Over the past few years, a clear change has taken place in how small and medium-sized enterprises conduct business online: from "running a single official website" to "maintaining multiple platform accounts." The costs brought by this change are often noticed only after the investment has actually been made.
From Open Connections to Closed Ecosystems
The internet of the PC era was centered on "connections." Websites linked to one another, search engines could crawl freely, overall traffic was growing, and openness was the consensus of all parties. At that time, the larger a platform was, the more incentive it had to build wider roads—the more accessible the roads, the more people traveled them, and the greater the platform's own value.
After entering the stage of competition over existing stock, the logic changed. When users can easily migrate between platforms, platforms are more inclined to keep transactions and relationships within their own systems. As a result, content, users, and transactions were gradually gathered into their respective ecosystems, and cross-platform jumps became less smooth.
Viewed individually, this shift is a rational business choice, but taken together it has created a new reality: the internet has gone from being one network to being several disconnected systems.
The Threefold Cost SMEs Pay for This
The first is duplicated investment. The same product requires a separate set of information maintained on a mini-program, an e-commerce store, and a content platform; the same product image must be recropped to different specifications, the same copy must be rewritten in different styles, and the same group of customers must be replied to separately in multiple backends. This work does not itself create value, yet it consumes a great deal of manpower.
The second is rising traffic costs. In an open ecosystem, traffic acquisition depends more on content quality; in a closed ecosystem, it depends more on advertising budget. The unit price of advertising rises year after year, while the predictability of results declines instead—rules are adjusted unilaterally by platforms, making it difficult for enterprises to form stable expectations for their investment.
The third is dispersed energy. When a team's main energy is spent adapting to the rules and rhythms of various platforms, the time invested in refining products and accumulating technology inevitably decreases. This loss is not easy to quantify, but its impact is long-term.
Why the Situation Is Difficult to Change on Its Own
For any platform, being the first to open up fully means bearing the risk of users and revenue being diverted. When multiple parties all weigh the situation this way, a more conservative strategy becomes the common choice. This is a classic collective action dilemma: individual rationality adds up to collective inefficiency.
Two External Variables That Are Already at Work
Variable one: AI search has changed the path of information acquisition. When users begin asking AI directly and receiving synthesized answers rather than searching within a single platform, the citability of content becomes more important than recommendation weight within a platform. For clearly structured, sustainably accessible independent sites, this is a positive change.
Variable two: a cost-driven return to rationality. When advertising costs rise to the point of affecting profits, some enterprises will reassess their investment structure and shift resources toward sustainable, accumulative channels. This does not require moral judgment; it is simply a natural calculation of costs and benefits.
Practical Advice for SMEs
In such an environment, the first priority is not scale expansion, but reducing friction costs. A feasible approach is: put the main energy into channels that can directly establish connections with users—official websites, communities, email, and instant messaging; put less energy into maintaining the daily presence of platform accounts. Reducing ineffective actions is itself effective cost control.
Changes in the external environment do not depend on any single enterprise, but an enterprise can decide where to direct its own resources.