For internet companies, user numbers—or rather, traffic—were certainly important. They could be called a company's lifeblood.
But after acquiring traffic, how to monetize it was an even more important factor!
If your traffic could not be monetized, then it was junk traffic. It meant the company could only keep burning money to maintain that massive traffic, paying enormous monthly server and bandwidth costs, along with hefty staff salaries.
Yet there was no corresponding income...
High expenses and low income—what future could a company like that possibly have?
That was why ICQ, which had once swept the world, had been forced to sell itself to a traditional media giant at a relatively low price because it could not find a way to monetize its traffic.
And Penguin was now facing the same predicament.
It had enough users and enough traffic, yet it had never found a suitable way to monetize that traffic.
On the surface, it looked extremely "prosperous," but in reality, danger lurked everywhere!
One term was especially fitting for Penguin's current state: "false prosperity"...
Since user numbers were still growing fairly quickly, Penguin's investors remained patient and were willing to give the company more time.
But as user growth slowed, the importance of revenue would become increasingly apparent.
If the company still could not find a suitable way to monetize its traffic by then, the investors' patience would be exhausted, and Penguin would go from being a "unicorn company" to a worthless one...
Penguin had now reached this critical stage.
It had enough users. It needed to figure out how to turn those users into financial revenue!
To that end, Pony Ma and Penguin's management had come up with many ideas.
For example, paid registration, QQ Club, premium QQ numbers, advertising, and so on.
All of these had been