Douyin Xuelang APP has stopped service!

It is no coincidence that the three major Internet giants in China have successively closed some of their training-related businesses. In the following article, we will discuss the development difficulties of the knowledge payment industry and recommend it to Internet friends.

Following the closure of Tencent Classroom, Xuelang, a training app owned by another domestic Internet giant Douyin, will also cease services on July 31.

In addition, I don’t know if you have noticed a piece of news. On April 24 of this year, Alibaba also announced the dissolution of Taobao University and turned it into Taobao Education. It changed from a training business department to a merchant service department, and will no longer develop new courses.

In the past, there were many courses available at Taobao University, with various teachers providing e-commerce training, some free and some charging several thousand yuan.

But now when you click on Taobao Education’s paid courses, you can no longer find any paid content.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the three major domestic Internet giants have successively closed some of their training-related businesses.

As for the real reason, I think all speculations by non-authorities are false.

But as a practitioner in the knowledge payment industry, I think we can still talk about this topic.

1. Education and training installment loans have a great impact

Many people may not have paid attention to this aspect. In fact, installment loans are already very common in many education and training businesses.

The most important point is that many students, mothers, and middle- and low-income people have applied for installment payments for education and training without knowing it or being induced.

Many courses attract customers by offering free trials or 1 yuan fees, and then privately promote customers to sign up for high-end orders such as 5,980 yuan. They then allow users to apply for installment payments under the guise of signing an agreement.

Of course, there are also some apps that directly support installment payments when users buy courses.

These apps take a 15-30% commission from teachers’ courses, while also charging users high installment fees.

This has caused many negative social problems, and various institutions such as the China Banking Regulatory Commission have also received a large number of complaints. Therefore, in recent years, the China Banking Regulatory Commission has clearly pointed out that financial institutions are prohibited from illegally issuing consumer installment loans to the fields of education, training, medical beauty, etc.

2. Users want to copy, not learn

Regardless of whether the training business of Alibaba, Tencent, and Douyin is related to consumer loans, one thing is at least certain.

The fact is that most users don’t love learning as much as we imagine. What most users actually want is growth through indoctrination, copying, and delivery.

I paid 99 yuan to buy a course, and then I directly acquired all the methods and skills that the teacher taught.

Instead, I spent 99 yuan, and you gave me a link to a course, or asked me to open and view the course on an APP myself. Many users will not even watch it.

This leads to a point where the platform wants to rely on 9.9 trial classes and invite big V teachers to give lectures to divert traffic to its own training APP, but in fact users will not watch it at all.

3. Impact of other training and office products

In the past, when we wanted to study a course, we would habitually look for it on some vertical course apps.

But now, with the emergence of various training tools and office meeting software, many teachers and experts will not publish on some course apps.

For example, many people are accustomed to using Tencent Meeting, and they directly initiate some training, consulting lectures and discussions. Some systems will automatically organize the course content, and others can view historical records.

In addition, live broadcasts on Douyin and Video Accounts can also limit viewing to different people, and there is also a history of live broadcasts.

In fact, for most users, what they want is not a course package that is directly given to them.

The reason they pay is that they want more timely interaction.

The same goes for classes. If you give courses to users and let them learn on their own, they will be too lazy to do so.

But if you talk to users live every week or during a training cycle, the effect will be completely different.

4. For most companies, one APP is enough

I just mentioned office software. In recent years, office collaboration software has developed rapidly. It is no longer just simple attendance clocking and document synchronization.

For example, products like DingTalk, Feishu, and Qiwei include everything from clocking in, chatting, documents, materials, courses, etc.

In fact, the same is true for Douyin. For courses purchased on Douyin, users can directly check and learn in the Douyin order. Why do they need to download an APP to learn?

The key is that even TikTok itself can create paid content for viewing directly on the APP.

5. Too few platform opportunities

There is a picture on the Internet, I don’t know whether it is true or not, so just treat it as gossip.

That is, a former employee of Tencent Courses said that it was not until July 2022 that Tencent Classroom achieved monthly balance between income and expenditure, and this was under the premise of installment payment for teaching and training.

As a company as big as Tencent, it took Tencent Classroom 8 years from 2014 to 2022 to achieve monthly breakeven.

You can imagine that just because a company is big doesn’t mean it will do its business well.

Similarly, although Xuelang APP relies on the Douyin Group, it is not related to some knowledge payment-related experts. Many people have never heard of it, including me, who only knew about it very late.

If your own product develops very slowly, does not make much profit, and there are certain social risks, and the key is that you cannot provide too much traffic, and there are some conflicting functions on your platform, if you encounter a leader who is not very interested at this time, shutting down is a high probability event.

As a teacher who also sells courses, I would not choose to go to these platforms.

The core reason is that there is no traffic and delivery is troublesome. Wouldn’t it be better to let users place orders directly on the platform?

6. Course platform is actually a niche business

Compared with the K12 education and training business, the scale of businesses like Tencent Classroom and Xuelang is actually very small.

Big companies like TikTok, Tencent, and Alibaba have shut down many small businesses in recent years.

There are two basic logics for large companies to do business:

First, the average order value is high enough, such as in the case of smart cars.

Second, the audience is particularly broad, such as information, social networking, games, and e-commerce.

As for selling ordinary courses to adults, which have nothing to do with K12, the general price is around 99 or 199, and the audience is very narrow.

On average, a teacher only sells about 100 to 200 copies of each class.

Moreover, many teachers can only offer three or five courses in three to five years.

It is completely not on the same level as users’ daily play and daily consumption. For example, Douyin is used by the whole family, but it is not as good as Taobao which is used by the whole family.

7. Don’t treat tools as platforms

Not only small factories, but many large factories are also prone to making mistakes. After all, large factories also have areas where they are not good at and where they make mistakes.

For example, the current teaching tools in the industry include Qianliao, Lizhi, etc., and they also have courses on their apps.

However, the vast majority of users do not take the initiative to search for courses on these platforms and then place orders.

Similarly, the vast majority of users scan a code somewhere and purchase Teacher A’s link, and then open the APP to watch this teacher’s courses. The probability of them buying other courses that they are unfamiliar with or have no need for is also very small.

Most teachers can’t publish more than one or two courses a year, and most people can’t buy two or three courses a year.

So this kind of thing is just a tool.

To a large extent, it depends on the teachers and bloggers themselves to bring in traffic and convert their own traffic.

But if it is just a tool, the benefits will definitely be small for large companies.

So instead of doing it yourself, you can support others to do it.

If a large company does it themselves, it will only employ a few dozen people, but there are hundreds of companies on the market that make teaching tools, and they can help the platform better serve customers.

For example, Douyin and Video Account both have the function of mounting courses, so these course service providers must be more proactive and professional in understanding and responding to user needs than Xuelang.

Therefore, it is not necessarily a bad thing for Alibaba, Tencent, and Douyin to close these platforms. On the contrary, a lot of customers, traffic, and opportunities will flow to many small and medium-sized tool companies.

Author: Shili Village

Source: WeChat public account: "Shili Village (ID: shilipxl)"