Who doesn't have a few cute baby memes in their phone?
Whether it is Gavin, a fake laughing boy who is popular all over the world, Song Minguo, who has become a variety show café at a young age, or Xie Tengfei, a "fierce man" in the black land of Northeast China, the enthusiasm of netizens to watch human cubs has never stopped.
Fake laughing boys Gavin, Song Minguo, Xie Tengfei
According to a report by the Pew Research Center in the United States, among popular Channels on YouTube, child-related videos are viewed 3 times more than other types.
As Ogilvy, the godfather of advertising, said when expounding the 3B principle, human love for Beauty (beauty), Beast (animal), Baby (child) comes from nature, and all visual images with these three elements are more able to attract the attention of the audience.
Today, when short videos are popular, it is even more "cute" that no one is spared.
01
In China, the first to push Mengwa into the mainstream vision is the variety show represented by "Where Daddy Goes", but after the state repeatedly restricted minor children's participation in commercial, adult and entertainment programs, Mengwa gradually disappeared in variety shows.
Until the rise of short videos, Mengwa once again became a traffic password.
As a subdivision vertical category in the field of mother and baby, Mengwa Track has full influence on the short video platform, open the vibrato search keyword "Mengwa", the total number of related topics played exceeds 100 billion, and the number of fans of some head accounts has reached tens of millions.
In addition to the reason why people are in short supply of cute content, the popularity of cute short videos lies in the simple production process of this video production and the low production threshold.
Due to the epidemic, many families have more reunion time than ever before, and in their spare time, some parents share their daily interaction process with their children on the short video platform, and the result is unintentional. Others have followed suit, thus forming a large-scale cute baby short video track.
Cute baby short videos usually record the cute moments that cute babies unconsciously show, and at the same time show a warm family atmosphere, with a strong sense of presence. Usually, it does not deliberately pursue plot interpretation, but pays attention to fully excavating the personality of Meng Wa.
From the audience level, Mengwa videos are not limited by the audience's gender, age, education, and cognitive level, and can get the highlights of such videos, from middle-aged and elderly people to children at least.
Especially for the vast number of urban youth, under the multiple squeezes of work pressure and high housing prices and high prices, many people choose to marry late and have children later.
As a result, watching the relaxed and healing cute baby video in their spare time has become a way for them to relieve loneliness and gain comfort. The wind of cloud baby raising has risen, and many people have become "mother fans", which in turn encourages more creators to join the cute baby track.
Some time ago, the very popular @SASA Maruzi sister was with a positive energy chicken soup greeting to capture the young people who were still on the run at the end of the year. In the video, Maruzimei with the child's unique innocent look, with the sound of milk milk to encourage the audience off the screen, "Although very tired, but must persist", "don't work too hard, be nice to yourself.".
Although we all know that a child with teeth and teeth must not be able to say such mature and reasonable words, behind which her parents must be teaching her to read word by word, but people who have watched this video have been deeply touched. The pure eyes of Maruko Sister and the chubby little pink face make it difficult not to feel empathy for this passage.
Prior to this, the video content of Maruko sister was mainly to record daily life, and maruko sister in front of the camera sometimes jumped and danced, danced with her hands, and sometimes sullen and unhappy and wept.
The authentic and unadorned VLog style shows her well-behaved, cute, lively and cheerful personality, and also captures the hearts of "mom fans", making these videos easily get more than hundreds of thousands of likes.
And that chicken soup video made Marukomei further out of the circle, soaring 560,000 fans in the first week of December alone, and now only one step away from tens of millions of fans.
But Marukomei is not the hottest account in the field of cute babies, and the head blogger with tens of millions of fans has others.
@Zhu Liangzha, as the top stream in the Mengwa track, has more than 37.8 million fans and a total of 320 million likes for the video. Their videos are mainly based on the daily play of their sisters from the perspective of their parents, and the sister Indica, who was born in 2017, is mischievous and has the most appearances. The younger sister is two years old, ignorant and naïve, and is usually a supporting role for the sister.
@Zhu Liangzha first got everyone's attention, which was a video released in March 2020.
In the video, the sister indica wearing cute pajamas "righteously and sternly" refused her father's request for a hug, and the unexpected funny scene coupled with the children's voice of indica with the northeast accent received a lot of attention, and the number of likes quickly exceeded one million.
In addition to being happy, netizens also made up a lot of paragraphs for her, such as "small cotton jacket that leaks wind", "special pit daddy" and so on...
Since then, this account has not become a hit, but has entered a tepid state, and the number of video likes hovers around tens of thousands.
And it really goes to the explosion, but also from the beginning of 2021, when @ Zhu two zha found their own fixed style, that is, the previous popular video of the "cute baby pit daddy", a family of four between the cute laughter of the "intrigue" scene made the audience laugh.
In a top-of-the-line video, when the mother asks the father why he does not take good care of the child, the eccentric indica takes the opportunity to add fuel to the fire, not only counting the crimes of the father who was "busy" playing the game in the morning, but also making a move to provoke the law, afraid that the mother will not hit the father.
After provoking the matter, she hurried to the side, pretending to cover her eyes with her hands and not daring to look, but secretly left a finger slit ready to watch the hilarity.
Netizens were happy after reading the music, and the message said that the child's pit was reasonable, the sentence was reasonable, and the trick was fatal.
It can be seen that compared with the simple shooting and editing in the early videos, the @ Zhu liangzha in this period has shown traces of professional planning, and the undertaking of video plots and the arrangement of lines have become more dramatic.
It can be seen that even if the production threshold is low, the mengwa short video track, in order to get the care of traffic, must also be continuously improved at the content production level, iterative evolution, otherwise it may fall into convergence in expression, so that it loses self-competitiveness.
02
Mengwa on the short video platform has captured tens of millions of viewers with a healing smile, corresponding to their strong ability to absorb gold. Behind the popularity of the cute baby phenomenon, MCN institutions, manufacturers and platform parties all want to share a piece of the pie.
According to the data of Yingshi Group Research Center, the scale of China's children's consumer market has approached 4.5 trillion yuan, of which the size of the children's entertainment consumer market has exceeded 460 billion yuan. In the face of such a vast blue ocean market, Mengwa Internet celebrities have naturally become the most favored channel for manufacturers to carry goods.
Take @ Zhu Liangyi as an example, in their light and humorous life clips, the figure of the advertisement flashes from time to time. In addition, they also opened live streaming with goods, with cumulative sales of 244.5W of 5 live broadcasts in October 2021.
The @SASA Marukomei opened a children's clothing company to sell related products with the help of popularity.
Not only in China, the Mengwa economy is now a global phenomenon.
According to data released by Forbes, Ryan Kaji, who ranked first on the YouTube blogger revenue list in 2019, earned $25 million, which is higher than the game and beauty bloggers on the same list. And this influencer was only 9 years old at the time!
The head mengwa account can earn a lot of money even with the platform share, not to mention that in today's vigorous development of the mother and baby market, they also have many ways to monetize. And mid-waist bloggers can also get extra money outside of their jobs with short videos or live broadcasts.
Stimulated by the news of "parents with a monthly income of 150,000 yuan with a baby", the boiling and endless baby economy has attracted more and more young parents to enter the game.
03
As the track grew more crowded, many of the bloggers (usually parents of their children) skewed their brains in order to spread their work further. In this process, the child becomes a tool for adults to achieve their interests, performing in front of the camera according to their instructions, making movements that do not match the age, and allowing the child to bear the pressure that should not be borne by that age.
In some videos, there are scenes of little girls learning to hold foundation and eyeshadow in the form of adults, teaching adults how to wear makeup and talk about the emotional life of adults. Some videos let the little girl imitate the so-called "pure desire" style, and the painting style is ambiguous. There are also videos of boys holding electric shock sticks to deceive their parents.
In 2020, an account of "Bao Mom Records Fat Doll Life Diary" attracted widespread attention, and in the video, peggy, a three-year-old girl, learned the popular big stomach king video at the time, regardless of her health and ingested a lot of food. The operator of the account, Peggy's mother, also used the child's weight as a gimmick to attract traffic, which triggered the disgust of netizens. In the end, this account was banned, but the traffic business under the banner of children's Internet celebrities and cute babies was repeatedly banned.
Screenshot of Peggy's live broadcast room (image from the internet)
If adults are said to be internet celebrities are independent choices, then many minors live broadcasts and short videos under the banner of Cute Baby belong to "catching ducks on the shelves", and before forming an independent world view, they have to face the value logic of the adult world.
The expression of true feelings is the most precious. It is precisely because the innocence and purity of children are not disguised that countless adults who have lost their innocent nature are obsessively watching across the screen.
And once this innocence is used and becomes a carefully designed and sold "product", the feelings pinned on the cute baby will disappear, leaving only a voiceless child and a childhood with nowhere to rest.
In the past, the film and television industry will emerge a number of child stars in every era, whether it is the early Xiulan Dumblee or the later Macaulay Kalkin, if we extend the time, we will find that the psychological problems caused by excessive exposure often accompany them for life.
The same question deserves deep consideration in the new media industry.
04
Fortunately, today's society has reached a basic consensus, that is, the right of minors to grow up healthy and natural should not be deprived, and they should be avoided from being polluted by the impetuous atmosphere brought about by excessive commercialization and utilitarianism.
The regulatory authorities have also noticed the chaos behind Mengwa, so the General Office of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism recently issued the "Opinions on Strengthening the Protection of Minors in the Online Cultural Market", which strictly prohibits adults from making profits from "Internet celebrity children", so as to protect the legitimate rights and interests of minors in cyberspace.
At the same time, we should also call on platforms to assume the social responsibility of protecting children and adolescents, strengthen the content moderation mechanism, and achieve a more reasonable push model.
It is believed that with the joint efforts of the whole society, those parents who regard their children as cash cows and do whatever they can to amass wealth will be restrained, and the online environment for minors will become clearer.