20 years of restarting life

Chapter 3030

Especially after the legend of Zhao Changan's investment in BlackBerry in October, which ignited the concept of domestic enterprises going global, GG's registered users and the average number of people online every day also started to increase dramatically.

Correspondingly, with the growth of GG users, the occupation of servers and various supporting resources has also increased significantly. The original annual loss of GG branch was expected to be no more than 3 million. As a result, in order to meet the growing user demand, a large number of new equipment and various corresponding supporting follow-ups had to be added.

At the end of August, the number of GG registrations just exceeded 8 million, with more than 4000 million people online at the same time every day.

As of now, GG has more than 1 million registered numbers, with more than 400 million numbers online simultaneously every day.

In just less than five months, the growth rates exceeded 150% and 160% respectively.

Of course, there is still a lot of water in this. According to the ninth "Statistical Report on the Development of China's Internet" released by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) a few days ago, as of December 2001, 12, there were approximately 31 million Internet-connected computers and 1254 million Internet users in China.

That is to say, on average, one Internet user has registered three GG accounts. Moreover, according to a survey of Internet cafe users, among these 3 million simultaneous online accounts, there are quite a few users who have two or three GG accounts at the same time.

This is also a common phenomenon in the Internet ecosystem. In order to obtain more beautiful data, companies often do not restrict users' repeated registrations.

However, when the GG number was launched, the 8-digit number was used as the lowest level number, and the registration of 9-digit numbers was opened at the same time. The random number registered each time was also an 8-digit number and a 9-digit number that appeared randomly.

No GG numbers with less than 8 digits were issued, including the several GG numbers used by Zhao Changan, which were all 8-digit numbers. In addition, rules were set in the program to intercept 666- and 888-digit numbers such as 8 and 9.

Under the setting of digital rules, more than 300 million GG numbers were intercepted and stored, but millions of GG numbers were deliberately omitted to support the registration enthusiasm of new users.

Of course, the real good numbers are the GG numbers with 5, 6, and 7 digits. As for the GG numbers with fewer digits, Zhao Changan has no intention of releasing them at all.

At least in the next fourteen or fifteen years, GG numbers will still be very attractive, until the emergence of new communication tools and a personalized GID system with replaceable displays that allows users to customize their account identification. Ordinary users can set a GID of 8 to 10 characters, while SVIP users can set a GID of 7 characters, supporting a combination of numbers and letters. Only then will this abnormal market-distorting behavior be cooled down.

These 567-digit numbers and 89 300 million-digit numbers will be used as intangible commodities to generate profits for GG in the future, or as rewards for various activities, or as favors that cannot be helped sometimes.

ICQ is similar to GG. In the current domestic IM market, MSN has a 6% market share and takes more than 90% of sales revenue, GG has an 80% market share and has 0 sales revenue, and ICQ has a market share of about 10% and less than 5% of sales revenue.

There are seven or eight more niche IM software remaining, accounting for 4% of the market share, which are more inclined to personalized services and take away 5% of sales revenue.

In fact, among these software, MSN has almost no false registration or one person registering multiple numbers. Users of niche IM software basically do not have such meaningless repeated registrations.

The hardest hit areas for multiple registrations are GG and ICQ. GG has the highest duplication rate, exceeding 300%. ICQ's duplication rate is estimated to be slightly lower than GG, but only slightly lower. According to the year-end statistics released by ICQ in 01, their registered users reached 3000 million, and the number of online users exceeded 150 million.

However, Yinnano's analysis department privately obtained ICQ's real year-end data. It was true that there were 3000 million registered users, but the maximum number of people online at the same time only exceeded 60 once.

Moreover, among these 3000 million registrations, more than 1500 million have never logged in again after registration, or have logged in less than 10 times and the total login time is less than 10 hours, or have not logged in for more than a month by the end of the year.

On ICQ's user login and registration lines, we can clearly see that before October, their registration times exceeded 2600 million. Then in the three months after October, the number of new registrations dropped drastically, and the login frequency of old users also began to drop sharply.

After eliminating these 1500 million zombie accounts, the Nanometer Analysis Department estimated that the actual number of valid registered users of ICQ does not exceed 500 million, and the number of people online at the same time does not exceed 30.

In the past, perhaps their actual number of valid registered users exceeded 500 million, and the number of people online at the same time exceeded 20, or even 60 as they advertised (minus the number of people using one phone with multiple accounts, which is about 30).

However, with the growing reputation of Yinami and Zhao Changan in the past few months, the IM field has been severely suppressed, especially the highly homogeneous ICQ. On the contrary, MSN, which focuses on enterprise IM, and niche IM software companies with personalized customization have not been affected.

Although today’s Internet companies, even if they are not profitable or suffer continuous huge losses, as long as they have market share, there will be venture capitalists betting on them, but these venture capitalists are not stupid. They are profit-seeking and do not want to be suckers and make contributions.

Zhao Changan estimated that under GG's strong suppression, ICQ's financing money had almost run out. Now it all depended on whether their propaganda of "registered users reached 3000 million, and the number of online users exceeded 150 million" could attract more investment to continue competing with GG.

The problem is that domestic experts now predict that the total IM market this year will reach 20 billion, of which MSN alone is likely to take away most of the sales revenue, and then there are those niche IMs. If ICQ does not change its positioning or seek new sales growth points, their sales revenue will not exceed 5000 million.

6◇9◇Book◇Bar

In today’s Internet competition, the homogeneous first and second are no longer the same as in the traditional economy where the first is the boss and the second is generally not bad either. Instead, the first takes almost everything, while the second only has one-tenth of the first or less.

Therefore, ICQ does not have many options in the face of homogeneous competition. If GG, which has already taken the lead, spends another 6 million this year, they will have to spend at least another 6 million to barely keep the gap between them from getting even more exaggerated.

But what investor would be so irrational as to waste hundreds of millions when GG is far ahead?

Zhao Changan estimates that after this year, ICQ's most likely choice will be to follow the corporate IM of MSN, or to go the niche customized IM. Given ICQ's current size and maturity, no matter which direction it chooses, or whether it chooses both directions at the same time, it is likely to achieve a certain degree of success, and may even turn losses into profits, which is not easy.

Because beating the Americans who don't understand the national conditions, or attacking those small crawlers, niche and customized IMs, is easy for ICQ.

But once ICQ missed this important time and event line node, it would be a pipe dream to come back and challenge GG in the future.