Less than two months after the tax storm disappeared, Via's broadcasting team "resumed work" one step ahead of her.
Recently, the news that "Wei Ya may seek a comeback in March" was reported by the media, and almost at the same time, an account called "Bee Surprise Society" was launched at Diantao (the former Taobao Live APP). Five of the six anchors in the live broadcast room have been the assistants of Via's live broadcast room.
The certification subject of "Bee Surprise Society" in social media is "Hangzhou Baifeng Culture Media Co., Ltd.", and the data of Tianyancha shows that Baifeng Culture is not directly related to Wei Ya's Qianxun company, and the anchor also calls himself a "small team entrepreneurship". However, on the first day of the broadcast, Qianxun employees publicized and drained, Weiya fan group warmed up the interaction, and the coupons distributed during the live broadcast also carried the words "0214 Weiya Live Broadcast Room".
The "Bee Surprise Society", which is stepping on the popularity of Weiya's topic, has ushered in rapid growth in live broadcast data - in the first week of broadcasting, the number of viewers soared from 1.16 million to 11.77 million, and the number of fans of its Taobao live broadcast account has reached nearly 1.4 million.
A humble staff member confirmed to 36Kr - Future Consumption that only three days after the start of the broadcast, the "Bee Surprise Society" has entered the top three in the comprehensive ranking of taoshi masters.
Will Via take this opportunity to rebroadcast? According to 36Kr, the relevant departments have shown no signs of loosening the punishment for tax evasion anchors. Shortly after the news of "Weiya rebroadcast", Taobao live broadcasting related people also responded to the media that no relevant plans were received and rebroadcasting was unlikely.
In the case of Wei Ya's passive absence, the problem that Qianxun needs to think about is how to fill the huge traffic loopholes on the front end and support the continuous operation of the entire group business on the back end - the launch of the "Bee Surprise Society" is just the beginning of Qianxun's self-help.
Assist in sowing rescue traffic
Time back to December 2021, after the anchor Broadcast Sydney was fined for tax evasion and was banned by the whole network, Wei Ya, one of the "live e-commerce ceilings", was also notified by the tax department, saying that she had evaded and underpaid taxes by more than 600 million yuan between 2019 and 2020, and finally fined 1.341 billion yuan, and subsequently, Wei Ya's live broadcast account, Taobao store, and social media account were all blocked.
The sudden departure of the super head has a huge impact on the ecology of Tao's live broadcast. According to the previous statistics of 36Kr-Future Consumption, the number of fans in Weiya's store reached 77.13 million, and the live broadcast account had 92 million fans, with an average number of viewers exceeding 20 million; on October 21 last year (the first day of the Double 11 promotion), Weiya's single live broadcast sales reached 8.25 billion yuan, and the field view exceeded a new high of 240 million.
After Via stopped broadcasting, the huge traffic should have re-entered the whole station loop. However, judging from the live broadcast data of the head echelon, the effect of the talent side on this wave of traffic is not obvious.
Li Jiaqi, who is also a super head, reached a peak of 38 million and 49 million in the next two days, respectively, and then fell back to the average line of 25 million to 30 million in the past; Chen Jie Kiki, Lie'er Baby and other talent anchors, Lin Yilun, Ji Jie and other star anchors, did not see too much data fluctuations.
The reason may lie in the difference in positioning and traffic attributes between live streams. To paraphrase the evaluation of industry insiders, Weiya live broadcast room is "humanoid poly cost-effective" + "small Wanda", one is the price advantage is outstanding, and the other is to cover all categories of comprehensive department stores.
However, most of the Anchors of the Tao series have their own main categories, which cannot cover the needs of such users, and the user portraits cannot be completely matched - taking more than 40 anchors under Qianxun as an example, Lin Yilun focuses on food, Li Xiang prefers mother and baby, Li Jing to do dressing and health; even if Li Jiaqi, another super head in the station, is also a beauty and mental protector.
The existing anchor echelon can not eat the overflow traffic, then use the remaining influence of Via, sample a new account, as far as possible to recover a part of the lost users.
To this end, Qianxun did not incubate new people, but the five assistant broadcasters in Via's live broadcast room served as anchors (the Sydney team also adopted a similar assistant broadcast channel strategy); on the first day of the "Bee Surprise Society", Qianxun also warmed up and drained Via's fan base.
The advantage of "Bee Surprise Society" is that once the front-end traffic is opened, it can immediately reuse Via's previous set of supply chain resources, operation teams and live broadcast methods. For example, according to the "Wired Insight" report, the investment team of the "Bee Surprise Society" is the original team of Wei Ya.
In addition to the staffing, the product structure of the live broadcast room is also similar to that of Wei Ya, and the skin care brand Yuze, which is deeply bound to Wei Ya, and the ITIB (designer brand aggregation platform) series of clothing led by Qian xun all appear in the live broadcast room of the "Bee Surprise Society".
According to the investment information of "Bee Surprise Society", the live broadcast room covers four categories of beauty, life, food and fashion, focusing on cost-effective products, and currently adopts a pure commission cooperation model with a commission of 20%.
In the first week of broadcasting, "Bee Surprise Society" has formed a stable daily broadcast rhythm, the number of commodity links in a single live broadcast is stable at 45-60; the number of live viewers maintains a growth rate of 1 million to 2 million people/ field, and the field view of three live broadcasts in the first week of broadcast exceeds the order of ten million - this is the number that some Tao top 10 anchors can only reach during the promotion.
"Building festivals" is an aspect that reflects operational capabilities. On February 18th and 19th, the "Bee Surprise Club" held a snack festival and a special live broadcast of clothing, and the audience exceeded 10 million.
Since 2017, Via has begun to launch festival-making campaigns, from the Beauty Festival, Life Festival, Snack Festival, Home Improvement Festival to Thanksgiving (the previous Fan Festival), from all categories to flower samples.
Dong Haifeng, chairman of Qianxun and Wei Ya's husband, once mentioned in an interview with the media that the anchor festival is essentially in the form of a special category to quickly cultivate the minds of consumers, "so that they understand that I (the anchor) have a certain degree of professionalism in a certain category and have the ability to choose high-quality goods." ”
Drainage and storage outside the station are also in place. Up to now, the official accounts of the "Bee Surprise Society" on platforms such as Xiaohongshu, WeChat Public Account & Video Number, and Douyin have been in place, and have begun to establish and operate the exclusive fan base of "Bee Surprise Society" through issuing coupons and other means.
Accelerated "de-heading"
Wei Ya, Sydney and other anchors suddenly left the scene, and the humble search behind them and Chenfan were forced to face a long-standing problem - how to get rid of the high dependence on a single anchor.
Throughout the live e-commerce industry, Tao's "Qianxun", "Beauty ONE", "Chenfan", Douyin's "Make a Friend", Kuaishou's "Xinxuan", "Remote Look" and other head institutions are all leveraged by their own head anchors to leverage traffic and supply chain resources. However, the problem of a single income structure and unstable business model has ensued, and "Ruhan", which relied on Internet celebrity Zhang Dayi to log on to the US stock market and finally was hastily delisted, is a representative case.
The fission exploration of business models by head agencies has already begun. In July 2021, Dong Haifeng told the media "E-commerce Online": "Qianxun is not a separate MCN agency, but a group-operated company. ”
Live streaming with Via as the core is the underlying business of Humble Seeking. On this basis, Qianxun fissioned out new businesses around the needs of different ecological roles: one is the supply chain base to meet the needs of the anchor's selection and the needs of the brand docking anchor; the second is to do TP (humble broadcasting), to do store operation for the brand; the third is to do e-commerce training (Qianye), to deliver anchors and operators for brand live broadcasting; and the fourth is brand marketing (Qianhe).
Luo Yonghao's "Make a Friend" also presents a similar business development logic. Ideally, the head agency will evolve into an integrated service platform for brand merchants, which can be empowered by external brands (such as Yang Tianzhen and Chenfan cooperating to launch plus-size women's clothing brands), or used for private brand incubation (Lao Luo began to do sneaker brands).
Front-end traffic is the basis for the operation of the entire business system, and the "Weiya" plays the role of the engine that constantly aggregates traffic. In order to increase the anti-risk ability of the traffic side, the head institutions are trying to fission out a more diversified anchor matrix.
Luo Yonghao's "Make a Friend" signed a star anchor and incubated a depersonalized vertical live broadcast room; Xin Youzhi (Simba) brought out one apprentice after another in Kuaishou; Sydney's "Chenfan" is said to have a billion-level traffic pool composed of more than 300 celebrities; Qianxun signed more than 40 talent anchors on platforms such as Taoshi and Douyin; even if Li Jiaqi is clear as the core and pursues the ultimateization of personal IP, he has also tried to fission the personal live broadcast room of "little assistant" Fu Peng on platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Douyin.
Wei Ya was blocked by the whole network and rebroadcast for a long time, which objectively became an opportunity for Qian to find "de-heading". The "Bee Surprise Society" has recovered some of the lost users, but it cannot completely fill the gap of Wei Ya in the short term - with the decline in the popularity of "Wei Ya's comeback", the field view data of the "Bee Surprise Society" has fallen to a certain extent. Next, Qianxun needs to hatch more "Via s" in a similar way.
The same problem was thrown to Taobao Live - according to "Late Post", since the 618 promotion in 2021, the overall number of Taobao live broadcasts has almost zero growth, and the overall growth rate of GMV is lower than that of Douyin and Kuaishou. In the context of the slowdown in the growth rate of the market, the two head anchors of Via and Sydney have been blocked, who will fill the growth gap of GMV?
Recreating a super head is almost impossible. On the one hand, the super head is the result of long-term accumulation + platform dividends, but the dividend period of Taobao live broadcast has passed; on the other hand, although the platform and brand rely on it, they are not happy to see the existence of the super head in essence.
During the double 11 period last year, 36Kr - Future Consumption observed that some brands have consciously "collected rights" and left the largest discount in the brand live broadcast room. A landmark event was the outbreak of the "lowest price" dispute between L'Oréal, Via, and Li Jiaqi, which was simultaneously issued by the two anchors and suspended all cooperation.
For a long time, the centralized traffic distribution mechanism has led to the stronger Wei Ya and Li Jiaqi, and the head anchor echelon under the two is hollow, so Taobao has tried to balance the ecology of the station with star live broadcast (with its own traffic foundation) and brand live broadcast (the advantage of goods is more obvious).
A super head suddenly fell, Taobao Live needs to accelerate the construction of the mid-waist echelon - refer to the strategy of Kuaishou when "cutting the domain" six families, support tens of millions of fans of the vertical category of large anchors, empower 100,000-1 million fans of the small and medium-sized anchors; at the same time continue to use brand live broadcasting to dilute and balance the voice of head anchors.
Taking the New Year Goods Festival in January this year as an observation node, Taobao said that during the New Year Goods Festival, the DAU, traffic, duration and transaction scale of Taobao live broadcast have increased; among them, the traffic of mid-waist anchors and store broadcasts has "increased greatly".
The tax storm of super anchors such as Via and Sydney may become a turning point in the industry's exploration of "de-heading". Regardless of whether it can eventually come back and whether it will turn to the background, from humble search to Taobao live broadcast, for the sake of long-term healthy development, we must make sufficient preparations for the possibility of "losing Wei Ya".