Do you spend on Owhat?
Recently, the official Weibo of the fan platform Owhat issued an announcement that the manual refund work provided by the fan association has been carried out in an orderly manner. The Owhat platform that has been fermenting since October has "indefinitely stopped fan association merchant services" storm, which has caused many fans to be dissatisfied.
The emergence of this phenomenon has once again triggered the development ecology of the fan platform industry to cause the public to think, relying on the harvest of fan economic dividends to develop and grow the fan platform, but in the end it has triggered the public's verbal criticism of its "thunder and run away" behavior, which cannot help but let more people focus on the hidden side behind the fan assistance app.
Owhat continues to transform
Fan-response apps have attracted much attention from capital
Founded in 2014, Owhat is positioned as a platform for celebrities to operate core fan communities and carry out fan operations. As a digital entertainment platform, it undertakes an important function of connecting offline B-end entertainment companies with C-end entertainment consumers. Fan groups can obtain celebrity information on the platform to help celebrities, and entertainment companies will also carry out various Amway activities for fans on the platform. With Owhat, many fans continue to gather in the platform, and Owhat has become an important base for many celebrity fans to carry out assistance activities.
As fans' trust in Owhat continues to rise, Owhat has gradually attracted more investors' attention. In 2016, Owhat completed four rounds of financing, of which tens of millions of Series A financing from Chuangfeng Capital, Jiangtong Investment and Far East Holding Group and tens of millions of A+ rounds of financing invested by Taihe Music created excellent capital conditions for Owhat's rise.
It is also under the blessing of capital conditions that Owhat developed rapidly from 2016 to 2018. In 2018, with the popularity of "Idol Trainee", the domestic idol industry has risen rapidly, from selling peripheral products to fan investment, which has made the industry see the development prospects of the fan economy. In this context, Owhat, which is relatively mature in function, has also become a key position for fans to "generate electricity for love", and during the launch of "Idol Trainee", Owhat has become a base for a large number of fans to make data for idol investment.
However, in the same year, while the enthusiasm for fans to help heated up rapidly, the policy wind direction was also quietly changing. The relevant policies introduced around the popularity of the talent show also made Owhat realize that if the platform simply focuses on the rescue function, it is bound to face many risks in the future development. Therefore, starting from 2018, Owhat has embarked on a transformation path towards a "celebrity lifestyle shopping sharing platform", expanding the social and e-commerce functions of the platform while maintaining the original basic functions. Not only is it committed to sharing the same good things with celebrities online, but also selling idol peripherals and derivatives through the creation of offline limited-time physical retail stores to provide fans with an immersive shopping experience.
In recent years, Owhat has established close ties with a number of entertainment agencies in the industry, from artist promotion to entertainment marketing, to music production and derivative development and other business Owhat, more importantly, Owhat's function as an "intermediary" between stars and fans has also been recognized by many fans during this period.
Thanks to the play of Owhat's "intermediary" function, many fans and the platform have formed a relationship similar to that of buyers and e-commerce platforms. From the perspective of the fan purchase process, it has formed a relatively mature transaction process similar to the e-commerce platform, the difference is that the fans in Owhat can use the platform to collect loose powder money and withdraw cash from the platform, and then pay to the outside third-party supplier, and the supplier arranges product production and delivery, which makes the platform an important bridge for star fans to contact more loose powder. Owhat has also gained the title of "Rice Circle Taobao" in the development of e-commerce.
However, since September, Owhat has begun to release negative signals of the interruption of the transaction chain, first requiring the fan merchants on the platform to provide e-commerce business licenses on the grounds of cooperating with the "Clear Lang Action", indicating that the merchants in the platform can only apply for withdrawal business after passing the approval. The difficulty of passing the certification approval and the delay in withdrawal have become the status quo of merchants in the platform for a while.
In addition, after entering October, Owhat completely kicked off the prelude to stopping trading. Official Micro issued a notice on October 14 that from now on, the platform will indefinitely stop all transaction services of "fan club" merchants, and will also stop fan club withdrawals to provide refund services for loose powder in the platform. For a time, fan buyers could not receive the purchase of goods after payment, and the refund could not arrive, and the platform merchants also reflected that the platform did not fulfill the payment commitment and could not carry out platform cash withdrawal, resulting in some merchants in order to ship in time, can only advance the payment, and eventually caused a huge loss. The words of "platform fraud" and "running away" flooded the Internet, which made Owhat on the cusp of public opinion.
Platform risks continue to emerge
Forcing the stars to return to sanity
To this day, Owhat is still facing the "accusations" raised by many fans about not returning money, although Owhat's official statement indicates that it is indeed carrying out a refund action, but the slow process is difficult to soothe the anger of many fans who have been "cheated".
The public opinion storm set off by Owhat this time not only made the public pay more attention to the fan assistance platform, but also pushed the industry ecology of the fan assistance platform that had received less attention in the past to the front of the stage.
The current fan assistance platform is the product of the rapid development of the fan economy, at first it was to build a bridge between more fans and foreign stars, and then with the development of the domestic idol industry, the fan assistance platform began to tilt to the domestic rice circle. Because it satisfies the psychological needs of many fans to harvest idol information for the first time, find more like-minded friends, facilitate the purchase of celebrity peripheral products, and be able to work with other fans to fight for the psychological needs of fans, the fan assistance platform has received the love and support of many fans after its launch.
Judging from the development of the fan economy in recent years, there are excellent development prospects for fan assistance apps, and the market variety of Apps is becoming more and more abundant.
The mainstream fan assistance App in the comprehensive market can be seen to involve a variety of basic functions such as information aggregation, peripheral welfare, assistance collection, and list playing in its functions, and at the same time, according to the characteristics of each App, different brand programs, purification and anti-black features are set up on their own platforms, so that they can form differentiated competitiveness with other platforms. For example, the Super Star Rice Ball App can provide users with dynamic information such as Aidou Weibo, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc., the Magic Rice Student App can provide fans with anti-black functions such as Weibo purification and Baidu purification, and the Aidou App pays more attention to building fan organizations and creating more sense of belonging for fans.
At the same time, fan support Apps have also shown a vertical development trend, and at present, there are also assistance Apps for Korean circles or a separate idol group in the market to meet the needs of different fan audiences.
In addition to the market's tolerance of fan-responsive Apps, from the perspective of fan groups, it has formed a solid consumption habit in star chasing. Combined with the "Generation Z" insight report released by questmobile, it can be seen that in the field of video consumption, apps involving celebrities have become an important part of Gen Z content consumption. At the same time, in terms of making lists for the topic of love beans and supporting idol endorsements, Generation Z has contributed important forces, which has also prompted the online star-chasing community to become a gathering place for Generation Z.
Image source: Questmobile Generation Z Insight Report
Good audience conditions and capital conditions, as well as some brokerage companies in order to help their own artists to collect fans' needs, prompting fan assistance Apps to be able to harvest a large number of user groups after launch, and fan assistance Apps can be in close contact with brokerage companies, but also allows such Apps to greatly cultivate a large number of loyal fan users.
But at the same time, it is worth noting that the potential "traffic fraud" and "illegal fundraising" risks behind such apps are gradually emerging, and at the same time, star-chasing and aid-oriented apps are very prone to capital operation problems, which will lead to the phenomenon that the platform is not well managed and "runs away", and many fans invest money in the platform.
At the moment when the operational risks of the fan assistance platform can be revealed, the deformed investment concept that exists in the rice circle is also gradually becoming prominent, and the behaviors of insults, pulling and stepping, rumor-mongering, and network violence have gradually lost their original intentions and immersed themselves in the false prosperity brought about by data fraud and crazy fundraising. At this time, the development of the "Qinglang" series of special actions seems to be opportune, and it is extremely important for the drastic rectification of various chaos, and the atmosphere of national entertainment and collective carnival will also be reversed, and it is believed that it will also promote the fan assistance platform to return to sanity again and promote the industry to return to normal operation track.
Owhat's storm will be a wake-up call for the industry, and will also have a strong impact on the formulation of industry standards for future fan assistance platforms, and can make fans remind themselves once again that they need to grasp the scale and grasp rationality.