Recently, Zuckerberg regretted it, admitting that he should have accepted the advice of an article four years ago.

The article was headlined "What Facebook Should Learn from WeChat" (what should Facebook learn from WeChat).

Learn from WeChat

Last week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg posted a blog post on his Facebook page announcing a major strategic shift from an open social platform that was originally intended for a broad audience to a personal communications tool and social networking platform that focuses more on communications encryption and privacy.

The New York Times, the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal and other media outlets believe that Mr Zuckerberg's vision has been implemented by WeChat, Tencent's social software.

Clearly, Zuckerberg has no d'adversity for Facebook's future model of learning from WeChat.

Zuckerberg posted on his Facebook page 

In his own words, "It's a real opportunity to use WhatsApp and Messenger as the foundation, and we want to create a private platform that starts with information, makes it as secure as possible through end-to-end encryption, and then introduces all kinds of private, intimate ways of communicating, like groups, stories, payments, businesses, sharing locations." "

Isn't that WeChat?

Zuckerberg responded on social media

Why should Facebook imitate WeChat?

With a valuation of 490.658 billion, 1.52 billion users worldwide, 2.7 billion monthly users using the company's apps and annual revenues of more than $10 billion, Facebook is undoubtedly one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world today.

But this money-making machine is not without problems and worries.

First, Facebook's business model is too single. Although Facebook's revenue in the last quarter exceeded analysts' expectations,But over-reliance on advertising, the monotony of the business model has always existed.

According to Facebook's fourth-quarter 2018 results,Revenue for the quarter was $16.914 billion, with advertising revenue of $16.64 billion, or 93%.It's not hard to see from Facebook's revenue schedule over the years that ad revenue has been Facebook's top source of revenue, with other revenues almost negligible.

Advertising (dark) is Facebook's main source of revenue 

Source: Q1 2018 Results

Second, in order to maintain ad revenue, Facebook needs a lot of user data to deliver accurately, so it inevitably touches user privacy and sparks a public backlash.

In March 2018, Facebook exposed a leak scandal that led to Zuckerberg's 10-hour congressional hearing and more than a year of media killings. It also forced Zuckerberg to re-examine Facebook's position and future.WeChat, home to 1.1 billion monthly active users, has shown Facebook another possibility - parallel to mobile payments, e-commerce, financial services, small-program service platforms and a variety of ad-making models.

"If it doesn't change, Facebook will only be seen as an advertising ad ad company that is suspected of stealing user privacy. WeChat, on the other 7th, is a ecosystem of mobile payment, Internet finance, small program ecology and advertising. Its profit model is not limited to games, advertising, but also includes financial services, local services and more. "An industry insider told Weekly Jun.

"Facebook is learning WeChat, and the media focus is on WeChat's business model, which may be what Facebook really wants to change." According to Hong Bo, a veteran Internet analyst,WeChat's real advantage lies not only in its business model, but also in its deep bundling of users.

Facebook has acquired a range of social media-related companies, including high-traffic apps such as WhatsApp and Instagram, but the overall lack of a closed ecosystem like WeChat's applets is distracting.

Not long ago, a netizen sunburned a mobile phone usage status shows that within a week the netizen used WeChat 25 hours and 33 minutes, all other APPS add up to less than 4 hours, WeChat occupies the vast majority of the user's time, which is also Facebook can not see.

从Copy to China 到Copy from China

Fifteen years ago, Happy Net, Renren and many other Internet social companies that highly drew on Facebook, in the domestic set off a wave of Internet social waves. Who would have thought that more than a decade later, Facebook, once seen as a target for countless Chinese companies, was turning to WeChat.

“Copy to China 已经变成了 Copy from China。 ”Kaifu Li, a partner at InnovationWorks, said.

For a long time, Chinese Internet companies have been speaking to investors and the media about a similar case that has been successfully listed in the U.S. to explain what they're doing and make their stories more compelling.

For example, the early 58-city and catch-up networks were seen as "Chinese version of Craigslist", JD.com went public in the U.S. as "China's Amazon," Youku was called "China's YouTube" and Drop was seen as "China's Uber."

Even Zhang Chaoyang, the former father of China's Internet, named Sohoo after an interview with Yahoo's Yang Zhiyuan on the eve of his start-up, and later changed his name to Sohu, reducing the relevance of the two companies.

Since china's first Internet e-mail was sent in 1987, China has experienced more than 30 years of rapid Internet development, including the Internet, mobile Internet, O2O, artificial intelligence and so on. Although very strong learning ability, but has been judged by the outside world no innovation ability, only cottage, "Copy to China" is a lot of talk.

But that is quietly changing.

"Now more and more foreign products are beginning to draw on Chinese characteristics and inspiration." A U.S. technology media report said. "In the process of reversal, what we're seeing is a learning and plagiarism, and behind it's actually a technical battle and a market game."

On December 28, 2008, Wang Xing, then a Facebook follower, recorded "Alipay's alexa ranking over paypal." "It was a surprise that a Chinese company's web traffic surpassed that of a U.S. company in the same field.

Now, China's Internet products and corporate dominance of the international is no longer a new topic.

Take mobile payment as an example, Alipay, WeChat payment has long been deep into every commercial application in the streets, shopping malls, hotels, shopping centers, small shops, pancake stalls, and so on. Europe and the U.S. are also using credit cards, Apple Pay and PayPal, the products of the last century, while the latter is limited by terminals and scenarios and is far less convenient to use than Alipay and WeChat.

In 2017, Apple announced at the WWDC Worldwide Developers Conference that it would add a personal transfer feature to iMessage to enable individual-to-individual Apple Pay payments, a change years later than WeChat Pay.

"Some of china's unique business models are already popular in the West and emerging markets." Hans Tung, managing partner at GGV Capital, said. Lime Bike, an American company invested in GGV, draws on China's shared bike model in the light of local demand in the United States.

With a population of 1.4 billion and 772 million Internet users, China is the world's largest internet community, according to the 2018 China Internet Report. The huge potential business opportunities that come with this have spawned a large number of emerging Internet startups, former BAT, now TMD... And the camp is expanding.

"But at the moment China is more about application innovation, business model innovation than technological innovation. Real technological innovation takes time to accumulate. Hong Bo told the weekly Jun.