Reading from Niubo to hammer

“ Reading is a small sanctuary that you can carry with you.” When the user left Maugham with a hammer reading in the Weibo commentary, Li Yan Gan Ruzhi. In his view, if the nation’s most popular news aggregators don’t provide this feeling, he’s interested in doing it.

On July 3, 2013, Luo Yonghao announced the closure of Niu Bo. At that time, Li Yan was still a journalist of “The World”. In his view, this “represents the end of a public speech era” and is worth writing about. Unfortunately, Luo Yonghao refused the interview.

The topic was not shelved because of the absence of the No. 1 figure. Subsequently, Li Yan interviewed Huang Bin, co-founder of Niu Bo.com, and dozens of bloggers of Niu Bo. They published “Niu Bo’s recollection, a kind of emotion and Exhausted.

This article was transmitted nine times by Luo Yonghao on Weibo. I can see it every time. If I know the level of reporters is so reliable, I will not refuse to accept the interview.

At this point, the two men established a connection because of a report and forged a fortune after two years. At the time, Li Yan was looking for a way out in a “business in the rivers and down the river”. The former was just ready to do a hammer reading.

The decline of the traditional media is almost everyone’s consensus, and Li Yan has been sympathetic to it and has also been entangled. The trace that can be seen is that in the interview that was very suitable for his career, he and many writers discussed the relationship between reading and the times:

"All Niu Bo authors interviewed by the bloggers of the blogging world believe that (the end of the blog era) does not mean that people no longer need to read long articles. Huang Zhangjin said that there are few high quality and valuable articles, but even if Only 1% of people are willing to take the time to read and are a large group in absolute numbers."

This is undoubtedly another consensus. According to Li Yan, Luo Yonghao founded Niubo.com because of his inability to tolerate good blog content and was flooded with a lot of rubbish-filled blog sites. The same original intention also applies to hammer reading. “The clean reading of the information overload era is about the same thing. ".

However, Luo Yonghao did not give Li Yan anything explicit except for the word “Hammer Reading”. For a long time, Li Yan was wondering what the hammer reading should look like.

If the reading of the hammer is placed on the mobile phone manufacturer's standard news app, its competitors' methods are simple and crude and effective. In Li Yan's opinion:

"As a mobile phone company, it often does not have the media strength, so simply working with an APP like this headline has the advantage that the content itself is very mature and does not need to invest in technology and copyright."

In fact, the hammer reading beta is the product. On December 29th, 2015, when the hammer reading beta was released together with T2, it could basically be understood as a hammer version of ZAKER with more than 1,000 content sites.

This is the result of "receiving", obviously contrary to its original intention.

Therefore, after a period of operation, the number of hammer-reading sites was reduced from more than 1,000 to more than 100, and the small words at the bottom of the article were also basically replaced by "transcoded by hammer."

The choice of content in Li Yan and his team, the principle is that this product should reflect the self-orientation and value judgment of Hammer Technology. Of course, there must be the authorization of the content party. For users, this is a multidimensional issue.

According to Li Yan, since hammer reading was released, many people have been deeply saddened by monotonous site classification: Why only six? Why are there no sports, constellations, stars these sections?

As an in-depth sports content demander, Li Yan understands these appeals. On the one hand, these appeals can already be well met through other channels. On the other hand, taking sports as an example, its content basically cannot escape the four categories of coaches' classes, player transfer, competition results, and player's lace. These contents are just outside the orientation.

“But there is no sporting content in the hammer reading? Yes. For example, after the release of Guojin Jiangjin’s “Prison of the People’s Gate,” and “The Emperor of Basketball + Business Talent: LeBron’s Perfect Life” by Fortune Chinese website, these articles seem to us to be sports. The content is quite valuable and it is what we like. This content has never been provided by a sports site."

Of course, even if they take the fine line, whether it is more than 100 content sites, or 6 content sections, Li Yan also said that far enough, but based on this, a high proportion of high-quality content can already meet the daily needs of users.

Later in the day, Luo Yonghao, who had left the dispensers, suddenly asked Li Yan: “The hammer reading is very nice. What difficulties do you have in your job? What do I need to support? ” Li Yan said: “ Rarely, I have to think about it. ”

In fact, you don’t need to think that money is the biggest difficulty, but in Li Yan’s view, “The construction of the site is not a need for the hammer to read the product form (help).” Since the realization is far out of reach, investment means loss.

"To be honest, I did not work in the Internet company before, and I did an APP across the border. The difficulty of everything was more than I thought. Licensing was one of them. " Li Yan said.

The most obvious difficulty is that there are no advantages to the content side: the money, the flow, and the hammer reading. In addition, some sites are not exposed to the rain:

"Some sites own companies that have their own content platform, so they are not too happy to do such external authorizations. There are some that don't give any aggregation platform, I let users look at me, I believe that my content So that you can already distribute yourself without relying on you."

The result is not a personal will. Li Yan can't think of a better way to solve these problems. This situation is very similar to that of Niu Bo. Luo Yonghao tried to persuade those high-quality bloggers to migrate from other platforms to improve quality.

In fact, apart from the increase in copyright fees, the biggest difference between the two is that hammer reading is often not an individual but an institution. It is more objective to weigh the pros and cons. In this regard, Li Yan accepted calmly and was full of expectations.

Once, when a former colleague signed an authorization agreement with him, he said: "In fact, there are other brands who talk to us. If there is such a possibility in the future, we will be monopolized by other platforms, and you will only be able to get offline from you. Li Yan said: "Yes, when we make more money, we will buy you back with higher prices."

However, Li Yan also understands that hammer reading will not become an app with a large amount of users, and it is difficult to achieve high business achievement. He just believes: “ Everyone has a romantic relationship with reading, you may Just do not know, good, interesting, good reading is actually buried in your heart, you need."