You call this entrepreneurship?

Chapter 319 Industry Dilemma
Qin Shaoyan sneered at the "Anti-Qvod Alliance", thinking that these were a bunch of idiots messing around. In fact, he was just talking without any concern.

By June 2005, 6, the number of domestic Internet users officially exceeded 30 million.

For the Internet industry, this is a rich treasure trove waiting to be mined and crops waiting to be harvested in the fertile soil.

In addition, the number of new Internet users is growing rapidly every year. This is the best era for entrepreneurship, as if there are endless user groups for them to absorb.

Before 2000, as long as you built a website, you would have users, and the cost of acquiring them was very low.

After 2000, although the large companies that survived the Internet bubble have shown a trend of becoming dominant, thanks to the crazy growth of Internet users, new entrants into the Internet industry still have plenty of room for survival and opportunities.

As long as you can find the right track, there is no shortage of users.

With users, there is data. With data, there is venture capital, and money will come in continuously.

In the vast blue ocean, there are thousands of Internet companies and websites of all kinds, presenting a thriving scene.

No entrepreneur thinks that if XX website becomes the number one in the industry, his own website will be forced to die.

As long as you have activities, can attract users and accumulate data, that is the best way.

Campus Network claims to be the largest social platform in China, but it has less than 10 million registered users.

As long as there are competitors willing to invest money, the campus network will not be able to maintain its advantages.

Qvod, the No. 1 video website, has only five million online users every day.

Logically speaking, there is not much conflict between the more than 100 newly emerged video websites and Qvod. In addition to Qvod's users, there are still a large number of netizens waiting for them to be discovered.

However, Tudou.com really felt that they could not survive.

Many entrepreneurs are excited about the emergence of the video website track.

YouTube was being fought over by three Internet giants, and Qvod was valued at $300 million less than three months after its establishment. Every piece of good news deeply stimulated Internet entrepreneurs.

A large group of young people with childish faces, with the courage and courage of a newborn calf that is not afraid of a tiger, shouted "the future of the Internet is the era of video" and plunged into this blue ocean track.

After diving in, what entrepreneurs get is not a smooth ride, but a bang of their heads against rocks on the seabed.

Although some entrepreneurs have made sufficient preparations, they never expected that the first bottleneck they encountered was funding.

When video websites were first created, everyone was aiming to subvert the four major portals.

When we actually started doing it, we found that the text and photos of beautiful women on the four major portals took up very little bandwidth, while the videos were much larger.

No one expected that bandwidth, servers, and traffic would be so expensive that user growth would become a burden.

At that time, most video sites were short videos of 5 minutes, generally not exceeding 10 megabytes.

The long video is about 20 minutes long and weighs dozens of megabytes, which is already the limit of video websites. In the era when the Internet speed was not fast enough, who could care about HD or Blu-ray? We should be thankful if it can be played smoothly.

The video website model and content are almost the same. If you grab good content, you can get traffic. The potential problems of the industry are also exposed. After the main content develops from short videos to TV series and movies, the number of users increases, and the bandwidth traffic increases.

How much does this bandwidth cost?
Qvod spends two to three million US dollars a month just on buying bandwidth, which is equivalent to investing in a Series A Internet company.

Even though the wealthy Qvod had raised so much money, it couldn't last more than a year.

What about other video sites?
Although their scale is not as big as Qvod, the broadband fees are not small, and they have raised less money.

After a few months, they were terrified by the money they had spent and were worrying every day about how to find investors to provide them with ammunition.

Video websites are like a bottomless pit of funds. The boss of Youku.com once said that there is never enough money and whoever raises the funds will be the industry leader.

They were very ambitious before. The bosses of Youku, Liujianfang and Ku6 once said, "Whoever among us can get 1000 million US dollars in the future will be the boss of this industry."

Seeing that Qvod had received tens of millions of dollars in investment, he changed his words and said that only with 1 million dollars could one become the industry leader. If Qin Shaoyan heard this, he would laugh at him for being too conservative.

Considering the level of money burning in the video industry, 1 million US dollars is not enough to even become the number one in Zhongguancun.

Because the video industry is burning so much money, venture capitalists are a little hesitant.

Other websites can spend millions of dollars and still make a name for themselves and rank high in the same field.

As for the video websites, millions of dollars disappeared without even a sound, like a black hole.

Video websites require too much investment, but the returns are so low that the advertising fees earned are barely enough to make ends meet.

In addition, in the video website market, there is already a benchmark like Qvod, which provides a reference for venture capitalists.

We can roughly estimate how much it would cost to reach or surpass Qvod.

This amount of funds is at least several hundred million US dollars.

Why not do something else with these hundreds of millions of dollars? Why spend them on video websites?
Besides, your video websites are far behind others. You have no vitality, no content, and no quality. How can you compete with QVOD?
The models and contents of today’s video websites are almost identical, and the videos in them are all pirated from each other, and everyone knows it tacitly.

In this situation, everyone has reached a consensus that if you can grab good content, you can get traffic, and if you have traffic, you can win.

To put it simply, it means being able to differentiate yourself. Your video website can be different from other websites. If you have good video content, you will be ahead of others.

Why is Qvod so popular? Because it has so much and rich content, and its update speed far outstrips all its peers.

Other websites search for pirated film and television resources on the Internet and then upload them to their websites. This behavior is almost a common phenomenon in the industry. Large websites have a group of dedicated employees to do this, uploading pirated resources in the name of users.

Because it is a pirated resource, the image quality is not very good, and the website compresses it, so the image quality is just passable.

It’s free anyway, so why would you want a bicycle?

But Qvod is different.

Qvod.com purchases a large number of copyrights. Once they buy the copyrights, they have genuine resources in their hands, all of which are of high-definition quality. Although they are compressed before being uploaded to the website, at least the quality is much better than other websites.

What is even more puzzling to other colleagues is that it is fine that the quality of your domestic film and television resources is good, but why is the quality of videos transferred from abroad also so good?
The secret lies in the fact that Qin Shaoyan is not only the boss of Qvod, he is also a shareholder of YouTube. He can directly obtain video resources from YouTube's backend.

Every week, YouTube would send people with several large-capacity hard drives to fly from the United States to Beijing to hand over the newly collected resources to Qvod.com.

Qvod.com gets first-hand resources, which are sorted out and then handed over to the subtitle group for translation, and then uploaded to the website after adding subtitles.

Therefore, Qvod.com updates a large amount of video content every week, from domestic to foreign, with rich resources that surpass its peers around the world.

The updates are fast and frequent, and the picture quality is clearer than other websites, so users will naturally go to Qvod to watch.

In this case, how can other video websites compete with QVOD?
Even if you steal its resources from Qvod, it will keep you busy for a while, and the quality will be even lower if the clarity is compressed.

From quantity to quality, to update speed, it crushes us in all aspects.

How do you expect other colleagues to compete?
There's no way I can beat him at all.

Why did Tudou and Youku form the "Anti-Qvod Alliance"? Because if they don't make some progress, they will really be dead soon.

With the existence of Qvod, they can only pick up leftovers. The number of users seems to be increasing, but even more are leaving.

Coupled with the financial pressure of purchasing bandwidth, they have become breathless.

If they can’t find investment, many websites won’t survive until the end of the year.

(End of this chapter)