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11-14 2022
Before
you know it, the social media market in the United States is about to change again
In mid-October, an anonymous social app called Gas quietly topped the US App \nStore free list, sitting for nearly half a month. Real-time data shows that gas downloads doubled from October 12 to 16.
For a long time, T-Tok has been the hottest social app in the United States, and it has been moving forward since surpassing Facebook in 2020. According to Sensor \nTower, T-Tok exceeded 3.5 billion historical downloads in the first quarter of this year, making it the world's most downloaded social app.
But now, T-Tok has finally met a strong opponent, and not from the family of arch-rival Meta's application, but from a new team.
The United States has always been a hotbed of social apps, and a large number of sensational phenomenal applications have been born in the past ten years. Some of them have taken root like Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat, becoming social giants that dominate one side; There are also many apps like fleeting meteors, which cannot escape the fate of decline.
Which fork in the road the future of Gas will lead is difficult to determine. But for the wailing American social application industry, Gas's popularity comes at the right time.
Replicating Facebook's success trajectory, what exactly is Gas for?
The speed at which Gas became popular is indeed scary.
At the time of its first summit on October 12, Gas was downloaded 500,000 times. That's certainly not on par with T-Tok, Instagram, Twitter, but the growth is staggering.
The
initial version was launched at the end of August, and the app was called Melt at the time. Subsequently, the technical team carried out two functional iterations and name changes in a short period of time, and the gas that was currently popular in the United States was not officially updated until September 29. Strictly speaking, it took less than two months for the new version of Gas to become popular.
In addition to the short launch time, the reason why this achievement shocked the industry and the media was two points: the open area was limited and there was almost zero publicity.
Gas was initially only available for download in seven states: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, and Illinois, and was only aimed at high school students. At press time, Gas has been expanded to 12 states, but the rules for high school users have not changed.
In addition, since its launch, the Gas start-up team has kept a low profile, focusing only on updates and iterations, not buying volume on other platforms, and not cooperating with KOLs to invest resources. In other words, the results that Gas has achieved today are all due to word of mouth and word of mouth among high school students in 12 states in the United States.
American middle school students love Gas so much, the reason is not difficult to understand: only for high school students, the user composition is very single, and it is more convenient for peers to communicate; The features are simple but practical enough, anyway, the platform is bent on making users compliment each other.
The operation and function of Gas are almost no difficult: enter the homepage and select a school and add friends, the system will automatically push questions for you, select the friend that best matches the answer to the question and send "pick", waiting for a response from friends. After completing the above steps, you can lie on the couch and wait for your friend to receive your compliment, while expecting your friend to send you a "pick".
The emergence of Gas can be said to provide a platform for American high school students to praise each other. Limiting the scope of openness to high schools and requiring users to choose a middle school and then add friends gives social behavior a layered characteristic.
Interacting anonymously in your circle of friends is another selling point of Gas. The user's "pick" is sent anonymously, and when he receives a "pick" from a friend in the same school, the message will only show the other party's gender, grade and other vague identity information. GAS's design team believes that this practice can improve users' sense of security and reduce the risk of personal information leakage.
Of course, the anonymity mechanism also provides imagination for the commercialization of Gas: users can pay to unlock friend information.
Gas has a membership called God Mode, which costs $6.99/month. Users who have God Mode enabled are given permission to display the full name of the friend who sent them "pick" twice a month, as well as the ability to view the initials of the friend as many times as possible.
Although the media likes to compare Gas with the current hot T-Tok and Instagram, from the perspective of popularity, Gas is more similar to the old overlord Facebook.
As we all know, Facebook also started from the campus and was popular by students. In the initial stage, Facebook was positioned as a real-name social networking site for college students, initially only open to Zuckerberg's alma mater, Harvard University, and then expanded to Columbia University, Stanford University and other well-known universities.
No matter what the era, young people, especially students, are the workhorses of social media.
According to the latest Pew Research Center report, as of the first half of 2022, 95% of teens in the United States are loyal users of social apps. Among them, only 35% of teenage users have always used one app or almost no use of two or more apps at the same time, and more teenagers have a wide range of hobbies, are highly receptive to new things, and can pay for multiple social apps at the same time.
In addition, a large number of teenage users say that it is difficult for them to leave social apps completely. In terms of time usage, as many as 55% of users believe that the amount of time spent on social apps is reasonable, and only 36% of users say they spend too much time. This means that user stickiness of social apps is still at a high level, and demand is also very strong.
In view of this, grasping the pain points of young people and providing functions and services that can make them crazy and addicted to them is the key to the success of social apps. The difference is only that Facebook captured the trend of real-name social networking and picture social networking, and today's Gas is stepping on the pain points of youth social and anonymous social networking.
However, there are many social applications that have become popular in the United States in the past few years, and very few can take root and grow into towering trees. Young Gas doesn't yet know which fork in the road he's going towards.
Hidden worries after popularity
: security, commercialization Like
other social apps, Gas cannot escape two problems: security and commercialization.
On October 27, local time, a video program of ABC News in the United States talked about the safety of Gas. In the comment area, many netizens raised similar concerns.
Social and media concerns about the security of social apps are based on users' high dependence on such apps.
According to a McGraw \nHill study, three-quarters of American students turn to social media for help with their studies and lives, and this generation of young Americans has become an integral part of their daily lives. McGraw Hill, chief transformation officer of McGraw \nHill, said in the report that social apps have an obligation to strictly review information and avoid the spread of false information, especially in educational information.
"If social platforms fail to form good constraints on users and creators, it may lead to 'out-of-control' scenes."
T-Tok, which has become popular in the past two years, has suffered losses in information review and user management. Statistics show that in the second quarter of this year, T-Tok deleted a total of 113 million illegal videos, many of which contained false information, violating the information integrity and authenticity guidelines of relevant US authorities.
Gas that has just been launched and has a limited user scale naturally does not have as much information review pressure as T-Tok, but it has been met with some doubts. In the investigation of ABC's program, some netizens questioned that Gas's God \nMode model may cause excessive socialization of teenagers, and there is also the suspicion of misguiding consumption.
As for commercialization, it is not yet the first priority for the fledgling Gas. Start-up teams now need to consider user retention, and only by retaining users and increasing users can there be a basis for commercialization.
On the one hand, to
protect user rights and user experience, on the other hand, to increase business revenue, this is a dilemma that all social applications have to face, and the future gas will be no exception. In the early days of its establishment, Facebook also encountered difficulties in choosing the commercialization route, and hesitated in advertising, value-added services and other routes. Zuckerberg's original decision was to suspend commercialization and focus on growth, seeing DAU as the company's number one metric.
Although Facebook has become less attractive to young people in recent years, its rise and operating model are still instructive for those who come after it.
In fact, Gas's design team also noticed the issue of safety and commercialization, and made two preparations in advance. In order to avoid a large number of negative remarks and personal attacks, the right to ask questions is in the hands of the platform, and users cannot send messages privately. In addition, in order to actively guide users to praise each other, the system pushes questions such as "Whose smile melted my heart?" Who is the most exciting Halloween dress?" and other positive questions.
In general, Gas is in the limelight and quite young at this time, and there is still a lot of time to modify design loopholes and explore the path to commercialization.
However, the
concern will not go away - after all, we must not forget that too many popular anonymous social apps in the United States have ended up in front of the mountains of commercialization and security, and the lessons of history are extremely cruel.
Post
\nSecret, known as the originator of anonymous social networking in the United States, was suspended after only three months of its launch, due to the instantaneous increase in users and the lack of strict platform censorship, resulting in a large influx of defamatory and pornographic information on the platform. For example, YikYak, which aimed at campus scenes like Gas and once climbed the top three in the overall iOS list in the United States, was also removed and rectified many times due to excessive negative content and inducing campus violence, and was finally completely shut down in 2017.
Even Snap, which finally forged a bloody road and successfully rang the bell to go public, is now facing the dilemma of a sharp decline in revenue and profits, and a cliff-like decline in stock prices.
In the view of the Value Research Institute (ID: jiazhiyanjiusuo), our research on the successful case of Gas should not be limited to the function of the app and the business prospects itself, but should focus on the development logic and operational thinking behind its popularity.
Maybe Gas will
eventually die, but as long as these truths are understood, there is always a chance that the next "Gas" will appear in the United States.
What Gas
Teaches Us: Users Are Always God
To
know who can be the next Gas, or how to create the next Gas, we have to go back to the question at the beginning of the article: What does Gas do to conquer the discerning American teenager?
The
social atmosphere of mutual praise, the freshness and security brought by anonymous socialization, the happiness amplified by the circle effect... All of the above factors can be summarized into one point: read the user and respect the user.
In the eyes of the designers of Gas, today's generation of American high schools lives in a stressful society: the growing gap between rich and poor, increasingly indifferent interpersonal interactions, and intermittent epidemics are all depriving young people of the joy of socializing. No one doesn't like the recognition and compliment of their friends, especially young people, and the emergence of Gas provides them with another way to get praise from friends from social apps.
It's like Gas' unofficially stamped slogan: Create a place that makes us feel better about ourselves, creating a place where we feel like we're getting better.
After becoming popular, gas co-founder Nikita Bier first faced the public in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. In this interview, Nikita \nBier did not talk about Gas's entrepreneurial story and business vision, focusing on the functions and security issues that users are most concerned about.
For example, he repeatedly stressed that users and their parents do not have to worry about hackers stealing platform data and causing information such as location, name, and school, because the platform does not even store the data on cloud servers. Even on her personal social accounts, Nikita \nBier has repeatedly assured users that this is a "clean" app, "no bullying, no stalking, no real-world anger."
From this series of operations, it is not difficult to see that Gas's start-up team has been actively catering to users and currying favor with users - this is also what other super apps that are often criticized for "cheating customers" and whose functions and positioning are increasingly deviating from social attributes.
The same report from the Pew Research Center pointed out that the proportion of American teenagers using Facebook is about 32%, close to the peak of 71%. Facebook, abandoned by young people, has also plummeted in word of mouth.
Looking back at Facebook's user growth curve, a series of scandals such as data breaches and security breaches that broke out in 2018 became the dividing point. Although the lawsuit with CA (Cambridge Analytica) was finally settled in 2020, and the lawsuit ended with Facebook admitting a $5 billion fine, the lost user trust and popularity are irreparable.
Looking back at China, the decline of Facebook and the explosion of Gas also have warning significance for a number of social platforms.
According to the statistics of iMedia Consulting, the post-95s and post-00s accounted for a total of 32.9% of China Mobile social platform users. Like the United States, the users of China's mobile social market are also getting younger across the board. In addition, a whopping 54.5% of users expressed their willingness to actively respond to messages sent by strangers on social apps, showing the potential of strangers to socialize and socialize anonymously.
At the same time, old social software such as WeChat and Weibo have more or less slots: the former functions are becoming more and more complex, and social attributes are being weakened by functions such as life payment, shopping and even online office; The latter has been reduced to a marketing base for entertainment stars and fan groups. Even the D voice and K hand, which single-handedly drive the short video outlet, are now going further and further on the road of e-commerce and local life.
Will there be a popular app like Gas in China?
Such hypothetical questions are difficult to find accurate answers. But one thing is certain: we will always need the next Gas.
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the fall of 2022, it is not friendly to the social media industry. The performance of many social giants in Silicon Valley has been thunderous, the market value and stock prices have plunged, and the entire market is depressed. Snap and Meta, which have released earnings reports in the past two weeks, are the most typical examples.
On October 20, Snap announced its third-quarter earnings, with a net loss of $360 million, a year-on-year increase of nearly 400%; Total revenue was US$1.128 billion, up 6% year-over-year, falling short of market expectations.
Meta, which just reported its earnings last night, saw its net profit plunge 52% year-on-year to $4.394 billion, and its revenue also declined for two consecutive quarters. App family revenue, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, was $27.429 billion, down 3.6% year-over-year.
Faced with such poor results, the capital market has also lost confidence in the social giants. On the day of the earnings report, Snap's stock price plunged 27%, directly crashing the entire Internet sector of the NASDAQ; Meta's stock price plunged nearly 20% after hours, falling more than 60% during the year, and its market value shrank by more than $500 billion. Seeing such a scene, Twitter, which has not yet announced its Q3 earnings report, may have long been hiding in a corner and shivering.
Under the cold winter of social media, Gas's popularity has undoubtedly given the entire industry a shot in the arm. Although no one expects Gas to save the entire industry on its own, and no one even knows how long Gas's high popularity will last, the rise of Gas at least shows that the social media industry still has the strength to create explosive models, and the needs of users still exist.
For the big players and more start-up teams, what they should do is not copy the next Gas, just as no one can copy Facebook, Instagram, T-Tok.
The reason why Gas can run out is because it grasps the pain points of users and the weaknesses of competitors, which also teaches us a truth: maintaining innovation and working hard to reach users is the key to the success of social apps.
Gas has only been established for two months to understand the truth, and there is no reason why other old rivers and lakes should not understand.
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