Text | Zinc scale, author | Meteor, edit | Chen Dengxin
The transformation of Station B began to accelerate.
In the capital market, Station B has fallen and fallen, changing the mood of 2020, as of December 17, 2021, it has fallen below the $50 mark, and pessimism has spread.
In this context, Station B is eager to tell new stories.
LexBurner, the banned top-notch UP owner who "bought live" for 20 million yuan, made the retired LOL legend Uzi comeback and joined the E-sports club BLD, which he ran, and prepared to launch the e-commerce function "Little Yellow Car" in the live broadcast room...
In short, Station B urgently needs to explore new profit growth points.
The success of breaking the circle is difficult to hide the embarrassment of loss, and Station B turns to e-commerce
In recent years, "out of the circle" has always been the keyword of Station B.
Although Station B has always emphasized its "two-dimensional" identity label, whether it is an old user or an investor familiar with ACG culture, it is clear that Station B's performance in the ACG content involved in the second dimension in recent years is not satisfactory: the animation deletion and removal of the shelf makes the audience complain, the poor quality of comic translation makes jokes, the game business engine is turned off, and the pillar of revenue gives way to value-added services... From these clues, many users are keenly aware that B station is becoming more and more strained on the ACG plate, or that its mind is no longer all on the ACG content.
And this is also the case, since 2014, the commercialization strategy implemented by Station B CEO Chen Rui and COO Li Yi has made it clear that the goal of Station B is not to become a successful version of Niconico Animation or AccFun, a vertical video content website based on ACG content, but to become a large-scale integrated video site similar to YouTube - in other words, Station B and Tencent Video, iQiyi, Many video website friends such as Watermelon Video have a consistent goal.
After clarifying this goal, the commercial operation of Station B has also been promoted in a very orderly manner, quickly stepping out of the "comfort zone" of ACG content, and extending its tentacles to mainstream cultural fields such as film and television variety shows and e-sports.
Among them, in terms of film and television variety shows, in addition to a series of variety resources jointly created by local satellite televisions represented by "Informal Talks", station B has also achieved great success in its self-made variety shows represented by "Happy Brothers", "Story King", and "Rap New Generation".
In terms of e-sports, in addition to forming its own e-sports team, Station B has invested 800 million yuan to buy the exclusive live broadcast rights of the top e-sports event "League of Legends" Global Finals (S Competition) in China for the next three years, which makes the two players in the vanguard of e-sports live broadcasting red-eyed.
In addition, Station B also has many operations to accelerate the integration of the website into the mainstream culture process, such as the "Most Beautiful Night" New Year's Eve Party, which once became a hot search topic on social media, and the promotional videos represented by "After the Wave" and "I Don't Want to Be Like This". These fragmentary operations have helped Station B establish a new brand image that dilutes the elements of ACG and emphasizes the attitude of Generation Z's life, so that Station B can break the otaku cultural atmosphere of "no one is near" spawned by ACG content in the past, and reach a wider and more diverse generation of Z users in addition to heavy ACG enthusiasts.
Nowadays, with the title of "two-dimensional" B station, the most active video partition is not any of the ACG, but the "grounded" living area, the number of submissions in the film and television area and the entertainment area also far exceeds the animation area and the drama area, when watching a group of B station users in the rural life, idol two creation or technology miscellaneous talk and other video content with bullet screen talk, it is difficult to imagine that the most popular video content of this video station is obscure ghost animal video, MMD dance video, Various VOCALOID handwritten and cover videos.
B station homepage
Obviously, Station B has successfully thrown the "subculture" hat far behind.
And B station investors are also happy to see such changes, more in line with the mainstream culture, meaning more diversified video content and user groups, which will make B station towards its goal - integrated video site Youtube a big step closer.
However, whenever users or investors talk about the topic that B station wants to become the Chinese version of Youtube, it is inevitable that there will be some embarrassment, because unlike other long video sites, B station due to the promises made to users in the past, resulting in it dare not easily enable the opening of the opening advertising profit model, and on the contrary, early to break even, even now considered to be in a profitable state of Youtube, the main source of its income is from the B station to tie hands and feet of the advertising business.
The difficulty of replicating Youtube's advertising business has left B in a haze on the road to chasing its goals. Without the simple and crude means of profitability of the opening advertisement, this also makes the loss of Station B more prominent. As mentioned at the beginning of the article, the "small broken station" in the third quarter of 2021 in the financial report of the loss continues to expand, the establishment of the "small broken station" has been established for twelve years, and now still maintains the state of "burning money", although the revenue data growth is obvious, but the loss data has also been rising, such a status quo is undoubtedly to investors poured a basin of cold water, making it difficult for them to continue to look at the development of station B with the almost blind optimism of the past.
Of course, Station B is also well aware of this, so it has begun to further tap new profit growth points, one of which is the recently widely concerned e-commerce function "Little Yellow Car".
E-commerce, especially the new form of live e-commerce, has been quite alarming in recent years. According to iResearch statistics, the scale of China's live e-commerce market in 2020 will reach 1.2 trillion yuan, with an annual growth rate of 197.0%, and it is expected that the average annual compound growth rate in the next three years will be 58.3%, and will exceed 4.9 trillion yuan in 2023.
Live e-commerce has a vast space for development, and when e-commerce is combined with B station, a video site with a large number of Gen Z users who have just taken over the banner of consumerism, it can indeed bring a lot of new fantasies to investors.
However, the voice of doubt also exists, some B station old users scoffed at the fact that B station is about to get involved in live e-commerce, believing that live streaming with goods is incompatible with the mainstream game live broadcast of the B station live broadcast plate, and the "little yellow car" project is very likely to encounter the situation of "water and soil dissatisfaction" after the launch of the project.
Two-dimensional users are not willing to pay money, who are potential consumers?
Is the above question justified?
In fact, this involves the problem of the "pan-quadratic" of the B station breaking circle mentioned above. Many old users and investors for the B station of the understanding of the still can not get rid of the "ACG", "home culture" such as the subculture label, in the view of this part of the people, the current live broadcast business of the B station is mainly focused on the game live broadcast and "paper man" virtual anchor, live broadcast with goods and these B station anchor "painting style" does not match, the audience will not buy it.
Although there is some truth in such a view, if you think about it carefully, you will also find many loopholes.
First of all, game streamers and virtual streamers are not as far away from live streaming as users think.
In fact, since the B station to promote the commercialization process, B station UP owners and anchors and manufacturers to carry out commercial cooperation "just rice" situation is not uncommon, and even has subtly become a major monetization method for UP owners and anchors, game anchors in the dynamic forwarding of manufacturers' product links, or in the live broadcast room to the manufacturer's goods unbox evaluation, is not a new thing. In addition to the virtual anchor's ACG enthusiast audience ratio is indeed very high, there is no obvious obstacle so that they can not live such content, in fact, in the vibrato activity of the virtual anchor "Silent Sauce", has tried to bring goods for snack goods in the live broadcast room.
Virtual streamer
Secondly, the number of users who like to watch live broadcasts with goods on station B may be more than the old users imagine.
There is no data to prove that the "Z generation" or "two-dimensional" group with the most users of Station B does not like to live broadcast with goods. In fact, after taking over the banner of consumerism, Generation Z young people have a great tendency to become the main consumer force of major e-commerce platforms. According to Nielsen IQ 2021 "Double Eleven" research report data, more than half of the Z generation participated in this year's e-commerce platform "double eleven" activities, and, according to the statistics of Zhigua data, such as Li Jiaqi, Wei Ya and other head anchors with goods, the total proportion of Z generation young people in the range from 95 to 00 in the live broadcast room also accounted for more than half, from these two data, the enthusiasm of the Z generation for new e-commerce consumption can be seen.
In this regard, there are also B station users with B station basic disk ACG heavy fans are most keen to consume the animation peripheral products (handmade, posters, badges, etc.) is not very suitable for live streaming with goods, adhere to the B station live with goods will be "water and soil" view. And this involves an interesting question, after the B station promoted the "pan-quadratic element" operation, has its basic disk been shaken? Those who are only keen to consume anime peripheral products ACG heavy fans, in the B station users account for a high proportion?
In this regard, we may not be able to get specific data to unravel the mystery, but from the "clues" exposed by the financial report of Station B, we can still roughly understand the fact that the basic disk of Station B is being "updated".
In the third quarter of 2021 financial report, the average monthly active users of Station B increased by 30 million to 267 million, an increase of 35% year-on-year; the average daily active users reached 72 million, an increase of 35% year-on-year; the number of "big members" of the company reached 18.2 million, an increase of 42% year-on-year.
Just looking at the data, we can not get other information except that the growth of the large members of the B station is very prominent, but if combined with some domestic policy changes this year, then we will find some interesting truths behind this data.
It should be emphasized that the earliest and most important right of the big members of station B is to watch animation dramas and film and television variety shows limited by large members. Moreover, with the advancement of the commercialization process of Station B, more and more animation dramas and film and television variety works of Station B have been labeled as "limited by large members".
As we all know, the basic disk of Station B has been considered to be ACG enthusiasts in the past, and such a situation should logically have a certain impact on the sales of large members of Station B. However, just like everyone saw in the financial report, the number of large members of Station B not only did not decrease, but "thrived" and achieved bright results.
From this, it is not difficult for us to conclude that this B station user may no longer be buying big members for anime dramas.
So where did these new big members come from? Users who want to watch film and television variety shows, users who want to use special memes, and users who want to see higher quality UGC content... All in all, it's not so "hardcore" ACG enthusiasts, as well as non-ACG enthusiasts.
With this conclusion, we return to the previous question, after the "little yellow car" e-commerce function on the B station, those secondary users who are stereotyped and believe that they only like to consume ACG-related products that are not easy to be carried may not pay money, but among the larger number of "pan-quadratic" users, there is no shortage of Z generations who have a strong interest in new e-commerce consumption and live streaming. Even from another point of view, those Z generation users who are not interested in the strong live broadcast section of station B (that is, game live broadcasting and virtual anchors) may also be attracted to the live broadcast area of station B because of the new live streaming content.
It seems that the "little yellow car" of Station B may be more troublesome than people think.
E-commerce is not a new attempt, but Station B is really anxious
"B station + e-commerce" always gives people a feeling of unknown, but to be honest, "little yellow car" is actually not the first time B has touched the field of e-commerce.
As early as November 2017, Station B launched its own e-commerce platform "Member Purchase", the platform was the first to focus on the sale of ACG content derivative products such as hand-made models, animation peripherals and comic exhibition tickets, and later in order to expand the scale of users, it has successively joined e-sports peripherals, Sankeng clothing and other commodities, and thanks to the support of the huge user traffic of Station B, the annual GMV successfully exceeded 1 billion yuan after the launch of Member Purchase, opening up new monetization channels for Station B.
However, after all, the B station "Zhengye" is still operating a bullet screen video website, and the e-commerce business is still quite unfamiliar to the B station at that time, so the member purchase has also exploded many problems in the process of operation, such as frequent delays in delivery, unreliable after-sales service, and some goods are not authorized.
But these problems did not stop Station B's ambition to further promote the e-commerce business. With the bubble mart represented by the tide play blind box began to become popular, B station continued to chase hot spots, on the basis of member purchase, launched a similar blind box to smoke gacha "magic reward" gameplay, although this gamified e-commerce model also attracted many users to come to taste in the early days. However, with the passage of time, the popularity of the blind box play faded, and the calmed users found that the magic reward did not have any probability of publicity, nor did it show the remaining number of each prize, and consumers who felt that their rights and interests were violated began to label the magic reward with negative labels such as "pit person" and "routine", and there were thousands of related complaints on the black cat complaint platform.
According to the B station 2021 third quarter financial report data, B station in the quarter of e-commerce and other business revenue of 730 million yuan, an increase of 78% year-on-year, it can be said that B station through member purchase and magic reward of e-commerce attempts to get good data results, however, before there were members to buy and ship slowly, after-sales poor, after the magic reward was questioned to infringe on consumer rights and interests, so that B station did not earn much reputation in the field of e-commerce.
Just like Station B did not put down the magic reward because of the problem of member purchase, in the face of the problems faced by the existing e-commerce business, Station B did not delay its pace, but continued to launch a "small yellow car", which really made people feel a sense of tension behind the bright financial report data of Station B.
Is Station B nervous?
In many ways, it may be true.
Only from the perspective of live broadcasting with goods, the "three giants" of Taobao, Douyin and Kuaishou have been far ahead in the track, not only occupying the vast majority of market share, but also becoming more and more mature. Kuaishou and Douyin have begun to build self-operated e-commerce platforms in order to form a complete closed-loop system through mature e-commerce platforms and supply chains with live broadcasts, while for Taobao, which is an e-commerce platform, it is busy digging up various Internet celebrities and accelerating the construction of content communities, in order to attract more users with interested content.
Taobao digging B station UP main
For the B station that only chooses to enter the live broadcast track with goods in 2021, although there is a huge user traffic, what kind of consumption preferences do users in their own community have, what kind of goods they choose to sell can give full play to the advantages of the B station anchor, how to solve the existing problems of the self-operated platform, etc. Station B itself is also confused, and it is necessary to feel the stones to cross the river.
Obviously, the existence of these burdens makes it difficult for the B station to advance the speed of the track with the three giants who have been crawling and playing in the track for more than 4 years, and when the B station catches up with these predecessors, how many cakes have been distributed to the B station, which has become the stock of the Red Sea, the answer is probably not satisfactory to the B station.
If Station B is frustrated in the field of live broadcasting with goods, it means that the current mainstream profit method has closed the door to Station B, and Station B needs to turn back again to face the loss problem of "old and difficult".
Of course, Station B will also find other seemingly feasible methods, such as increasing the more mature e-sports industry in recent years, such as further developing idolized UP masters, tapping the potential of the fan economy, and entering the catering industry, such as investing in Western food chain brands Pink Burger before... But no matter what Station B wants to do now, one of its main purposes will be to take off the hat of "the most money-losing long video platform in China".
Obviously, before the omen of profit appears in front of the commercialization routine of Station B, Station B must run faster, faster than the speed at which disappointment and doubt catch up with capital and investors.