No one can become the YouTube of China.
No one can become the YouTube of China.-
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for a long time, China's Internet video industry has been pursuing to develop its own "YouTube", first Youku, then iqiyi, then bilibili, and what looks like a recent watermelon video
Every family hopes to succeed, but in fact, even bilibili, who now includes everything from astronomical and geographical manual dance games, documentaries and so on, does not make everyone feel that "this is China's Youtube
" No one can even become the YouTube of China
Author: the comment comes from the full text of 7011 words on the Internet, and it takes 14 minutes to read-BEGIN
Recently, watermelon video, bilibili and iqiyi are debating "who is China's YouTube"
YouTube can be said to be the holy grail of China long Video Company, including Tudou, Youku, six rooms, 56
com, Sohu Video, Tencent Video, iqiyi and now bilibili and Watermelon Video
All the video websites that have existed in China, except Letv, have wanted to build themselves into the "YouTube of China" at some stage
But they have either failed or are on their way to failure
What is YouTube? In the eyes of users, YouTube is an open video community, a great philanthropist who can skip ads, a top product with first-class functional design, and a long video recommendation stream as accurate as Douyin
YouTube is the promised land for all video users, and if the experience of all long video sites is not good, it must be because it is "unlike YouTube"
But YouTube is not a charity
What is the nature of YouTube as a business? Is it accurate advertising? Is it an ultra-high percentage of creators' sharing plan? Is it a great homemade channel? Neither
YouTube's business logic is simple: a video site that pays almost no Internet fee
01 the server and bandwidth cost of the video industry: why did Chinese video websites fail to do UGC or PUGC before? -- because the server and bandwidth costs are unbearable
Why was Douyin only allowed 15 seconds of short videos when it first launched in 2016? -- because the server and bandwidth costs are unbearable
Why did Wechat's moments rise from allowing 10-second short videos to 15-second short videos at the end of 2019? -- because the server and bandwidth costs are unbearable
In an article in the 2012 Daily Business News [1], the then Chinese video websites were divided into these four categories: the first category was Youku and Tudou, which used UGC (users to share content)
) lengthen the mixed mode of authentic video content; the second type is the UGC mode represented by 56net and Ku6, which focuses on user sharing content and interaction; the third category is authentic HD faction represented by iqiyi, Tencent Video and Sohu videos; and the fourth category is video information represented by exciting net and the first video
In retrospect, you will find that the third category of video sites based on legitimate content has become the current mainstream
In the first category, after the merger of Youku Tudou, which both UGC and genuine dramas have to do, it has actually become the third category; the second kind of video sites based on UGC, PGC and community have died out
Oh, no, it was a dead round, and now bilibili is the second round
Specifically, let's take a look at Tudou's data at that time: according to Tudou's 2011 annual report, Tudou's server bandwidth cost that year was 180
2 million yuan, accounting for 42
1% of the revenue cost
In other words: nearly half of Tudou's costs are paid to operators
According to the report released by iResearch that year, Tudou had 193 million monthly active users that year
Here, we divide the two and invent a whole new concept to compare the inflation of bandwidth and server costs: "return on infrastructure investment (hereinafter referred to as IROI)"
Tudou's IROI=1
93/1
802=1
07 person / yuan, that is, it invests 1 yuan in server bandwidth every year, which can serve 1
07 more monthly active users
Some people will say: in the past 10 years, the overall cost of server bandwidth has been falling, today's video site operating costs can not be so high
This is actually caught in the trap of Moore's Law-computers at the same price today perform more than ten times better than those of 10 years ago, but can you still install Windows XP on today's computers and continue to use the software and games of that era? Over the past decade, users' requirements for image quality have changed from 480p to 4K 60 frames with a high bit rate, and the significant upgrade of shooting equipment will make the current pure UGC platform more cost-effective
If you don't believe me, take a look at bilibili's server bandwidth cost: bilibili's bandwidth server fee for the whole of 2019 was 919 million, accounting for 16
5% of the cost
Bilibili had 130 million monthly active users at the end of 2019, so it can be calculated that bilibili's IROI=1
3/ 919 million = 0
14person / yuan bilibili invests 1 yuan more per year and can only serve 0
14 more people
In other words: in terms of service capacity, instead of falling, the cost of server bandwidth has increased sevenfold over the past decade (or about fivefold excluding inflation)
With such a high service cost, onlyCrazily squeeze commercial value in order to become a normal business rather than charity
Tudou failed to survive such a high cost on its own and was finally eaten by Youku
So, what can bilibili rely on to smooth out this seven-fold cost increase and make a profit? Of course, it depends on "changing the taste"
If you can't cut expenditure, you can only open source
Bilibili as a high sticky 172 million monthly active Internet products, so far is still "pure", there are many places to add advertising
Whether it is to continue to make efforts to divert games, pay for knowledge or to be an e-commerce in Z era, it should be no problem to survive and even make a profit one day
One spoonful of commercialization is not enough, seven spoonfuls, up to profit
But when that day comes, will bilibili still be the "promised land" in the hearts of users? In the same way, the same is true of watermelon videos
02 Why can YouTube be YouTube? let's first set up a scenario: Baidu has acquired a magic so that Baidu's network disk can run without server and bandwidth
What will it do? Baidu's online disk will certainly remove all capacity, download and upload restrictions
The price may be reduced to a symbolic 1 yuan or completely free, and then make money by indirect means such as scanning user data and placing accurate advertisements, when Baidu's online disk must be the best user experience on the planet
When a business becomes unprofitable, it usually becomes less profitable
Because every penny you receive earns more, it is more important to squeeze your competitors out with a good experience than to earn an extra dollar
And YouTube is the product that gets the magic
To explain this, let's start with the domestic network environment
If you surf the Internet early enough, you should remember that it is very slow for domestic Internet Unicom users and telecom users to access each other, transfer files, type voice or video
Until now, some domestic online games are also divided into telecom service, Unicom service and mobile service
The reason is that even though China's operators are state-owned enterprises, companies still account for each other independently
They each build their own infrastructure (which used to be), which is equivalent to forming "several physical networks"
As a Unicom user, the access fee you pay to Unicom is used to access the resources hanging on the Unicom network
Whether you are chatting with a telecom user or downloading content from a website hanging in the telecom room, half of you are using telecom infrastructure
So in theory, you have to pay for telecom
However, this thing can not be done too well, or it will really become two nets
Therefore, China Unicom and China Telecom will sign an agreement, which is rarely mentioned in China, so there is no name; abroad, it is called Peering Agreement, peer-to-peer agreement
To put it simply: in order to facilitate mutual access between users of Unicom and telecom,Although Unicom users do not pay China Unicom, nor do telecom users pay Unicom, they can get a certain free data exchange quota for each other
For example, it is agreed that every day all Unicom users can send 1TB content to the telecom network, and every day all telecom users can send 1TB content to Unicom network
Within this amount, neither Unicom nor telecom will pay the other, and the two users will not have to pay for the broadband
But the name "peer-to-peer protocol" sounds bad-how can there be so many peers because of things on the Internet? Let's take it a step further and now pull the video website in
Youku was founded in 2005
It is headquartered in Beijing, the site of Unicom
Let's assume that its initial computer room is only connected to the bandwidth of China Unicom
What will happen then? Youku is developing rapidly, and more and more users are watching videos
Telecom will find that Unicom's daily quota for accessing Unicom's online resources is used up in an hour, and Unicom has to pay a settlement fee for the remaining 23 hours of running traffic
Not only that, and all telecom users access Youku very slowly, the card is not good
The only solution to this problem is to let Youku also connect directly to the telecom network, so that telecom users do not have to Peering to watch videos on Unicom
However, this solution has developed two different directions of compromise at home and abroad: 1
In China, the operator is absolutely strong, only it collects money
If you want to develop users in South China, you must come to our telecom backbone network to pull a line
In this mode, website operators need to pay bandwidth fees to operators to ensure user access speed
two。 In foreign countries, Google is absolutely strong, you a carrier access to Google is so slow, waiting for users to change broadband brands
Therefore, operators should use Peering to actively dock with Google's computer room
In this direction, website operators can even charge operators for money to improve user access
Google started its series of operations here: first, in 2005, Google was revealed to have bought a lot of dark fiber (Dark Fiber) [3]
Dark optical fiber means that operators tend to lay more optical fiber when laying optical fiber for cities
For example, they expect the building to use 1TB broadband in the future, but will lay 10TB underground
Because the cost of optical fiber laying mainly comes from digging the ground, digging the wall and burying the wire, just like the wiring of your home decoration, it is only reasonable to open the wall once
Therefore, for a long time, although there was only 1TB network access in a building, the 9TB bandwidth optical fiber was still idle in the wall
Google rents dark fiber everywhere at a low price, where it is more complete
Build the edge computer room there, and spread out the edge computing and CDN of some of your own servers
In this case, for example, you are a subscriber of a broadband operator in City A, and the broadband operator and Google Peering
Your request for access to YouTube will be routed to the edge computer room of Google in City A, and then transmitted on the intranet of Google, which greatly saves the number of network routes and improves the speed of access
Google, on the other hand, will not pay a bandwidth fee to the operator in City A, even though it should have
In 2009, Google was already the largest holder of Dark Fiber in the world
Some media began to question whether Google wanted to hijack the Internet on the grounds of public rights
So Google simply launched its own broadband operator Google Fiber the following year
The project has largely stalled in 2016
However, some foreign media have always suspected that the purpose of Google Fiber is never to provide services to users, but to frighten operators [4]
Now it seems that the purpose of scaring operators is two: 1
At that time, operators in Europe and the United States, especially in the United States, were affected by the collapse of Bubble on the Internet in 2000, and were reluctant to invest too much in infrastructure, which hindered the development of many new services of Google
To put it bluntly, operators are reluctant to speed up and reduce fees for fear of bankruptcy
Google Fiber was the first operator in the United States to produce "low-cost 1G home fiber", the equivalent of putting a catfish in a box of sardines
two。 As an operator, it is better to do Peering, with the operator after all, "if your users want to access Google, quickly, you have to pay me, not me
" This logic is unacceptable in the global ISP community
But if it is not Google, but an operator Google Fiber, it is in line with the general principle of equality of Peering Agreement
Both of these goals should be achieved that, Google Fiber does not cover many areas and does not have many users from the beginning to the end
, Google Fiber came to a standstill in 2017 after the three major operators in the United States launched similar gigabit broadband
After Google Fiber stagnated, Google Peering did not stop, but was incorporated into Google Cloud, and developed better and better
For specific development data, you canTo see it on the peering
google
com portal
So, is YouTube part of Google Peering? Apparently
According to a presentation on Google Peering by Ritz Campbell, product manager of YouTube, at the 2014 APNIC Conferences (Asia Pacific Internet Information Center Annual meeting), PPT shows
There are three major benefits for operators to join Google Peering, one of which listed separately is to improve the quality of YouTube access
This practice has caused resistance in France, where broadband users almost all over the country found that access to YouTube became very slow in early 2013
The reason is that all operators in France do not Peering, with Google and they think that if Google wants French users to access YouTube faster, Google will have to rent French broadband (Chinese operator model) from them [5]
Of course, France surrendered at last
To further "intimidate" operators, Google has been rating ISP services since 2014, a tool that is actually "measuring how your network accesses YouTube"-if your test results are not good, YouTube will give you detailed science popularization, which is mainly the operator's pot, and suggests you switch to broadband that supports Google Peering
YouTube, a product owned by Google (Alphabet), has rarely disclosed key data since it was acquired in 2006
Until 2020, Alphabet reported the revenue of YouTube for the first time in its annual report, but did not split the cost of YouTube
In Alphabet's financial report, the cost of server bandwidth and infrastructure maintenance is an astronomical figure of about 290 billion RMB, which is about 10 times the cost related to Tencent, but this includes the cost of all Google services around the world and Google Cloud sold by Google, so it does not have much reference value
So how do you prove that YouTube is only a small part of this? Back in 2009, Arbor Networks, a data monitoring company, released a report saying that "the cost of YouTube bandwidth is almost zero
" According to that year, YouTubE as almost the only video website in the world, with 100 billion broadcasts, the traffic accounts for only 6% of the total network traffic [6]
Data monitoring companies generally cooperate with ISP to set up bypass traffic monitoring on the backbone network for market research, similar to TV's "ratings monitoring"
Therefore, Peering traffic cannot be detected without entering the public network route
The huge gap between Google's user active data and third-party monitoring data means that Peering has played a huge role
Your largest video site, with more than 1
5 billion monthly active users and 900 million video hours per month, accounted for only 17
31% of Internet traffic
In the following year, YouTube accounted for a much lower proportion of public network traffic than Netflix, even though it had dozens of times the number of players and users
In 2014, Netflix accounted for 32
39% of total uplink and downlink traffic in North America, while YouTube accounted for only 13
25% [7]
Later, with the rise of the mobile Internet, without the blessing of Peering, YouTube accounted for more than 30% of the total mobile traffic in North America [7], which is the bandwidth cost of websites of this magnitude
Then, Google worked out the mobile virtual operator Google Fi, tried to replicate the strategy of pipelining the typical operators, but because the base station construction involved in the mobile network is more complex than the fixed network construction, it has not made enough achievements so far
There is no doubt that without the free bandwidth that Google Peering provides for YouTube (or bargaining power for operators), "becoming China's YouTube" is a pipe dream
Because, to the operator bargaining power, what changes not only is the cost, but also the competition mode of the video website
After reducing rigid operating costs to almost free, YouTube became the "bandwidth-free Baidu network disk"
The essence of YouTube's PUGC business is not to incubate potential stars, but to keep unlimited typing monkeys-as long as you want to share videos on the Internet, whether you are professional creators or high-paste videos shot by young people in a small town, YouTube will provide you with high-definition, high-bit-rate, high-access video hosting services
There will always be some monkeys who accidentally become Shakespeare, bringing high commercial value to YouTube and video creators
In China, only short videos can use this model, and long video websites can not even beat the cost of server bandwidth when they do the UGC mode of raising unlimited monkeys
InAfter defeating competitors with low-cost and high-quality services, YouTube is purely post-paid for content creators
Youtube is rarely like domestic video sites, skipping the data-sharing scheme and directly paying high signing fees for Youtuber (this only happens on a handful of channels such as YouTube Red Camera)
In addition to Google Peering bandwidth savings, YouTube can also make full use of Google Cloud's idle resources in storage and computing to offset the inventory cost of cloud computing business
In addition, YouTube's accurate advertising recommendations also reuse Google Ads's R & D and data collection costs
This part of the headlines and Tencent may have, but may not be able to reuse so well, bilibili and iqiyi certainly do not have
Of course, it's not impossible to have to do it, but the more you do it like YouTube, the faster you die
Reference: [1] "can Youku eat Tudou to make video sweetness", ://m
nbd
com
cn/articles/2012-03-14/640767
html[2] "China's online video market", "three heroes compete for hegemony", Https://lmtw
com/mzw/content/detail/id/66547/keyword_id/-1[3] Google wants' dark fiber', ://www
cnet
com/news/google-wants-dark-fiber/[4] Why Google Fiber Is High-Speed Internet's Most Successful Failure, ://hbr
org/2018/09/why-google-fiber-is-high-speed-internets-most-successful-failure[5] YouTube sucks on French ISP Free, and French regulators want to know why, Https://gigaom
com/2013/01/02/youtube-sucks-on-french-isp-free-french-regulators-want-tO-know-why/ [6] "report that YouTube bandwidth cost is almost zero", Sandvine Global Internet Phenomena Report- / END /-report / feedback of http://tech
sina
com
cn/i/2009-10-17/10583515309
shtml[7] over the years