"You ugly you sleep first, I beautiful I live" .
In 2016, the advertising slogan used by Yingke for marketing was no less popular than today's "absolute son" and "YYDS", although offensive, it still won the round of the thousand broadcast war with the groundbreaking beauty live broadcast.
How popular was the live broadcast ever?
According to incomplete statistics, there were more than 200 mobile live streaming apps running online at that time. In terms of financing, taking Yingke as an example, from January to September 2016, in about eight months, the valuation soared 18 times. With a three-year golden development period, in 2018, Yingke was successfully listed in Hong Kong, becoming the "first stock of live broadcasting".
Its rise and fall are also sudden.
Also in 2018, Douyin's "Gucci Gucci Prada Prada" completely went out of the circle, Kuaishou opened the national live broadcast permission, and the old iron began to go everywhere. Later, the two words of live broadcasting and e-commerce are bound deeper and deeper, and the traditional live broadcast of the show has been forgotten.
This article will explore the same live broadcast as a sample of the screener, why is the live broadcast of the show inferior to the latecomers? Are there inherent flaws in the live show?
The loss of the inquest
The high point of Yingke's stock price was fixed on the day of listing on July 12, 2018, and after 7 trading days, the stock price broke, and since then, it has gone all the way south, and now the market value is only less than HK$3 billion.
Yingke, listing is the peak, just as in 2016, the Yingke App, which was launched for less than a year, met the first year of live broadcasting.
Through the concept of "live broadcasting of ordinary people", Yingke has created a precedent of "live broadcasting for all", and in the third quarter of 2016, the average monthly active anchor of Yingke was 7.14 million, according to its prospectus, this anchor size currently ranks first among all live broadcasting platforms.
However, in the process of actual implementation, live broadcasting still has a threshold, and it can only be broadcast live after reaching a certain level through gift giving upgrades. Yingke also took the initiative to recruit Internet celebrities non-publicly, and there was only one shell left in the national live broadcast, and the core was still the logic of the show live broadcast.
In 2016, Yingke achieved revenue of 4.335 billion yuan, of which 99% came from live broadcasting business, and then began to decline continuously.
If you look at its core operating data, you will find that the "flowering period" of in-house growth is short and there are traces to follow.
From the second quarter of 2016, after the average number of average monthly paid users reached a peak of 2.62 million, it turned around and entered the accelerated decline in 2017, and by Q1 2018, it had dropped to 730,000.
The number of anchors has also gone through a roller coaster, with monthly active anchors going downhill from 7.14 million in the third quarter of 2016 to 1.506 million in the fourth quarter of 2017, and 36.8 million people holding anchor status on the yingke platform during the same period.
Such a strong contrast is not explained by the lack of activity of the anchor, but the loss rate of the anchor is too high, or it is transferred to other platforms, or it is simply attracted by an activity, such as "Ms. Sakura" and "Mr. Yingke", and after not finding the special value of the platform, it turns around and leaves.
Although revenue and core operating data are declining, Yingke has always been profitable, and because of the rise of fame, it has saved a lot of sales expenses and added other revenue, and its net profit has been rising.
Until 2019, the decline in gross profit margin was accompanied by the increase in the sales expense ratio, and the profitability of Yingke fell sharply, and the first half of the year began to lose money.
2019 is also a watershed year for the entire industry. In 2018, live shows peaked at $5.1 billion and fell to $4.8 billion the following year. Also in 2019, Panda Live, which Wang Sicong invested in, issued a closure announcement. In 2020, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television also introduced a policy on the limit on the amount of rewards for live broadcasts of the show and the requirement of a real-name system, giving the show a heavy blow.
The live broadcast of the show is so step by step cool.
9158, the harmonic sound about me, is the first to bring the words such as beauty and heterosexual dating into the player's eyeball chat room. Its parent company, Tiange Interactive, has seen its revenue decline year by year since 2018, as has its share price.
The loss of 9158 is the epitome of the live broadcast of the show, a live broadcast to sell itself on Weibo, YY first dismantled the tiger's teeth, and then sold it to Baidu, Momo acquired the probe, and entered the social field of strangers.
Yingke uses audio and video as the carrier to create a diversified social "product matrix", in addition to the Yingke App, there are more than 20 products such as "Jimu", "Fate" and "Not on", and the proportion of live broadcast revenue is getting lower and lower, coupled with the special situation of the epidemic, in exchange for the recovery of income in 2020.
It must be admitted that a single live show can no longer support a large company.
The back wave struck
What is the hottest thing after 2018? Short videos and live streams must be included in the answer.
On the one hand, in 2018, the DAU, the average number of daily startups, and the average daily use time of users in the short video industry have exceeded the live broadcast of the show, of which the average daily use time is more than twice the average daily time of the video live broadcast industry.
On the other hand, the financing situation of live broadcasts on the runway quickly receded.
Live broadcasts are distracted by short videos for three reasons:
1. The content is different.
The content of the live broadcast operation of the show is people, and changing the live broadcast room is still a similar talent display.
The content of the short video not only includes people, but also includes planning, such as the Kuaishou net red handmade Geng who always makes useless inventions, and Zhang Classmate, who has recently caught fire, and each anchor has formed distinct characteristics and unified on the platform, with both talent displays, as well as plot, humor, and earthy taste, and various flavors have formed a rich content library.
2. Time fragmentation.
Fragmented short videos condense the most essential parts in just a few minutes, and present them to users directly, which is more in line with the rhythm of people's life and work in the case of major mobile apps competing for attention.
3. The mechanism is different.
Under the model of the anchor + guild (brokerage company) of the show live broadcast, the platform cares more about the stability between the three, which is greatly affected by the tipping of the head paying user. The national live broadcast has a steady stream of vitality, focusing on the long-tail market, paying attention to the scale of users, and the monetization model includes brushing gifts, bringing goods, and receiving advertisements, which is relatively diverse and can stimulate users to create good content.
The difference in mechanisms is essentially due to cross-edge network effects, which are not expanded here and are described in detail below.
Live streaming is also due to the higher value of the content provided to the live broadcast of the show.
In the show mode, people's performance is a commodity; in the live streaming mode, the connection between the anchor and the user has an extra layer, that is, the commodity, and the anchor sells his ability to distinguish the advantages and disadvantages of the product, the marketing ability and the ability to bring benefits to the user.
Coupled with the wealth-making effect of live broadcasting with goods, it is difficult for show anchors not to be impressed.
It is difficult to say whether live broadcasts and short videos are still people's time-killing tools in the future, but in the past few years, they have indeed provided content that is more in line with people's rhythm, richer and more valuable.
The live show is not hard, they all have a layout for short videos, and tried live e-commerce:
In 2020, YY set up a live streaming channel in the App - live shopping, mainly jade play, the category is very vertical, the goods come from its jewelry e-commerce "one piece", and the anchors inside come from the settled merchants;
Also in 2020, Tang Yan, the founder of Momo, publicly stated that he was exploring potential opportunities for the combination of e-commerce and online live broadcasting. During the 618 period last year, the floating window entrance was launched, allowing the anchor to list goods through you like, and also supported the insertion of goods from Taobao, but there was no special live streaming with goods partition, Tech Planet reported last year, Momo is preparing to build a live e-commerce team;
Yingke opened a "Hi Buy" live streaming with goods area, according to reports, this is an e-commerce platform positioned to serve live broadcasting. In its 2020 annual report and 2021 semi-annual report, it has not yet given a separate space to the live broadcast, and it is speculated that it is not yet large-scale.
However, the pattern is set.
Why is the live broadcast of the runway not far away?
The model of live broadcasting is photographed on the beach, there is a certain inevitability, even if it is not short video and live e-commerce, its ceiling is also visible to the naked eye.
First, the cross-border network effect of live broadcasting on the runway is weak.
The cross-edge network effect refers to the promotion effect of the participants on one side of the platform to the other side, that is, the positive externality. The stronger the positive externalities, the greater the scale effect, and the easier it is for resources to be concentrated on this platform.
For example, the more types of products provided by Taobao merchants, the more they can achieve a variety of goods, and the popularity of the user side will become more and more prosperous, and it will attract the merchant side to settle in, forming a positive cycle.
The large number of producers and consumers, and can promote each other, is called a bilateral market.
The live broadcast of the show also looks extremely close to the bilateral market, connecting the anchor on the one hand, and connecting the user at the same time, and the anchor and the user are enough. However, the content of the live broadcast of the show is relatively single, mostly chatting with users while doing some talent performances, and the homogenization is serious.
The user side is easy to form two kinds of behavioral logic: 1, identify several familiar anchors, especially the anchors who have been rewarded, the more consumption, the more they want to have a strong association with the anchor, such as offline meeting; 2, the channel pushes what anchor, look at what anchor, will not be screened, this behavior logic, the amount of reward generated is relatively low.
Either way, a larger number of anchors will not be the core competitiveness of a platform.
On the anchor side, "the number of users" has the advantage of attracting anchors in the early stage of the platform, but in the later stage, the anchor pays more attention to the number of "big brothers" in the live broadcast room, and the strong correlation with the "big brother", rather than the user scale of the platform.
Metcalfe's Law tells us that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the square of the number of customers it has.
The cross-border network effect of the show live broadcast is weak, the industry scale effect and the first-mover advantage brought by it are not obvious, and the focus of competition has become the scale of its own traffic and the channel for purchasing traffic, which will lead to higher costs, just as the sales expense rate of Yingke began to rise in 2019. The peaking of traffic also makes the platform more dependent on the value of existing traffic.
Second, too much reliance on head live streaming.
People are risk-averse. According to the expected theory of behavioral economics, in most cases that can be calculated, people estimate "the value of what was lost" twice as high as "the value of what was gained."
Therefore, under normal circumstances, people do not want the costs that have been paid to become sunk costs, and only by continuing to pay can there be gains. In the process of paying, the relationship with the anchor is closer.
In this case, the user is loyal to the host rather than the platform. To a certain extent, it can be considered that the platform has been kidnapped by the head anchor with a loyal fan base, which leads to the platform losing its right to speak in terms of traffic tilt and benefit distribution.
To put it simply, the show live broadcast platform relies on the value of existing traffic, and the existing traffic is more likely to be bound by the head anchor, and the head anchor may have a conflict of interest with the guild behind it or with the platform, resulting in job hopping, so the platform must maintain the stability of the three parties as much as possible.
Third, supply and demand misalignment and regulatory risks.
Live broadcast of the show provides talent performance capabilities, and the corresponding demand should be the user's appreciation of singing skills or dance choreography. Users come to the show to live stream in order to meet emotional needs.
The talent-based live broadcast has become an emotional labor, this supply and demand dislocation has weakened the importance of the "content" of talent, emotional connection is the most important capital of the show anchor, and the show live broadcast has become an online KTV and nightclub.
And because the content provided by the anchor is similar, in order to highlight the heavy siege in the game with the platform to get more voice, the anchor has to succumb to more gifts, throw away the shame or transform it into a job demand, in the form of rubbing the edge ball or even less vulgar form to satisfy people's original desires.
This kind of inner volume in the direction of no lower limit will inevitably be hit by supervision, touching the red line or losing users, and the platform must carefully balance, which also leads to limited scale increments.
epilogue
When the mobile Internet tariff is reduced, mobile live broadcasting has the soil to grow. Yingke took the lead in proposing the form of live broadcasting for the whole people, but did not stick to it, and finally succumbed to the traditional guild + anchor content supply model, still taking "local tycoon" tips as the most important source of income.
This model has a high degree of certainty in the upfront profit. However, as a platform with a weak cross-border effect, the model has limited ability to attract traffic, can not do the winner takes all (winner-take-all) effect, grows to a certain scale, after the increase in the number of entrants in the market, the platform on the one hand to use high fees to the channel to grow, on the one hand to maintain the existing paying users and the anchors they are loyal to have to make profits.
The showcasts eventually trapped themselves in a frame that was difficult to break through, and when they turned their heads to look, they found that the grain and grass had been plundered.