112: Chapter 112 The Dilemma of Douyin

After the Mi Band was released,

it consistently followed a path of being affordable and cost-effective.

Relatively speaking,

its sales volume and revenue were quite good,

mainly because compared to the smartwatches and smart bands on the market that often cost several thousands or even tens of thousands,

the Mi Band's price of only 199 was truly cheap.

Liu Guanfeng, who was primarily responsible for wearable smart devices, gained Bai Jingqing's appreciation,

and he attached great importance to the smart band sector,

fighting day and night,

wanting to produce even better products.

Whenever he thought about being at Huayao,

he felt a faint sense of luck,

grateful that he had made the right choice back then.

Back then at the World Mobile Communication Congress,

he had almost sought investment from Xue Haixin, the director of Li Xiang Technology,

and fortunately, Li Xiang Technology was relatively arrogant,

and didn't take an interest in his product,

which allowed him to work with Little Boss Bai.

Looking back now,

choosing Huayao was much better than choosing Ideal.

First, Little Boss Bai truly delegated power,

basically giving all authority to you,

allowing you to focus wholeheartedly on refining your work

and realizing your own ideas.

Secondly, with the results of this year's Double Eleven,

Huayao's mobile phone market share was not much lower than Ideal's,

and it could even be said that it had achieved a reversal,

proving that Huayao's prospects were also incredibly broad,

and in such a company, he was full of hope for the future.

In order to not let down Bai Jingqing's cultivation and recognition of him,

Liu Guanfeng worked very hard,

often working overtime until two or three in the morning.

However, this soon caught Bai Jingqing's attention.

Although Bai Jingqing hoped to improve the technology and service levels in the domestic Mobile Communications field through involution,

he did not want it to be this kind of unhealthy and abnormal involution.

Therefore, he also reminded Liu Guanfeng many times,

telling him not to work overtime so late,

as it would create a bad influence on other employees in the company,

making them feel that since even you, the department head, work so late,

they would feel guilty if they didn't work overtime.

Bai Jingqing really didn't need his employees to work so desperately;

he already had the system,

so why would he need to squeeze his employees so hard?

He couldn't bring himself to do such an immoral and black-hearted thing.

But Liu Guanfeng only agreed verbally,

while in action, he still often worked late,

and Bai Jingqing simply couldn't talk him out of it.

In fact, Liu Guanfeng just hoped to use overtime as a way

to try his best to make better products,

so as not to let down Little Boss Bai's appreciation of him.

On the other side,

Zhang Yiming was also filled with guilt towards Bai Jingqing at this moment,

and he would also often work overtime and put in effort,

because Douyin's current operational status was not that healthy.

Douyin had been online for trial operation for over a month now,

and on the surface, no problems or omissions had appeared,

but Zhang Yiming was incredibly anxious and fearful inside.

At this moment, no problem was the biggest problem,

because it also meant that Douyin wasn't making any waves at all.

If it continued to develop like this,

the inevitable outcome would be elimination.

To this end, Zhang Yiming also took many measures,

wanting to stimulate the creative passion of users.

He arranged a large number of robot sub-accounts,

specifically responsible for liking the posts of those bloggers with fewer likes,

to make them feel that there were still people who liked their work.

Since users didn't get any revenue from uploading short videos themselves,

he launched a video creation incentive,

giving certain cash rewards after the number of views reached a certain point,

to make users more enthusiastic about creating high-quality content.

At the same time, he also invited many high-quality content creators from traditional video platforms to join Douyin to attract traffic.

But despite trying various methods and measures,

Douyin remained lukewarm.

And a more critical point was that

Douyin was now facing the same pain point as jinri toutiao,

which was the difficulty of monetization!

According to Little Boss Bai's requirements,

Douyin was specifically made into a playback format where you only need to swipe up to switch to the next video.

At first, Zhang Yiming thought it was amazing that Little Boss Bai could come up with such an operation method,

because this method didn't require any brainpower at all;

as long as there was a simple swipe, new content could be seen,

and this method greatly increased the user's usage time.

But over time,

the drawbacks of this operation method began to show;

since there weren't many creators on Douyin yet,

the content released was basically just remakes, following trends, and imitations,

so sometimes swiping through several videos in a row resulted in basically the same content,

which easily caused visual fatigue,

thus actually reducing user stickiness.

However, this was also a problem of the Douyin platform's content not being rich enough yet;

this operation method was definitely the most suitable for short videos.

He had thought about obtaining certain revenue by inserting advertisements in the middle of swiping through videos,

but Douyin was currently a small platform,

and not many advertisers came to cooperate with him,

so the advertising income was actually negligible.

In this situation,

Douyin created a tipping function,

allowing users to tip the content they liked,

with the tipped amount eventually split between the video uploader and the platform.

This way, on one hand, it could increase the income of video uploaders,

and on the other hand, it could also increase the platform's revenue.

However, while this function seemed good,

in this era, there were still very few people willing to top up for virtual consumption and tipping on the internet,

so compared to the R&D investment and server operation costs,

the income in this area could basically be ignored.

Originally, Zhang Yiming could still tolerate these things,

and he was also encouraging the team to find better ways to stimulate users' creative passion

and look for more monetization channels.

But soon, something happened

that made him feel utterly discouraged,

even feeling that this app almost couldn't go on.

He didn't know if it was orchestrated by jealous manufacturers,

or if it was simply some netizens with an overflowing sense of justice

who liked to act as internet police online,

but recently, a large number of basically similar comments appeared in Douyin's comment section,

all accusing Douyin of plagiarizing a foreign software called Musical.ly.

It wasn't even as simple as plagiarism;

Zhang Yiming specifically did an investigation

and found that Douyin was practically a pixel-level imitation of Musical.ly.

The presentation format of both was basically similar,

both presenting video content in a way where you could enter the next video by swiping down.

At the same time, those basic functions,

such as liking, bookmarking, commenting, sharing, searching, and so on, were basically all there,

and even the interface layout was exactly the same.

Zhang Yiming was also very distressed about this;

he could guarantee that when he made this app, he had definitely not referred to this software,

everything was done according to Little Boss Bai's instructions,

but he didn't expect such a problem to occur now.

According to his investigation,

that software indeed appeared earlier than Douyin.

In this case, it was truly "yellow mud sticking to the crotch; even if it's not shit, it's still shit."

He now even felt a sense of being unable to defend himself.

But he couldn't go and blame Bai Jingqing;

could it be that Little Boss Bai really came up with the idea after seeing such a foreign software?

After all, Bai Jingqing was his boss,

and he didn't dare to question him like that to his face.