This article comes from the official account "Capital Jingwei" of Wechat. The author is Jun Yuqiao.
Himalayan FM completed a new round of financing contracts of 4 billion yuan on Aug. 13, with a post-investment valuation of 24 billion yuan. In addition, the Himalayan FM has completed the construction of the VIE framework and started preparations for the listing of Hong Kong stocks, and will officially log on to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in the second half of 2019. The Himalayas set a precedent for paying for knowledge in 2016, but driven by a variety of factors, there has been a "cooling" situation recently.
According to media reports, Himalayan FM completed a new round of financing contracts of 4 billion yuan on August 13, with Tencent, Goldman Sachs Group and Pan-Atlantic Capital participating in the investment. this round of financing will be delivered in the near future, with a post-investment valuation of 24 billion yuan. In addition, the Himalayan FM has completed the construction of the VIE architecture and started preparations for the listing of Hong Kong stocks.It will officially log on to the HKEx in the second half of 2019.
Since the beginning of this year, there have been numerous rumors that the Himalayan FM will IPO, and the officials have responded with "false news", which has aroused people's curiosity. It is understood that the Himalayan FM, which has always kept a low profile, now has 470 million end-users and daily sales of nearly 200 million yuan, making it a super unicorn in today's knowledge payment world.
Now it's time to unveil it.
Himalayan FM uses voice to "sell knowledge"
Himalayan FM is a well-deserved market leader in the field of online audio in China.
According to the 2017-2018 China online Audio Market Research report released by Ai Media Consulting in April this year, Himalayan FM ranked first in China's online audio penetration (the number of APP active users / network-wide users) with 5.12%, while Dragonfly FM and LIZHI INC FM ranked second and third with 2.29% and 2.18%, respectively.
Compared with the industry position of Himalayan FM, its market voice has not been very loud.In fact, the Himalayan FM can be called the "darling" of the capital world.According to incomplete statistics from ID:zishijw, Himalayan FM has completed six rounds of financing since 2014, totaling nearly 1 billion yuan (see figure below). What is intriguing isIn the latest round of financing, Tencent appeared for the first time, which may mean that Tencent officially extended his commercial tentacles to the audio field.Although the exact amount of investment is not clear, in the era of "standing in line BAT", once targeted by the giants, it may not be easy for Himalayan FM to be left alone.
Himalayan FM is frequently favored by capital and is closely related to its rapid development. In March 2013, Himalayan App was officially launched, when mobile Internet applications were in full bloom. After research, Himalayan FM cut into the audio market segment, broke through the restrictions on the use of scenarios by broadcast enthusiasts, and greatly met the needs of users through rich and colorful content, thus entering a period of rapid development: 10 million users were achieved in six months, and in early May 2014, eight months later, the number of users exceeded 50 million. It reached 120 million in January 2015, eight months later, and reached 200 million users in September 2015.
At a time of rapid expansion of users, the revenue of Himalayan FM is still relatively simple, mainly advertising, and mainly display and audio advertising. 2016 is a crucial year for Himalayan FM.In June of that year, Himalayan FM was the first to pay for knowledge and held the first "123knowledge Carnival"24-hour sales revenue reached 50.88 million yuan, the second sales is as high as 196 million yuan, paid content is also subdivided from workplace, business, finance and other categories to vertical areas, becoming a comprehensive paid content platform.
At present, through the exclusive copyright of PGC+UGC+ and the complete fan reward model, Himalayan FM has built an audio ecosystem, and the payment system is becoming more and more mature. In addition, it also develops a variety of intelligent hardware products, which can not only seize the next-generation traffic entrance, but also bring a certain amount of income.
The latest data show that the total number of users of Himalayan FM has exceeded 470 million. There are 5 million VJs in the platform, including 200000 certified VJs, with a market share of 73%. The average daily listening time of active users is more than 135min.
Current situation of knowledge payment market
According to the New Media Blue Book: China New Media Development report (2018), by the end of 2017, the scale of the domestic knowledge payment industry was about 4.91 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of nearly three times.It is estimated that by 2020, the scale of knowledge payment industry will reach 23.5 billion yuan.
By the end of 2017, Himalayan FM firmly accounted for half of the knowledge payment market (see chart below), ranking second, but its size was less than Himalayan FM 1/3, and dragonfly FM ranked third. In addition, according to Tianyan survey data, the current Himalayan FM competition as many as 50, worth, Zhihu Inc. live, Douban time and other well-known payment platforms, are covetously wanting to eat this piece of fat.
Let's first take a look at the progress of the remaining two troika companies in the audio industry, namely, Dragonfly FM and LIZHI INC FM, in the field of paying for knowledge.
It is understood that the action of dragonfly FM is relatively late. In June 2017, it launched the "short, Big and tight pointing to the North" payment program, with more than 100000 users and more than 20 million streams in a month, thus gaining a reputation in the field of knowledge payment. This column not only establishes the market image of dragonfly FM, but also sets up a whole set of production and distribution process of paid products, and locates the paid content in the aspect of humanities.Only three months after the launch of knowledge-paid products, Dragonfly FM completed a new round of financing, with an amount of 1 billion yuan, setting a single-round financing record for the Internet audio industry at that time.
At present, Dragonfly FM has 300 million users and 12 million daily active users. The main profit models are advertising marketing, cooperation with operators, content payment and fan economy. Its paid business accounts for more than half of the monthly revenue and is growing.
The positioning of LIZHI INC FM is different from that of Himalayan FM and Dragonfly FM. Its user group is very young and has a stronger demand for entertainment, so the narrow sense of content payment is not suitable. Based on the above reasons, LIZHI INC FM launched the voice live streaming feature and launched the virtual gift feature in October 2016, which increased virtual income by 10 million in three months, and the highest share of the voice anchor's income can reach more than 100,000 yuan a month.At the beginning of this year, LIZHI INC FM upgraded the previous slogan "everyone is an anchor" to "together with voice" and changed the Chinese brand name "LIZHI INC FM" to "LIZHI INC".
By the end of June 2018, LIZHI INC's total registered users had exceeded 200 million, covering nearly 40 million active users per month, and had more than 100 million original audio programs. Relying on the voice live broadcast business, LIZHI INC has embarked on a different path of commercialization.
At present, the most popular knowledge payment platform is undoubtedly the product founded by Luo Zhenyu. In November 2015, APP was launched, and the momentum of development is extremely rapid. In March 2016, it was announced that the total number of users exceeded 5.58 million. In June, it launched five paid content products, including "Li Xiang Commercial Internal reference" and "Hecaitou". Among them, the 20-day revenue of "Li Xiang Commercial Internal reference" exceeded 10 million yuan, which shocked the industry. After that, a series of content products were quite popular. Li Xiaolai's column "the Road to Wealth and Freedom" received 50,000 subscriptions in one month, with a revenue of 10 million yuan, while Xue Zhaofeng's economics column exceeded 250000 subscriptions in March 2018. set a record of 50 million yuan in revenue for a single column.
According to data previously released by APP, it had more than 17 million users as of March 2018.By May this year, Luo Zhenyu announced in his personal Weibo Corp that the number of users had exceeded 20 million.The above data show that there is still a lot of room for growth under the strong suppression of the Himalayan FM.
However, the knowledge payment industry seems to be in full swing, but it is beginning to show a "weak" state. At present, there are more and more voices saying that the future development of knowledge payment is not good-looking. The capital gentleman believes that platforms such as Himalayan FM, get, and dragonfly FM have basically eaten up the knowledge payment market, and under the Matthew effect, newcomers have lost the opportunity to compete for the market. At the same time, there are more and more homogenized content on various platforms, resulting in a decline in the repurchase rate of paid products. More importantly, in this era of selling anxiety, many users find that the effect is not as good as expected, driven by a variety of factors.The knowledge-paying industry may "cool down".