Tech Planet (WeChat ID: tech618)
Wen | Wang Lin
Cover source | Tech Planet
Sydney finally agreed to Hong Lei's rebroadcasting needs, which made his tense nerves relax a little.
Finally have a chance to save the sales of Double Eleven, Hong Lei thought. They went live in Sydney on the night of November 10, and even though psychological expectations were already low, the final result that the turnover was much lower than the pit fee was unacceptable.
Originally, the brand side did not have the opportunity to re-broadcast. Although the reputation of a high-end washing brand operated by Hong Lei is not as good as P&G, most of the celebrity pumps and the strength of more than 5,000 outlets across the country make Sydney willing to re-broadcast again on the night of November 22. After all, the two sides will most likely cooperate in the future.
On the morning of November 22, Hong Lei originally wanted to keep an eye on the process of live broadcasting on the same day, but less than an hour after the start of construction, the Hangzhou Taxation Bureau announced the penalty notice for Sydney, and Sydney stopped broadcasting that night.
There's nothing worse than the sudden disappearance of the sales channel. "If only it were a day late." Hong Lei sighed.
Super anchors such as Wei Ya, Li Jiaqi, Sydney, and Simba are the last wave of dividend harvesters in the mobile Internet era - on the night of the double eleven pre-sale, Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya sold the sales of SKP, China's most profitable shopping mall, for a whole year, with more than 4,000 listed companies' annual revenue.
A person who creates such a huge wealth value through emerging technologies is an opportunity given by the times.
But opportunism and legal compliance are often just a thought away. Via exchanged nearly 1.4 billion yuan of tax evasion for a brief highlight and an indefinite suspension, and the tax rebate wave that lasted for more than 100 days seemed to make the myth of the anchor's wealth come to an abrupt end at the end of 2020.
However, this is only an illusion. No booming industry will be depressed by the fall of one person, and no industry will fall because of more reasonable supervision, let alone e-commerce live broadcasting with sufficient profits - an anchor with an annual income of tens of millions of dollars will eventually earn as much as 5 million even if it is taxed at 45%. That's pretty much the amount of wealth a good programmer born in the 85 or so years or so has accumulated over the past 10 years.
Tax reimbursement is more like a brief pain in the industry, like an occasional cold. After healing, everything returns to normal. It's like the LED headlights that will be lit on time in the evening live broadcast room, and the white lights emitted are extremely dazzling, which is the halo of wealth.
Mystery tax reimbursement list and 500,000 threshold
Network anchors may not have thought that a notice could make Wei Ya, who has nearly 60 million followers, fall silent in the live broadcasting industry.
On September 18, 2021, the State Administration of Taxation issued a notice on strengthening the tax administration of employees in the field of culture and entertainment. The "Circular" requires that efforts should be made to strengthen the tax management of celebrity artists, network anchor brokerage companies, brokers and related producers, and carry out verification of whether star artists and network anchors should enjoy preferential tax treatment in accordance with law.
Things fermented quickly after a month.
"About October, individual anchors have been notified of self-examination, there is a list in the legend, the relevant departments will send some of the anchors' sales data to the locality, the anchors in the list have been notified to make up taxes." Huang Gang, head of a live broadcast base, told Tech Planet.
Taxation was once recognized as a gray corner of the e-commerce industry, and tax inspection seems to be expected.
"This is the original sin of the e-commerce industry, users rarely need to issue invoices to buy things on Taobao, which leads to no entry and exit vouchers, so it is difficult to define the VAT and income tax of e-store owners." An e-commerce practitioner analyzed.
But for the entire industry, a very easy to verify data is the commission that the platform settles for the anchor. Therefore, the rectification began first with the anchors.
In the past, some anchors registered as self-employed households to pay according to the proportion of 3%-5%, and now anchors cannot report income from labor remuneration as business income tax. Because the tax point of income from labor remuneration is paid according to the income from wages and salaries, up to a maximum of 45%.
"I have not heard of the requirement of an annual income of 500,000, and now, the anchors above the waist of the three major platforms of Douyin Kuaishou Taobao have basically made up." Huang Gang analyzed.
But this does not mean that the legal awareness of the anchor group has increased on a large scale.
A live base staff member shared his experience with Tech Planet. In the early days, in order to make the live broadcast more standardized, the base held free financial and tax courses, but few people came to listen to the lectures. After the notice of the tax bureau was issued, he repeatedly reminded everyone in the working group of the live broadcast base that it was about to reach the deadline for self-examination and self-correction, and there were questions that could be consulted, but almost no one responded.
On the contrary, on the day of the Sydney accident, someone once came to consult, but it was limited to the day.
Live broadcasting can be regarded as the fairest arena, you can see Liu Yuanyuan, a student of Peking University and the champion of "Super Speaker", and you can also see Wei Ya with a secondary school background. Here, education background, family strength does not seem to matter, there is only one measure of your success - whether you can sell goods. This has caused uneven educational standards for anchor practitioners.
The tax rate rose sharply from 5% to 45%, and wealth shrank on a large scale. There are more professional company operations behind the big anchors, and the tax reimbursement will be more active, after all, the loss caused by the ban is greater.
"Some small anchors have a fluke mentality, and the idea of these people is that the first time they are caught is not illegal anyway, and they can find out and make up for it, which is almost the same as making up for it themselves." A person in charge of live base operations said.
Making money cannot be stopped
E-commerce anchors are almost the highest average income group in the past 3 years, even if you can't become Wei Ya and Li Jiaqi, the income obtained is considerable enough.
A brand source revealed to Tech Planet that the cost of part-time anchors in smaller cities is now 100-300 yuan / hour, and in first-tier cities such as Beijing is 200-500 yuan / hour. The brand side's requirements for the anchor are not very high: the image is OK, the speech is clear, and the product can be introduced. As long as these factors are in place, you can come to the pilot broadcast.
An anchor who graduated from a technical secondary school, if he works part-time in a big city like Beijing to do live streaming with goods, is calculated at an hourly wage of 300 hours, carries goods for 5 hours a day, works 22 days a month, and has an income of 33,000 yuan a month. This is equivalent to a month's salary of a programmer with a master's background entering an Internet factory.
The epidemic has instantly stimulated the vitality of the e-commerce live broadcasting industry like a catalyst, and its market size has grown by as much as 121% last year. In 2022, the scale will continue to expand. The China Commercial Industry Research Institute expects that the scale of China's e-commerce live broadcasting market will further rise to 1,507.3 billion yuan in 2022. Another emerging trillion-dollar market.
Countless people gathered in the direction of hot money. More than one vocational college has opened a "network anchor" major, and in the case of difficult employment last year, the graduates of this major were snatched up by enterprises in advance.
This has driven up wages across the industry.
A beauty merchant shared with Tech Planet his experience of recruiting anchors: from a secondary school, he found two young girls who had just graduated and just turned 18 years old, without any live broadcast experience, and their salaries were starting from 10,000 yuan, while their classmates could only get a few thousand yuan in wages just after graduation.
No one can stop this heat wave, and the tax reimbursement wave is a collective pain experienced by the industry. "It doesn't have that big impact, it just gives practitioners a clear signal: be formal." This is the view expressed by many practitioners to the Tech planet.
In fact, no booming industry has ever been devastated by the fall of a few people.
Anchors who have been immersed in the industry for many years know this well. Their mentality doesn't seem to have much of a hit. An anchor who has paid 3 million yuan in taxes has completely followed the original live broadcast frequency and has not been suspended for a day. The reason is very simple, this is an anchor with an annual income of tens of millions, that is, according to 45%, there will be millions of income.
But it is undeniable that the tide of tax reimbursement has affected the development route of some live broadcasting companies. A super head clothing master was previously her own group of goods, so that the operation can get a lower price, but now the supply chain is too heavy, pressure on funds, high taxes and other reasons let her begin to give up her own group goods, to the brand cooperation development. Giving up their own group goods, more is to help others to bring goods, is the choice of many talent organizations.
Some streamers are looking for ways to reduce their tax payments. "One of the anchors I know is now reducing taxes by reducing the percentage of commissions after paying up 3 million in taxes. For example, in the past, the beauty category was based on a 40% commission, and now it is 30%. A person in charge of a live broadcasting agency operation company said.
The idea of the anchors is that as long as their income is not particularly high, they will not attract attention. In this case, the probability of some irregular operations being discovered is reduced. "They also pay separately, for example, by reducing their income from the books through private-to-private methods." A person in charge of beauty live broadcasting introduced.
Once there is a proper profit, the anchors are bold.
Disappearing traffic
In the first half of 2019, Weiya's two-year-old Qianxun Culture was relocated from Jiubao in Hangzhou to a 10-story building with a total area of 33,000 square meters in Binjiang, before that, because of insufficient warehouses, Qianxun Culture's goods were piled from the floor to the ceiling.
The openness of the office space is a footnote to Wei Ya's growth, this year Wei Ya has become a proper Taobao with goods, she and Li Jiaqi have become the gemini stars of Taobao live broadcast.
What's more, Jiubao is about 24 kilometers away from Alibaba's Binjiang Park, which means that communication can be made more convenient, and the "Top 1" dispute between Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya is even hotter.
Now, they don't have to fight anymore. Li Jiaqi has become a proper Top 1, and no one can stand out.
Li Jiaqi, who lost his balance, once again enjoyed the flood-like traffic on the night of December 20 (the day That WeiYa was banned) - more than 30 million viewers watched online, and the following day's snack festival, Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room was nearly 50 million viewers.
This makes the brand side feel afraid. "Oligopoly is better than a monopoly, in the future Li Jiaqi will become more and more difficult, his pit fee is not expensive, only a hundred thousand, but he can sell goods, so the commission will be more." A brand side analyzed. Most brands believe that Li Jiaqi will most likely increase the pit fee in the future, which will make their already small profits thinner.
The traffic doesn't seem to be converging rapidly towards the head. On January 6, after 16 days of Wei Ya's ban, the number of viewers in Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room returned to more than 11 million per day. One brand side believes that this may be due to the high degree of overlap between Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya's fans.
The middle-waist anchors want to undertake this part of the traffic, they did not take the opportunity to increase the price, but frantically took orders. The ROI of some waist anchors even exceeded 20. But it was only an occasional brief binge. At present, no waist anchor data has soared, perhaps because the head gap is too large, or it may take more time for the miracle to appear.
Part of the reason is that after Via stopped broadcasting, the fans' desire to buy was suppressed. It is also possible that the traffic has been divided by other platforms, after all, the traffic of the Tao system is not abundant now. A person in charge of the live broadcast base said.
Traffic is split by other platforms, which is perhaps the last scenario Taobao wants to see.
Traffic Defense War
Traffic was once Alibaba's scarcest resource, and Tmall needed to continuously buy traffic from the outside world. According to a data obtained by Tech Planet, Ali's advertising in the byte system exceeded 18 billion yuan in 2021.
Alibaba hopes to firmly control this part of the traffic to provide advertising space for merchants, and advertising is also one of Alibaba's most important revenues. Therefore, any business model that affects Taobao diversion will be valued.
But now, new forests have emerged both inside and outside Taobao.
Externally, 600 million people open Douyin every day, 320 million people open Kuaishou, as a content platform, their traffic is huge, and the traffic is cheaper than Ali as an e-commerce platform.
More importantly, they eroded into Ali's hinterland and became Ali's opponents.
Douyin has a healthier live broadcast ecology than Taobao. "You can understand that douyin live broadcast is like a rugby ball, the head and tail are actually not large, and the anchor in the middle has huge room to play and can sell goods." The ecology of Taobao live broadcast is like a big head pushpin, only one or two heads can sell goods. A person in the live broadcast industry analyzed.
Internally, Li Jiaqi has become an inextricable forest for Taobao Live. One data that can support this view is that Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya, the number one anchors of Taobao on Double Eleven this year, led by a post-sales fault of 10.653 billion yuan and 8.252 billion yuan respectively, followed by Sydney and Lie'er Baby with sales of only 930 million yuan and 159 million yuan respectively. The performance gap between the two echelons divided by the top four has reached as much as twenty times.
"Tao department can play Li Jiaqi now, last year Chen Jiekk and Zhang Dayi were OK, this year is really not at all." If the GMV is pure, GMV is not as powerful as Li Jiaqivia, but there are many anchors with more than 100 million in a single game. A beauty brand said.
For the brand side, it is not only the GMV data that is valued, but more importantly, the ability to push products. The above-mentioned beauty brands signed an agreement with Li Jiaqi and the anchor of a certain million fans on Douyin at the same time, and as a result, the sales of the two were almost flat.
Highly centralized traffic is the existence that all platforms and merchants are afraid of, and almost all platforms are working hard for decentralization. The decline of Wei Ya has made Li Jiaqi more irreplaceable and more dangerous.
A person in charge of the operation of the live broadcast base revealed to Tech Planet that many anchors in the base have transferred to Douyin this year. "Taobao has no traffic to new anchors, everyone has no room to play, and Douyin has this space."
The tide of tax reimbursement has made Taobao clearly aware that it needs to break the traffic hegemony that has grown up within its system as soon as possible. People familiar with the matter revealed to Tech Planet that last week Taobao Live had pulled some heads of institutions to a meeting to discuss how to divert the flow.
This may be the best way to deal with the outflow of Li Jiaqi's monopoly and Tao's anchors. It is undeniable that Taobao still has the most comprehensive e-commerce infrastructure, but as the importance of e-commerce business to Douyin increases, it is only a matter of time before it is perfected.
The tide of tax reimbursement is the beginning of the compliance of anchors, and it has also made the competition between new and old giants more intense. The outcome of this war is unknown for the time being, and the only certainty is that for the anchors, the era of barbaric growth is over.
Remarks: In the article, Hong Lei and Huang Gang are pseudonyms.
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