Recently, Li Jun, deputy to the National People's Congress and secretary of the party branch and director of the village committee of Xiuyun Village, Baiyi Town, Cangxi County, Guangyuan City, suggested that the cancellation of live broadcast tips triggered heated discussion among netizens. How much does live tipping mean to live streaming platforms and anchors? How much of an impact will it have to cancel live tipping?
On the morning of March 5, the upstream news reporter interviewed Wen Tao, the head of a Chongqing company. Wentao is now a live broadcast company and has also built a live broadcast platform. He believes that if live broadcast tipping is really canceled, it will be a heavy blow to both the live broadcast platform and the anchor, especially the "middle waist" anchor who relies on the tip share.
A platform's tip recharge interface Source: APP screenshot
Industry Insiders:
Many anchors who do not have a tip income are unemployed
Wen Tao said: "I have seen the news that the NPC deputies have proposed to cancel the live broadcast tip. As a practitioner of the live broadcasting industry, this news is very bad news for us, because whether it is a live broadcasting company, a host or a live broadcast platform, the biggest profit model is still live rewards. ”
In 2017, Wentao organized a live broadcast guild, which ranked high on live broadcasting platforms such as Douyu and YY, and the highest profit exceeded 1 million. Where does such a high profit come from? Wen Tao introduced: "The income of live broadcasting mainly consists of three parts, the most direct is live broadcast tipping, which is also the most important profit model; secondly, after the anchor has a certain reputation, there will be merchants willing to contribute to provide live advertising to realize traffic realization; the last part is the anchor's offline commercial activities and platform signing fees, which is only the right of the head anchor or the anchor with a certain traffic foundation." ”
If I cancel the live tip, what is the impact on the host? Wen Tao believes: "For the head anchors, even if there is no tip, they still have a good signing fee, offline commercial activities, live advertising and live streaming with goods as a guarantee. The main source of income for a large number of 'mid-waist' anchors is live broadcast tipping. In addition to tipping, most of the subsidies given by the platform are only a few thousand yuan. Without the tip, it will be difficult for them to continue the job. It is also difficult for show anchors to turn into anchors with goods, and many anchors are good at talent performances, but they are not good at shouting and selling goods. ”
Wen Tao believes that in addition to being unbearable for most anchors, the live broadcast platform is also unbearable: "Operating a live broadcast platform, the more people watch and the higher the traffic, the higher the server channel fee provided by Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud, so the traffic without monetization means is a burden for the platform." How to maximize the value of traffic conversion is one thing that all platforms are working on. ”
Wen Tao admitted that there are indeed problems with live tipping under the current mechanism: "Judging from my experience in the industry for so many years, it is only a matter of time before live tipping is standardized. There is a saying in the live broadcast industry called 'don't look down on any trumpet', the subtext of this sentence is actually to illustrate: live tipping is mostly impulsive consumption, and the main group of its consumption is ordinary people with low income, so in recent years, there have been so many news about tip anchors. Some are minors who tip their parents' savings, some are online loan tips, and some even embezzle public funds to tip..."
Well-known anchor Feng Timo in live broadcast Open source: live video screenshots
Minors are tipped 1.6 million
The court platform voluntarily refunds all the tips
As Wen Tao said, one of the major criticisms of live broadcast tipping is to induce some minors to pay large private tips. This frequently leads to disputes and even lawsuits to the court, and public opinion is quite unfavorable to live broadcast rewards. In March last year, the Supreme People's Court released a typical case.
In 2020, the Tianjin No. 3 Intermediate People's Court heard the case: the plaintiff, Liu Mou, was born in 2002 and dropped out of junior high school. From October 23, 2018 to January 5, 2019, Liu used the bank card used by his parents for the circulation of business funds to transfer money to the account of a technology company for several times to tip the anchor of the live broadcasting platform, and the amount of reward was as high as nearly 1.6 million yuan. After Liu's parents learned about it, they hoped that a technology company could refund the full amount of the tip, but the company refused, and the two sides went to court.
The court of first instance ordered a technology company to refund part of the amount, and Liu appealed. After many communications and coordination, the parties reached an out-of-court settlement, the plaintiff withdrew the lawsuit, and the company involved in the case voluntarily returned nearly 1.6 million yuan of tip money and has been fulfilled.
In March 2021, the Supreme People's Court held a press conference to announce the case. The SPC's response to the issue of underage live broadcast rewards clearly pointed out that those who restrict their ability to act are minors over the age of 8, and when these people play games or tip online, some of them are thousands or tens of thousands, which is obviously incompatible with their age and intelligence level. In the absence of retroactive recognition by the legal representative, the act should be invalid. Where guardians request that network service providers return the money, the people's courts shall support them.
During the live broadcast of a female anchor, there are fans who continue to send live broadcast tips Source: screenshots of live videos
CPPCC National Committee member Zhang Yiwu:
Positive value live streaming charges are similar to knowledge payments
Although some NPC deputies have suggested abolishing live broadcast tips, some NPC deputies and CPPCC members have suggested strengthening supervision rather than one-size-fits-all.
Zhang Yiwu, member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, vice chairman of the Beijing Municipal Committee of the China Association for Promoting Democracy, and professor of the Department of Chinese of Peking University, was interviewed by the media a few days ago, and when talking about the current controversial live broadcast paid network tipping behavior, he believed that this needs to be analyzed according to the situation. "In fact, in the live broadcast platform, a large part of the anchors come from the field of intangible cultural heritage and the opera industry, they are forced by the impact of the epidemic, or actively participate in the field of traditional culture dissemination, with the help of the platform for live broadcasting, its content has positive value, if you can get some benefits through the platform, it is also natural to get returns in the process of dissemination." In Zhang Yiwu's view, just as the public enters the theater and also needs to buy tickets, live broadcast tipping is more like the digital embodiment of traditional formats. "It's actually similar to paying for knowledge." Zhang Yiwu said.
He said that in the future, we should support enterprises, institutions and individuals to popularize knowledge and disseminate traditional culture through short video live broadcast platforms in terms of policies, and obtain appropriate legal and reasonable income through live broadcast payment and network tipping. Zhang Yiwu believes that in the face of development problems, "promoting and regulating both coexist", it is necessary to strengthen effective supervision, strengthen industry self-discipline, and strengthen publicity and guidance to avoid irregularities.
A few days ago, Xiao Shengfang, a deputy to the National People's Congress and president of the Guangdong Lawyers Association, also suggested in an interview with Upstream News that live broadcasts of online shows should be divided into three types and different management measures should be adopted: One type of live broadcast is an expert in a certain field to attract audiences with the quality of the output content. The second type of live broadcast is "live broadcast without professional knowledge and professional skills content but does not violate laws, regulations and policies", including some gossip news network live broadcasts, "pure face value" live broadcasts and non-professional "dance" live broadcasts.
Xiao Shengfang believes that the difference in the management of the first type of live broadcast and the second type of live broadcast lies in the restriction of live broadcast tipping, and establishes a "compulsory cooling-off period for the second type of live broadcast tipping", that is, the tipper can withdraw the tip within three days without reason. This helps to guide webcasters to spend their energy on live content, reduce the generation of vulgar and boring live broadcast products, and reduce the blind tipping under the impulse of tippers.
Related news
The little girl tip is nearly 100,000 in 11 days
In 2019, Xiao Wu, who was less than 10 years old, registered an account on a live broadcast platform and tipped a number of anchors a total of 143 times through the APP in 11 days, with an amount of nearly 100,000 yuan. Later, the parents found that the balance in the bank card and Alipay had shrunk significantly. At the end of 2019, the court of first instance ruled that the live broadcasting platform should return 60,000 yuan to Xiao Wu and rejected Xiao Wu's other litigation claims. In November 2020, the Changzhou Intermediate People's Court rendered a final judgment: the original judgment was upheld.
"Online classes" tip nearly 250,000 yuan in three months
On July 11, 2021, Mr. Yuan, a citizen of Pu'er, Yunnan, suddenly found that the WeChat "change" and the deposit in the bank account were nearly 250,000 less. It turned out that in April this year, their son Xiao Yuan was obsessed with a certain online game and game live broadcast, so he asked his father to play games on his mobile phone and watch live broadcast tips on the grounds of online classes. After receiving the alarm for help, the police repeatedly checked the bill and found that Xiao Yuan gave the anchor a tip 136 times, with a minimum amount of 10 yuan and a maximum of 30,000 yuan each time, with a total of 248,253.6 yuan. The police repeatedly communicated with the live broadcast platform, and finally the live broadcast platform agreed to refund 198602.88 yuan.
In more than two months, he paid 166,000 yuan
In 2017, Xiao Peng (pseudonym), a 14-year-old boy who likes online games, was addicted to the female anchor of the game live broadcasting platform Tentacle TV (also known as Tentacle Live), in order to occupy the top of the female anchor's fan list of "Big Is enemy", for more than two months, Xiao Peng gave the 166,000 yuan accumulated by his parents for 10 years of working to the network female anchor, a total of 110 times. Tentacle TV refunded part of the tip after verifying that it was a minor tip.
Upstream journalist Zhao Yingji Yang Bo