On March 20, 2022, the YY2021 Annual Summit Ceremony was held in Haikou, which is the tenth year of the YY Annual Festival.
At the ceremony, more than 100 popular YY anchors performed on the same stage with 4 powerful stars such as Tengger, Jin Zhiwen, Huang Xiaoyun and Jin Chi, and the program content was not only singing and dancing, but also new content such as talk shows and intangible cultural heritage. The whole festival was simultaneously broadcast live on multiple channels such as YY Live, Baidu APP, Baidu Tieba and Good Looking Video, and the popularity value of the live broadcast room on the night of the event reached 8.52 million.
Judging from the content and form of the YY2021 Annual Peak Festival, the 10-year-old YY Festival is no longer just a head event IP of the pan-entertainment live broadcasting industry, but has been upgraded to the brand IP of YY Live, becoming the stage for YY show muscles, show achievements and show future.
The grand ceremony is the "double 11" of the live broadcasting industry
Nowadays, pan-entertainment live broadcasting has become a mainstream entertainment product like music and short video, and with the increasingly certain policy environment and more perfect infrastructure such as 5G, pan-entertainment live broadcasting is further prospering. According to data from iiMedia Research, the scale of online live broadcast users in China has maintained steady growth, with the user scale exceeding the 600 million mark in 2021 and expected to reach 660 million people in 2022.
In the pan-entertainment live broadcasting industry, the "live broadcast ceremony" has become the annual drama of major platforms, YY annual peak ceremony, Douyin "Radiance with You" live broadcast carnival, Kuaishou annual spotlight festival... Although the names are different, each platform will create an annual drama, allowing the platform anchor to perform on the live stage, combined with the online interaction of the live broadcast platform, to achieve the goal of promoting user activity, upgrading the content ecology, and expanding commercial monetization.
However, what many people don't know is that YY is the pioneer of the "Annual Festival" gameplay. When YY Voice came out in 2008, it was just an instant communication tool for World of Warcraft players, stemming from the pain points that Li Xueling found when playing children's games. In 2011, the YY live broadcast APP was launched, with the concept of artists and listeners, explored the model of fans to "send flowers" to artists, and developed a paid monthly pass and later a paid gift system based on this, which laid the most basic commercial system in today's pan-entertainment live broadcasting industry: the tipping model. In January 2013, the YY2012 annual ceremony was launched, and the anchors ranked PK at the festival to win the support of fans, and then the annual ceremony gradually became the highlight of the content ecological operation of the YY platform, and also became the largest event IP under YY.
YY's annual festival has been doing for 10 years, and it has been evolving for several years to become a mature event IP, and has also contributed multiple values to YY and the live broadcast industry:
1. Serve the online anchor PK qualifying competition.
The YY Annual Festival is not just a separate party, but an event that lasts for most of the year. Every june, the first round of quarterly qualifiers for the YY Entertainment Annual Festival opens, and the scrolling note of "Ask for Channel Tickets" will appear below the live broadcast rooms of major anchors, and the anchors will constantly remind fans to send tickets, because the channel tickets determine whether the anchor can participate in the annual festival.
After a round of PK, the anchors will be divided into highs and lows at the end of the year, whether they can be on the list, whether they can perform live at the festival, is the glory of the anchor and the guilds behind it, which represents the achievements of the past year, reflects the popularity, talent and commercial value of the official endorsement, and also means the development potential of the next year, it can be said that the "grand ceremony" is the Oscar of the live broadcast session.
It can be said that the first value of the YY annual festival is to serve the anchors' qualifying competition. As a platform, YY excavates high-quality celebrities through competitions, and encourages anchors to PK, so that they can conscientiously improve their content standards, continuously enhance fan stickiness, continuously optimize operational capabilities, and achieve continuous activity and upgrading of the platform's content ecology.
2. Drive YY's business to continue to grow.
The ten years of the YY annual festival are the decade of the large-scale development of the live broadcasting economy: the ecology and business model of live broadcasting have been established, the guild model has emerged, the anchor income has been raised, and a number of live broadcasting platforms, including YY, Yingke, Douyu, Huya, and Kuaishou, have been successfully listed. In the process of growing the pan-entertainment live broadcast cake, the annual grand ceremony is indispensable, just like the value of the double eleven to the e-commerce industry.
Tmall Double 11 is the most successful event IP in the e-commerce industry, the essence of which is that Ali has successfully promoted the popularization of e-commerce through festivals to stimulate consumption, and improved e-commerce infrastructure such as logistics, payment and cloud.
YY's annual ceremony is YY's "Double 11", which can also be said to be a "festival" created by YY, which directly promotes the growth of YY live active users, celebrity anchors, high-quality content and tip revenue, and helps it firmly occupy the top spot of pan-entertainment live broadcasting.
Tmall created Double 11, but Double 11 has now become a grand event for the entire e-commerce and even the consumer industry. Similarly, the annual festival created by YY has also become the IP of the industry, although the festivals with different names on different platforms are held at different times, but their essence is no different from the YY annual festival. I have always said that YY's biggest contribution to the live broadcasting industry is three, one is the tipping model, the second is the guild system, and the third is the annual festival, all three of which have profoundly affected the pan-entertainment live broadcast and even the entire content industry.
The annual festival allows more people to understand the live broadcasting industry and become users or anchors. Nowadays, the number of live broadcast users has exceeded 600 million, and after the entertainment live broadcast, the game live broadcast and e-commerce live broadcast have risen, and the live broadcast has become the Internet infrastructure, which is inseparable from the drive of the annual festival.
3. Become an active IP with commercial value.
Every year, the brand attaches great importance to the marketing of the Spring Festival Gala, on the one hand, because the Spring Festival Gala can create a traffic flood that is difficult for the server to carry, on the other hand, because the Spring Festival Gala itself is a brand, and the three words "on the Spring Festival Gala" have gold content.
After years of influence precipitation, YY Annual Festival has become a brand in itself. It originated from the annual anchor award ceremony of the live broadcast platform, but now it has become an entertainment evening that includes song and dance, talk shows and other content, just like Bilibili's "most beautiful night", forming a commercializable IP value.
In fact, YY2021 annual ceremony has a lot of commercial cooperation, such as its cross-border cooperation with the well-known beverage brand Wang Laoji, the launch of "Ge Y Hong" custom can, as a limited edition drink of the anchor guest, I think this is just the beginning of the YY annual festival IP value digging deep, the future YY annual festival will create greater commercial value for the platform, especially with Baidu's marketing capabilities deeply strengthened.
The value of the annual festival has been seen by various platforms, and when many live broadcasting platforms have done the grand ceremony, the 2022 YY annual festival has changed.
How does the YY Annual Festival "transform into a butterfly"?
In the past two years, the live broadcast industry has given people a feeling of a mature industry, with fewer and fewer players at the head, some solidification of the industry's gameplay, and the vitality of the market is no longer the same. Different platforms grab anchors, rob guilds, rob users, and it is not an exaggeration to say that there are some "inner volumes" in the pan-entertainment live broadcasting industry.
As the promoter of the growth of the pan-entertainment live broadcast cake, YY also stands at a new starting point, especially after deepening cooperation with Baidu, the outside world is concerned about where it will go next. In 2021, attempts to launch 66 live broadcast festivals, YY8.0 online and other actions are the indirect answers given by YY one after another. Entering the tenth year, the YY annual ceremony is no longer just a live event IP, but a brand IP of YY, focusing on its achievements in the year and the future development direction.
One is the content triangle from the trinity of "anchors, guilds, and platforms" to "anchors, influencers, and celebrities.".
In the previous online anchor PK competition of YY Live, the number of guilds and anchors increased significantly to a new high, the competition data set a new record, and new faces emerged from the award-winning anchors. At the annual ceremony, in addition to the successful anchors, there are also Internet celebrities, celebrities, etc. participating in the performance, which reflects that YY is enriching the pan-entertainment content ecology in addition to the anchor content ecology led by the anchor.
If service anchors are YY's industry, then strengthening the incubation of celebrities is YY's second growth curve, which means that YY can better grasp the short video and live broadcast dividends of the whole platform. YY adopts the "Internet platform thinking + professional star-making knowledge and team + fan accompaniment growth interactive mechanism" to carry out Internet celebrity incubation, and its ability to do a good job in the red economy is the accumulation of anchor ecological management for many years.
YY takes an open route, emphasizes the anchor training strategy, adopts an open mind to cultivate and support anchors, so that anchors have a broader world of development, rather than trapping anchors on the platform, such as promoting the "main broadcast circle", that is, digging and incubating celebrities in the platform, and then pushing these celebrities to the whole platform such as TV programs, film and television dramas, network roundups, and short videos, to expand the influence of the circle. When the whole platform becomes popular, they will feed back to the YY platform and bring more cross-circle fans back to the "mother's home" by creating high-quality content, helping the growth of live broadcast platform users.
In this way, YY actually already has some super red MCN attributes. Xiao Ah Qi, Dai Yutong, Wu Dailin and other phenomenal Internet celebrities who climbed the YY2021 annual peak ceremony have all grown from YY anchors step by step to well-known singers on the Internet, and the whole network has tens of millions of fans.
At the annual ceremony, YY announced that in 2021, YY Live's Internet celebrities will achieve a 71 million fans on the whole network, adding 8 million fan-level Internet celebrities, 5 million stream anchors, and releasing a total of 110 songs throughout the year, including 88 original songs, of which Xiao Ah Qi and Dai Yutong sang the original songs "Once Upon a Time" and "Late" that were once ranked TOP1 on multiple platforms at the annual ceremony, and the whole festival gave stars and Internet celebrities more performance opportunities.
The stars who joined, in the content ecology of YY bloomed a different brilliance, YY2021 annual ceremony adopted the "anchor + star" CP partner performance mode, the grand ceremony to the climax, Jin Chi opened with the anchors to perform "You are you", Jin Zhiwen and anchor Wen Er sang "Self-amusement", Huang Xiaoyun and light blue, Wen'er chorus "Star Sea", light blue and Tengger chorus of "The Wind Blows" also once appeared on Weibo and Douyin hot search. YY does not simply invite celebrities to the annual ceremony platform, but through the cooperation between celebrities and anchors, it wins wider attention for anchors.
In 2021, YY also strengthened "star-element cooperation" and "star anchors" in PGC programs, such as the first talk show variety show IP "Crooked Talk" of YY Live Broadcast, which began broadcasting in October, took the form of star debaters and YY talk show anchors forming a team PK to help more anchors achieve "out of the circle".
The second is to change from "only the anchor live performance" to "do professional programs in an established manner" to make the content better, better looking, and more systematic.
The content ecology of the live broadcast platform has always relied on content creators such as anchors, what content they provide to the audience to see what content, the platform does not intervene much in the live content itself, at most it is to design rules and provide support in the dimensions of traffic, content, and business, so that the platform content ecology can develop benignly.
From the perspective of this annual ceremony, YY Live is strengthening its own content planning and building capabilities, developing in the direction of professional entertainment content institutions, and outputting high-quality content, just like in addition to YouTube of live broadcasting, the Netflix attribute of live broadcasting has been increased.
This annual festival is not just a stack of anchor/net celebrity/star program singing and dancing performances, but more song and dance, language, and talk shows, such as YaoYaoya's "Roof on Fire" singing and dancing, Guqin master Xie Dongxiao and anchor Damumumu's "Stepping on mountains and rivers" performance, Andy's talk show performance, etc., and the program standard is in line with the professional TV station evening.
Throughout YY Live's 2021, we can see that it is strengthening its self-made content capabilities. In June, the first "66 Live Broadcast Festival" was held in conjunction with Baidu APP, relying on the content triangle of "big-name stars, top Internet celebrities and gold-medal anchors", attracting 31 million viewers through more than 30 live broadcasts such as celebrity live broadcasts, Internet celebrity singing, anchor celebrations, and innovative variety shows. In addition, there are key content such as the third season of "YY Musician Plan", the talk show variety SHOW IP "Crooked Talk", the dance IP "Born Dance King", and the sports IP "The Second Chess National Hand Challenge", which cover key content categories, and all show professional production standards, breadth and depth.
Is it speculated that YY will create more large-scale content IPs like the "Annual Festival" in the future? This can not only give platform creators a larger and more performance stage, but also allow YY to upgrade from the live broadcast economy to the IP economy, and evolve in the direction of the pan-entertainment comprehensive platform, to put it more bluntly, YY already has some iQiyi shadows, but it is more biased towards live content.
The third is to cooperate with Baidu to gradually enter a better state, relying on cutting-edge technology to run to the sea of stars.
At the YY annual ceremony, the new version of the Y bear doll was unveiled, showing that YY stood at a new starting point.
On September 16 last year, YY announced a new mascot (YY bear) image and product logo, while the YY live broadcast app was upgraded to version 8.0, and the YY voice PC client was upgraded to version 9.0. YY8.0 is a major revision in the four years since the YY live 7.0 version was launched in 2017, vertical screen priority, personalized recommendation, and enhanced experience show that YY is more firmly embracing the mobile ecology and more firmly using the development ideas of new technologies such as AI, which is directly related to its cooperation with Baidu, because AI, AR/VR, metaverse and other black technologies are Baidu's expertise, so the selection of the finale track of the YY annual festival "Star Sea" is also meaningful.
"Star Sea" is easily reminiscent of Baidu's 2021 brand image film "Look Farther", which was when Baidu was listed for the second time in Hong Kong, which can be described as standing at a new starting point, Baidu showed generations of technical believers through this promotional film to explore the Star Sea, "Everyone who looks farther is pushing the times forward." "The Sea of Stars" pays tribute to "Look Farther", and the two echo each other, reflecting that YY will also adhere to technical beliefs and long-termism like Baidu, "look farther", do difficult and correct things, and run to its own sea of stars.
In particular, it is worth mentioning that this year's YY annual ceremony is also the one that strengthens the sense of social responsibility: for the first time, it joined the YY annual positive energy data inventory, established the Torchlight Public Welfare Alliance, launched the Torchlight Plan, and advocated multi-party participation in building a positive energy live broadcast ecology, which shows that YY has a deeper understanding of its own social value and responsibility, and actively takes action.
The annual ceremony is the "Double 11" of the live broadcasting industry. Double 11 in 2021 has also undergone significant changes: various platforms, including Tmall, no longer emphasize GMV, and the media interpretation ali has bid farewell to the GMV theory, laid down the burden, and embraced a new era of high-quality and sustainable growth, and user experience, business interests and social responsibility have been placed in a more important position than GMV. From the perspective of the YY2021 annual ceremony from the event IP to the brand IP, the live broadcast industry is also saying goodbye to the past, "seeing farther" and embracing the new era with a better attitude.