Compared with free knowledge, knowledge payment seems to be a backward economic model. But if we look at knowledge payment from another angle, it actually uses crowdfunding to connect professional and knowledge-intensive knowledge to the Internet.
Knowledge payment has become a trend, even a trend, unconsciously. Knowledge platform regards it as an inevitable trend, and the attitude of knowledge consumers is gradually changing and getting used to it. So, in the past two years, what happened to make many knowledge products gradually enter the paid era from the free era? Is knowledge payment a gimmick or a necessity of development?
This paper will start with the evolution path of knowledge payment, think about the essence and mode of knowledge payment, and finally analyze the "get" products with the help of some theories in kevin kelly's Necessity, and see the development logic of knowledge payment through the "get" products.
The following is the mind map of this article:
First, the evolution of knowledge payment
The evolution of knowledge payment has gone through three stages, from the initial knowledge payment, to knowledge free, and then to knowledge payment. From the enterprise's point of view, the core of determining whether knowledge is valuable is whether knowledge has barriers, that is, whether it has intangible value that cannot be copied. From the user's point of view, the core of determining whether knowledge is valuable is the scarcity of required knowledge. The knowledge in the first stage is scarce because of its finiteness, the knowledge in the second stage is not scarce temporarily because of its infinity and free copying, and the knowledge in the third stage is scarce because of its information redundancy. Next, we will carefully examine the evolution of knowledge payment from these three stages:
The first stage, knowledge pays.
In essence, providing knowledge means providing services, which is the process of delivering the right content to the right people at the right time. In the traditional process of knowledge transmission, knowledge is transmitted through the real physical world. Whether in the publishing industry or the education industry, whether you buy books or attend classes, you need to pay for the knowledge you enjoy, because the services or products you enjoy have physical obstacles, and it is impossible for countless people to enjoy them at the same time, so the costs paid by knowledge consumers cannot be shared indefinitely. The knowledge in this stage exists in the atomic world, and the atoms in the atomic world cannot be copied indefinitely without cost, and the production cost cannot be divided wirelessly and approaches to free, thus forming the first stage of knowledge payment.
In the second stage, knowledge is free.
At this stage, there are two main reasons for the birth of free knowledge:
(1) The Internet was born.
The important function of the Internet is to make the bits in the bit world be copied and spread infinitely. The Internet itself is a huge copier, and the motivation of this copier is human desire. If there are no strong barriers to the knowledge products provided by enterprises at this stage, it is difficult to avoid others' copying and copying of content information. In this era of Internet of Everything, users can get the information they want by searching and comparing. At this time, the use of knowledge free strategy is an inevitable trend.
(2) the birth of "free" thinking
Since free knowledge is inevitable, the idea of "free" was born, and the so-called "wool is on pigs" appeared, and knowledge began to enter the stage of "free". At this stage, knowledge itself has the property of a tool, which can connect and aggregate users who want to use this tool, thus bringing traffic and becoming the basis of later commercial realization. Owning the flow is the first-class rocket of the product, and the profit of advertising or related operation activities is the second-class rocket. The first-stage rocket is to boost the continuous rise of the second-stage rocket. Nowadays, a series of content platforms, such as headlines, have begun to take the profit path of free knowledge and advertising fees.
The knowledge in this stage exists in the bit world, and the bits in the bit world can be copied almost freely, and the cost is infinitely divided and close to free, thus forming the knowledge free stage.
The third stage, knowledge payment.
In the third stage of knowledge payment, with the improvement of internet infrastructure and the continuous exploration of knowledge service methods, the "free" strategy has become a strategy adopted by many enterprises. At this point, knowledge free has lost its first-Mover advantage, so the era of knowledge payment 2.0 has arrived.
(1) With limited time, the information explosion has brought endless information redundancy to people. How to choose useful knowledge quickly under the limited time has become a new demand, which is just needed.
(2) Many enterprises have explored ways to establish knowledge barriers. It is a strategy to provide high-quality knowledge and let users pay for high-quality knowledge. It is also a strategy to provide knowledge services without providing knowledge products. These two strategies have promoted the current wave of knowledge payment. For example, "Get" establishes payment barriers by providing high-quality knowledge services, so even if other enterprises can copy methods and contents, they can't bring users the same excellent user experience as "Get" products, and can't make users have the same trust and dependence.
At this stage, knowledge also exists in the bit world, but with the information redundancy caused by the infinite replication of information, and at the same time, some enterprises explore the strategy of establishing their own knowledge barriers, and begin to enter the era of knowledge payment 2.0. The core of this stage is filtration.
Second, the logic of knowledge payment 2.0
From the perspective of information, the information that everyone needs belongs to a part of the total amount of information. When the total amount of information changes from less to more, the difficulty of finding the knowledge that everyone needs gradually decreases, but when the information is overloaded, the increasing amount of information will increase the difficulty of finding information. In this closed system, there is always a paradox between the required information (knowledge) and the total amount of information. The more knowledge you have, the more you can find the knowledge you need. However, the more knowledge, the more interference items. Therefore, an external force is needed to deal with this contradiction, that is, filtering (search is an accurate filtering). The existing knowledge payment products actually provide a filtering mechanism for users, connecting high-quality knowledge to the Internet and filtering it to users. In this process, the connection and filtering of high-quality knowledge need motivation, and this motivation is that users pay for knowledge.
Compared with free knowledge, knowledge payment seems to be a backward economic model. But if we look at knowledge payment from another angle, it actually uses crowdfunding to connect professional and knowledge-intensive knowledge to the Internet. Knowledge consumers don't have to pay high tuition fees to listen to famous lectures, and they don't have to go to the scene to learn the systematic and specialized knowledge, while knowledge producers export their professional knowledge in a profitable situation. From a certain point of view, the existing knowledge payment platform roughly follows the following simple mathematical equation:
The income of knowledge producers is positively related to the expenditure of individual knowledge consumers and the number of knowledge consumers.
Platform income (positive correlation) The income of knowledge producers and the number of knowledge producers.
The number of knowledge consumers and knowledge producers presents a bilateral network effect, which promotes and complements each other.
The core of this equation lies in the number of knowledge consumers. The core of the platform is to ensure the number of knowledge consumers and the quality of knowledge producers. First, they attract traffic through Luo Ji's thinking and Luo Pang's 60-second voice every day, bringing enough knowledge consumers. Then, starting with the knowledge producers, the valuable and attractive knowledge producers and knowledge are screened out ("get" is similar to the traditional shelf in the long tail theory, and only the products that are most likely to sell well are placed). Then through their own endorsement, content marketing and other means to continuously increase the number of knowledge consumers, improve the income of knowledge producers. Finally, relying on more knowledge consumers and their own brands to attract more high-quality knowledge producers to join, finally forming a bilateral network effect between knowledge producers and consumers and forming their own lifelong learner community. At the same time, the payment mode of "getting" has become a way of screening users, connecting some high-quality users, and polishing their products and contents to a higher quality by using users' payment. Knowledge payment has become a two-way promotion mode here. (For the analysis of "getting" products, please refer to my other analysis article: Looking at "getting" from "point, line and surface": three angles and three questions)
In other more knowledge platforms, although there is a lack of knowledge consumers to "acquire" a certain column, it also lowers the threshold of becoming a knowledge producer and allows professionals in more fields to participate in the wave of knowledge payment. "Get" platform sacrifices the number of knowledge producers to ensure quality, while other platforms attract the number of knowledge consumers by increasing the number and types of knowledge producers. "Get" is constantly making all kinds of explosions and forming an ecology around this explosion, while other platforms are constantly attracting long tail producers and consumers around the long tail theory.
Thirdly, "acquiring" knowledge service mode.
I think "get" has established an excellent knowledge payment mechanism, because the essence of knowledge payment is to overcome the "easy to copy" characteristics of the Internet to some extent, prevent some of its own characteristics from being copied, and establish a special barrier for its own knowledge products. The following will analyze the "acquired" products with the help of several effective ways to resist copying mentioned by KK in Necessity: immediacy, personalization, explanation, reliability, acquisition right, materialization, sponsorship and searchability.
(1) reliability
"Get" focuses on the reliability of knowledge, giving users a feeling of trust, not just trust. Relying on our own screening and polishing of products, and also relying on our own platform and the endorsement of knowledge producers, we have created a feeling of "getting" products, which will be no problem. In terms of reliability, "Get" improves the learning effect by exploring its own knowledge service methods, such as teacher-student interaction, student interaction, teacher leading the way, and even knowledge question and answer, which also enhances the user's dependence on this product.
(2) Acquisition right
Users can read products anytime and anywhere after purchasing them, which also depends on the improvement of mobile Internet infrastructure.
(3) materialization
The "get" subscription column belongs to a kind of knowledge service. After the service is completed, knowledge products are formed through simplification and packaging, and delivered to consumers, such as Five Minutes Business School in Liu Run, Road to Wealth Freedom in Li Xiaolai, and Master Wanweigang. This materialization of knowledge service transforms knowledge in bit form into knowledge in atom form, and continues to resist some malicious Internet copying and dissemination.
(4) immediacy
The "get" subscription column has immediacy to some extent. There will be corresponding teachers and course guidance in this subscription section, and there will be interaction between students. After the subscription period, these timeliness attributes disappeared, leaving the accumulated knowledge dry goods.
(5) discoverability
The emergence of "get" allows us to find the core of the knowledge we want to learn from the vast ocean of knowledge, help us screen out the knowledge we need, and let us find the knowledge we want on this platform instead of searching aimlessly on the Internet.
In the future, I wonder whether "get" will continue to strengthen its own barriers in personalization: that is, through some technical means, such as recording users' learning records, learning duration, viewing duration of each article, articles of interest, number of messages, message content, etc. , will conduct data analysis, use these analyses to generate personalized recommendations for users, and even have special learning consultants to recommend everyone's learning paths and methods for users, so as to personalize users' learning.
Fourth, write it at the end.
Knowledge-paid products such as "getting" give us the opportunity to find what we like at a lower cost and observe and learn from a professional perspective. This is the process of learning and exploring yourself.
I really like a sentence from teacher Liang Ning:
"What you absorb, you become what kind of person, what you meet, you will become what kind of person. This is your destiny. "
What makes you want to keep doing it is your talent. There is nothing better than discovering your talent. This wave of knowledge payment is actually the insurance you bought for your time in the Internet age. I hope you can love what you love, do what you do, listen to your heart and ask for nothing more.