Author Pan Lei
Editor hai Yao
Tuyuan Midjourney
To be honest, you have to understand the car emperor.
This is the Slogan of ByteDance’s car information platform "Know the Car Emperor", which became popular in the early days by guiding car owners to publish their car experience. Now it is the top stream of car vertical content platforms, with two trump cards: short video and live broadcast.
According to some data, Knowing Car Emperor has been the largest car live broadcast platform in China as early as almost four years ago.
Investors are also concerned about the money-making opportunities brought about by the subversion of the old vertical websites of cars by Know Car Emperor-such as car home and Easy Car, all of which have been listed in the US stock market.
The latest news shows that investment institutions, including Sequoia China, KKR and General Atlantic, are ready to provide up to $800 million for Chedi to support its IPO.
General China of Sequoia invested in this round of financing, and contributed $400-500 million.
This makes the valuation of the car emperor as high as $3 billion.
Considering that the car emperor App has been online for less than 7 years, this is an amazing valuation explosion.
In contrast, the market value of car home currently listed on NYSE is about $3.5 billion.
This is also in line with the iterative law of automobile information websites-every time a new automobile information giant appears, it basically means a cruel reshuffle.
According to Byte insiders, the number of daily users who know Chedi began in October 2021, and has already surpassed car home and Easy Car.
This also makes it logical for investors to throw a lot of money in pursuit of understanding the car emperor.
From "auto channel" to the number one in the industry
Understand the prototype of the car emperor is ByteDance’s "today’s headlines" auto channel, which is actually closer to auto channel in the early portal era.
It is said that in August 2017, after being hatched by the commercialization department of ByteDance, it was officially launched to understand Chedi App.
Backed by the huge "flow pool" of today’s headlines, the number of users who know the car emperor is growing rapidly.
According to the "Autumn Report 2017" released by the mobile Internet data organization "QuestMobile" in October of that year, only two months after the launch of Chedi App, active user data has already ranked among the TOP5 in the industry.
At that time, car home ranked first, with 17.37 million active users, while Car Master ranked fifth with 1.28 million users.
From then on, it took only four years, and car home, who has been the industry leader for many years, was trampled under his feet.
This kind of overspeed development obviously makes Byte interested in splitting up the car emperor.
At the beginning of 2023, it was reported that Byte moved the employees who knew the car emperor to a newly established wholly-owned subsidiary.
In addition, it is said that employees who know Chedi have independent office space.
This makes the outside world believe that Byte may be preparing for the introduction of external shareholders until the spin-off and listing.
According to the information provided by the third-party enterprise inquiry agency, on December 21, 2023, the corporate legal person who knows the car emperor changed from today’s headline to "Xiamen Know Car Technology Co., Ltd.".
This shows that Master Che officially became independent from ByteDance.
According to the data, the major shareholder of Xiamen Zhiche is He Jian (holding 60% of the shares), who also serves as the president of Zhiche Di.
Until now, it has exploded to seek financing with a valuation of $3 billion, indicating that knowing the car emperor is one step closer to the final IPO.
Seize the short video outlet
"We really want to vote for you. After all, newspapers have been very supportive of our work in communication for so many years, but unfortunately, customers have not given any budget to the print media at all."
This is the feedback from a senior official of a newspaper in Beijing who personally led a team to visit 4A Company more than ten years ago.
4A company said that the customers of car companies gave most of the budget to the online portal, leaving no budget for the print media including newspapers, which also made it impossible to complete the delivery.
This 4A company’s attitude towards seeking advertising cooperation with newspapers is a microcosm of several major portals, such as Sohu, Sina, Tencent, Netease and Phoenix, which became the mainstream automotive information platform at that time.
The "auto channel" of these websites, with large traffic, fast communication speed and various forms (there have been some test drive videos), completely subverts the information dissemination mode in the era of print media, and also makes it difficult for traditional print media to obtain business cooperation opportunities.
In the era when the portal website auto channel is booming, employees are busy.
A person who once worked as a "car editor" in a portal website said that he had been on a business trip for several weeks and participated in various test drives and release activities organized by car companies. "I had to ask my wife to send my change of clothes to the airport, and I changed my clothes and flew to the next destination."
However, almost at the same time as the popularity of the portal website auto channel, automobile vertical websites are sought after by more and more users because they can provide more focused and professional content.
In 2000, Easy Car was founded, and car home was founded five years later.
The establishment of these two representative websites indicates the arrival of the era of traffic segmentation.
In other words, these two websites can provide more professional content, and users are more accurate and more valuable to car companies.
So the balance of traffic began to gradually shift to such vertical websites as Easy Car and car home.
Auto channel, a web portal, was subverted by car home and Easy Car.
From the establishment of car home in 2005 to the launch of Know Car Emperor APP in 2017, it can basically be regarded as the golden age of car home and Easy Car.
In 2017, car home’s net revenue was 6.2102 billion yuan, up 4.2% year-on-year, and its net profit reached 2.0016 billion yuan, up 63.0% year-on-year.
Another vertical website giant, Easy Car, earned RMB 8.751 billion in the same year, up 51.6% year-on-year, and its gross profit for the whole year was RMB 5.517 billion, up 49.3% year-on-year.
Car home’s forum is an epoch-making product form, which provides a platform for car owners to communicate and interact.
This also shows that the content produced by users is becoming the value core of the automobile information platform.
When the mobile Internet emerged, after the car-savvy emperor exploded in the form of short video of UGC (User Generated Content), he was caught off guard by car home and Easy Car-the latter two are basically products of the PC era.
In fact, almost no forum products in the automotive field have been successfully copied to the mobile platform.
Understand that the car emperor has done this through short video outlets.
This makes it the latest subversive of automobile information platform.
At present, auto channel, the portal website, has basically lost its influence, and even car home has experienced a slowdown in business growth-the annual revenue in 2023 was 7.18 billion yuan, up 3.5% year-on-year, and the adjusted net profit was 2.159 billion yuan, down slightly year-on-year.
Knowing that Chedi has not announced specific revenue, it continues to make great strides in user growth.
In October, 2023, according to QuestMobile’s data, the daily growth rate of Knowing Car Emperor reached 57% in the past two years.
This may be related to the "empowerment" of today’s headlines-the automotive content published by users on today’s headlines will be automatically synchronized to the car-savvy emperor.
"online celebrity" is shaking the financial resources of knowing the car emperor
Corresponding to the iteration of automobile information platform, the relationship between it and automobile enterprises (dealers) has also experienced the change from cooperation to game.
In the early days of the portal, the cooperation between car companies and "auto channel" was mostly advertising and activity cooperation (various car forums or summits).
However, with the growing influence of the portal, its commercial value in new car sales leads began to stand out.
In other words, if you bring the address or contact information of the 4S store at the bottom of auto channel’s article, you can "drain" the relevant stores.
This may be the earliest way of selling "sales leads" about the automobile information platform.
However, it is Easy Car and car home that really carry forward this business model.
The reason is that they have more accurate traffic than portals.
Based on this, these vertical websites began to build professional products around sales leads.
More than a decade ago, the sales lead products promoted by automobile vertical websites to 4S stores were as high as hundreds of pages, detailing all the details such as clue acquisition and transformation.
This is also the biggest financial resource for car home and other vertical websites.
According to car home’s 2023 annual report, the number of cooperative dealers in that year exceeded 26,000.
In Q1 this year, car home’s clue service revenue was 726 million yuan, accounting for 45.1% of the total revenue of 1.609 billion yuan, exceeding media revenue (327 million yuan) and online marketing and other income (555 million yuan).
Now I understand that after Che Di became the traffic king of the automobile information platform, he also "inherited" the clue business model.
The bridge section of "the boy who kills the dragon will eventually become a dragon" is staged in this cycle, and the car emperor has become the latest "boy who kills the dragon".
However, the effectiveness of this business model is increasingly questioned by car companies.
At the beginning of this year, brands such as Wenjie and Zhijie under Huawei HarmonyOS Zhixing stopped "cooperating with members who know Car Emperor, car home and Easy Car".
This kind of recharge "member" is actually a sales lead product.
According to statistics, the annual membership fees of Easy Car and car home sold to dealers in 2024 both exceeded 200,000 yuan.
In 2019, due to the 20% increase in the membership fee of car home, many automobile dealer groups including Express Group and Zhongsheng Group suspended their cooperation, and the market value of car home once evaporated by 1.8 billion US dollars.
At that time, Li Hong, the president of Express Group, said through social media that "when a vertical website started from a car dealer was growing, it actually wanted to rely on monopoly to encroach on food", aiming at car home.
In 2023, Knowing Car Emperor upgraded the cooperation mode of members to CPS mode (Cost Per Sales), which triggered the anxiety of dealers.
Some dealers believe that this settlement mode leads to uncontrollable budget and refuses to cooperate.
After learning about Che Di, he released a letter to the dealers’ partners, saying that it was necessary to provide subsidies for dealers and reduce the burden on the industry, and this matter gradually subsided.
The suspension of cooperation between HarmonyOS Zhixing and the automobile vertical platform highlights the expensive nature of clue fees.
Some car companies or brands that implement the direct sales model even spend huge sums of money to build a clue acquisition and transformation system.
A few years ago, a brand of new power hatched by a car company in the north once spent tens of millions of yuan to build a clue system directly facing users according to the characteristics of the company.
The original intention of this system is not to "understand the car emperor", but to provide differentiated experience by directly serving users.
But in the objective effect, this model is equivalent to getting rid of the clues of the automobile information platform.
Moreover, as the cost of clues becomes more and more expensive, it also makes related car companies overwhelmed.
Recently, at the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Auto Show, Yu Chengdong, managing director of Huawei, said that it was related to saving marketing expenses when talking about the creation of personal IP by car CEO.
Other car companies have also confirmed that this model can indeed bring about transformation.
According to Zhang Yong, CEO of Nezha, since the listing of Nezha L, the demand for orders has been in short supply, and "half of the credit is attributed to Lao Zhou"-Lao Zhou is Zhou Hongyi, which recently triggered the internet craze by criticizing Zhang Yong, promoting Nezha Automobile to learn from Lei Jun, and promoting Nezha Automobile to change its name, which also proved that the "online celebrity" effect can indeed be transformed into sales leads.
This makes the "clue" value of the automobile information platform represented by knowing the car emperor decline.
In addition, even "I really have to understand the car emperor" is being questioned.
At the end of 2023, the "2023 Winter Test of Knowing Car Emperor" released by Knowing Car Emperor showed that the endurance achievement rate of the extended range version of the M7 was only 31.6% in severe cold conditions, ranking first from the bottom among all test models.
Yu Chengdong said that this is "cheat people’s test, misleading people!"
Geely and Great Wall also questioned the test results of Che Di.
Relevant car companies said that the test of knowing the car emperor was warmed up for a long time before departure, which consumed a lot of electricity and did not conform to the real use scenario of users.
According to some data, the relevant evaluation of knowing the car emperor has been questioned for many times.
This erodes the content advantage of knowing the car emperor.
However, the status of the first traffic platform in the automobile circle, the valuation of up to $3 billion, and the financing of up to $800 million show that at least before the official listing of the capital market, knowing the car is attractive enough for investors.
