ into an instant messaging tool, is not satisfied. In February 2003, Tencent.com was officially released and entered the Internet media industry. In 2004, Tencent launched news, education, entertainment, fashion and other channels. Despite being questioned by people inside and outside the industry, Tencent is still rated as one of the "top five websites with the largest market value" in China by virtue of its strong overall strength.

With their own strength, these emerging websites broke the siege when the three portals were in trouble, and to some extent, they rewritten the pattern of Internet portals in China, especially Tencent, which came from behind and was called the four portals of China together with Sina, Netease and Sohu.

The establishment of the status of the fourth media

In June, 2000, 65,438+10/0, with only 16 and15,000 employees, AOL announced the acquisition of 79-year-old and 70,000 employees for 18 10 billion dollars.

In China, from the news contest of the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000 to the network emergency report of the "9. 1 1" major terrorist attack in the United States, online media gave people a brand-new reading experience. In 2002, domestic online media participated in the coverage of the "NPC and CPPCC" for the first time, and its significance has gone far beyond the news field, playing an irreplaceable role in promoting the construction of democratic politics. It can be said that online media has been recognized by more and more netizens for its timeliness, interactivity, openness, vividness, easy preservation, easy retrieval and multimedia. The portal website with "content is king" as its main development mode has become the "fourth media" coexisting with traditional media such as newspapers and television.

Challenge: respond to the impact of Web2.0 and innovate yourself.

Since 2004, new concepts such as Web2.0 have mushroomed. The website provides a platform for users, gives them the right to choose and spread, and lets them act as communicators. Websites organize and sort out information according to users' behaviors, and pursue personalization and interactivity, thus emerging new business models such as blog, SNS, RSS, Wiki, TAG, P2P, YouTube and Weibo.

User-generated content

In 2002, Fang Xingdong, the "godfather of China Blog", 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 makes the traditional portal realize that one-way communication and lack of interaction have become the bottleneck of its development, and open resource sharing platforms such as blog China and podcast network will become powerful competitors of the portal.

Faced with the surging trend of "portal 2.0", several major portal websites have launched "blog" columns to deal with it. And under the banner of "celebrity blog", it not only provides material for its content, but also attracts a large number of fans to gather and create huge traffic. "2.0 portal" gives users the right to choose and spread, provides users with a platform to act as communicators and dominates the content sources of the Internet. After 2005, Sina enhanced its content with blogs, and one third of the content on the homepage was linked to Sina blog, thus gathering more users and increasing the stickiness of the website.

Since 2005, search engines represented by Google and Baidu have created stock market legends, and portals have also launched their own search engines: Sohu launched sogou search, Sina launched Aiwen search and Netease launched Youdao search. , and integrated a lot of valuable information for users to query through keywords. Although search engines are a small part of portal business, and the search engines made by Sina and Sohu are not very successful, they have solved the problem of Internet information explosion that traditional portals cannot solve to some extent, and the communication methods are becoming more and more interactive and two-way.

The Rise of Mobile Portal

As an important invention in the history of human communication, the emergence of smart phones is a very important milestone in the development of mobile phones. Due to the limitation of the network speed and the processing capacity of the mobile phone itself, most of the early smart phones can only use WAP mode to surf the Internet. In 200 1 year, Ericsson launched the world's first WAP-enabled smartphone R380sc, and Nokia and Motorola also launched the first Internet-enabled smartphones. Subsequently, the three major telecom operators in China announced the opening of WAP services, and almost all websites launched WAP services one after another. For example, Sina launched the Sina WAP station in May 2000, launched the WAP portal in 3G era on the basis of Sina WAP station in February 2005, and Sohu also launched the mobile phone Sohu website in June 2005 at 5438+ 10, but WAP did not really promote the large-scale application of wireless Internet access.

After 2007, this situation has been fundamentally changed. In 2007, Apple launched the first generation iPhone, which changed the market structure of smart phones and the development history of portals. Because of its simple appearance, simple touch screen and smooth operating system, iPhone is very popular with users. Mobile phone users have become important visiting customers of portal websites, and major portal websites pay more attention to mobile phone portals, which has become an important channel for portal websites to seize mobile phone users. In April 2009, Netease launched a mobile website, integrating Netease's news information and superior products to provide comprehensive services such as information, comments, search, email and game information for mobile phone users.

Leverage Weibo to break through.

After blogs, videos and social networks, Weibo became the hottest topic on the Internet in 2009. Weibo has quickly become the most popular application of the Internet because of its short and fast communication characteristics and various publishing forms of web pages and mobile phones anytime and anywhere. China Internet has officially entered the Weibo era from the blog era, and Weibo has become an important means for portal websites to cope with the impact of Web2.0.

The originator of Weibo is Twitter, which was founded in 2006. Twitter has a large number of fans in China. At first, most of them were entrepreneurial companies, such as eating, whispering, doing, tweeting and so on. After a period of operation, due to various reasons, such websites are either closed or difficult to maintain. Sina is the most dependent on advertising revenue among the four major portals, and it is also the most eager to transform. In August 2009, Sina took the lead in launching Sina Weibo, and enabled t.sina.com.cn as the main domain name. With its consistent celebrity effect, it quickly has a large number of users, and its products also have the characteristics of atmosphere and perfection. Sina Weibo has a relatively strong technical and operational team, which is bursting with popularity and hard to meet its rivals.

Facing the craze of Sina Weibo, the major portals gambled on Weibo's economy. In 20 10, Netease, Sohu and Tencent also launched Weibo services one after another. For a time, the field of Weibo stood side by side, competing for the potential of the Central Plains, and became the battlefield of personal combat for portal websites.

Weibo, as a platform for sharing and communication, pays attention to timeliness and randomness, and can express ideas and latest trends at any time, which has been greatly welcomed. According to official statistics of Sina Weibo, the number of users of Sina Weibo reached 536.5 million in March of 20 13, up by about 65.5% year-on-year. The number of active users is 60.2 million, nearly doubling in one and a half years. Due to the expected increase, in April of 20 13, Alibaba Group acquired a 0/8% stake in Sina Weibo/kloc-0 for US$ 586 million. At that time, Sina Weibo was valued at $3.3 billion. Since then, Sina's share price has risen by a third. 201April 17, Sina Weibo officially landed on NASDAQ, becoming the first Chinese social media listed in the world.

Organizational model of personalized information production

In the era of Web 1.0, the mainstream of information dissemination is the major portals, which have the largest discourse power and information resources. Although the emergence of BBS has realized the limited right to speak of the public, it has not formed a climate.

However, Web 2.0 gradually changed all this, and the role of users began to be repositioned and changed. Through Web 2.0 technology, such as blog, RSS, Wiki, Digg, bookmarks, etc. Users can gain more and better freedom to spread and share information on the Internet, and the cost of information dissemination becomes low and efficient. This new way of information dissemination poses a strong challenge to the large-scale portal websites that still stay in Web 1.0.

Since the media, social media, social networks ... new concepts have emerged one after another, completely changing the media and information dissemination methods. Anyone can use social media to spread the first-hand information around them in real time, which directly subverts the pattern that mainstream media dominated the world in the past. The sharp boundary between traditional communicators and receivers has been completely broken, and "equal right to speak" has become possible. The scenery that traditional mass media has in traditional society no longer exists in the era of social network.

Way out: Mobile Internet is coming, where is the portal?

With the continuous expansion of 3G and WiFi network coverage, the proportion of access to the network through the traditional 2G network is declining, the issuance of 4G licenses and the gradual popularization of mobile terminal equipment at the end of 20 13 have injected tremendous energy into the development of mobile Internet. By April of 20 14, the total number of mobile phone users in China reached 848 million, and the penetration rate among mobile phone users reached 67.8%. The number of mobile Internet users has reached 500 million, accounting for more than 80% of the total number of Internet users. Mobile phones have maintained the position of the largest Internet terminal, and cmnet has entered the era of national development.

With the development of mobile new media, users' access to the Internet is becoming more and more convenient and diverse. Mobile phone client, Weibo, WeChat, traditional desktop pop-ups, search engines and other seemingly chaotic ways and their automatic promotion of messages have become the main entrances for people to access the Internet and obtain online information and services. Portal websites developed based on the traditional Internet are in an awkward situation. In the past ten years, portals that constantly meet the information needs of hundreds of millions of users have unconsciously fallen from new media to "old media".

Mobile news client makes efforts.

After 2009, due to the rapid development of mobile APP, the processing speed of smart phone and the speed of Internet access, the presentation of news content on mobile phones has become more and more diversified, and major portals have launched mobile news client apps one after another, and constantly updated their versions quickly, bringing more imagination space for user value and marketing value and enhancing user stickiness. China Mobile News Client Market Research Report 20 13 released by Ai Media Consulting in March, 201014 shows that the number of domestic mobile news client users has reached 344 million, an increase of 48.3% over the same period of 20 12, and the penetration rate of mobile news clients among domestic mobile network users has reached 60.4%, which has made netizens obtain news information. The report shows that the scale of users of mobile news clients has entered a stage of stable development. Among them, Sohu News Client, Tencent News Client and Netease News Client ranked in the top three, with active users accounting for 3 1.2%, 29.4% and 27.6% respectively, and Sina News Client ranked fourth, with active users accounting for 2 1.8%.

With the application of new information technologies such as big data and cloud computing, mobile news clients are no longer as complicated as traditional portals, but become more accurate, lightweight and intelligent. Different from traditional portals, they no longer boast of massive information, but take the "personalized" route, that is, meet the personalized needs of users for some information, and customize users' personalized information according to the comprehensive analysis of users' clicking behavior, browsing behavior and geographical location.

Professional vertical competition

With the Internet entering the era of Web2.0, more professional and subdivided vertical portal websites quickly use the technology of Web2.0 to enhance their attraction, which has a tendency to subvert the traditional website structure. In relatively large vertical markets, such as tourism, recruitment, securities, automobiles, real estate, or listed companies, such as car home and Che Yi. Com, or has attracted a lot of venture capital, such as financial sector and Silicon Valley power, it has directly challenged the large and comprehensive model of portal websites, which is manifested in the user scale and advertising revenue. Take advertising as an example. In the second quarter of 20 14, car home's advertising revenue was $59 million, far lower than Sina's $654.38+558 million, but the pressure of the latter's volume and operating cost was several times that of the former. Accelerating vertical transformation is the biggest challenge facing the portal website at present. April 20 13, Sina clearly divided portal channels into media channels, comprehensive channels and commercial channels, and the latter two should undertake sales tasks. In more and more vertical fields, the traditional content production model has begun to weaken relatively, and the challenge of business model is greater than content operation.

Content is no longer the only "king"

With the development of mobile new media, the ways and means for users to get news have changed. On the one hand, users can obtain information through social products such as news clients, Weibo and WeChat, without relying on portals and search engines. On the other hand, the role of editing in information screening is weakened, because users can obtain information directly through their own social relationships. Under this change, content is no longer a scarce resource.

Compared with content operation, traditional portals may feel more obvious pressure on technology and business model innovation. Especially in the business model, most of the current news clients still focus on display advertisements. However, after the mobile phone became the first terminal for users to surf the Internet, traditional advertisements not only damaged the user experience, but also failed to meet the advertiser's requirements for the effect, and the portal showed a trend of "balancing the resources of advertisers". Sina, which owns Weibo, may be able to make a breakthrough in social advertising, while other news clients are facing greater challenges. "Today's headlines" broke the monopoly position of portal websites for many years almost overnight, relying only on "technology+social interaction".

If upstarts such as search engines, social networking sites and e-commerce sites are on the rise, portals such as Sina, Netease and Sohu seem to have found a little chance to survive through the development of blogs, Weibo, online videos, online education, browsers and input methods, but with the emergence of 20 1 1 WeChat, Tencent has connected everything through the connector of WeChat. Sina, Sohu, Netease and other portals once brought impact to traditional media as cutting-edge forces. Some traditional functions of portals, such as spreading online news, pushing online advertisements, interacting and developing e-commerce, seem to lose not only loyal users, but also the future in front of WeChat. 20 14 10, the resignation of Chen Tong, the editor-in-chief of Sina, was regarded as bidding farewell to the portal era.

Under the sweeping tide of mobile Internet, the transformation of traditional portal websites is imperative. It is hard to see where the future portal transformation and development road lies. Where is the evolution direction of China's portal website, which needs the portal people in China to continue to explore.

(Contact email: mellowmelon@ 163.com)