First, a brief history of live broadcasting
2005 was a reckless year for China. That summer, the months-long "Super Girl" ignited the whole summer, and Li Yuchun became the luckiest girl, and her smiling green photos appeared in Time Magazine, becoming a symbol of China's grassroots and public opinion.
That year was also a very special year for the Internet industry, and many landmark historical events occurred in that year. For the first time, China's Internet users exceeded 100 million, becoming second only to the United States; the second wave of Internet entrepreneurship booms, the executives of established Internet companies have left their jobs to start a business; Baidu and other Internet companies have been listed overseas, and the total market value of Chinese Internet companies has reached an unprecedented $10 billion.
It was also in that year, starting from two cities in southern China, two entrepreneurs were exploring two development models of online live broadcasting in two very different directions, which also opened the curtain on the history of china's live broadcast development.
Hangzhou, 2005. A young man who has experienced projects such as movie download software, online bookstores and search engines, and who have failed to start a business in a series of businesses, is releasing pressure in the performing arts bar downstairs of the company. There, he saw some bosses spending as little as a few thousand to tens of thousands on the night, and most of the money, in addition to drinks, was spent on baskets and crowns for the catwalk models.
Every time a gift is given, a staff member will use a microphone to shout loudly ,"How many flower baskets did the boss give to Miss so-and-so", sometimes there are too many gifts, and the number of gifts in the performing arts bar is insufficient, and the number will simply be reported directly. After all, models don't care about flower baskets and crowns, they care more about the money they consume; and the boss doesn't care about these things, they care more about the scene.
These deeply inspired the young entrepreneur who was struggling with the subsistence line, and he excitedly asked the sales manager of the showroom: "If I run this business on the Internet, do you think you can make 200,000 yuan a month, no", "Yes!" He continued to ask, "What about making 1 million a month?" Still got a resounding answer.
Meanwhile, thousands of kilometers away in South Korea, there is an online video dating platform called "Ten People's Room" that has exploded. From offline copy to online, from foreign copy to domestic, this project is in line with the two iron laws of the successful Internet entrepreneurship project of that era, which makes the young entrepreneur determined to start a business again.
At that time, it was difficult for him to imagine that because of this decision, he would become the owner of a listed company after 9 years, and he was Fu Zhengjun.
So at the end of 2005, Fu Zhengjun founded a stranger video dating community, "Long Time Love", and successfully won $1.5 million in angel investment to start his Nth venture. Whether it is Fu Zhengjun or "long-term love", their names may feel very strange, but later Fu Zhengjun changed a more well-known name for his project - 9158, a name that mentions the development history of China's online live broadcasting, which cannot be bypassed, and is also the originator of live show broadcasting.
A live broadcast room is like a box, which has an anchor performance, you have to enter the live broadcast room to see it first; when you see a favorite person performing, you can give the performer a virtual gift to buy, which is equivalent to offline "tipping". Fu Zhengjun moved all the inspiration he got in that interpretation bar to the line unchanged, and transformed it into a "live show".
Everything is going as he initially thought, but the business income is not the monthly income of millions as he thought at the time, but the monthly income of 50 million, gross profit of nearly 90%, all of which is attributed to his online deduction bar is an online super deduction bar with tens of millions of monthly active users.
This was also a thunder in China's Internet industry, which was mainly based on advertising revenue as a single business model at that time, and also made more peers turn their attention to 9158 and invest in live broadcasting.
Liu Yan, the founder of Six Rooms, is one of the many side-eyed peers, at this time he just parted ways with Wang Dongan, the founder of Sina.com, and created the main UGC video sharing platform - Six Rooms, like Tudou and Youku in the same period, dreaming of doing the Chinese version of Youtube.
Although it has experienced some twists and turns, but the initial development of the six rooms is still good, the birth of such as "Bird Cage Mountain Bandit" and other explosive videos, holding the Internet to make money password - traffic, although it has never been able to achieve effective realization, but this is also a common phenomenon of Internet companies in that era, the only way to make a profit is to rely on financing, which of course also lays a huge hidden danger for the future.
In 2008, the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the United States triggered a financial tsunami around the world, and the "Chinese version of Youtube" began to have a crisis that the speed of financing could not catch up with the development speed of the platform, which also made the six rooms that had not been profitable, on the verge of collapse in the face of accumulated copyright fees and bandwidth costs.
The emergence of 9158 and its original runway mode made the six rooms seem to see a glimmer of hope in a desperate situation, and also grasped a life-saving straw, which Liu Yan later called "a revolution in the depths of the soul".
Idealists were also forced to bow to realism. As a result, in 2008, the six rooms were officially transformed into a live show, and from that moment on, the account of the six rooms company began to ring out the sound of money. That month, the six rooms that had been in business for 4 years finally paid the team their first salary with profitable money, which also allowed Liu Yan to truly see the revenue ability of the show live broadcast.
Guangzhou, 2005. Another young entrepreneur left NetEase and started his first entrepreneurial journey with Lei Jun's $1 million investment. Rented a house in Tianhe, Guangzhou, bought a server, called a few former colleagues of NetEase, and began to do dog network and multi-play network. At this time, he still just wanted to concentrate on making game information vertical websites, and he did not expect that in the near future, he would be related to live broadcasting, this unfamiliar term.
The following year, a game called World of Warcraft became a global hit, and of course included China, which has a large number of gamers. In addition to bringing huge traffic to his multi-play network, the explosion of Warcraft also allowed him to discover a new opportunity.
In this game known as the MMORPG game type, there is a new game concept of the copy, the user needs to cooperate to complete the task through the form of teaming, more than dozens of people, in this kind of scene that requires both operation and collaboration and communication, text chat is very inconvenient and tired, and the existing voice chat system on the market is not specifically built for the game, players in the game to use the experience is very bad, delay, stutter, drop is serious.
So he decided to build a multiplayer voice chat software that did not stick or delay, and soon after YY voice was born, and quickly occupied the game market. And he is Li Xueling, the founder of the Happy Gathering Era.
YY Voice has also changed the way World of Warcraft players socialize. Even if you are not playing a game, some people will use YY voice to communicate, and slowly extend the entertainment activities such as singing and storytelling. Seeing the rise of 9158 in the same period, Li Xueling also followed the trend, adding many entertainment paid functions to YY voice, making YY gradually transform from a "multi-person voice software" into a "live broadcast platform", and finally landed on nasdaq in New York in 2012, which was even two years earlier than the first 9158 to start, becoming the first overseas listed company in the domestic live broadcast industry, and sitting firmly on the first chair of live broadcasting.
In the same year of listing, Li Xueling transferred a joint project team of 20 people from within YY to start the YY game live broadcast business, which was later Huya Live Broadcast. Almost at the same time, Chen Shaojie, who had just taken over the A station of the two-dimensional aircraft carrier at that time, also decided to set up a douyu project team to enter the field of game live broadcasting. So far, the show live broadcast and the game live broadcast, these two most important forms of live content have appeared in the public eye one by one.
Two years later, in 2014, Fu Zhengjun's Tiange Interactive was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and the listing of YY and 9158 represented that the pattern of live broadcasting in the PC era had been settled.
However, with the rapid development of the mobile Internet, the content supply side and demand side of live broadcasting have undergone earth-shaking changes, and live broadcasting has officially entered a stage where everyone can live broadcast and everyone can tip.
This also completely ignited the ambition of every live broadcast pretender, eager to grab the tickets of the mobile Internet and create a new live broadcast order, so all kinds of capital and entrepreneurs have poured into the new track of live broadcasting, which kicked off the prelude to the "Thousand Broadcast War" in 2016. And now people are familiar with live broadcast products, they are only the victors in that fierce battle, or the survivors.
Because they could hardly have imagined that at the time of this bloody battle, the times had changed.
In 2017, a talent show called "China Has Hip Hop" resembled 2005's "Super Girl", which became popular all over China in the summer, "Do you have freestyle?" "It has become a mantra for many people.
This also allows rap to appear in the mainstream mass market for the first time, with the explosion of the program as the program title provider, a short video APP called Douyin also entered the public vision, and then its number of users multiplied by a geometric explosion increased, but also led the short video track into an explosive growth period.
The world has become the world of short videos for a time, and the traditional live broadcast companies that are fighting fiercely seem to have become people who have been forgotten by the times.
In the same year, a short video company called Kuaishou quickly completed the cold start of the live broadcast business by means of cooperation with YY, and then Douyin quickly followed up. Based on the huge consumer users and creators of short videos, the traffic game of jitter is almost a dimensionality reduction blow to the previous live broadcast products, and it will soon occupy half of the entire live broadcast market.
And then there are some familiar stories.
Through a brief history of the development of live broadcasting, you will find that the development of live broadcasting is accompanied by the development of the Internet business model. Making money is the first driving force for the development of live broadcasting. It is precisely because it has excellent revenue capabilities that countless capital and entrepreneurs have invested in it, and it is precisely because countless capital and entrepreneurs have invested in it that live broadcasting has developed in continuous change and evolved in development.
To this day, live broadcasting is still active in the public eye, but in the form of live e-commerce. Live broadcasting has become a basic tool, so that everything can be truly + live broadcasting, which can empower various formats.
Of course, this is because the development of the live broadcasting industry is now in a mature recession period, and its own traffic, monetization efficiency and growth trend are in a downward trend, so it is more used by Internet companies as a plug-in tool for its own business and commercial empowerment. This article is mainly about the simple live broadcast business, so it will not explore the live broadcast + format.
Second, what to make money on
How exactly does live streaming make money? Before answering this, we need to seriously consider three questions: Who are the users of the first live broadcast? Why do second users pay? What exactly does the third live streaming company make money through?
1. Live streaming is anti-elite
Looking back at the situation at the beginning of the development of live broadcasting, "grass recklessness" may be a synonym for fitting to the point that it can no longer fit. This is not only a summary of that era, but also a summary of the Internet entrepreneurs of that era, as well as a summary of the development model of live broadcasting.
Whether it is Fu Zhengjun or Li Xueling, whether it is 9185 or YY, they do not shy away from saying that the users they target are the basic disk of Chinese society: the ordinary people who live in third- and fourth-tier cities or rural areas, have very few ways of pastime and entertainment, have boring amateur life, and often mix with KTV and Internet cafes.
Fu Zhengjun directly called them "Di Si", Li Xueling affectionately called them "grassroots", and now we call them "sinking crowds". But no matter how the times and societies develop, no matter what synonyms we give to these people, we cannot erase the fact that they are the majority of the country's population, which accounts for 70 percent of the country's population.
Any successful product is essentially solving the needs of the greatest common divisor, and the same is true of live streaming products, which are solving the needs of most people and providing them with corresponding services. Because of this, the early shows and voice rooms will be labeled as "earthy" and "vulgar" by the so-called "mainstream social elites", which cannot be seen at all. But this has not affected the rapid development of the live broadcasting industry in the slightest, but has a greater potential energy.
This huge potential energy is of course due on the one hand to the fact that this group of people has a sufficiently large base, and on the other hand, it may be more important, that their nature is fully exposed and that they need enough primitiveness. Human nature is inherently evil, and this evil is not to say sin, but more to the defects of human nature such as gluttony, lust, greed, rage, laziness, melancholy, vanity and arrogance.
Compared with the "elite class", the so-called "diaosi class" is affected by the objective factors of education level, living environment, and economic foundation, and has great reservations and indulgences in the "nature" of human nature. Of course, it is precisely because of this that the significance of education is highlighted, people often say that education is anti-human, and the purpose of education is to indoctrinate and restrain the defects of human nature.
Back to the point, Maslow's theory of needs classifies human needs into five models: physiological needs, security needs, social needs, respect needs, and self-actualization needs. The hierarchy is from low to high, forming a pyramid. The lower the level of demand, the greater the degree of need, and the greater the potential energy.
The demand caused by human nature is naturally a very low level of demand, and at the same time it is a demand that urgently needs to be met, so that "Di Si" is willing to pay the price beyond the eyes of ordinary people to meet its own needs, and has also become the best quality live broadcast target user.
2. Live streaming is a one-to-many way to socialize
"The earliest business model of the Internet was advertising, and later games were 'hate', and we were based on 'love'." This is Fu Zhengjun's description of the business model of live broadcasting in an interview during the 9185 period. Looking back now, I can't help but applaud his grasp of the humanity of the live audience, but to be precise, the live broadcast is based not only on "admiration", but also on "admiration" and "vanity".
The reason why the business model of live broadcasting can be established is based on the user's "love of vanity" for the anchor, and the reason for the emotion is that live broadcasting is essentially a one-to-many social network.
I have a deep analysis of social networking in my previous articles, and there must be three elements in social networking: content, interaction, and relationship chain. Based on people-oriented content, interactive behaviors such as words or languages are generated, and then the relationship is precipitated into a relationship chain, and then the content continues to form a social ecological closed loop.
In contrast, live broadcasting, whether it is game live broadcasting or entertainment live broadcasting, the anchor continuously transmits content to the user through live broadcasting, which includes both appearance, body, age, and singing, performance, and game skills, based on the continuous release of information elements, users will interact with the anchors they are interested in.
Compared with the interaction in traditional social and community products, in addition to comments and bullet screens in live broadcasts, they can also interact with the anchor through paid methods such as gifts, and the interaction itself will help establish the relationship between the anchor and the user, deepen the feelings, and even produce a sense of belonging and ownership, and this feeling will be enhanced in the one-to-many group synchronous social scene of live broadcasting.
Of course, it is precisely because of the social attributes of live broadcasting that most users watch live broadcasting for specific anchors, and payment is even more so, which will also lay hidden dangers for live broadcast platforms.
Users pay in this scenario, in fact, pay for their own emotions. I myself once thought about a live user payment model: "Willingness to pay = (impulse level * love vanity) / decision time". Impulsivity is a necessity, and it is impossible for a perfectly sane person to buy any non-essential.
In live streaming, the vast majority of things that require users to spend money are non-essential. In addition, the degree of impulsivity is divided into two kinds, intrinsic is caused by personal personality, some people are easy to impulsive people, and some people are not; external is caused by the external environment, such as time, atmosphere, festivals and other external factors, both of which will affect the degree of impulsivity of a user.
"Love vanity" means that the user has a love for the anchor in the live broadcast product, as well as vanity, this emotional factor is a multiplication of the degree of impulsivity, and it is also a key factor to pry the user to pay. The decision-making time is the time spent by the user in the process of payment to consider whether to consume, although it is measured in time, but it involves a variety of factors such as understanding threshold, payment threshold, psychological threshold and so on. These factors interlock, and under the interaction, determine whether a user will pay or not.
Therefore, in the revenue design of live broadcasting, it is not important to do any task, rush to the list, and function or function, what is important is how to create the user's impulse point around the anchor, how to establish and meet the user's love and vanity, and how to shorten the user's decision-making time is the most important thing.
3. Live streaming still makes a hard money
Today, live broadcasting is not an industry like 9158 when the gross profit margin was close to 90%, and it is no exaggeration to say that most live broadcasting companies make a hard money.
Image source Douyu financial report
Not long ago, Douyu announced its unaudited financial report for the fourth quarter and full year of 2021. According to the report, the total revenue of Douyu in 2021 was 9.165 billion yuan, of which the total revenue of Douyu in the fourth quarter was 2.328 billion yuan, an increase of 2.6% year-on-year; the gross profit reached 245 million yuan, an increase of 34.3% year-on-year. The gross profit margin of Douyu Live is only 10.5%, and the gross profit margin of other live broadcasting platforms is probably the same, which is not bad.
Profit rankings by industry
What is the concept of gross margin of 10.5%? Compare the approximate gross profit margins of various industries to see. This gross margin ranks third from the bottom in the conventional industry, only higher than the express delivery industry by 9% and ordinary workers. The gross profit margin of the waste recycling industry is 3.5 times that of live broadcasting, not to mention that the gross profit margin of online games is 9 times that of live broadcasting. It can be said that the gross profit margin of 10% is already a very low level, of course, this is also due to the profit model of live broadcasting itself.
Most of the profit models of live broadcasting platforms are particularly single, basically the original set of 9158, which is nothing more than gift tips, advertising revenue, traffic monetization, paid live broadcasting, etc., but the most important source of income is still from the user's direct consumption tip.
As early as the 9158 period, Fu Zhengjun once told the media that "it is the majority of the onlookers "Di Si" that prompted a small number of "local tycoons" to contribute income to 9158" and to this day most of the live broadcast platforms still earn the money of the head big brother.
If the live broadcast platform wants to make more money, it has to find more big brothers, and this process is like the gold rush in the old movies in the Western United States, the anchor is just a gold panning tool screen, the user traffic is like a river, flooding through the screen, leaving a very small number of golden sands, these golden sands are the big brothers of the live broadcast platform.
This process is useless to rely on product design alone, and more operations are needed to intervene, which also forces live broadcasting companies to be in the same labor-intensive industry as e-commerce companies.
Third, the dilemma of profitability
1. The never-ending arms race
The best way to end a battle is to defeat all your opponents. In the history of China's Internet, whether it is the "Hundred Regiments War" or the "Online Ride-hailing War", it is all confirming this proverb. However, after experiencing the tragic "thousand broadcast war", the live broadcasting industry did not appear as in history, a situation of dominance and winner-take-all, but after the survival of the fittest, it showed a trend of hundreds of contending.
It is in this unusually mild environment, and even later bred the industry revenue scale Top2 that has not participated in the "Thousand Broadcast War", which makes a money-burning blitzkrieg forced to turn into a continuous consumption of the position war.
The battle is endless, the competition is not stopped. As mentioned above, the social attributes of live broadcasting have laid a huge hidden danger for the development of the platform, which is that users have a strong connection and dependence on the anchor, and traffic and revenue are attached to the head anchor. Following the rule of two and eight, the vast majority of platform head anchors account for about 80% of the entire platform anchor revenue, the head anchor is the traffic, the head anchor is the revenue, and the competition of the live broadcasting companies is always around the head anchor.
But it is very difficult to cultivate a head anchor, look at the head anchor on the market now you know, entertainment anchors can not only look good, but also have talent, humor will nag, game anchors not only to play games, but also to talk about paragraphs, will come to work, in short, the head anchor is a kind of touch bypass compound talent.
Since the live broadcast company is not good at training, it can only go to the market to buy, originally the head anchor is less, but there are more bidders, so that the head anchor can be inhabited, the signing cost is less than tens of millions, more than hundreds of millions. Not only that, it is precisely because the head anchor is too scarce, so that companies are eyeing the head anchor of competitors, but also lead to mutual poaching between platforms, the industry gradually fell into a vicious competition whirlpool, such as Douyu default poaching was fined 49.7 million cases.
In the case of the gradual disappearance of the industry dividend, this ineffective vicious competition only hurts the enemy by one thousand self-losses and eight hundred, increases the cost in vain, and also makes the capital behind it sit still. Since 2020, Tencent, as the common majority shareholder behind Douyu and Huya, has been interested in matching the merger and marriage of the game live broadcast boss and the second boss, so as to stop this unnecessary competition in the local area.
However, the weather is unpredictable, with the country's anti-monopoly supervision of the Internet industry in recent years continues to increase pressure. On July 10, 2021, the State Administration for Market Regulation directly issued a document stating that the merger of Huya and Douyu is prohibited by law, believing that if the merger of the two will occupy more than 70% of the game live broadcast market share, Tencent will control the merged entity alone, which is not conducive to fair competition in the entire market.
Subsequently, Tencent could only reluctantly accept the review decision, announcing that the high-profile merger incident had finally failed, and the arms race on live broadcasting had completely lost the pause button.
2. The head-scratching problem of sharing
The anchors of live broadcasting platforms are generally divided into two types: guild anchors and ordinary anchors. Guild anchors are more professional anchors operated by guilds, and ordinary anchors are ordinary anchors without guilds. The guild system was first established by Chen Zhou, the former CEO of YY, and the inspiration was also based on the game guild.
Guilds are the equivalent of brokerage companies that sign up and train anchors, and then let them broadcast live on the live platform to get revenue share. The original intention of creating this system is to reduce the operating costs of live broadcasting companies by delegating the right to manage and operate anchors, and YY did manage millions of anchors through the guild system by a small number of operations, and the guild system was quickly promoted in all live broadcasting companies.
However, with the continuous development of live broadcasting and the gradual escalation of competition, the competition around the anchor has also made the revenue share of guild anchors rise, and the general share level of guild anchors in the industry is about 60%, and there are higher to reach 80% or 90%. Even the ultra-high share ratio has become a weapon of vicious competition.
Use almost 100% rebates to attract more guilds and anchors to settle in, while the guild uses ultra-high rebates to carry out unlimited brushing flow, on the one hand, to create an illusion that big brothers follow up, on the other hand, to pull up the entire live broadcast platform book flow, but this ultra-high share is also the culprit that causes the surface profits of live broadcast companies to seem to rise, but the gross profit may not have a corresponding floating.
Compared with the super high share of guild anchors, the share of ordinary anchors will be much lower, but the corresponding problem is the lack of business capabilities and revenue capabilities of ordinary anchors. Most of the ordinary anchors are subject to their own conditions and professional capabilities, making the live content closer to pure social, combined with the user payment model I mentioned above, it is almost difficult for users to pay for it.
Therefore, in any live broadcasting platform, there is almost no pure reliance on the vegetarian anchor as a supply-side source, rather than cooperating with the guild. Although such as Kuaishou Live broadcasting at the beginning of its development, it is also trying to make some breakthroughs in this area, but it still seems to have little effect.
3. Losers in the war of time
Image source Aurora iAPP
If the domestic Internet competition is disassembled into different stages, I think the most important are two stages:
The first stage of competition around the demand, the domestic Internet industry from scratch, everywhere is a blue ocean, you can do it, so the most important thing for Internet companies is to find the unmet needs and quickly occupy the position;
The second stage revolves around the competition of time, the development of the domestic Internet industry is relatively mature, everywhere is the Red Sea, there are more and more tracks and opponents, but the time left by users to the Internet is limited, and companies are ultimately competing for limited user time.
Demand is traffic, time is flow, whether it is the first stage or the second stage, the ultimate competition is traffic.
Image source Aurora iAPP
Back to live broadcasting, starting in 2005 and xing in 2016, according to the early calculation of the birth of nearly 20 years ago, it has also experienced two stages of competition. Especially in the first stage of competition, live broadcasting is born out of demand competition, so it quickly obtains traffic and develops. But today, in the competition for user time, live broadcasting has obviously become more and more weak.
Different from the early days of its birth, when it was mixed with long videos and online games in various urban Internet cafes, today's live broadcasting, although it has also entered the era of mobile Internet, still has characteristics that are incompatible with this era: high real-time requirements, long single-game time, and low effective content density.
In this era where every second counts and even time is fragmented, the battle around user time has reached the point of granular competition, and it is difficult for users to spend a long time in a fixed period of time to obtain unsustainable and short-term pleasure.
Not to mention that live broadcasting can not meet the needs of contemporary users, not to mention that there have been stronger competitors in the past long videos and online games and it is tough. This opponent is the short video, which has the opposite characteristics of live broadcasting, the user can spend the same unit of time to obtain a continuous and uninterrupted dopamine stimulation, and rely on the algorithm, making this stimulation efficiency very efficient.
According to Aurora data, short videos account for 30% of the daily use of mobile netizens' apps, and there is a trend of continuous expansion, which can be said to be the absolute time killer at present, and live broadcasting can only be out of reach.
The lack of traffic is like the first falling domino, creating a series of chain reactions. The first is the traffic realization, followed by advertising revenue, and then the most important tip revenue, the upstream built a reservoir to block the water, the downstream how to pan for gold, and finally make the entire live broadcast ecology into a vicious circle.
4. Strangled marginal revenue
The disappearance of the entire live broadcast dividend is accompanied by the disappearance of marginal revenue. The so-called marginal revenue is the risk income that is free from the unregulated and regulated gray area.
Live broadcasting was originally to move the offline clubhouse to the Internet through live video broadcasting, and to provoke the sinking crowd with strong demand through the outstanding and hot anchors, so that they could pay for their own overly exuberant dopamine, which was such a simple and rough business logic, which created huge profits in the early live broadcast period.
With the passage of time, live broadcasting has not changed much in business logic, and the content and categories have been greatly expanded, but the profits have long been much worse than before, and an important reason is that there are regulatory issues. In the initial development process, live broadcasting belonged to a barbaric growth state without supervision, but as the industry became more and more mature, the regulatory policies of relevant departments were also followed up and improved.
Whether it is pornography, edge ball, or even private live broadcast room, these most popular live broadcast audiences, and pay high prices for the content will inevitably be hit hard by the regulatory authorities, and the live broadcast platform has to do a good job of supervision of its own content in order to protect itself, forcing it to move towards the deadlock of "the smaller the scale, the less the payment".
In addition to the risk of content supervision, the risk of minors' consumption is also a headache for major platforms. Through the above-mentioned payment model, minors are the highest quality live broadcast users, and the immaturity of age and mind has created their characteristics of high impulsiveness, high love of vanity, and short payment decision-making time, so the proportion of minors' consumption on many platforms is not low, especially for game live broadcasting.
As the news of juvenile huge rewards continues to break out, it has gradually become a social problem, and the relevant departments have paid more and more attention to the issue of minors' tips, and supervision has continued to increase. On March 8, 2021, the Fourth Session of the 13th National People's Congress was held in Beijing, and Zhou Qiang, President of the Supreme People's Court, made a report on the work of the Supreme People's Court at the meeting.
In the report, President Zhou Qiang mentioned that in terms of strengthening the judicial protection of minors, the court tried the case of invalid rewards for minors live broadcasting, and the live broadcasting platform returned the full amount of 1.58 million yuan of the reward. This case was also selected as a typical case of judicial protection of minors in the Supreme People's Court.
This also means that once the guardian of the minor uses the minor's tip as a reason and provides evidence to prove that the minor fraudulently used the adult account to tip, he can apply for a refund to the platform.
The gradual increase in regulation has also cut off piece after piece of cake that was once considered attractive by live broadcasting companies.
Fourth, survival or destruction
Under the predicament, survival or destruction, this is a problem worth thinking about in the live broadcasting industry.
I have to admit that after more than ten years of development, the entire domestic live broadcasting industry has been in a mature period of transition to a period of recession. It is becoming more and more difficult for a single live broadcast business to make money, and the growth is getting slower and slower, while the competition is becoming more and more fierce, and it is difficult to support a story that can be told, which is why it has fallen into such a situation.
"Maintenance" and "consolidation" have become the main themes of the current industry, some companies hope to squeeze out the last bit of value of users under the apocalyptic carnival; and some companies are still actively looking for a "second development curve" even in the face of such difficulties.
In 2020, Huanju Times successively sold its Huya Live broadcast and YY live broadcast to Tencent and Baidu, completely withdrew from the domestic live broadcast business, and took the only BIGO live broadcast to prepare enough food and grass to lightly load up, all in the overseas live broadcast business.
Going to sea makes the current dilemma no longer a dilemma, and it is also a wise move for live broadcasting, a money-making game, to continue to be maintained.
As early as 2019, Li Xueling said that "BIGO helped YY confirm one thing: the income model of live broadcasting overseas is established." At that time, it was already the fifth year of BIGO's overseas cultivation. In an internal open letter after the acquisition of BIGO by Juju Times that year, Li Xueling said:
"The world will eventually be the competition of three major markets: the European and American markets, the Chinese market, and the rising third world market. The main Internet companies in the future are working in these three markets. The next ten years will be a decade of revitalization for Southeast Asia, and the countries of the third world will usher in development opportunities. ”
Escaping the confinement of the domestic market and pointing to the vast overseas market is a long-term plan for Juju, and many companies have also gone to sea in recent years.
In addition to overseas markets, the exploration of diversification of live broadcast profit models may also be a way out. Speaking of this, some people may want to say that live e-commerce, it is true that live e-commerce has developed rapidly in recent years, but this is more like the empowerment of live broadcast tools for e-commerce business, in addition to jitter fast is not very suitable for traditional live broadcast companies.
The real exploration to the smaller, may be the change of the model, such as some social APP, based on the vegan multi-person interactive live broadcast mode, but also achieved nearly ten million monthly flow; to the larger, it is more necessary to integrate new things into the old things for continuous innovation, such as meta-universe, NFT, cloud games and other popular concepts to help create a new live broadcast model, there are also many companies are trying.
When the old live broadcast is a thing of the past, the new live broadcast may meet you again in a new way in the near future, and this story about making money is still to be continued.
Resources:
Jiang Yue, Lu Yuan "2005, a year of important turning points in China's Internet!! 》2017.09.06
Southern People Weekly "Fu Zhengjun Video Show Di Si Counterattack" 2014.08.27
Facing the media "Li Xueling's History: A Journalist Born, 20 Years of Entrepreneurial History Witnessing the Changes in China's Internet Territory", 2020.11.18