10 years ago, the whole of St. Petersburg was talking about Pavel Durov’s project. Then all of Russia started talking about the new social network. The creator of VKontakte quickly connected new universities to the service, added functions, updated his own blog and had not yet thought about monetization.
VK of those times was the most resonant Russian IT startup of the 2000s - this site really united people for several years.
Users downloaded giant photo albums (Egypt 2008), enjoyed pirated videos (especially movies), painted graffiti on walls and played apps (for example, the legendary Happy Farmer).
In a word, people did not sit on VKontakte - they lived there .
But over the past five years the situation has completely changed. The inhabitants of VK have long ceased to be active, and the phrase “I only get in touch for the sake of music” can be heard more and more often.
According to visit statistics, VKontakte has not failed – there are still plenty of visits. Another thing is scary: it feels like the social network has fallen into an era of stagnation, when there are no more powerful and bold ideas left.
Below are five symptoms of monstrous stagnation.
No philosophy
Pavel Durov was for VKontakte about the same as Steve Jobs was for Apple: it is not surprising that in April 2014 he was also forced out of the company. The founder of the social network behaved as stubbornly as possible, boldly defended his ideals to shareholders and refused to cooperate with the authorities, but this did not matter.
The point was different: VKontakte users adored and believed in the person whose profile link always hung at the bottom of the page.
Durov actively promoted his own principles - honesty, modesty, and the desire for self-improvement. He regularly wrote about how to work on oneself, and sometimes published comics about how to properly develop Russia.
Pavel was a real preacher, the captain of a ship - with him, VKontakte followed a given route, but without him it lost its bearings.
The same Mark Zuckerberg publicly sets himself a new goal every year: for example, read 52 books, learn a new language, or run 365 miles. In this way, he motivates not only himself, but also the multimillion-dollar Facebook audience who follows the founder of this social network to take useful actions.
VKontakte has not had this for a long time. Today's general director of the social network, Boris Dobrodeev, is probably a talented manager, but he is not a missionary. Where is VKontakte heading now? Most likely, even Dobrodeev himself does not have an answer to this question.
Note for the task. How to search by groups on vk.com
Step 1.
Go to the “My Groups” section (your menu items may differ slightly from those shown in the picture depending on the settings):
Step 2.
Enter the word or phrase by which you want to find a group in the search bar. For example, “inexpensive clothes” or “fashion store” (think about the name of a group on a topic that interests you). The search will happen automatically
No growth potential
Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are, in theory, capable of conquering the entire planet. This won’t work for VKontakte: in Russia everyone is already connected, in the CIS almost everyone is connected, and outside the former Soviet republics no one really needs the social network.
At the same time, growth is perhaps the most important parameter for the development of a service. When it is there, a new audience comes and you can experiment with it. But when there is no growth, bosses only think about how not to lose current users.
VKontakte has already switched to the second model, and it is not clear what to do with it. It is possible (but far from certain) that Pavel Durov could open a window to Europe and the States, but the current leaders are definitely not capable of this.
June
The developers have launched a service of short videos “Clips” with all kinds of AR effects. It became possible to record video from the Moon or on the stage of the Mariinsky Theater. A tool for monetizing VK Donut communities is also presented, with which subscribers can provide financial support to the project.
No top bloggers
VKontakte was very active in protecting opinion leaders and even created a section with recommendations for profiles to follow. Alas, the writing audience still chose Facebook. Probably, the stereotype worked: VK is for schoolchildren, FB is for respectable business people.
It is worth admitting that the top management of VKontakte did not put up with this situation for a long time, but they chose the wrong strategy. For a year and a half (from 2014 to 2016), the marketing department under the leadership of Yaroslav Andreev did the same thing: contacting foreign stars and helping them create pages on VKontakte.
Celebrities agreed and wrote greeting posts for fans, but after that everything died down - the singers and actors themselves forgot where they had created a profile.
In response to Andreev’s actions, the already fired Pavel Durov gave an interview in which he criticized the promotion scheme through famous people.
“Word of mouth is much more effective,” noted the founder of VKontakte. It’s hard to argue with him - he spent zero cents on promoting Telegram to 100 million users.
No pirated content
In the 2000s, the RuNet was free: no one banned films, musicians cried over falling sales, and torrent trackers flourished. VKontakte became a hub for pirated files just in time: there you could listen to any track and watch any movie in good quality.
As soon as a section with documents was added, books were immediately added there without asking the copyright holders.
When Durov was a student, he had a strange habit of not paying for minibuses - according to his concepts, this transport was included in the travel package. If he was dropped off from a minibus, he got out, waited for the next one and got on there. Naturally, without planning to pay.
He transferred this principle to VKontakte: if a file is uploaded to the Internet, then everyone can use it, and certainly for free. Now, with such an approach, VK would simply not survive - it would either be blocked or closed.
Having lost pirated content, the social network doomed itself to two major troubles. Firstly, those who went there only for stolen movies were eliminated. Secondly, we had to enter into agreements with copyright holders.
To recoup the money spent on purchasing licenses, nasty advertising was added to the audio recordings - which, of course, forces users to look for other streaming services.
What is a wall in VK?
Surely you have heard the expression “On social networks, people behave like in Ancient Egypt - they worship cats and write on the walls.” And, if everything is more or less clear with the universal adoration of cats, then what does the second thing have to do with it?
So, the wall (also called the feed) on the vk.com website is a special space where a person can post any information. These can be photographs, texts, music tracks and videos. You can post them on your own behalf, downloading them directly from your computer or mobile device, as well as repost them from the pages of other users and groups.
It is the feed that visitors to any account or public pay attention to. Here they can leave their comments and likes, as well as post their entries on other people’s pages.
For a group and community, a smart news feed is the main tool for attracting subscribers, because this is where they post all their content, conduct surveys, organize promotions and post announcements.
Where is it located and how to write on it
Finding a wall in VK is not at all difficult, but let’s take a step-by-step look at how to look at it and how to place any information on it.
On a smartphone
So, when using the mobile version of the VKontakte website, namely m.vk.com, you can see the wall and leave a message on it as follows:
- Sign in to your account.
- Tap on the three lines in the lower right corner.
- Now tap on your name that appears at the top of the screen to open your profile.
- Scroll down the page a little to the “Posts” section. Now you have found your feed. In the same way, you can open the wall of any other user and scroll through it to look at all his posts in chronological order.
- To make an entry in your feed, you need to use the line “What’s new with you” - it is located immediately above the block with posts.
- Click on it and a field will appear in front of you where you can record news and attach any file (photo, audio, video) to it.
- After creating a post, click on the checkmark in the upper right corner and the news will appear in your feed.
On the computer
To find a VK wall using a PC and publish news on it, do this:
- Log in to your VKontakte account.
- Click on your name in the top right corner.
- Select "My Page".
- Under the block with photos you will see the line “What’s new with you” - we already know how to use it to create and publish news (see the instructions for the smartphone).
- Well, immediately below this line is your feed.
If someone posts a post on your feed on their behalf, you will receive a notification about this. The post itself will be in first place in the feed. In fact, few people like it when strangers (even friends) leave posts on their page. Fortunately, they can be easily removed using a cross. Or completely disable this function in the privacy settings (but more on that later).
No experiments
In 2010, Pavel Durov replaced the usual wall with a microblog, provoked rallies and protests, but courageously defended his position - people came to terms with the new format. Now sources close to VKontakte say that inside the company they are wildly afraid of a repetition of the situation called “Durov, bring back the wall.”
Because of this, the bosses of the social network do not fundamentally change anything - they are afraid that any reform will lead to an outflow of the audience. Even the redesign last year was carried out in two stages: the management carefully studied user reactions. Now the site looks a little more modern, but this redesign did not bring anything new.
They are trying to develop VKontakte in such a way as not to offend, upset, offend or scare anyone away. This is the basis for projects like Snapster, a mediocre Instagram clone released five years later.
In addition, “stories” that were stolen entirely from Instagram and Snapchat recently appeared in the news feed. Do I need to clarify that Snapster has been in a coma for a long time, and no one has been using “stories” from the very beginning?
Cowardice, conservatism and conformism - today’s VKontakte rests on these three qualities. Are there any hopes that things will improve in the near future? Unfortunately no.
The maximum that can happen is adding a few more advertising blocks: since there is still an audience, you need to monetize it somehow.
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