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Author: Zhou Ke, official website of Yangfan Chuhai

If you don't pay, you won't have any friends? The answer may be yes.

PNK is a social application launched in February this year. Since May this year, its downloads and revenue data have soared, with monthly revenue growth exceeding 180%. Its influence among users is even close to that of the popular social application Wizz.

PNK and Wizz are both popular social applications in the US market. In February this year, Wizz, which had 20 million users, was removed from the app market due to suspected "sextortion" fraud. During this period, PNK was born and began to have a significant increase in downloads in April.

Both apps focus on social networking for young users, especially Wizz, whose target user group is teenagers. PNK also focuses on social networking for users of the same age group, with an emphasis on young people.

Compared with traditional social applications that cover a wide range of people, Wizz and PNK deliberately narrowed the scope of social groups, but achieved quite good results and were recognized by tens of millions of users.

Socializing is a long-standing topic, and every generation has its own social needs.

The difference lies in that people in different eras have different demands for social forms. We have been paying attention to the social product market for a long time. Today, when mobile applications have become the main medium for social interaction, the forms of social products are increasingly expanding in the direction of video and real-time chat.

The real chat demand is often only temporary, so a chat application that can provide users with real-time, real-person chat companionship is very important for user experience.

While sliding the screen interface, you can find your favorite person to chat in real time. Will this product form, which is popular among young American users, become a new beginning to subvert the reform of social application models? What are the pain points of the social needs of young people of Generation Z? Wizz and PNK may give us some answers.

01. Increasingly clear boundaries

Speed ​​is the most obvious label of this era.

How fast can you make a new friend? It only takes a second with the swipe of your finger.

Both PNK and Wizz have designed their products in a way that allows users to select new friends to chat by sliding the screen. The biggest advantage of this method is that it allows users to make choices quickly without wasting time, and it also provides a wide range of options.

Real-time chat is another advantage. When users open a social application, they are already in the moment of social desire. From the user's perspective, at this moment they need the person on the other side of the screen to provide emotions and respond instantly.

The third key point is age.

People of the same age are more likely to have common topics, but how to match people of the same age for socializing is a problem that PNK and Wizz face. Users need to submit their real age information during the application registration process before they can enter the social circle that is exclusive to their age group.

People of the same age have more similar social needs. Whether looking for a romantic partner or a hobby partner, it is easier to find people of the same age.

Sliding chat, real-time chat, and chat with peers, combining these three elements in the same social application is a very fresh existence for users.

But at the same time, it can be seen that a very prominent feature of this type of social product is the sense of boundaries.

Age restrictions and real-time online requirements are equivalent to defining an intersection in the user circle. Only users who meet these intersection requirements have the opportunity to become social players. This very clear boundary is also one of the reasons why users are willing to download and use Wizz and PNK.

Wizz was born in 2019 and PNK was launched in February this year. Both applications have the above functions.

Last year, Wizz's total global downloads reached 10.48 million, with an average of nearly 900,000 downloads per month. Its total turnover was $24.36 million, with an average monthly turnover of $1.95 million. The best performance was in July last year, when Wizz's total turnover exceeded $2.83 million and its monthly downloads reached 1.2 million.

Most of Wizz's revenue comes from in-app purchases. Last year, its in-app purchase turnover was US$23.2 million, accounting for 95% of the total annual turnover, which shows the strong money-making ability of its products.

As a rising star, PNK's offensive is also very fierce.

PNK was launched in February this year, and the number of downloads has increased significantly since April.

Since May, PNK has received 1.04 million downloads, with an average of over 500,000 downloads per month. In terms of revenue, PNK has received a total of $470,000 in revenue since May, with an average of over $230,000 in monthly revenue.

Compared with Wizz, PNK's performance is indeed inferior, but as a product that has been born for less than half a year, PNK's transaction and download data performance is already very outstanding, and it can be called a dark horse in social applications.

Both Wizz and PNK clearly state that their apps are free to use, but when you want to talk to the users you like, you will need to pay to communicate beyond the free quota.

On Wizz, users can purchase gold coins or monthly memberships. The cheapest paid item is 40 gold coins, which only costs $0.99, and the most expensive paid item is 2750 gold coins, which costs $49.99. In addition, a monthly membership costs $9.99, and a 3-month membership costs $19.99.

PNK's payment is mainly based on weekly and monthly memberships, among which the weekly payment price is US$9.9 and the monthly payment is US$13.99.

In comparison, PNK's payment price is slightly higher than Wizz, and this paid chat method has also received some opposition. For example, some users believe that the user groups on PNK and Wizz are highly overlapping. They are all teenagers who do not have strong financial capabilities and cannot afford to pay more for socializing and chatting.

However, this also shows that in the entire social product market, the product designs of Wizz and PNK have hit the user pain points. Their product forms, the value they provide, etc. are very consistent with user needs, verifying the correctness of the value and direction of such products.

The product design is successful, but Wizz and PNK still have many problems to overcome in terms of how to retain the product's advantages and achieve growth in both revenue and user retention.

02. The dilemma of social networking with paid content is difficult to solve

"I actually met a lot of older men between the ages of 15 and 16, which made me feel disgusted." Kim gave PNK 4 stars because she met a lot of people of different ages on this app, but at the same time, Kim also said that "(PNK) is super smooth and easy to use."

Kim's needs coincide with PNK's main function of dividing users into age groups, but it is obvious that when users register, PNK does not have a good control over the access of users of different ages. It may also be that in order to attract more users to join, PNK is not so strict in reviewing the age of users.

The consequence is that users who are attracted to the social app because of their age group may show their aversion to the app when they encounter users who do not match their age.

This is a difficult problem. How to ensure that every user who joins PNK meets the age requirement? It requires review and the collection of user privacy information. But at the same time, due to the age limit, a large number of users who are interested in PNK will be excluded from the screen.

Social applications want to expand their user base while also maintaining their core advantage of user age groups. It is difficult to strike a balance between these two demands.

Safety is another issue.

Compared with the various borderline features of many AI-based social products, real-life human interactions are somewhat conservative in terms of chat content.

But security issues arise.

Wizz and PNK are both social networking apps that focus on youth groups and have clear age requirements for users. With tens of millions of youth groups concentrated on one social platform, the hidden business opportunities behind this are more than just social networking.

In February this year, the Wizz platform was removed from the Apple and Google app stores due to issues related to sexual blackmail scams.

The FBI defines sextortion as "a crime that involves adults forcing children and teens to send explicit images online." After the images are sent, the criminal threatens to widely publish or send the explicit photos or videos to the victim's friends and family unless the victim makes repeated payments through various peer-to-peer payment apps, gift cards, and cryptocurrency transfers.

The appearance of "middle-aged men in their teens" on PNK and the sexual blackmail incident on Wizz both point to a key point in the problems of these types of youth social applications: group safety.

Precisely because PNK and Wizz are concentrated social platforms for young people, these platforms are also used by some criminals as a breeding ground for juvenile crimes.

Wizz's sexual extortion incident is a typical example of security issues encountered by social products. Under pressure to be removed from the shelves, Wizz updated the version of the application on February 13. In the new version of the product, it provides product and security enhancements, involving mandatory user verification, double-layer advertising review, in-app warnings, in-app education, shared safety net, etc.

After this round of events, social security, especially the social security of specific user groups, has become a focus of greater attention for application manufacturers.

Finding a safer balance between user safety and advertising revenue poses a greater challenge to app manufacturers.

Social applications are constantly exploring new forms to maintain their appeal to users and provide them with a sense of freshness. From the success of Wizz and PNK, we can see that the entire social market is also developing in the direction of user group differentiation, refining user circles, exploring richer and more innovative social forms, finding their common social pain points in specific user groups, and meeting the social needs of users of different age groups. Of course, security issues cannot be ignored. How to find a more reasonable and legal way to operate products in user security, user growth, and advertising revenue is the key to the long-term development of applications.