On February 23, Zhang Wei, public relations director of Alibaba Entertainment, was reported to have committed suicide by jumping off a building.
The news shocked the Internet for a while.
Later, the family confirmed that the news of the death was true, but did not disclose the cause of death, and expressed the hope that the deceased could be respected and that the other party could leave quietly.
Nowadays, Zhang Wei’s name can no longer be found in Alibaba’s large entertainment media group, and Alibaba has not responded to whether Zhang Wei committed suicide due to too much work pressure.
However, it is undeniable that Zhang Wei’s departure has made the already shaky Alibaba Entertainment even worse.
In the same way that entertainment is developed, the development of Alibaba Entertainment in recent years is obviously not as good as Tencent Entertainment.
Why did Alibaba, which had abundant assets and was prospering in the Internet, encounter Waterloo in entertainment?
When Alibaba Entertainment was first established, Jack Ma had high hopes for it.
Jack Ma said in an internal meeting that Alibaba’s expansion of entertainment business is for Alibaba’s future consideration. Alibaba cannot rely solely on e-commerce, because the mainstream needs of people in the future will mainly focus on entertainment and health.
Therefore, the main purpose of the establishment of Alibaba Entertainment is to import traffic to Alibaba’s e-commerce through entertainment business, and to compete with competitors such as Tencent.
In order to make Alibaba Entertainment grow rapidly, Alibaba invested a lot of money in acquisitions.
In 2013, Alibaba acquired Xiami Music and established a digital entertainment division, which is the predecessor of Alibaba Entertainment.
In the same year, Ali bought Tiantian Dongting, UC, Culture China, and invested in the football club Evergrande Football, making it a leader in the domestic entertainment industry in a very short period of time. One of the characters.
In 2015, Alibaba spent another US$4.5 billion to acquire Youku, the number one video website, once again expanding its entertainment sector.
After occupying a place in the video industry, Alibaba established China Literature non-stop to continuously improve the entertainment landscape.
In 2017, with the successful establishment of Alibaba’s game business group, Alibaba’s large entertainment sector was completely improved.
In just a few years, Alibaba has gone from scratch to complete the acquisition of entertainment projects, easily covering the entertainment field.
At this point, all members of Alibaba Pictures are in place, and Alibaba Entertainment has officially grown.
With its two music player platforms, Yongtiantiandongting and Xiami Music, Alibaba once controlled more than 60% of the exclusive copyrights of Chinese songs, occupying the top position in the market.
Film and television, literature, games, and digital entertainment occupy high ground in all aspects. With Ali as the big financial backer, no matter how you look at it, the future entertainment industry will be dominated by Ali.
No one expected that although Alibaba acquired strong traffic such as Xiami and Youtu, it failed to achieve the effect of strong alliance.
On the contrary, in recent years, Youku has given up its No. 1 video position and has been gradually replaced by iQiyi and Tencent Video.
Xiami Music announced its official closure at the beginning of this year, which became the tears of the years in everyone’s mind.
It can be said that these once kings in their respective fields failed to shine with new light after being acquired by Alibaba. Instead, they either shrank and died, or were merged and disappeared. This is the case with Youku Tudou and Tiantian Dongting Xiami. The same is true, no one has been developed and expanded at all.
To be honest, from beginning to end, Alibaba Entertainment's equipment is top-notch, and it can be called the best combination.
When it comes to money, Alibaba Group has no shortage of money. It burned 6.4 billion yuan in the first quarter.
We need the group’s support and help. In the past five years, Alibaba Entertainment has changed three presidents and 10 core executives. Alibaba veterans, professional managers, and new generation talents have all been assigned. Come to the big entertainment to help us, and strive to make the big entertainment develop rapidly.
To achieve idealism and a deep understanding of the industry, we have successively invited top musicians such as Gao Xiaosong and Song Ke, as well as the film and television industry genius Xu Yuanxiang.
Good investment projects, Youku and Xiami, each were leaders in the industry at that time and had good development prospects.
However, Alibaba Entertainment unknowingly played a good hand to pieces.
In the final analysis, Alibaba Entertainment has no soul, and even Fan Luyuan, who does not understand the film and television industry, is in charge of Alibaba Entertainment.
The entertainment industry is a place where insiders only know the rules and laymen watch the excitement.
Without a certain professional background, you are destined to be unable to understand its inner rules.
So over the years, Alibaba has invested a lot of money. As a result, Youku has fewer and fewer hit dramas, and there are no popular variety shows at all.
Xiami’s exclusive copyrights also continued to decrease, and it finally had to shut down.
Games cannot compete with NetEase and Tencent, and there is not a single hit game.
Of course, the biggest problem of Alibaba Entertainment is that it wants too much and cannot grasp it.
Since its establishment, Alibaba Entertainment has not been aiming to do a good job in the film and television industry, gaming industry or even the music industry, but to turn back the clock for the ultimate e-commerce.
Therefore, even though Alibaba Entertainment has a strong momentum, its trajectory is off-track, which means it is on the wrong track.
Invisibly and inadvertently, the development of the content industry was ignored, resulting in Alibaba Entertainment being unable to grow bigger and stronger.
For example, when iQiyi and Tencent produce dramas and variety shows, their main goal is to look good and attract as much traffic as possible.
But Youku is not.
Previously, Youku launched a variety show "Eat of the Sunrise", which not only produced delicious food, but also integrated Hema into it.
All the ingredients discussed in the entire program are related to Hema. The goal is to increase Hema’s sales revenue to a certain extent.
No matter how natural the implant is, it feels like hair has fallen into the food, causing diaphragmatic reactions.
With this kind of mentality when creating content, whether it is music, variety shows, TV series, or even games, it will be difficult to impress the audience, let alone be more exciting.
Naturally, if the content does not attract the audience, it will be difficult to attract money. However, although Alibaba is not short of money, no matter how strong its assets are, it cannot sustain the continued losses of Big Entertainment.
In 2018, Alibaba Entertainment suffered a loss of RMB 21.4 billion; although the loss was not that much in 2020, it still lost RMB 2.4 billion in the fourth quarter, making it the largest loss maker in Alibaba’s business segment.
Although Jack Ma initially expected that Entertainment would lose money, he even said, "It doesn't matter if we lose money for ten years."
However, looking at the already silent UC sector and the shutdown of Xiami Music, it seems that Ali is increasingly lacking confidence in burning money in entertainment.
For Alibaba Entertainment, the top priority may be to find someone who understands entertainment and the Internet to take the lead and concentrate on making good content.
Maybe everyone will feel much more relaxed when we start thinking about traffic drainage once we have traffic.
Perhaps tragedies like Zhang Wei’s suicide due to work pressure will never happen again.
. END .
Reference: "Who will save Alibaba Entertainment": Gao Honghao
Text | Jiuyue
Editor | Song
Typesetting | Wang Dake