Upon hearing Qu Qiongying's words, Bilibili's boss, Xu Yi, immediately went pale.
Because Qu Qiongying had directly hit upon one of the key reasons Bilibili had been willing to offer Lin Feng 0.5% of its shares in exchange for his exclusive video livestreaming rights.
Aside from recognizing Lin Feng's enormous influence on Bilibili and wanting to prevent another incident where nearly thirty percent of viewers were lured away,
the more important reason was that they wanted to use Lin Feng, a major internet celebrity, to advertise Bilibili for free and continuously bring in new users.
That was why they had been willing to offer 0.5% of their shares to win Lin Feng over.
One had to know that even Director Ao, who had greatly contributed to Bilibili's development, produced many excellent videos, and wielded tremendous influence on the platform, had not received any shares.
The reason was that Director Ao could not continuously funnel traffic to Bilibili like Lin Feng could, bringing in new users and allowing Bilibili to grow rapidly.
If Director Ao had possessed several million fans back then and could have brought Bilibili millions of new users, Bilibili would also have offered 0.5% of its shares without hesitation to win him over.
"How much do you want?"
Xu Yi's expression had turned somewhat unpleasant. After all, every extra fraction meant cutting another piece of flesh from himself and the others.
"How much we want will have to be decided by our boss in the end. But personally, I believe that anything less than 1% would be an insult to our boss."
"At least 1% of the shares?"
Xu Yi considered it painfully, calculating whether he should offer 1% of the shares in exchange for Lin Feng's exclusive video livestreaming rights.
But in Qu Qiongying's eyes, that expression had already invisibly revealed his bottom line.
No wonder someone in his previous life had said that Xu Yi was unsuited for business and only suited to managing Bilibili. Just the way his delight showed so plainly on his face made it hard for him to go far in business.
While they were talking, Lin Feng was also considering whether to join Bilibili. Granted, Bilibili had been impressive in his previous life and had successfully become Great Xia's YouTube.
But the previous life was the previous life, and the present was the present. The current Bilibili was still a pathetic video website.
Whether in user numbers or video quantity, Bilibili could not beat AcFun, much less compete with video website apps like Youku, Tudou, Tencent, iQIYI, and Kuaishou.
"0.7%."
After hesitating for a moment, Xu Yi ultimately decided to increase the offer by another 0.2%.
But before Qu Qiongying could continue, Lin Feng, who had remained silent until then, suddenly spoke. Shaking his head slightly, he said,
"Whether it's 0.7% or even 1%, it still seems far too stingy."
"Huh?"
Everyone present was shocked by Lin Feng's words. Did he want even more?
Xu Yi, who already felt that 1% was too much, instantly looked displeased, so angry that he nearly wanted to leave.
But Lin Feng ignored Xu Yi's ugly expression and directly raised a question that made Xu Yi freeze on the spot.
"Bilibili has been unable to turn a profit since its establishment in 2009. Do you want to turn losses into profits?"
"Turn losses into profits?"
Xu Yi raised his brows. He had not expected the discussion to jump from Lin Feng's exclusive video livestreaming rights to how Bilibili could turn losses into profits. Wasn't that leap a little too large?
"That's right, turning losses into profits!"
Lin Feng nodded, then said confidently,
"As for how to make Bilibili profitable and self-sustaining, I have a complete profit-development plan and a twenty-year paid license for a recommendation algorithm that can perfectly solve your problems.
With these two things, Bilibili can absolutely turn losses into profits. In one or two years, you may even be able to contend with sites like Youku and Tencent.
Of course, if you want to obtain them, you'll naturally have to pay a small price."
As someone from 2024, Lin Feng knew the rise and fall of major companies in the internet industry like the back of his hand.
Now that Bilibili had suddenly come knocking, Lin Feng realized something he had long overlooked and understood a shortcut straight to the top.
That shortcut was recommendation algorithms!
In A Concise History of Internet Information Distribution, written by the famous expert Teacher Jin, the internet information landscape was directly divided into four eras.
The first era was the directory index—portal era. During this period, the four major portal websites were the gods of all other internet companies.
Because portal websites controlled the gateways to internet traffic. If you wanted to become popular, you had to obediently pay the portal websites. As a result, all four major portal websites went public.
The second era was the search engine—search era. As the internet developed during this age, the amount of information began expanding without limit, and a single internet portal could no longer meet users' demand for information.
Under such circumstances, people were forced to learn how to use search engines. Thus, companies like Qiandu and Google rose to prominence. They controlled the gateways to internet traffic, and their peak market values were enough to make people take notice.
The third era was the subscription and following—the era of divided powers. Its defining feature was that, with the arrival of the mobile age, every company had its own software, forming its own little circle.
Information in this era was exclusive and closed off. For example, a novel could only be read on a certain novel platform, while a TV drama or movie could only be watched on a certain platform. People were divided into countless information islands.
The fourth era was the recommendation algorithm—precision marketing era.
The defining feature of this era was the use of big-data recommendation algorithms to analyze every action taken by customers, understanding data such as users' hobbies, characteristics, preferences, and recently followed events.
The goal was to precisely push advertisements for everything—news, videos, novels, products, and more—into users' hands.
From then on, one would find that entire categories of products, videos, novels, and news were all things one liked or cared about, making it easy to keep scrolling for a very long time.
Among all this, recommendation algorithms were undoubtedly the key to everything. Whoever had the stronger recommendation algorithm could retain more users.
Take the two major short-video apps, Douyin and Kuaishou, for example. Kuaishou had clearly developed several years earlier and accumulated a massive user base, so why was it ultimately overtaken and crushed by Douyin instead?
The reason was that Kuaishou's recommendation algorithm leaned more toward protecting major uploaders. In other words, the strong grew stronger while the weak grew weaker, and the cost of becoming a major uploader was extremely high.
Douyin's recommendation algorithm, on the other hand, was comparatively ruthless. Under Douyin's recommendation algorithm, all traffic was controlled by the algorithm.
Major uploaders with millions or tens of millions of followers naturally enjoyed many advantages there, but once their videos performed poorly, Douyin's ruthless algorithm would not treat them any differently.
For small and mid-sized uploaders, or even individual users, as long as their videos were high quality or had a viral hook, they could become overnight sensations and gain tens, hundreds, thousands, or even millions of followers at any time.
Under such circumstances, many small and mid-sized uploaders, as well as ordinary users, naturally preferred to post their videos on Douyin first.
As a result, Douyin had more and more excellent videos, combined with the precise targeting of its recommendation algorithm...
High-quality videos plus precisely recommended content that interested users—when those two ultimate moves were combined, it would have been strange if Douyin had not taken off and defeated Kuaishou.
Please vote with recommendation tickets and monthly passes.
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