The person in charge of Baidu Post Bar responded for the first time： take a warning and deeply reflect on the partner system of Post Bar.

Since January 11th, the Baidu Post Bar incident has continued to ferment, and from financial media to social media, it is rare to fiercely attack this company. And Baidu, except for its CEO Robin Li’s brief mention of "we will reflect deeply" in a forum on January 18th, no one publicly responded to this matter.

On January 19th, Caijing reporter had an exclusive interview with James Lu, vice president of Baidu and vice general manager of mobile service group. He was also the general manager of Post Bar Division and the direct person in charge of Post Bar products. This was his first statement after the incident.

The interview revolves around the following questions: 1. What does Post Bar mean for Baidu? 2. What are the steps and processes of commercialization of Post Bar? 3. Is this vicious incident accidental or inevitable?

James Lu said that in terms of revenue, Post Bar’s contribution to Baidu is "basically negligible". Post bar is not over-commercialized, but almost not commercialized. The reason for the problem this time is that we made a mistake in the supervision system. For medical diseases, we should not use routine commercial considerations. In the medical industry, the most important consideration should not be activity, but public welfare and fairness of information.

Caijing: Where did the commercialization of Baidu Post Bar begin?

James Lu: Post Bar is of great strategic significance to Baidu. The course of Post Bar can be divided into three stages-the first stage is from 2003 to 2008. In the early days, there was little content on the Internet in China. Post Bar increased the breadth and stickiness of search by generating content. The typical case is the rise of Super Girl Bar. The second stage was from 2008 to 2012, when a large number of niche and tail stickers appeared, and the stickers were really presented as a community for the first time. The third stage is the fan economy stage of Post Bar. Through the operation of fans on the post bar, we can gain influence and income in culture, public welfare, consumption and other aspects. At present, Post Bar is in the initial stage of the third stage.

In the first 12 years since the birth of Post Bar, there was no profit or commercialization, and it has been losing money. 2015 is the first year of commercialization of Post Bar. At the end of the third quarter of 2014, we met for the first time and said that we should consider the exploration of commercialization of Post Bar. At the end of 2014, we started to form a team. We formed two commercialization teams-a user business team and an enterprise business team. It was not until 2015 that it was really commercialized.

Baidu has more than 19 million post bars, and our commercial post bars are only one tenth of them, about 2,000. In the whole medical and health field, there are more than 100,000 post bars, of which only about 50 or 60 are commercialized. At the same time, the background data shows that the user activity of all post bars that introduce commercial cooperation has reached more than twice the previous level.

I don’t want to talk about commercialization, but more accurately-the establishment of an economic system. Post Bar is like a small society. There are 600 million netizens in China, and almost half of China netizens come to visit us once a month. However, a society is incomplete without an economic system. The economic system cannot be produced only by the people themselves. The society needs its own currency, services, transactions and so on.

Caijing: Do you recite KPI?

James Lu: Of course. But KPI is not equal to commercialization. The first KPI I recite is the KPI of user activity, the second KPI is the KPI of user stickiness, and finally the KPI of commercialization and economic system. At the same time, I want to say one more thing. You may hear the KPI of the commercial economy system, and immediately think of money. No, it actually refers more to the business model.

Caijing: Let me ask you another question. Do you recite the revenue indicators?

James Lu: I rely on the success of the business model. The revenue indicator is used to confirm whether your business model can be successful, otherwise you can’t do it.

Caijing: What percentage of Baidu’s total revenue does Post Bar account for?

James Lu: The contribution of Post Bar to Baidu’s revenue is basically negligible. They all say that Post Bar is over-commercialized, but the fact is that we are hardly commercialized.

There are four main revenue components of Post Bar, 50% of which are pure user consumption, that is, users take the initiative to buy, including virtual gifts, props and so on; The second is the native advertising business, and more are native advertisements like Facebook, accounting for 20% of the revenue of Post Bar. These advertisements are displayed in the information flow, and users can know that they are advertisements at a glance; The third is the income generated by the partner mechanism, including agency fees, certification fees for enterprise bars and so on; The last piece of income comes from other small cooperation.

Caijing: Should different post bars have different ways to realize business?

James Lu: We will gradually open and commercialize the Post Bar in batches and categories. Enterprise is the earliest commercial post bar, followed by star post bar, followed by some vertical post bars, such as games, animation, education and medical care.

We are more like a platform. For example, if we give you a hammer, some people will knock something directly with the hammer and nail it. Some people will take this hammer to dismantle things, and some people will directly turn into gongs and drums. What we have to do is-I’ll give you these tools, but don’t make mistakes, and we’ll also do some supervision.

Caijing: Did you know that the operation right of hemophilia bar was contracted to a partner?

James Lu: Yes.

Caijing: The operation right can be sold because Baidu transferred the management right of Post Bar to the agent this year, and the agent was introduced because of the partner system implemented this year, right?

James Lu: Yes. But in fact, the post bar partner system has been running for some time when I took over the post bar.

I want to make it clear what the post bar partner mechanism is-first, let’s find some generation operators. Each of these agents has to be strictly audited, from the organizational structure to the personnel resume and experience. After the audit, there is a trial process, and different agents are graded. Then we use a set of indicators every quarter, which are not only income, but also indicators of operating users. According to the index, we eliminate agents, and we eliminate one-third of agents almost every quarter.

Caijing: So you think the main problem lies in your management of agents?

James Lu: I don’t think so. The management of these agents has a set of rules and systems. Our enterprise commercialization team has a hundred-odd specialized teams to supervise and operate these agents. These agents of hemophilia bar are our gold medal agents, and these bar owners (hospitals) are actually qualified.

What’s the problem? First, this is the first year of our commercialization; Second, for industries like medical diseases, the mechanism we consider is not perfect.

With such a large volume, we use more market mechanisms (user activity, satisfaction, etc.) to consider. Therefore, the reason why we opened the hemophilia bar is that we used the original set of routine business considerations. But what we haven’t considered is that for medical diseases, activity should not be the most important consideration standard, and the most important consideration standard should be public welfare and fairness of information.

So the root cause lies in our misjudgment in supervision.

Caijing: Have you ever managed bar owners and agents? How to manage?

James Lu: We adopt four sets of management methods. One is the bar owners mechanism. We use the bar owners team to manage the post bar. The second is that we have about twenty or thirty people’s technical research and development and product teams to develop all kinds of software and help you manage it through machines; Third, we have a fixed team to manage bar owners; The fourth is the management of agents. We have probation period and consideration standard for agents, and grade them. At the same time, we will eliminate some agents every quarter.

Caijing: Does Baidu think that the outbreak of this matter is more of a public opinion disadvantage for you?

James Lu: I’m posting it. It’s no small matter. I was the first to know about it. It was Sunday, I was working overtime in the office, and I saw this news popping up on the intranet. We communicated with the original bar owners within 24 hours and removed the commercialized bar owners. But then in the hands of the media, the voice became a bit unfavorable. There is definitely a period of out of control, and it began to get out of control on Monday and Tuesday.

Next, the biggest measure we take is to stop the commercial operation of all kinds of diseases, and then we will examine the regulatory mechanism one by one to see which loopholes need to be revised, which mechanisms need to be improved, which ones we may need machine research and development, and which ones are more to judge its fairness. Next, we also adopted the "small door god plan", that is, let the users of the post bar work together to crack down on these swindlers. At the same time, we also started a nationwide report program. Now on the homepage of Baidu Post Bar, the first button is the report button.

Caijing: Has Baidu ever reflected on this internally?

James Lu: At the internal communication meeting of Baidu, we said "take warning" three times.

I think this incident has exposed our immaturity in the supervision mechanism and our mistakes in judgment.

There are 4.5 million bar owners in Tieba, who log in and maintain it every day for free, but they are just like our employees to delete posts, engage in activities, produce better content and make the best posts. If we imagine this 4.5 million bar owners as a company, Baidu Post Bar is the largest company in the world. Indeed, we have failed to do something well, but it is still very good on the whole.

First of all, we realize that we have loopholes in some regulatory mechanisms. This incident was a fuse, and we quickly saw this loophole. We must believe that there is room for improvement, but in terms of commercialization mechanism, this road is very long, and we have just started. At present, the commercialization ratio is only one in ten thousand. Therefore, this matter is not entirely bad for us. We can find the problems in time and make us think more thoroughly and in the long run on the road to building an economic system in the future.

Whether it is the partnership system or the so-called agent management, we should deeply reflect on it, but it is not a blow to death. Because in most scenarios, this is very good. Like the enterprise bar and star bar we just talked about, all win-win, the user wins, the enterprise wins and the post bar wins. Taobao has a fake problem, and Tencent has a Tencent problem. It doesn’t mean that all of them have been suspended, and they don’t sell goods and don’t operate, no.

We need to reconsider the operation and management standards of Post Bar. For example, in the past, we only looked at activity and satisfaction in the operation and management of medical and health post bars. Now, public welfare and fairness are the main considerations, so we introduced authoritative people from non-profit organizations to manage post bars together. We haven’t figured out how to take this road today, but what we want to know is that fairness and authority are very important in this industry.

Caijing: Will new rules and systems be formally introduced in the future? Just like the launch of Baidu Fengchao system many years ago.

James Lu: Very likely, but I can’t promise. We are still very active in reforming. If I told you today that this happened on Sunday, I would build a new system on Wednesday, and you wouldn’t believe me.

Caijing: So what will change?

James Lu: I’m very used to giving up short-term interests and thinking about the long-term future. We want to build a long-term great company, and we won’t see the results in the next year or even six months. I can tell you with certainty that in my genes, I will never compromise on over-commercialization. But I also said that in the society of Post Bar, it is absolutely impossible without an economic system.

There have been many meetings in the last week, which are held late every day and sleep at one or two in the morning every day. For example, today, I get up at 5 o’clock and communicate at all levels. We haven’t reached the stage of resumption yet. Will there be a repeat offer in the future? There must be, will there be responsibility? There must be. But when there is a problem, face it, because it is the most United in the most crisis. Now I see unity.