Sports Big Business No. 2876, welcome to pay attention to the leading sports industry information platform
7 days Douyin account rose to 10 million fans! Because of the live fitness broadcast during the home isolation period of the epidemic in Shanghai, Liu Qihong, a Taiwanese artist who is nearly 50 years old, has finally officially become popular. Before that, the versatile Liu Qihong actually had a lot of labels: singer, actor, Jay Chou's friend, "Little Puff" dad ("Once took his daughter to "Where Did Daddy Go"), but what really made his popularity soar was the fitness live broadcast between the epidemic in Shanghai.
In the past month, Liu's fitness live broadcast has been watched by nearly 40 million people, with a single peak of popularity reaching 1.09 million, and as of April 20, the number of fans on his Douyin account has increased to 18.48 million. Liu Qihong's live fitness broadcast immediately became a phenomenon-level topic, and the scenery was infinite for a while. Many female viewers who followed her live broadcast to work out called themselves "Liu Qihong Girls" and often called on Coach Liu to "approve fitness homework online" for them.
Since the outbreak of the epidemic in 2020, because Chinese people are often forced to stay at home, fitness online live broadcasting has quickly become an emerging way of life, and fitness live broadcasting is a hot topic on various content platforms such as Kuaishou, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu. For the fitness industry, fitness live broadcasting has become the key to promoting the digital transformation and upgrading of the fitness scene under the epidemic, and a large number of traditional gyms that have been forced to close their stores because of the epidemic are taking live fitness as a new operating format, whether it is through online live broadcast paid teaching or live streaming with goods, which has allowed the gym to find a new path to survive under the epidemic and even develop by leaps and bounds. In addition, digital applications that provide fitness services such as fitness live broadcasts have quickly reached hundreds of models after the epidemic, and paid subscriptions to fitness content have become its main revenue model.
According to the data of the sports big business review enterprises, there are 1.336 million fitness-related enterprises in the mainland. Among them, in 2021, 358,500 fitness-related enterprises will be added to the mainland, an increase of 41.55% year-on-year. Obviously, fitness companies that are adapting to the epidemic have rebounded against the trend by actively transforming. In this process, fitness live broadcasting is comprehensively rewriting the operational logic of the fitness industry. Of course, how to really retain users for a long time and really run through the commercial model of fitness live broadcasting, this issue still needs to be solved, such as the online live fitness platform TT Live Fitness, which has carried out three rounds of financing, has stopped operating during the epidemic.
The fitness live broadcast model is on fire, and the two major monetization models closely embrace the home fitness outlet
Long before the outbreak of the epidemic, fitness live broadcasting has gradually emerged among young people and become an emerging social lifestyle. A number of digital sports platforms that provide online fitness guidance services have also come into being and become the darlings of the investment community, the leader of which is Keep, which has an annual revenue of 1.1 billion yuan and will soon become the "first stock of sports technology" in Hong Kong stocks, Keep has attracted a large number of fitness experts such as Pamela in the past few years.
Since the outbreak of the epidemic, the national home fitness has catalyzed a broader blue ocean. The concept of "HomeGym" has attracted global attention, and a number of online fitness programs have emerged at home and abroad. For example, after the outbreak of the epidemic in 2020, former Fitbit executive Lindsay Cook and AllTrails founder Russell Cook, a couple who created the FitOn fitness app to provide users with personalized fitness guidance, and at the beginning of this year, FitOn completed a $40 million Series C financing.
After the outbreak of the epidemic, the State Council specially proposed in the "Opinions on Strengthening the Construction of National Fitness Venues and Facilities and Developing Mass Sports" to "promote Internet + fitness, promote home fitness, and encourage sports stars and other sports professional and technical personnel to participate in fitness live broadcast activities." In order to respond to this call, domestic professional live broadcast platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou, B Station, Little Red Book or Penguin Live have taken the initiative to guide fitness KOLs to launch fitness live broadcasts, which has significantly increased the support for fitness live broadcasts, while related fitness guidance short videos and KOL fans have shown explosive growth.
Take the recently released "Douyin Sports fitness report" as an example. The "Report" shows that in the Douyin sports fitness videos, in 2021, the number of Douyin sports fitness videos increased by 134% year-on-year, and the number of creators increased by 39% year-on-year; fitness anchors increased by 208% year-on-year, live broadcast revenue increased by 141% year-on-year, and the 18- to 23-year-old audiences with "post-00s" as the main force watched sports and fitness videos the most actively.
After the fire of fitness live broadcasting, how to continue to stabilize monetization has become the core business logic of the industry's attention. In the view of sports big business, fitness KOLs such as Pamela and Liu Qihong, who have an amazing number of fans, are monetizing commercially through brand promotion, building their own brands, and live streaming with goods. Overall, the more mature monetization model of fitness KOLs can be divided into two categories: first, fitness class payment; second, live streaming with goods.
At present, many well-known fitness bloggers have launched paid fitness courses by entering various fitness platforms. For example, Keep previously released the "Pamela Girl Research Report" shows that the cumulative number of training trips of 80 sets of Pamela fitness courses is as high as 25 million, with an average of 110,000+ punches per day, more than half of the people train at least 3 times a week, Pamela's monthly training trips can reach 8.87 million, and the data is still creating new highs.
Keep has created the role of "content product manager" since 2019, attracting fashion fitness experts such as fitness, running, yoga, dance, and ball to enter the platform, and helping these fitness experts achieve commercial realization through course payment sharing, advertising monetization, e-commerce with goods, brand endorsements, offline activities and other forms. In the past 2021, Keep has invested 50 million in cash rewards, focusing on supporting talents who create high-quality, high-frequency content, helping 5,500 talents achieve commercial profitability, and boosting weekly content consumption by 50%.
As for live streaming, well-known fitness bloggers can not only cooperate with various fitness brands and implant various fitness equipment in the live broadcast, but also super popular sports internet celebrities such as Pamela will also create their own sports brands. According to incomplete statistics, the sports brands endorsed by Pamela are: Puma, Keep smart bracelet, FITURE fitness mirror, etc., and also created their own personal sports underwear brand. In addition, the soft wide implantation of its single video is as high as 1 million yuan, and the average fee per social media post is $38,700.
Liu Qihong, who recently became popular on douyin for live fitness broadcasting, will also be monetized through live streaming in the future. Liu Qihong's popularity seems to be some accident, but in fact, he is a fitness coach who has been in the industry for nearly 30 years, and he opened a KH.TRAINING STUDIO gym in Shanghai, and the price of Meituan is 3382 yuan per capita. As early as June 2019, Liu Also conducted live streaming on Taobao, including various types of protein powders, dietary packs and other fitness foods.
At a time when home fitness has become the way of life of the public, more and more fitness brands have begun to launch home-style smart fitness equipment with a small footprint and interactive functions, such as the fitness magic mirror and keep fitness bracelet that have been on fire in the past two years. This kind of new fitness equipment often intelligently transforms traditional fitness equipment, and then equipped with interactive touch screens to interact with users, through artificial intelligence, big data, Internet of Things and other modern scientific and technological means, the entertainment, social, competitive and other life scenarios into the hardware equipment and software programs of sports and fitness, successfully integrate fitness courses and intelligent hardware in one, not only to solve the limitations of sports and fitness time fragmentation and space privatization. It also alleviates the social anxiety of long-term closed home fitness to a certain extent through the diversified presentation of fitness data.
As early as the epidemic in 2020, the "2020 Public Fitness Behavior and Consumption Research Report" released by the China Sporting Goods Industry Federation specifically emphasized the development trend of the increasingly intelligent mass fitness industry at a large length: the four major demands of users for home fitness equipment are easy to install, lightweight and non-occupied, fashionable and intelligent. This kind of smart home fitness equipment that integrates software and hardware is most suitable for live streaming through fitness internet celebrities. Under the background that home fitness has become a new normal of fitness, the overall market size of smart home fitness equipment is expected to quickly exceed the order of 100 billion.
The fitness live broadcast dividend only belongs to the head internet celebrity, and the integration of online and offline is the long-term way
Although the epidemic has accelerated the industrial chain of fitness live broadcasting, the business model of fitness live broadcasting is still immature, the monetization model is relatively single, and the problems of user retention activity and commercialization still need to be further explored.
In addition, with the end of the epidemic in the future, although the fitness population will retain the habit of online fitness, the return of the fitness population to the offline gym will still have a diversion effect on the existing fitness live broadcast audience. After all, there are also many practical small flaws in fitness live broadcasting. For example, the quality of online fitness services cannot be guaranteed, and the overall experience is not as good as that offline gyms. Because in the live broadcast, the coach and the audience can not communicate positively and in time, and the coach cannot effectively teach and guide some of the students' actions, so that the fitness function and effect will be greatly reduced.
In addition, the real can get large-scale benefits through the fitness live broadcast is still a small number of head fitness masters, and ordinary fitness coaches are difficult to quickly become popular like Liu Ruihong. "Times Finance" specifically pointed out after Liu Qihong became popular: "Compared with the easy rise of fans of head fitness celebrities, more ordinary fitness coaches have to give up the current outlet because they can't find the traffic password." Cloud Fitness is the outlet of Liu Qihong, the outlet of Saturday Ye, Pamela and Cat Ning, but it is difficult for ordinary people to grasp. It is difficult to break the circle online, and the offline operation is at a loss, and ordinary coaches are doomed to be unhappy. ”
Even as a star, Liu Qihong' popularity through fitness is not accidental, but there are special packaging support from professional institutions behind it. According to the "Interface News" report, like most anchors who have become popular, Liu Qihong's out of the circle is inseparable from the strong support of the MCN institutions behind him. At the end of 2021, Liu Has signed a contract with Hangzhou Worry-free Media Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Worry-free Media"), which has a deep cooperative relationship between MCN institutions and Douyin, and the cooperation between the two has been very close. Since its inception in 2016, Worry-free Media has been active in Douyin, and is currently the number one MCN of Douyin short videos and has won many popular Douyin masters. The popularity of Liu Qihong this time, including seeing relevant hot words on the Douyin hot list, is also inseparable from the planning and promotion of Douyin.
In this sense, although all kinds of live broadcast platforms are currently pushing the fitness live broadcast content and supporting fitness masters, if you want to truly become the head fitness live KOL, for most ordinary fitness coaches, I am afraid that there is still a long way to go. At the very least, Liu's successful model is difficult to replicate. Overall, fitness live broadcasting should become an important means for gyms to carry out digital transformation and upgrading after the end of the epidemic, so as to gradually promote the close interaction between online and offline in the fitness industry.
Note: The images used in this article are from the Internet