Wen | Zhou Xiangyue and Zhang Jikang, authors of the weekly magazine "Finance and Economics"
Edit | Chen Fang
Yu Minhong's hard work live broadcast worked slowly
On February 22, Yu Minhong, the founder of New Oriental, who set out to regularly release some daily records and reflections from the beginning of 2022, unsurprisingly updated his personal public account "Old Yu Gossip" on time.
In this article titled "Life is not easy, everyone live well!" In the tweet, Yu Minhong recorded his experience in the last week in accordance with the custom, writing that he held eight business work meetings a week, did two live broadcasts, read two books, and interspersed some of his own feelings about life from time to time.
At the end of the article, he still advertised for the Oriental Selection, and the format was also very uniform, with four big words of orange and yellow "Advertising Time", a brief introduction of the Oriental Selection, plus a fixed publicity map that read, "Committed to building a platform for selecting high-quality agricultural products and good things". This is a fixed practice of Yu Minhong in the past two months, in order to support the development of Oriental Selection, since the release of the first tweet of the New Year on January 3, 2022, he has habitually hung an advertisement for Oriental Selection at the end of each tweet to divert its flow.
Although Yu Minhong is shouting hard to bring goods live, the effectiveness of this new cause is still too slow compared to the huge loss of 5.7 billion yuan in half a year for New Oriental.
According to a number of media reports, as of February 18, New Oriental's live broadcasting platform Oriental Selection, a total of 26 live broadcasts in the past two months, but the cumulative sales were only 4.5476 million yuan, the cumulative number of viewers was 3.316 million, and the cumulative sales volume was 81,400. Among them, the day with the highest single-day sales volume, only 11,000 items were sold.
When the "Finance and Economics" weekly verified the data with New Oriental, the other party did not deny it, but said that it was not convenient to respond for the time being.
In the live broadcast circle with millions and tens of millions of sales on a single field, the live broadcast performance of Oriental Selection is quite bland, especially in the context of "star figures" such as Yu Minhong. In stark contrast, Luo Yonghao's live broadcast room, which also has the endorsement of "star figures", although it is not common for Lao Luo to personally go down, the average sales volume and average sales per game in the past 90 days have reached 105,400 pieces and 21.4813 million yuan, respectively.
Under the huge contrast, the topic of "New Oriental Live Broadcasting has only sold 4.5 million yuan in the past two months" once appeared on Weibo's hot search, causing widespread discussion among netizens. Some netizens commented that "a box of apples is hundreds, and it is true that it cannot afford to consume" "Positioning is not good, not everyone needs high-end agricultural products", and some netizens compared it with Luo Yonghao, saying, "Not everyone is Lao Luo".
Yu Minhong's live streaming business began in November last year, when New Oriental, which encountered a "double reduction" crisis, urgently needed to find a second growth curve, and finally chose the live broadcast industry with strong gold absorption ability. On November 7, 2021, Yu Minhong opened the first live broadcast on Douyin, revealing a big news between words - New Oriental plans to set up a large-scale agricultural platform, and he will lead 100 New Oriental teachers who have passed layers of selection and careful training to enter the Douyin platform to help farmers live.
(Source: Visual China)
This is the beginning of the new Oriental live streaming platform "Oriental Selection". In the following month or so, New Oriental wanted to transform the sound of live streaming with goods. On December 28, 2021, Yu Minhong and Dongfang selected the debut of helping farmers with goods officially launched, with the previous warm-up and preparation, coupled with Yu Minhong personally sitting in the personal live broadcast room on the same day to promote and drain, the effect of New Oriental's live broadcast with goods debut is still good.
According to xinjiao data, Yu Minhong's special live broadcast on the day reached 1.8696 million times, with a single-game increase of 44,100 fans, a peak of 33,000 people, a total of 31 agricultural products on the shelves, sales of 58,000 pieces, sales of 4.9084 million yuan; Oriental Selection single field of powder 13,400, a total of 44 products on the shelves, sales of 1946 pieces, sales of 147,900, the total of the two with more than 5 million yuan. The products with goods are mainly concentrated in fruits, beef and mutton and other agricultural products.
From the data point of view, this achievement is far from Luo Yonghao's transaction volume of more than 110 million yuan in the Douyin debut, but it is the peak value of Yu Minhong and Dongfang Selection in the past two months.
Since December 2021, in order to promote new oriental live streaming with goods, Yu Minhong can not be said to be careless, daily in his own live broadcast room to sell, and frequently advertise on his personal public account. As if that wasn't enough, he would also promote eastern selection to permeate every aspect of his life.
In his many notes on recording his life and his own thinking, from time to time, he can see fragments such as "In order to dock the resources of the Oriental Selection in the future, I promised to make a special session, drank one night, and sold hundreds of thousands of agricultural products", "Used the Oriental Selection to help 'Peking University Lamb Brother' sell mutton", "On the weekend, I conducted two consecutive wheat with the Oriental Selection Live Broadcast to help them recommend goods and guide fans", "Now the Oriental Selection has just begun, and the daily sales are still pitiful, only a few hundred thousand yuan".
What Yu Minhong said is true, the daily sales of Oriental Selection are indeed pitiful. The data shows that in the 29 live broadcasts from December 29, 2021 to February 20, 2022, the sales of Yu Minhong and Dongfang Selection generally stayed within 300,000 yuan, which was slightly dismal.
It was not until the latest live broadcast on February 22 that the live broadcast results of Oriental Selection had a relatively large improvement for the first time, and the number of single viewers and the sales of a single live broadcast exceeded the million level for the first time, reaching 1.3583 million and 1.5926 million yuan respectively. However, whether this "improvement" can be sustained is still unknown.
(Source: Third-party data platform Xinjiao)
Former employee Luo Yonghao live broadcast "True Return"
Interestingly, in the context of the slow progress of Yu Minhong's live broadcast career, his former employee Luo Yonghao has recently gone up another level in the live broadcast career - a new account of the e-commerce academy of @make a friend, and set up live e-commerce training.
After more than ten years of going around, the 50-year-old figure Luo Yonghao stood on the podium again, because the principal of the @ Make a Friend E-commerce Academy was Li Liang, the former principal of Beijing New Oriental School, netizens said that "Lao Luo opened a 'New Oriental' in the live broadcast industry."
On February 16, Luo Yonghao's Douyin account with nearly 20 million fans was pinned to a video in which he wore a black shirt as always and said slowly to the camera in his own Mandarin: "I will teach you to become a star anchor with an annual income of millions or even millions." ”
Under the video with 37,000 likes, there is a hot comment that reads: "When the live e-commerce giant began to teach you how to do live e-commerce, it means that he is not going to do it." When you are ready to buy his class, he will be successful. ”
In the live broadcast of the sale class, Luo Yonghao sold a total of three types of courses, namely: anchor nova camp, anchor advanced camp, and business practice camp, and the selling price of the live broadcast room was 2980 yuan, 20800 yuan and 20800 yuan respectively. In addition to the three-day and two-night online teaching of the Nova Camp, the other two courses are taught offline in Hangzhou.
As for whether Luo Yonghao himself will personally participate in the teaching? Luo Yonghao said that when the first phase of the course began, he would go to give a one-and-a-half-hour class, and the rest of the time would be replaced by other anchors.
Although the course was not taught by Luo Yonghao alone, and the price was not cheap, many people still bought this course in his name. The data shows that on the night of the live broadcast, Luo Yonghao sold a total of 1.1541 million yuan of three types of courses, of which the anchor nova camp course worth 2980 yuan was sold out before the end of the live broadcast. People who are eager to make money through live broadcasting hope to pay tuition fees to learn from Luo Yonghao.
Luo Yonghao's story direction in the live broadcast career, did not appear like the past ten years of hammer mobile phones, electronic cigarettes like the "do what not to do" type of bumpy experience, although the beginning of the live broadcast repeatedly overturned, frequent apologies, but in the end it succeeded.
In 2018, Luo Yonghao, who once stood in the middle of the bird's nest and confidently said" "I did this to change the world, not to make you a few stinky money", would not have thought that two years later, he not only did not change the world, but also carried 600 million debts, was included in the list of restricted high consumption, and finally could only rely on live streaming to "sell art to pay off debts".
There are heart-planted flowers that do not bloom, and there is no heart to plant willows. In the previous period of entrepreneurship, the hammer technology that injected a lot of painstaking efforts made Luo Yonghao become a "lao Lai", and the live broadcast that was not very interested in the goods helped him to become the fourth largest e-commerce anchor after Wei Ya, Li Jiaqi and Simba in just two years.
When he first became an anchor in 2020, Luo Yonghao was a little nervous, although he mistakenly said that the "extreme meter projector" was a "nut projector", but the record was very amazing. Official data shows that in the three hours of Luo Yonghao's first live broadcast with goods, the cumulative number of viewers exceeded 48 million, and the total amount of payment transactions reached 110 million yuan, setting a new record for Douyin live broadcasting at that time.
Luo Yonghao, who tasted the sweetness of the goods, quickly staged the "True Return". Five months after the live debut, Luo Yonghao said on the variety show "Talk Show Conference" that he has paid off nearly 400 million yuan of debt, and the remaining debt can be repaid in about a year. In early 2022, judicial information showed that Luo Yonghao was no longer restricted from high consumption.
Huge debt repayment is nearing the end, and Luo Yonghao's live broadcast business is still in full swing. Luo Yonghao's live broadcast room became the first place in the annual sales on the Douyin platform in 2021, and the ability to carry goods even exceeded that of Jia Nailiang, Zhang Ting and other stars. According to the data, Luo Yonghao's live broadcast room sold more than 18 million goods, with a transaction volume of more than 3 billion yuan and a cumulative number of viewers of more than 600 million people.
At the beginning of this year, Luo Yonghao tweeted that he would return to the technology world after the year, and this Weibo received nearly 1800 comments. Most tech fans expressed support for Luo Yonghao's return, "As long as you do it, we will buy!" There are fans who excitedly leave messages below.
(Source: Screenshot of Luo Yonghao's Weibo)
Since September 2021, Luo Yonghao's live broadcast room has opened a 20-hour daily live broadcast mode, and at the same time, a number of new anchors have been incubated in the live broadcast room. On Luo Yonghao's official account, there are 531 works, and among the 15 recently updated works, only 2 works related to Luo Yonghao himself are related.
Huang He, the founder of "Make a Friend", who was once a product manager at Hammer Technology, said in an interview with 36Kr that the live broadcast room has been trying to get rid of its dependence on Luo Yonghao, and the ultimate goal of "making a friend" is that MCN institutions account for 40% of revenue, while Luo Yonghao's income only accounts for 10%-15%.
Here, Luo Yonghao, who made up his mind to fade out, changed the track under the background of Sydney, Wei Ya, and Donkey Sister-in-law Pingrong being punished one after another, and changed from an anchor to an anchor teacher. On the other hand, Yu Minhong is still a "Meng Xin" with only two months of live broadcast experience, struggling in the loneliness of "Oriental Selection".
Yu Minhong's feud with Luo Yonghao
Luo Yonghao and Yu Minhong met in 2000, when Luo Yonghao, who was born in 1972, was only 28 years old, a full 10 years younger than Yu Minhong, and the first encounter between the two was the story of "Maxima and Bole".
At that time, Luo Yonghao, who was still unknown in the year of establishment, achieved nothing, although he hated English and became a teacher, but for the sake of "annual salary of millions", he desperately memorized words, and Shengsheng improved himself from English white to GRE English vocabulary lecturer level, and even after being eliminated due to academic problems, he dared to write a 10,000-word cover letter directly to Yu Minhong, the highest ruler of New Oriental, and cheekily persuaded the other party to "demote talents in an eclectic manner".
After seeing this cover letter, Yu Minhong, who had already achieved fame, really gave Luo Yonghao, a job seeker with only a junior high school education, three opportunities to try out the lecture. After the third audition, Luo Yonghao successfully won the offer of New Oriental and began a 6-year teaching career. Here, Luo Yonghao, who was born in Yanbian, Jilin Province, soon became one of the most famous teachers in New Oriental because of his witty and humorous lecture style and frequent golden sentences.
But Luo Yonghao, who has been Yu Minhong's subordinate for 6 years, does not seem to have a good personal relationship with the former owner. He has publicly criticized Yu Minhong and New Oriental, saying that they are cloaked in ideals and make money hypocritically. "Later I found out that Yu Minhong was one of the most unprincipled people I had ever met in my life."
In the more than a decade after leaving New Oriental, Luo Yonghao and Yu Minhong fought in different fields, and coincidentally, there was a certain degree of convergence between the two.
As former superiors and subordinates, both of them have talked about their ideals in New Oriental, and after parting ways, they are also bumpy, Yu Minhong's New Oriental has "walked on the verge of collapse" several times, and Luo Yonghao has started a business many times, repeatedly defeated, and is known as the "industry lamp". Later, the two also transformed into live streaming with goods at the darkest moment of their careers and even their lives.
Luo Yonghao started his live broadcast career because of huge debts, he did not learn "next week to return to China" Jia Yueting, single-handedly applied for bankruptcy, but chose to "sell art to pay off debts"; Yu Minhong was because the company encountered a huge crisis brought about by "double reduction", he immediately decided to refund the tuition fees of New Oriental students, settled the teacher's salary, and donated tens of thousands of sets of desks and chairs to rural schools and sought transformation.
The two's approach has won them a lot of public favor, but in terms of live broadcast results, the two are very different.
This is not unrelated to the time when the two enter the live track. When Luo Yonghao entered the live broadcast jianghu, the live broadcast sales were still in the ascendant stage, and the vibrato with the largest traffic had just started, and it was urgent to build a top anchor. However, yu Minhong entered the time of live broadcasting with goods, but he caught up with the moment when the live broadcasting industry changed greatly, and the days when the anchor frantically sucked gold were gone.
In November last year, the head anchor Sydney was fined 93.22 million yuan, kicking off the prelude to the large-scale rectification and standardized development of the live broadcasting industry. A month later, "Live Queen" Wei Ya was fined 1.341 billion yuan, which shocked the industry and beyond. Recently, the punishment and rectification spread from the Taobao system to Kuaishou, and on February 22, Kuaishou anchor Donkey Pingrong was fined 62 million yuan.
Under the fines issued by the State Administration of Taxation, the platforms have gradually broken the pattern of relying on head anchors, and have begun to tilt traffic to waist vertical professional content anchors, and more small and medium-sized anchors have ushered in development space. But this means that the competition is more red and sufficient, and the anchor must show his real ability if he wants to stand out.
The difference in the live broadcast style of Luo Yonghao and Yu Minhong eventually led to a world of difference in the live broadcast results of the two. Luo Yonghao was known for his humor and humor in his early years, good at speech, and long speech time but no urine point in the whole process, which will drive the audience's emotions, and his live broadcast style is not a traditional shouting style, but according to the specific needs of consumers, combined with their own practices, they say the advantages of the product and output their own unique views. Yu Minhong, who has been a teacher for many years, is more full of a literati atmosphere when he brings goods on live broadcasts, and likes to popularize various kinds of knowledge during live broadcasts.
At the debut of agricultural products in December last year, Yu Minhong quoted poems to express his love for agriculture, and then every time the agricultural products were sold, the map of the origin of the products and the local history, culture and geographical environment were introduced as standard. So much so that after the end of this live broadcast, there was a view that Yu Minhong was "live broadcast for three hours, half in lectures, a small half in eating broadcasts, a small half of the paragraphs, and then inserted to sell some goods."
"Live like class" is also the selling style of New Oriental teachers, and when introducing products, they will always explain some knowledge points. However, although this style allows consumers to gain knowledge while watching live broadcasts, it is difficult to stimulate their desire to place orders.
In terms of selection, the agricultural products selected by New Oriental itself are not as rich as the products that Luo Yonghao sells. Moreover, the agricultural products themselves are more affordable and cost-effective, and if there is no particularly prominent feature, it is difficult to have a competitive advantage. The agricultural products selected by the East have been repeatedly complained by netizens that the price is too expensive.
Although according to Yu Minhong's words, New Oriental is not the cheapest, but the best agricultural products, but if the price is too high, for most consumers, this will greatly increase their purchase threshold, and there is no ability to support them.
16 years ago, in the face of Luo Yonghao's evaluation of "hypocrisy", Yu Minhong, as a senior, said quite generously that in his mind, Luo Yonghao was still a very good teacher. After 16 years, Yu Minhong, who wants to slowly do the selection of the East, may be able to take his employees to the training course of Lao Luo, the "predecessor" of the live broadcast industry.
Although Yu Minhong has always said that the reason for choosing live streaming with goods is out of personal preference and feelings of helping farmers, Oriental Selection also insists that "not only GMV theory", what he wants to do is "support agriculture and help farmers, it is a long-term cause", but a fact is that New Oriental in the transition period does need to explore a new growth line. If the road of live streaming with goods can go through, it will obviously be good news for New Oriental.
On the evening of February 22, the latest data released by New Oriental showed that in the six months ended November 30, 2021, New Oriental achieved revenue of US$1.967 billion, a slight increase of 4.96% year-on-year, but the net loss was as high as US$900 million (about RMB5.7 billion), the first loss since its listing in 2004.
New Oriental wants to reverse this huge loss, it is necessary to think of some cruel methods, want to make live broadcast achievements, but also have to find the correct positioning, and make some hard work.
After all, according to the data of the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, the current number of practitioners in the national live broadcasting industry has exceeded 10 million, the number of industry anchor employees has reached 1.234 million, and the number of employees is growing rapidly at a rate of 8.8% per month, which is a very competitive market, but unlike the head anchor "eating meat and drinking soup", the survival status quo of most small and medium-sized anchors is not satisfactory, with 9 losses in 10.
In this sense, Yu Minhong's live class on Luo Yonghao is always helpful to his live broadcast career.
This article is originally produced by AI Finance and Economics, an account of Caijing Tianxia Weekly, without permission, please do not reprint it on any channel or platform. Violators will be prosecuted.