Wang Le (left) and Jiang Nan (right), founders of Duoniu Media.

After nearly a year, Duoniu Media’s redesigned “Renren” application has been officially put into public beta. At the end of 2019, one day after it went online, the app broke into the Apple App Store social free app rankings. After Duoniu Media acquired Renren, it inherited related assets and users and began to adjust it. The new Renren continued the previous positioning of Renren as a social network focusing on campus relationships.

On December 31, 2019, regarding the details behind this transaction and the future development of Renren products, Duoniu Media Chairman Wang Le and CEO Jiang Nan accepted an exclusive interview with a reporter from the Beijing News in their office.

Chen Yizhou spoke the truth after drinking and could not accept buyers squeezing everyone's value

Beijing News: What has Duoniu done since taking over in the past year?

Jiang Nan: Renren is an old product. It was once the core product of one of the top three or four companies on the Internet, and it has accumulated huge data of 240 million real-name registered users. We spent nearly 9 months sorting out all the data and interfaces in its backend, and even today there are still many problems.

There are billions of photos and tens of billions of updates. I don’t think they will be completely sorted out by today in 2020. We need a lot of storage space. At that time, we only saw a huge amount of wealth placed there, but it was placed in many boxes and grids, and it was not uniform.

It has taken so long to integrate new apps and select new functions. Our team conducted several rounds of discussions, including surveys with the company’s senior management, industry insiders, and former Renren colleagues, and we finally determined which features should be retained. Regarding the live broadcast that users complained about, we separated it into two applications (referring to Renren and Renren Live), which also took a long time.

Beijing News: Why did you want to acquire Renren in the first place?

Jiang Nan: We have seen such a large scale and user base, covering a high proportion of real classmate relationships in China from the post-85s to the pre-95s in the past 10 years. This is the first foundation. The second one is Renren’s brand, a business merger that took the entire Internet by storm. At that time, it even surpassed the scandal between Ashin and Jolin Tsai in the hot searches. Third, we also considered whether assets can be activated. The public beta that started on December 30th answered this question. Many people chose to come back and take a look, because this platform recorded all his youth. We also calculate whether it is cost-effective to wake up this product based on our own capabilities.

We can do the math, there are more than 200 million users, there are at least 150 million net users, and then wake up 10% of them, which is 15 million, and the average wake-up price for each user in the market is 10 to 15 yuan, that is to say Our wake-up cost is 200 million, but if you want to make social products in the market now, if you spend 200 million, you are guaranteed to see nothing, and it will be a waste.

Beijing News: Is Chen Yizhou looking for a successor as outsiders say? How did you talk to Chen Yizhou?

Jiang Nan: To this day, we are still discussing whether this acquisition is correct. In fact, judging from Chen Yizhou's company assets, he does not necessarily need to sell Renren, and he is indeed our shareholder. He has a better understanding of the character of our founders, management and the capabilities of the company.

It should be said that there are many people looking for Chen Yizhou, including some big brands. These people may have better bids than us, but the final outcome may be to use up the last residual value of Renren and close it down. This is emotionally unacceptable to Chen Yizhou.

Wang Le: Around 2017, when the weather was very cold, we met Chen Yizhou once in Japan. We are all old users of Renren, so we naturally talked about products.

Jiang Nan: I have a deep impression. We drank wine that day and had an in-depth communication in an informal state. We talked a lot about our views on the future of the Internet, including discussions on various products, including how to view Renren. Then we complained about him, saying that you would commit suicide by bundling the live broadcasts together. We expressed straightforwardly that if you are still interested and think this matter can be done, we think we can do it, and you trust us.

Beijing News: When did Chen Yizhou finally make the decision to sell Renren?

Jiang Nan: Chen Yizhou said that we would talk with each other when we return to Beijing. In fact, he began to have an idea in his mind. Of course, someone also gave him a quotation. It seems that the final decision will be made in the summer, right?

Wang Le: When it comes to negotiating the business terms, the terms have already been decided.

Beijing News: Have your quotations changed during this period?

Jiang Nan: The price has not changed much because Chen Yizhou himself is also a shareholder of Duoniu.

Wang Le: Renren is a listed company, and shareholders such as the Audit Committee, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and SoftBank are all reviewing it, so it is impossible for Chen Yizhou to sell at a low price. Our shareholders also include Shenzhen Venture Capital, Haier, and Perfect World, so it is impossible to deviate from its value.

In 8 years, there is no longer a leader in campus social networking in the Chinese market

"Beijing News": What is the value of Renren today?

Jiang Nan: In the history of China’s Internet, there are many products with more than 200 million registered users, but there are too few products with real names and strong social relationships. It was once Chinese, there is no doubt about it.

More than 200 million real-name registered users. I know who you are, who are your classmates? Or even who are your classmates’ classmates? If you want to socialize on the Internet in China, the scene is more important than the social interaction itself. Renren used to be the top spot on Chinese campuses. It has been 8 years since it went on the market and there is still no other Renren.

"Beijing News": Has the social demand behind this been generalized and no longer requires a specific application?

Jiang Nan: Games, videos, and live broadcasts are all light social activities, and they are all typical products in which entertainment accounts for more than 60%. Campus is a special scene, and it is about socializing with acquaintances. Renren is an ecology of acquaintances and a scene with clear needs. It does not mean that users are distracted by other social activities. The biggest regret about Renren's product is that it didn't stick to this issue.

"Beijing News": What problems has Renren encountered?

Jiang Nan: When the company went public, it faced a lot of pressure, especially profitability. He made a lot of products at that time, but he did not continue to make efforts in social networking. what is the problem? It’s too expensive and can’t make any money. But if you look back in hindsight, today, the monetization efficiency on the mobile Internet is dozens of times that on the PC. It did not persist until the market had better monetization returns for it.

"Beijing News": Why didn't Chen Yizhou seize the mobile Internet?

Wang Le: Renren has four major concepts on the market. Renren.com corresponds to China, 56.com corresponds to China, Nuomi corresponds to China, and Renren Games corresponds to Zynga. Therefore, after the listing, the market value also became the top three Internet companies in China. , second only to Tencent and Baidu.

Then there are two problems. First, you are losing so much money every day, so you are forced to do something; second, you have already achieved a market value of tens of billions (at that time, Renren's stock price was less than ten billion at its peak) , then we have to achieve 100 billion, so at that time we made a lot of layouts and made a lot of attempts. And it is difficult for us to look at these things from the perspective of hindsight.

At that time, Renren had discussed the merger with China Mobile's Fetion. If it can really be done at that time, then today's mobile social landscape may have a different look.

Jiang Nan: Let’s take a look at what we have experienced. We have also experienced the rise of other products overseas, but why is it still so popular today? Just keep doing it.

Wang Le: At least I didn’t give up completely. I started working on the VR line and the AI ​​artificial intelligence line. Before these new layouts come into play, it’s right to stick to social networking. When a company moves towards a new stage, it is common for it to be confused at one stage, which is nothing more than diversification and internationalization. The problems that everyone encounters are not unique.

The new version was tested by Renren, and the large influx of users once caused the system to crash.

Beijing News: What did Duoniu inherit from Renren?

Jiang Nan: The team is mainly composed of newcomers, and there are also some engineers from Renren. For products, we can only say that we should take over and inherit them first, and development will take time. Duoniu itself has a variety of products and its business is healthy. We will not pursue everyone's returns in the short term.

Chen Yizhou helped me prove how correct I was in choosing this path. The scene on campus was real. Doing things on the Chinese Internet and finding the right path will cost you a lot. Secondly, with such huge user assets and scale, we have a good customer acquisition base and scenario. Third, we own the Renren brand and trademark.

We re-made the app, but it contains a lot of interfaces for old products, and I still need to make stable iterations on these.

"Beijing News": After the acquisition, how did Renren arrange the team to take over? How to manage?

Jiang Nan: In internal management, it is an independent business team, and it is currently in the process of recruiting employees. If you look at it individually, Renren should be the one who currently invests the most troops in our team. From the business reporting line, we also have a partner with a technical background who comes and takes charge of more daily work.

Wang Le: In this Renren project, we actually need the support of everyone in the entire company.

"Beijing News": How is the product operating at present?

Jiang Nan: We did a small test version in October. We didn’t expect such a large number of users to come in, which put us under a lot of pressure. I can't reveal the exact numbers, but it's in the millions. We were seriously underprepared at the time. Calling from bandwidth and user data interfaces took up too many resources, causing many users to experience system crashes during use. After the public beta, we temporarily increased the bandwidth, and the peak value did not drop until 1:40 a.m. the next day.

"Beijing News": What innovations have been made in the products since taking over?

Jiang Nan: We have also thought about this issue before, asking whether users are tourists after coming here? We have developed a recommendation mechanism, using the technology of thousands of people to recommend users to browse relevant content of their friends. In addition to nearby people, some new features such as exercise recording have also been added. It is currently only a public beta version and there is still a lot of room for improvement.

Wang Le: Technology has been developing continuously in recent years, and there have been many innovations in social gameplay. Renren needs to make up a lot of lessons in social networking. Of course, there are also many innovation points, and we will continue to invest in this direction.

Jiang Nan: As long as there is something new online, we will try it.

"Beijing News": Do you think real relationships are one of the values ​​of Renren, so are people still willing to socialize under real names nowadays? Especially when encountering those dark histories.

Jiang Nan: The state stipulates that social products must have real names. If you do not use real names, you cannot register. Mobile phone number binding has been added to the product. As for the so-called "black history", we feel that this matter is actually a friendly joke, and people mostly laugh at it. From the data we have seen, the proportion of users themselves deleting their accounts and protecting the privacy of their accounts is very low. Black history is more of a joke, not a real fear of this thing.

"Beijing News" Will Renren encounter the same user privacy protection issues?

Jiang Nan: First of all, we try our best to protect all users' privacy as completely as possible. We even have very strict privacy requirements during the entire transaction process. Secondly, we have set privacy permissions so you can choose who is visible. Adding new features to old products is a huge headache for us. We still have to debug various interfaces compulsorily because we hope that users will have their own choices after they come on board.

Wang Le: It must be complete during the transfer process so that it has no copies and is unique.

Jiang Nan: During the acquisition, we spent at least four and a half months to check the integrity of all data, make relevant data confidentiality agreements and privacy policy agreements, and design a migration plan. The migration of Renren directly physically moved the servers and handed over thousands of servers.

Forget about nostalgia, social networking is still the best way to reach over 100 million users

"Beijing News": Are you worried about users returning from Renren to WeChat, which has strong connections?

Jiang Nan: Actually this is a prejudice. Everyone has a prejudice against WeChat itself. WeChat is obviously a communication tool with social attributes, and everything will come back to WeChat. But, as a user, where do you post what content? Where are you talking about? Who to talk to? It's all the user's choice, and everyone needs different scenarios.

Regarding Renren's return, everyone showed their nostalgia for their youth in this matter. We have released an H5 page that can display how many days and how many updates you have posted on Renren. We see that many people are forwarding it to Moments.

Wang Le: We have a user who logs in to the website to check in every day for more than 4,500 consecutive days.

Beijing News: How long do you think this nostalgia can last?

Jiang Nan: Do we really post a lot of things in WeChat Moments? With all due respect, my life and my work are all tied together. There is nothing real about our circle of friends.

Why can we use the word "bet" on this transaction? Why do we bet on its assets, its brand, and its user behavior? It's because the scene where we bet is a real social scene. You and I are classmates. I'm going to complain about a certain thing. I want to tell the truth. Will you amplify it? Won't. Chinese people attach great importance to friendship between classmates and comrades-in-arms.

Wang Le: What we are most concerned about recently is whether old users can return smoothly, because after they graduate from college, some of them have changed their email addresses and mobile phones. Can their accounts from back then be successfully retrieved? Can the past photo history be saved smoothly and safely? Users can use Renren to connect with many friends who have lost contact. This is the first step. Only after the first step is completed can the following actions be taken.

Jiang Nan: We believe that many people come, but they may leave again, or delete things they don’t want to see, or even set them to close. But what we can see is that most users have still settled down and have in-depth exchanges with their friends, classmates and good friends like them. At present, these users are very stable.

"Beijing News": Who are your competitors on the campus track currently?

Jiang Nan: When we first came out for testing, someone said that a product called Friends was also coming back to the market (Friends is a product of Tencent). I said that it had nothing to do with us. We didn't set up an imaginary opponent for ourselves. In other words, my biggest competitor is Renren in 2011.

Wang Le: Times have changed, and it is no longer possible to attract users by signing up for free chicken legs, stealing food, or grabbing parking spaces. Researching new user needs and satisfying them well is far more interesting than saying what opponent I am looking for.

"Beijing News": Why does the entire industry attach great importance to social products in 2019?

Wang Le: Today, whether you are doing games, e-commerce, or anything else, the threshold is very high. If you invest hundreds of millions, it is very likely that there will be no sound. However, is there no opportunity in this industry to use small things to make big gains? With a team of 40 or 50 people, you can create a product with hundreds of millions of users. I'm afraid social networking is one of the few tracks in this. Socializing with clear scenarios is worth investing in, and it is better than spending time on other things.

"Beijing News": Are there any plans related to financing and listing?

Jiang Nan: We have some plans and ideas, and many investors have communicated with us. We are not particularly urgent. At that time, acquiring Renren's listed companies was indeed an option, but we did not do that.

Wang Le: We chose to buy assets, which is simpler, because we don’t want to engage in listed capital operations, we just want to socialize on campus.

Biography of Renren.com

The predecessor of Renren is Xiaonei.com, which was founded in 2005 by Wang Xing, the founder of Meituan. He was obsessed with the "six degrees of connections" theory and expected to make a social product. Initially, Xiaonei.com was aimed at the United States, requiring users to register using an email address ending in edu, and the users were limited to university students. By offering "chicken legs" for registration, we began to promote users in universities in Beijing and other places.

In 2006, Chen Yizhou, who had founded the 5Q campus network, acquired the school network from Wang Xing and formed Renren. This year and the popularity of Twitter, entrepreneurship in the social field has started a climax and entered the Web 2.0 era. In 2010, Renren merged with its rival Kaixin.com.

In May 2011, Renren was built as the "Chinese version" and listed on the New York Stock Exchange. At that time, the opening price increased 39.28% from the issue price. The market value of US$7.483 billion surpassed many established Chinese Internet companies in one fell swoop, and once reached as high as Ranked second in Chinese concept stocks in the United States, it later became the third largest market value of listed Internet companies in China after Tencent and Baidu.

However, with the rise of other social platforms, the arrival of mobile Internet, and students starting to enter the workplace, Renren began to fall behind. From 2011 to 2015, although Renren made a lot of attempts, including launching Nuomi.com, Jingwei.com, etc., and acquiring the video website 56.com, its business involves group buying, videos, games, etc. But at this time, senior executives resigned, quarterly revenue and net profit fell sharply, and the company experienced large-scale layoffs.

Regarding Renren, in 2016, Chen Yizhou said in an interview that Renren was already an Internet financial company, and the social networking team only had about 200 people left. In the same year, Chen Yizhou vigorously promoted Renren Live Broadcast, and links to Renren.com automatically redirected traffic, which attracted a lot of doubts from users. The live broadcast business has plummeted to less than 200,000 in early 2018.

In 2018, Chen Yizhou announced the blockchain project "Renrenfang" and the token "". He hoped to apply it in multiple business scenarios. However, he soon encountered an interview with the regulatory authorities and had to withdraw the coins. In August 2018, Chen Yizhou lamented in a long article, "I no longer know how to socialize."

On November 14, Renren announced that the assets related to Renren’s social platform business were sold to Duoniu Media for US$20 million in cash, while Renren received US$40 million in shares issued by Duoniu Media Cayman Company. Duoniu Media was once owned by Renren, and Chen Yizhou is still on its board of directors.

On the same day, Chen Yizhou issued an article stating that a large number of external teams and companies had contacted him, and he chose Duoniu Media because the latter was “developing rapidly and has a good business model.” Founders Wang Lehe Dianzi (real name “Jiang Nan”) I like to research products, "Their company's market is big enough and they have enough strength to take over Renren."

Beijing News reporter Liang Chen, editor Xu Chao, Wang Jinyu, proofreader Li Xiangling