Text | City Image, author | Wen Changlong, editor | Yang Zhou
“DingTalk’s eating scene is really ugly! You even do open-screen advertisements during the morning check-in time to earn money from workers. For example, many people who go to work at the same time will be late because of your 5-second open-screen advertisement without pressing the check-in button. Do you know ? “What happened to DingTalk? There are no more ads.”
Recently, some users have openly questioned DingTalk’s built-in ads on social platforms. As early as last year, some users had complained about the opening-screen advertisements of DingTalk APP. At that time, they were just sporadic complaints. However, as time goes by, more and more users find that the problem is not simple. DingTalk advertisements are penetrating into every function. interface.
According to the observation of “City Phenomenon”, in addition to application opening screen advertisements,Since September this year, DingTalk has intensively embedded marketing advertisements in various aspects such as clocking in after get off work, sign-in, overtime approval, work logs, and live broadcast playback.This further intensified user dissatisfaction, and complaints continued to rise.
“Shixiang” consulted customer service and learned that DingTalk’s advertising function is still in the testing stage, and users can manually turn off advertising. If you want to block it, the customer service suggestion is “You can provide your DingTalk mobile phone number, and we will provide you with feedback to close the factory notice.”
Previously, DingTalk has always exercised restraint on built-in advertising. DingTalk president Ye Jun has also emphasized user experience and even set up a team composed of P9-level personnel to specifically troubleshoot the problem of inconsistent icons in the upper right corner of DingTalk;Just in June this year, Ye Jun publicly complained about Baidu, saying that the first ten search results were almost all advertisements.
Judging from the basic model of application profit, built-in advertising and subscription fees are the most common methods. However, for B-side products, especially tools like DingTalk that are positioned for collaborative working, from the perspective of user experience, there is rarely the same ecosystem. In the case of a product introducing marketing advertising within the application, Feishu CEO Xie Xin has previously mentioned that “the To B industry cannot be monetized through traffic and advertising.”
This is hard not to think of commercialization. DingTalk has previously set a goal of achieving breakeven within three years, and judging from the small incision of introducing advertising,It seems to be making a choice between user experience and commercialization, trying to achieve new revenue breakthroughs through advertising, and embarking on a controversial path.
01 The lucrative advertising “side business”
According to incomplete statistics from “City Scene”, advertising on DingTalk almost covers many Internet companies such as Tmall Double Eleven, Kuaishou, Dewu, Toutiao, Didi, Kimi, Ele.me, etc. It can be said that it has been widely penetrated.
These advertisements are scattered in various functional links of DingTalk. In addition to the criticized open-screen advertisements, the advertisements in DingTalk live broadcast replays and logs are even more unacceptable to users.
“Originally I just clicked the screen twice casually to take a break from get out of class to take notes. Every time I had to remove this annoying ad, it was both annoying and a huge waste of time.” Some users publicly complained about DingTalk when the video was paused. Forcibly inserting advertisements seriously affects the user experience.
The ads when the DingTalk live playback video is paused can only be closed manually by clicking the “X”. Double-clicking does not work. It is extremely coercive, which makes users feel quite troubled. According to the reply from DingTalk customer service, ads during the live broadcast can be permanently eliminated after upgrading the rights.
The advertisements in the work diary even make workers break their defenses. “The experience is very poor. DingTalk is so short of money. It’s annoying to have ads appear first during our internal review process.” Another user said bluntly: “DingTalk looks ugly, and the ads are pervasive, affecting normal work.”
Despite the constant complaints from users, DingTalk’s approach has clearly brought huge benefits.
From a commercial perspective, advertising, as the troika of the Internet economy, does have strong blood-generating capabilities.
Take open-screen advertising, which is the most frequently complained about by users, as an example. Its unique advantages make it the preferred exposure platform for brands and enterprises. Relevant data shows that open-screen ads usually account for 40% to 50% of advertisers’ overall budget. Therefore, the commercial value of this form cannot be underestimated.
AdSet once roughly calculated the monthly advertising revenue of an app with 10,000 daily active users. Using the common exposure-based CPM model, it is assumed that each daily active user generates 2.5 screen opening impressions per day, and the average daily CPM of screen opening ads is 40 yuan.
Calculated in this way, the daily screen advertising revenue for each daily active user is 1 × 2.5 × 40 / 1000 = 0.1 yuan. If only the revenue from open-screen advertising is counted, the monthly advertising revenue of an app with 10,000 daily users can be as high as 0.1 × 30 × 10,000 = 30,000 yuan.
So what’s going on with DingTalk? QuestMobile data shows that from October 2022 to September 2023, DingTalk’s average monthly active users reached 214 million, and daily active users were nearly 100 million.
If we assume that one of the users using open-screen ads is20 millioncalculated according to the previous formula, the monthly advertising revenue can reach0.1 × 30 × 20,000,000 = 60 million yuanwhich is undoubtedly a considerable income.
What’s more, DingTalk not only has open-screen advertising, but if other advertising forms are added, the overall revenue will be even more impressive.
Previously, there were two main types of conventional commercialization models of DingTalk: the first was subscription-based payment for third-level professional versions, etc., which were charged to B-side enterprises, which was its main source of income; the second was to acquire products through the DingTalk open platform. The commission income is similar to the Apple App Store model in the To B field.
The logic of advertising is the To C traffic monetization model, which is inconsistent with the To B logic previously advertised by collaborative office products such as DingTalk.
It can be said that, to a certain extent, advertising revenue has become a good “side job” for DingTalk.
Since this year, DingTalk’s attempts at this “side business” don’t stop there. Just recently, DingTalk launched 365 membership, with functions including AI search, automatic speed reading, member logo, personal authentication and AI personal assistant. Among them, these functions such as “membership mark” and “personal authentication” are obviously a traffic monetization product for individual users.
So the question is, why does DingTalk no longer exercise restraint, and even at the expense of user experience, it still chooses to make money through the “side business” of monetizing traffic?
02 The three-year deadline is approaching
When DingTalk launched 365 membership, Ye Jun once said frankly, “We are too tired of B-side payment, and we need to innovate. Maybe our ideas will be proven wrong today, but we are willing to make some attempts for this.”
This seems to hint at the reason behind DingTalk’s current actions. If analyzed further, the so-called “B-end payment is too tiring” may be the more critical reason behind an AI misjudgment.
In April last year, DingTalk joined Tongyi Big Model in a high-profile manner, claiming that it would use AI to re-polished its products; at the Ecological Conference in August of the same year, DingTalk further demonstrated its intelligent achievements, announcing that 17 product lines and 55 scenarios had been fully developed. Incorporate large models. At this press conference, DingTalk even proposed the industry’s first commercialization plan for large-scale model applications.
At that time, DingTalk was confident in the commercialization of AI. In an interview with Sohu Technology in the same year, Ye Jun talked about the impact of large models on DingTalk’s revenue and user growth. He said bluntly: “I think the commercial revenue boost for the entire market should be dozens of points, not one or two points. question.”
However, only one year later, at the DingTalk Ecosystem Conference on June 26, 2024, DingTalk’s strategy shifted to “not rushing to commercialization.”
Ye Jun summarized this: First, the progress on the application side is far less rapid than expected, and the market pull force is insufficient; secondly, the model price has indeed been reduced, and the price reduction is both sudden and inevitable – when the demand side is not strong, the supply side will naturally have the advantage Unable to give full play. Both of these changes were unexpected.
The implication is that the effects of AI commercialization have not met expectations. Ye Jun also implicitly told the media at the time: “The SaaS industry as a whole is not doing well now, but our commercialization data is much higher than the average, but it is definitely lower than last year.” In fact, Feishu also fell into the same trap. Xie Xin also publicly stated this year, “It seems that AI is just that.”
At the same time, the actual cost of AI cannot be underestimated. Although AI commercialization is still in the product exploration stage, the cost of tasks such as AI search that require huge amounts of knowledge and data processing is still high. AI not only failed to become a breakthrough in business, but also became a heavy cost burden.
While the AI layout failed to work as expected, DingTalk’s commercialization window is also gradually narrowing.
On August 13, 2023, Ye Jun announced that DingTalk would be separated from Alibaba Cloud and move towards a more independent development path. Then on November 16, 2023, four businesses, including DingTalk, became Alibaba’s first batch of strategic innovative businesses.
In the past, DingTalk focused on scale expansion and made little attempt at commercialization, and Alibaba has never put profitability pressure on DingTalk. Previously, Chen Hang mentioned in many interviews that Alibaba’s support for DingTalk was “almost regardless of cost.”
But now it has become a strategic innovative business operating in the form of an independent subsidiary. This also means that companies such as DingTalk need to completely get rid of dependence and rely on their own operating income to achieve independent survival goals, facing higher profitability pressure and survival tests.
In terms of commercialization expectations, Ye Jun publicly stated in June 2023 that DingTalk’s goal is to achieve breakeven within three years, but it is unclear when these three years will start. In the same year, Ye Jun further stated that DingTalk plans to achieve breakeven by 2025.
However, at the beginning of this year, when faced with the media’s question about “The 2025 profit target is now 2024, how is the progress?”, Ye Jun responded: “It is fiscal year 2025, one year later than the natural year. In fact, there are still In two years, the general direction remains unchanged.”
But Alibaba’s fiscal year starts on April 1 of each year and ends on March 31 of the following year. Therefore, the so-called fiscal year 2025 actually begins on April 1, 2024, and ends on March 31, 2025. Just on August 15 this year, Alibaba announced its first quarter results for fiscal year 2025 (second quarter of 2024, the natural year).
In any case, DingTalk’s commercialization window is imminent, and when the B-side commercialization progress is not as expected, starting from the “side business” seems to have become a last resort.
03 “Profit” is on the agenda of “Taking Enterprise Flight”
DingTalk’s helplessness is also a situation faced by Feishu and Enterprise WeChat. As of now, none of the three major collaborative office platforms, including DingTalk, WeChat Enterprise and Feishu, have achieved profitability.
Different from the three-year profit target set by DingTalk, Li Zhifeng, vice president of WeChat Enterprise, said at an exchange meeting at the beginning of this year that WeChat Enterprise is confident that it will be the first among the three (DingTalk, WeChat Enterprise, and Feishu) to achieve profitability.
In contrast, Feishu’s attitude seems more conservative. Last year, Feishu CEO Xie Xin said frankly when talking about profitability, “Profitability will not be that fast yet. It is more about allowing the business to grow healthily.”
However, judging from Feishu’s layoffs in March this year, Feishu’s ROI (input-output ratio) is not ideal due to its high investment and large team. The layoffs are obviously due to considerations of accelerating commercialization.
On the whole, it is almost a matter of time for collaborative office products to lay off employees under the pressure of breaking even. In August this year, DingTalk also made a personnel adjustment, the most representative of which was the departure of chief product officer Qi Junsheng.
However, the commercialization of collaborative office obviously cannot rely solely on reducing expenditures. The key lies in how to open up new sources of revenue. Finding more revenue growth points is the top priority.
At present, from the perspective of commercialization actions, changing charging standards is a common method.
In February 2023, Feishu updated its charging standards, and the rights and interests of non-paying users were significantly reduced, including reducing the document cloud disk space from 50GB to 10GB, and the storage time of chat records from unlimited to 180 days. These services were previously Free.
This year, Feishu has further adjusted the rules for using storage space, and recently announced a limit on the duration of voice-to-text conversion: starting from December 3, 2024, Feishu free version users will only have 300 minutes of “Miaoji voice-to-text conversion” per month. Text” free quota, but there was no time limit for this feature before.
Similar adjustments also occurred on DingTalk. In the second half of this year, DingTalk revised the charging standards for address books, employee attendance, and OA approval. As a result, some companies were forced to pay or consider replacing collaborative office products.
Behind these actions, there is no doubt that functional restrictions are used to drive user payment and promote product commercialization. However, judging from some social media reactions, actual progress does not appear to be as smooth as expected.
Now, DingTalk has turned its attention to advertising monetization, which makes people speculate: Will Feishu and Enterprise WeChat be inspired to try this path?
After all, objectively speaking, in China’s collaborative office market, a considerable number of small and medium-sized users are accustomed to “squeezing out the wool” and enjoy a large amount of storage, bandwidth and server resources, but are hesitant to pay. The introduction of advertising can directly and quickly convert huge daily active users into income, which can be regarded as a realistic commercialization path.
From this perspective, it is indeed worth paying attention to whether Feishu and WeChat Enterprise will follow DingTalk and realize traffic monetization through advertising.
Of course, this attempt also comes with challenges – although advertising can bring revenue, office scenes have higher requirements for user experience. If not handled properly, it may affect the product image. Therefore, if there is not enough commercialization pressure, Feishu and WeChat Enterprise may be more cautious in advertising monetization.
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