After a period of constant rumors, Baidu's financial management channel has finally gone live, starting to sell the fund product rumored to have an 8% yield but was halted by regulators. The channel went online at 10:28 AM, and roughly ten minutes later it malfunctioned—users who entered their usernames, passwords, and verification codes were still shown as not logged in, making it impossible to purchase. Reporters at the unofficial launch event discussed how this seemed to follow Xiaomi's rhythm—"enthusiastic buyers crashed our servers." However, according to Baidu's usual pattern when things go wrong, the product manager should also scream "unprecedented!" on the Tieba app for everything to be perfectly complementary.
Despite these hiccups, Baidu officially announced in the afternoon that sales from Baidu Finance had surpassed 1 billion yuan; this aligns with many observers' predictions that "Baidu will cover the yield itself, so there will be an upper limit set on the initial sales amount." Since the general yield of money market funds is around 4%, after selling 1 billion yuan worth of financial products, Baidu would then buy another 1 billion yuan, using its 4% yield to subsidize users who bought the first billion yuan, allowing them to reach the doubled return of 8%. Of course, these matters could only be done quietly later on without promotion.
In comparison, Alipay's Yu'e Bao garnered 50 million yuan in subscriptions on its first day, whereas Baidu's finance platform achieved 20 times that scale in just over four hours. According to insiders from Baidu, the surge in purchasing brought concurrent access volumes comparable to those during the Spring Festival travel rush on the 12306 website, causing even the technically proficient Baidu to crash. If not for this, the 1 billion yuan sales record might have been achieved in an even shorter time.
Although the new product's website stability and interface received plenty of criticism, it’s more important to see that after round after round of "internet finance" preheating, the enthusiasm for wealth management on this new platform among user groups has been ignited. When friends around each other ask "did you buy it?" Uncle Miao recalled the enthusiasm of the previous generation buying government bonds. Baidu calls its first batch of users "founding users," hoping to leverage their word-of-mouth to maximize socialized communication of this new product, creating even more "unprecedented" achievements beyond the 4-hour, 1-billion-yuan mark.
Carefully calculated, what kind of promotional heat (yesterday on Sina Weibo's trending topics list, Baidu Finance climbed early to the fourth position) did Baidu need to pay? Actually, not much. This 8% annualized yield is only guaranteed for the first two months, which is one-sixth, so Baidu needs to pay out only 1 billion yuan × 4% ÷ 6 = 6.66 million yuan. And Baidu announced that the number of founding users exceeded 120,000 households, meaning the acquisition cost per user was 5 yuan; if adding those who registered Bai Fu Bao but failed to make a purchase, the registration cost per user would be even lower. For a product directly dealing with money, this user cost is very cost-effective, especially considering the enormous public opinion momentum throughout the process. A regular company spending 6 million yuan to buy a CCTV advertising slot might not achieve such lasting heat.
Therefore, unlike Yu'e Bao, Baidu's financial product launch differs from detailed technical operations like big data and user profiling, mainly showcasing internet companies' marketing capabilities to traditional financial enterprises. It is often said that the financial industry is heavily regulated, but internet companies, especially those involved in content production, face substantial regulatory pressures as well; through years of negotiation, internet companies have rich experience in treading the regulatory baseline while pushing for peak attention. Both Yu'e Bao and Baidu Finance emphasized returns as their primary selling points in early promotions; once they caught the attention of regulators, they quickly clarified statements, recalled promotional materials, acting swiftly and courteously, but the necessary publicity had already spread.
For instance, regarding the aforementioned 8% yield, if regulations prohibit emphasizing returns, I won't emphasize it; but if I spend my own money to buy a fund and decide autonomously who to share it with, isn’t that allowed? Internet companies always place "acquiring users" above "acquiring sales volume," with users rather than products as the sales target. Precisely because of this, the pricing of each user in the internet industry is clear and precise, knowing how much the unit price of users in which field is reasonable and bearable. This point, in this "8% Defense Battle," is actually worth learning from for traditional industry enterprises: in this era, selling a product to users only once is outdated; retaining users and repeatedly selling products to them is the internet way.
Nevertheless, from a product perspective, after this wave of heat passes, Baidu Finance will still face some tests ahead. These are mainly reflected in three aspects:
First, Bai Fu Bao currently lacks a complete payment environment. In a previous article titled "Can WeChat Pay form a closed loop?", I mentioned that the success of a payment tool primarily depends on whether the payment environment is complete. What can the funds in Bai Fu Bao be used to buy now? The options are lackluster. If in the future Bai Fu Bao is merely positioned as a channel for selling financial products, it undoubtedly wastes Baidu's data accumulation and computational capabilities, akin to returning the pearl and keeping the box, limiting Bai Fu Bao's prospects.
Second, Bai Fu Bao doesn't even have its own app yet, but it dares to rename itself Baidu Wallet, showing quite a bit of courage—it's rare to see someone carrying a PC to buy things on the street. Since it's called a wallet, your mobile transformation should speed up. Moreover, the three key elements of financial products—risk, yield, and liquidity—the last item, liquidity, often relies on the mobile end for assurance. Since it claims high convenience for its products, the homework on the mobile end cannot be skipped.
Finally, there's Baidu's own user system construction. Baidu's accumulation in terms of consumption habits is still insufficient, at most being able to grasp what a user has searched for. Financial businesses have a characteristic: the requirements for the hosting platform are highly refined because risk control is always placed first. To ensure this layer of security, Baidu must expedite its work on user habit profiling.
Regardless, as Alibaba and Baidu have successively entered the internet finance domain, users' financial knowledge has gradually become richer. After all, these two companies are the largest domestic network media platforms. Now, any random friend can casually talk about annualized yield, regulatory thresholds, and sales licenses. Markets always warm up before bursting, and the financial journey of internet companies is gradually becoming lively.