Can Chinese internet pioneer Sohu pull off a comeback after missing the mobile era?

Years after Sohu.com, once known as one of China’s leading internet portals, fell from grace by missing the mark in some of the hottest realms of the mobile internet age – social media, live broadcasting, and short video – it has vowed to make a comeback with new initiatives in videos and more.

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Sohu is at the stage of bottoming out and is set for a comeback, Sohu founder and CEO Charles Zhang Chaoyang said at a media briefing on Wednesday. He detailed plans to launch a new self-developed drama series on its streaming site and move into the short video space, according to a report on the Sohu News portal.

But can Sohu pull off a recovery?

Its latest attempt was Huyou, a social app that last month joined the attack on China’s dominant social and messaging app WeChat, but it failed to impress users and the industry after it was pulled from app stores only two days after launch.

“Due to the need to improve some features, the Huyou app will be removed in half an hour from app stores for a week,” Zhang wrote in one of three posts announcing the decision last month on Weibo, China’s popular Twitter-like microblogging site run by rival Sina Corp.

He added that the app, which works like a hybrid of WeChat and Weibo as a social platform, remained accessible to existing users, but some users were quick to move on. “I’ve already uninstalled it,” read the most upvoted comment in response to Zhang’s post.

Sohu did not comment on Zhang’s remarks or the company’s strategy to achieve a comeback.

Huyou missed its one-week deadline for relaunch. It is still “undergoing some improvement,” Zhang said at the media briefing, as reported by Chinese tech media outlet TechWeb.

As one of the earliest internet companies in China, Sohu is now entering a space dominated by Tencent Holdings-operated super app WeChat, which counts more than 1 billion active users and is known as Weixin on the mainland. New social media apps continue to pop up and challenge WeChat’s predominance in the world’s biggest internet population, usually in vain.

“It’s natural for Sohu to make this move because social media is the center of internet traffic, and that’s why major Chinese internet companies, including Alibaba with its Laiwang app, have made their attempts in this field even though many of them failed in the end,” said Dingding Zhang, former head of Beijing-based research firm Sootoo Institute and now an independent internet industry commentator.

Alibaba is the parent company of the South China Morning Post.

The chances for Huyou to break through in the crowded social media market are slim, Zhang said.

“In social media, the cost for users to switch to a new platform is very high, especially when WeChat has covered pretty much everything it can do,” he said. “I don’t think the company thought it through, making Huyou a hodgepodge of all major social products. The chance for it to succeed is less than 1%.”