"Following Jay Chou's Materia Medica every night to have a shuttlecock exercise become the closest daily choice under the epidemic situation", life blogger Xiao Xia has been staying at home in his apartment in Shanghai for 21 days, "punching cards and notes can barely replace external shooting to maintain account business.".
Following Li Jiaqi, who brought the goods industry, the live broadcast industry has not seen a rocket-like "newcomer" for a long time. From "former Taiwan paste coffee" to "fitness live broadcast superstar", Liu Qihong only took 2 months. On February 18 this year, Liu Qihong, who recently signed a contract with Worry-free Media, opened his first fitness live broadcast on the Douyin platform, when the number of viewers exceeded 240,000 and the number of fans increased by nearly 8,000. Today, Liu Ruihong's Douyin account has more than 31 million fans, nearly 10 million fans in 7 days, and the cumulative number of video plays has exceeded 230 million, which is popular.
The label of "Liu Qihong Girl" turned out to be a big way to surpass Li Jiaqi's "Pig Girl" at that time, and the terms related to Liu Qihong took turns to occupy the hot search, and the popularity may be far from reaching the peak.
Before that, who could have imagined that the most eye-catching data for live broadcasting this year would be a former male star who had "heard of it, but had not chased it much" - Liu Qihong. Liu Qihong and his wife led fans to "cloud fitness" through live broadcast gymnastics on the Internet, which was not the first. In fact, affected by the epidemic, the way of online fitness has long entered the public eye, according to the "Douyin Sports fitness report", as of the end of last year, more than 60,000 sports and fitness creators with more than 10,000 fans, and the live broadcast revenue of fitness anchors increased by 141% last year.
But why did Liu Qihong, who "tortured" fans to burn fat, become the new "top stream"? In addition to the image of positive energy and affinity, the courses that are easy to get started and contain professionalism are of course inseparable from the MCN institutions behind them. After being injured by the three bans on Douyin, the team seized the opportunity to market, and only then did Liu Qihong completely go out of the circle. The popularity of "top stream" is always the result of the completeness of "personnel time".
In addition, there is also a "peer support".
In fact, this should have been the most "scenic" period for a number of live broadcast "top streams". Years of supply chain operation and consumer cultivation have made e-commerce synonymous with "new consumption". However, the thriving trend ended abruptly with the ban on Via's live broadcast room at the end of last year, the "super head" collapsed, the industry was shaken, and the "top stream" who ran all the way were forced to stop. Even after many months, whether it is Via's own rebroadcast or the "backdoor" team testing the waters, they are in the tentative stage of supervision, and the policy attitude is unclear, so that all parties choose to continue to wait and see.
And fitness bloggers this spring ushered in a sudden wave of rising fans, as if there is a sense of "the east is not bright and the west is bright", whether the industry opens up a blue ocean, or digs the potential to save itself, there is no conclusion. But the question in people's minds is that over the years, the complex game relationship formed by the "top stream", MCN institutions, platforms, and brands will still envelop the entire traffic ecology.
Who's making the top stream
Short video tracks and sharing communities have bred a large number of high-quality bloggers. Their works start from hobbies, to be sponsored by the brand side to implant "just rice" through products, and then to do live broadcasts in person. Monetizing through "bringing goods" is the business path chosen by most bloggers after continuous exploration and "voting with their feet".
On this road, bloggers need to create different personalities and differentiate competitions to increase the number of fans and fan stickiness. After all, traffic and the number of fans determine the influence of bloggers, and influence is the premise of the olive branch of the brand. How to strike a balance between the quality of the work, the commercial transformation and the emotions of the fans tests the control of each blogger.
Compared with "forward-looking" video bloggers, network anchors are obviously more comfortable with "bringing goods". After all, "carrying goods" is essentially commodity recommendation and marketing, and the anchors in the digital economy era have nothing more than a sense of real-time interaction and experience compared to the salesmen of traditional shopping malls. It is estimated that about 20 million new jobs will be added to this industrial chain, of which the vast majority of the employed people are post-95s.
Pre-sale, sale and after-sales are fully online, and consultative marketing replaces traditional promotions. This requires anchors to establish the role of "shopping guides" among users, and eventually aggregate fragmented social traffic and translate it into sales performance. In the journey of anchors to become the "top stream", professionalism and "network sense" are both stepping stones and stumbling blocks. Consumers in front of the screen can always keenly capture the understanding and love of the goods they have from the eyes and words of the anchor.
After all, commercial operation not only involves "bringing goods", but is more like a combination of investment promotion, marketing, planning, advertising and brokerage companies, and it is difficult for individuals to take care of so many links, and celebrities are no exception. Many "Mengxin" bloggers and anchors who have just started are often "lack of stamina" and fall into the whirlpool of public opinion of "plagiarism", "dark and wide" and even fakes.
Even sometimes, bloggers and anchors who are not deeply involved in the world will become victims of the whirlpool of public opinion. A report entitled "Live streaming with goods "black intermediary" cut leeks, Hu Xing'er carried the pot" pushed anchor Hu Xing'er to the cusp of the storm. The anchor shouted, the organizer shouted injustice, humbled to refute the rumors, and only after verifying the information did it find that this was a dispute caused by the middleman earning the difference.
More and more bloggers and anchors realize that to promote the "first line" and "top stream", whether it is to accept the invitation of MCN institutions or build their own teams, "recruitment" is imminent, and it is necessary to let professional people do professional things as much as possible. Li Jiaqi, a "live broadcast brother", once revealed that his quality inspection team has a postgraduate degree or above, and there are professionals who do food research and chemical testing. Wei Ya said that she has a team of more than 500 people, and she recommends products through layers of screening.
After the bloggers and anchors who occupied the resources earlier became the "top stream", they became the traffic pool of the divided party, and while improving the bargaining power of the brand, they began to lay out the supply chain ecology and go deep into the development links of many brands. In Europe and the United States, the commercial development path from beauty bloggers, Internet celebrities with goods to the development of private brands has long been through.
In the case of the long-term impact of the epidemic on the e-commerce supply chain and logistics, the monetization through short video advertising implantation and live broadcast rewards is more operable and more in line with the personalities of some "top-notch" stars. The new "top stream" Liu Ruihong may not be in a hurry to receive commercial orders with live streams, business cooperation is more stuck in brand implantation, and in the future, it is more likely to provide customized teaching for the platform, or directly endorse the brand.
MCN Agency Breaks "Deep Bundling"
As a bridge connecting brands, bloggers and platforms, MCN institutions are mainly responsible for personnel incubation, traffic operation, resource docking, and value-added services such as copywriting planning, supply chain promotion, and data analysis. However, at present, the MCN institutional business model is still single, and it is difficult to get rid of the excessive dependence on head bloggers and anchors.
Hatching a "top stream" is expensive and the winning percentage is unpredictable. After all, the "head" that can become the power to carry is a probability event after all. Known as the "first share of China's Internet celebrities", Ruhan Holdings' stock price continued to decline after its listing on the New York Stock Exchange, and from the disclosed revenue data, the incubation anchor had huge expenses and high marketing costs, and the market was worried about whether it could cultivate the next Zhang Dayi. Once the popular Internet celebrities leave, it will cause great harm to the MCN institutions, and Li Jiajia, the founder of Li Ziqi's IP, sued the MCN institution Weinian who cooperated with him is the latest case. Although the current lawsuit is still inconclusive, it has had an impact on the financing of Wei Nian, and the capital that was previously invested in high-priced shares has begun to retreat.
Different from the head MCN institutions, the middle and tail MCN institutions have less funds and resources, business expansion is difficult, trial and error costs are high, and it is difficult to sign well-known Internet celebrities. Such MCN institutions can often only sign small and medium-sized bloggers and anchors, who often have limited creativity and do not have bargaining power, indirectly causing a negative cycle that is difficult to cash in with goods, and the weaker they are.
XiaoXia also finally signed a contract with MCN after several hesitations, because she did not get the key support of the agency operation group, her boyfriend was still responsible for the filming, post-editing, platform entry and uploading of the epidemic period, and the two also needed to regularly lead the bullet screen, manage the comment area, and maintain the basic operation of the account.
"Although the second creation is controversial, it has become a common choice for insiders, at least so that we still have income this month," Xiao Xia said.
In the field of e-commerce live broadcasting, high-quality and inexpensive broadcasting companies are also actively seizing the market, and the mid-tail MCN institutions are even worse. The broadcasting company is a live broadcast service provider that provides services such as operation, anchor, venue and so on when the brand is live broadcasting. Unlike MCN anchors who charge "pit fee + commission", most of the broadcasting companies charge according to "service fee + hourly wage". Compared with the tens of thousands of pit fees of mcN institutions for a live broadcast, the minimum hourly wage of the broadcast service provider is only a few hundred yuan. Many brands will sign long-term cooperation with the broadcasting company, which can maintain the popularity of the brand at a lower cost and ensure the duration of the live broadcast. What's more, the brand side will poach the anchor of the agency company. In the increasingly fierce traffic jianghu, the positioning of the mid-tail MCN is increasingly embarrassing.
Under the pressure of profitability, MCN institutions have made great efforts to transform. In the same way as the "top stream" reached for the supply chain, MCN institutions also began to regard the supply chain as their core competitiveness. Although the humble search behind Via also pays attention to the cultivation of anchors, it has already integrated the supply chain upwards and developed a "super supply chain base" to improve the gross profit margin of the business.
The platform seeks change in strong supervision
It is the consensus in the industry that traffic will be concentrated to the head to improve the conversion rate. "At Alibaba, there are two categories of anchors: Li Jiaqi, Wei Ya and others."
Recalling the "Double Eleven" in 2018, Ali founder Ma Yun personally went down to compete with Li Jiaqi to buy lipstick, and the platform bought huge traffic for the two major anchors, and now, this scene is almost impossible to appear again. "Top stream" has become a "black hole" of the platform, absorbing most of the ecological dividends, and it is difficult for small and medium-sized anchors and businesses to grow.
When the "top streams" and their companies invariably choose to go deep into the upstream supply chain and try to become the "Costco of the e-commerce world", the sense of crisis in the e-commerce platform is getting stronger and stronger, and it is impossible to sit still. While helping head brands cultivate self-broadcast teams, Alibaba also supports business anchors such as Dong Mingzhu to balance the siphon of traffic by "super heads" such as Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya, and reduce the risk of anchor flow and ban.
Video platforms are also actively responding, encouraging ordinary users to produce UGC (user-generated content) content at the same time, signing up stars and brands, to achieve more professionals "settled", produce more PGC (professional production content) content, and incubate more new "top streams" with professional endorsements. More and more video platforms are embracing e-commerce.
In addition, the platform also has to deal with the cross-platform operation of "top-stream" bloggers and anchors. To this end, the platform continues to expand the partitions, attract users through diversification, and develop new traffic.
In fact, in the context of tightening supervision such as anti-monopoly and anti-unfair competition, and the penetration rate of the short video industry is close to the ceiling, the platform has to do more than just build a platform for display and match potential business opportunities. Network transactions with "carrying goods" as the starting point, because it involves multiple entities such as bloggers (anchors), product supply enterprises, broadcast platforms, third-party platforms, etc., once disputes arise, it is not easy for consumers to protect their rights, and e-commerce platforms often have to make a bottom for various complaints. When the single brushing behavior is frequent, the inaction of the e-commerce platform is also harshly criticized.
In addition, for the problem of commodity prices such as "first raise the price and then discount", the responsibility for the platform is also being further consolidated. The Interim Provisions on Regulating Promotional Activities, which came into effect on 1 December 2020, clearly stipulate that the benchmark price of the promotion should be clarified for the promotion price reduction. Where the benchmark price of the promotion is not indicated or indicated, the discount or reduction shall be based on the lowest transaction price of the same business operator in the same business premises within seven days before the promotion activity.
The brand side is not willing to be only "wool"
The commercial uncertainty of live e-commerce is much stronger than that of ordinary e-commerce platforms, anchors are easy to sell, but also easy to sell down, single volume fluctuations caused by a sharp increase in supply chain pressure, anchor high commission leads to thin profits, merchants love and hate this. The "top stream" team, which is more familiar with traffic operations, has gained fame and fortune.
At this point, the relationship between the "top stream" and the platform and the merchant is becoming increasingly unbalanced, and the brand has to personally participate in the live broadcast in order to enhance the right to negotiate the right to speak at the same time, try to reshape the channel. This year's "Double Eleven", more than 80% of the live broadcast rooms are business live broadcast rooms, an increase of more than 200% year-on-year. 184 long-established brands such as Katazai Pearl Paste and Fang Huichuntang Sesame Pills followed the trend to open live broadcast rooms, and Beijing Caibai Jewelry was the first live broadcast room with a turnover of more than 10 million in the old brands.
The brand side was originally the "customer" and "father of Party A" in the true sense of the platform and the anchor, but now it has to "compete" with Party B. And the price competition bears the brunt of it.
Almost all the head anchors claim to be the "lowest price in the whole network", and the more the head anchors, the more they emphasize this. The biggest advantage of the brand side that valued the anchor with goods was the promotion of inventory clearance, because of the epidemic in the past few years, the channel backlog was caused, and the online line, which was not limited by physical space, became the first choice. But nowadays, more and more brands have begun to choose in-store live streaming with goods, and live broadcasting has become the norm of Internet sales and the embedded standard of many stores. After joining this "inner volume", the brand side gradually found that its control over pricing power was getting weaker and weaker.
Long-term low-price promotion is actually a harm to the brand. At first, the brand side believed that compared with the advertising mode, the cost of live broadcast customer acquisition was lower, the user portrait was more accurate, and the consumer relationship could be recreated through the improvement of the repurchase rate, so the traffic business was taken as the marketing standard in the era of big data. But the question is, do big brands need to break through the price line at the lowest discount to acquire customers? How strong the discount is, which channel is placed, and the brand has more comparisons and considerations.
This is not the case for new brands, which prefer to use the "top stream" to quickly rise and build brand recognition. Compared with mature brands, the price and channel system of new brands are not transparent, and they are more inclined to "cooperate" with the operating strategies of bloggers, anchors or platforms.
Behind the traffic business is the migration of consumer relationships. Under the violent impact of the e-commerce economy, the traditional retail market has long been unrecognizable, especially with the improvement of online payment, logistics and other industries, rigid demand shopping has shifted to online, and the typical department store model has completely declined. "Top-stream" bloggers and anchors firmly grasp the core competitiveness - the ability to select products in the supply chain, help consumers make choices, improve the shopping experience, and realize traffic monetization.
At present, the game between "top stream", MCN institutions, platforms, and brands has reached the midfield. The acceleration of the "top stream" platform trend, touching the vested interests in the traffic ecology and robbing the "pricing power" of platform traffic, is bound to cause a chain reaction and stir up the decision-making of all parties.
However, with the intensive entry of supervision, the variables of market expectations are increasing, among them, there are not only comprehensive tax management for "top stream" and MCN institutions, but also the tightening of anti-monopoly and anti-unfair competition supervision on platforms and brands, and a series of laws and regulations such as the "Basic Specifications for Live Video Shopping Operations and Services" and the "Code of Conduct for Online Live Broadcast Marketing" have been introduced.
It is foreseeable that the competition between all parties in the future is not only a contest of traffic, operation, technology or professional capabilities, but also a contest of values, policy adaptability and compliance. Understanding the direction of policy, complying with industry norms, and expanding career radius may be a new course for the "top" people. At present, the final realization results of Liu Qihong have not yet been revealed, and the commercial value is difficult to predict, but not forgetting the original intention is still the biggest expectation of the public for "Liu Qihong".
This article was jointly written by Hu Tianhui, Lu Beiying, Chen Xutao and Zhang Ziyan, and originally produced by Zhu Yuanyuan's data journalism team