Author | Hu Shu Editor| Luo Lijuan
Liu Qihong, who once "couldn't help Jay Chou", has now turned into a new "top stream" and is all over the internet.
With his wife in the vibrato live broadcast fat burning gymnastics, only 7 days, Liu Ruihong rose to more than 10 million fans, becoming the "Li Jiaqi" in the fitness live broadcast industry.
Some fans ridiculed: Li Jiaqi shouted "321" in the live broadcast room Liu Qihong shouted "123" in the live broadcast room, one hollowed out the wallet, one hollowed out the body, it is simply a combination of "seeking wealth and killing people".
On Weibo, a number of Liu Qihong-related terms have been repeatedly on the hot search; in the circle of friends, a competition of "Liu Qihong Girl" has also begun to brush the screen.
Or affected by this, the growth of many anchor fans in the fitness field on the Douyin platform has accelerated significantly; at the same time, social platforms such as Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and Station B are competing to support fitness content.
Since the outbreak of the epidemic, people's demand for physical and mental health has continued to increase. In addition to the hot field of home fitness, the field of Internet mental health has also blown a lot of wind.
According to Orange IT data, from the end of last year to April 1, a total of 17 investments and financings occurred in the field of mental health, and in March, the suspension laboratory known as the "online psychological gym" and simple psychology completed a new round of financing.
After the outbreak of the epidemic, the daily active users and users of some apps that focus on meditation and mindfulness have often increased significantly. On short video platforms, meditation and mindfulness assistance to help with sleep and relieve anxiety are also increasing, and KOLs with millions of followers are beginning to appear.
At the moment full of uncertainty, in the face of epidemic isolation, life pressure, emotional anxiety and other issues, whether it is home fitness or "healthy heart" are increasingly becoming "just needed". However, behind the explosion, in the commercialization of monetization, it seems that there is still a lack of answers.
01 Liu Qihong's "accident" and "necessity"
How hot is Liu Qihong at present?
Even if you haven't seen his live fitness, you probably browsed his fat-burning gymnastics adapted from "Compendium of Materia Medica" for BGM on the short video platform. It is also this "Compendium of Materia Medica" that has also set off a whole-network challenge at present.
According to media reports, in the seven days from April 14 to 20, Liu's fans on the whole platform soared from 6.208 million to 18.86 million, an increase of more than 200%. As of April 22, its Douyin fans alone reached 32.7 million, and the day before Liu Ruihong launched the live broadcast room, more than 3 million people watched at the same time.
From the perspective of traffic, Liu Qihong seems to have the momentum of "Li Jiaqi". But before that, the flow on Liu's body has been tepid.
At the age of 50, in addition to the identity of fitness coach, he also has multiple labels such as actor, singer, "little puff daddy", "Jay Chou's friend" and so on. At the end of last year, Liu Lihong signed a contract with MCN agency Worry-free Media and began to try to bring goods live. According to ST data, from December 19 last year to February 17 this year, Liu Ruihong broadcast 9 live broadcasts in 2 months, accumulating 6.6542 million yuan in goods, which was decent and not a success.
It wasn't until February this year that Liu took his wife to start a live fitness broadcast.
His popularity is full of drama.
One time was because he accidentally exposed his armpit hair, was warned by the system to be unsightly, and the live broadcast room was sealed; secondly, because the gym suit was too showy, he was repeatedly misjudged by the platform for violations, so that he and his wife had to wear down jackets to jump, the picture was very "magical"; another time was a netizen who asked him about Jay Chou's body, Liu Qihong said a sentence "Wish Jaylen good health", the platform judged that his live broadcast room was medical health, and was blocked again.
Image source: Weibo @ Liu Ruihong willliu
Under the coincidence of various "catching horses", Liu Qihong's live broadcast has become a source of happiness for netizens while meeting the fitness needs of fans, and one netizen said: "Even if you lie in bed, you will watch his live broadcast." Wave after wave of traffic gradually gathered here, and in the Douyin live broadcast on the evening of April 20, Liu Lihong ranked second in the whole station, and received 160 million likes one after another.
The popularity of Liu Qihong is also the inevitable development of home fitness content on various social content platforms under the demand of cloud fitness. Under the epidemic, in the past two years, fitness content is becoming a new traffic password.
In order to accurately capture the traffic of home fitness, major social live broadcasting platforms are also continuing to deepen relevant content operations.
At the end of last year, Douyin launched the short video fitness action "DOU Movement Plan", calling on individuals and institutions with sports content creation capabilities to create and publish sports videos based on Douyin to record fitness daily. Liu Qihong's explosion also has a certain relationship with the "Let's Stay At Home" series launched by Douyin Live in April. In this show, Liu Qihong and his wife took netizens to the cloud jump exercise together, and the single live broadcast attracted 3.23 million views, and the highest number of real-time online users exceeded 22w.
Station B is also vigorously supporting fitness content, and recently launched 30 public welfare paid live broadcast activities for 10 consecutive days, inviting 14 head and waist fitness UP owners, as well as Leke Sports and Laimei China users to bring home fitness live classes.
Recently, Xiaohongshu launched the "Looking for Xiaohongshu Power" activity to inspire users to share strength training, experience and other content, and at the same time launched topic activities such as "14-day hot sweat challenge", inviting well-known fitness bloggers and professional fitness institutions in the station to start live training.
According to Keep, in 2022, Keep will invest tens of billions of traffic resources and 50 million cash rewards to support high-quality fitness content creators, while increasing the commercial development of talents, and greatly enhancing the commercial influence of head creators while realizing revenue.
Under the traffic support of major platforms, whether it is a fitness blogger with millions of fans or a large chain of fitness institutions, they have begun to broadcast fitness live, and as a "cloud personal trainer", the related fitness content and traffic have risen significantly.
In 2021, the number of Douyin sports and 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, and live broadcast revenue increased by 141% year-on-year.
In addition to Liu Qihong, there are also many anchor fans in the douyin fitness field whose growth has begun to accelerate. For example, the existing "Cat Ning Counterattack" with 6.63 million fans, from January 21 to the end of March, the number of fans rose by less than 30,000, and the number of fans rose by 2.06 million in the past 30 days; and for example, the existing waist anchor "Qiyue Body Aerobic Exercise" with only 1.56 million fans, more than half of the fans were "rising out" in the past month.
In April this year, the number of fitness and weight loss notes published on the Little Red Book increased by 176% over the same period last year.
In the B station, the fitness million powder head UP master has been born 12, in addition to the well-known Saturday Wild, Pamela, there are new super quality fitness UP master Ouyang Chunxiao, Han Xiaosi, Shu Gui, Shuai Soserious, Yan Shuaiqi and so on.
Pamela, who is jokingly called "fitness AI person", although it is stationed on the whole network, Keep is still its main teaching platform. Since entering the station in August 2020, Pamela has accumulated more than 10 million fans in the Keep station, and the number of monthly training trips is close to 28 million.
Fitness guru Pamela
In fact, before Liu Qihong, major platforms have developed head KOLs with good traffic. The appearance of Liu Qihong gathered the scattered needs of this track together and detonated the traffic. The fact that a phenomenon-level KOL like Li Jiaqi can appear on the fitness track also shows that this track has huge traffic potential.
Haidong, a senior researcher at keep sports research institute, told All-Weather Technology: "For 1 billion fitness users, one Liu Qihong is definitely not enough, we hope that more positive energy stars will emerge in the industry." ”
02 Capital aims at "Healthy Heart"
While major social platforms are competing to grab the "Liu Qihong Girl", capital is also gradually tilting towards the emotional health products of "Jianxin".
In March this year, the digital health brand "Suspension Lab" announced the completion of a round of financing of 50 million yuan, led by Lanchi Venture Capital, and the old shareholder Changling Capital continued to provide additional support.
The suspension laboratory is positioned as an online "psychological gym" to provide online psychological intervention services directly to users to enhance the participants' psychological regulation ability and reduce emotional distress caused by anxiety, depression, insomnia and other stress.
Also at the end of March, the mental health service platform "Simple Psychology" announced the completion of the B+ round of financing. This round of financing is exclusively invested by Qianji Capital, with an investment amount of RMB 100 million. In November last year, Simple Psychology just completed a 200 million yuan B round of financing. In just 4 months, the financing process of simple psychology has been promoted again.
According to Orange IT data, from 2021 to April 2022, a total of 17 investments and financings occurred in the field of mental health, with a cumulative investment and financing amount of more than 1.5 billion yuan.
Among the ranks of investors, there are also Internet giants. In September 2021, ByteDance led the C round of financing of 200 million yuan for the mental health digital service platform "Good Mood", refreshing the record of the largest single financing in the domestic mental health track. One month after this financing, Good Mood completed another C+ round of financing of 100 million yuan.
The continuation of the epidemic and the economic turmoil have caused a lot of shocks to all industries. Under great pressure, negative emotions such as anxiety, depression, and depression need to be relieved.
Globally, Ashall-Payne, CEO of ORCHA, an independent health app review service, has said that downloads of health apps have increased by 25% from before the outbreak to the present. Every day, 5 million people download health apps, and that number keeps increasing.
In China, according to the "2021 White Paper on Exercise and Sleep" released by the China Sleep Research Association, more than 300 million people in the mainland currently have sleep disorders, and nearly one-third of them stay up until after 1 a.m. to fall asleep. On the "Good Mood" platform, in the past year, the platform accounted for one-third of the number of user consultations on sleep problems, an increase of 200% over previous years.
Demand is the main reason for capital to move, Anker Innovation founder and chairman Yang Meng believes: "Physical and mental health has increasingly become the goal and lifestyle pursued by contemporary people, and there is still a lot of room for exploration in this market. Only the way of exercise and psychological counseling can no longer meet people's needs, and self-knowledge and exploration of the heart are becoming the desire of more people. ”
Therefore, the emotional products of meditation and mindfulness have gradually ushered in a wave of small peaks.
Global Meditation Market Size Forecast 2022-2029 (Source: Data Bridge)
A practitioner of the meditation app told all-weather technology that there are already many live streaming content of meditation and mindfulness on major live broadcast platforms. If you brush short videos in the middle of the night, you can also brush short video content that assists sleep from time to time. Searching for the keyword "meditation" on Douyin, there are also 3 bloggers with more than 1 million fans.
In China, a number of apps that focus on meditation and mindfulness have been born, such as tides, NOW meditation, Bloom, small meditation, breathing meditation, etc. NOW Meditation says it has seen a user growth rate of 200 to 300 percent during the pandemic in 2020.
Under the current new round of the epidemic, according to the data provided by Meditation App FLOW, its weekly active users increased by 22.8% in the past month; Up to now, Tidal wave of mental health audio applications has been downloaded by tens of millions of people, of which Huawei's app store data has exceeded 35 million.
In 2021, investment in the cold meditation and mindfulness track has opened the window again, and FLOW, Heartly Lab, etc. have been established for less than a year, and have also received early financing.
Some Internet platforms have also begun to access meditation-related services. Keep has launched mindfulness courses, and NetEase Cloud Music has a "Focus Meditation" section, which contains audio for different functions such as sleep aid, meditation, light music, and goodnight stories.
03How does traffic turn into business?
How to turn traffic into business is a question that capital and the market have equal doubts about the two major areas of "fitness" and "healthy heart".
At present, Liu Qihong's "value" has risen. According to the Times Weekly, a business source from a head advertising company revealed that there are now brands that want to be exposed in a 60-second short video of Liu Qihong, and the price is 500,000 yuan. "Since the fire, Liu Ruihong's business cooperation quotations have been one by one a day."
According to China Entrepreneur, on April 10, Liu's live broadcast received 260,000 sound waves, and on April 19, it received 2.4 million sound waves. The exchange ratio between yinlang and rmb is 10:1, and in the equivalent of 9 days, the income of Liu Qihong's live broadcast has risen from 26,000 yuan to 240,000 yuan.
The biggest commercial potential of Liu Qihong may also lie in carrying goods. In fact, in the field of live fitness, many fitness bloggers have opened the path of carrying goods.
Douyin fitness blogger "Cat Ning Counterattack" products are mostly sports fitness shoes, equipment and food and beverages; Saturday Wild is to do their own brand "Wild Sataurday", in addition to selling personal training classes, there are yoga mats, yoga balls, resistance belts and other products.
Many people speculate that after liu qihong's epidemic is unsealed, he will restart live broadcasting and become the "Li Jiaqi" in the fitness industry. Whether live streaming with goods will be the end of the fitness live broadcast, both inside and outside the industry are waiting for Liu Ruihong to give an answer.
At 7:30 p.m., seeing whether Liu Or Li Jiaqi became a tangled question
There are also major platforms that hope to grasp the outlet. For Xiaohongshu, Station B, Douyin, etc., how to seize the traffic of "Liu Qihong Girl" and make an advantage in fitness content is the focus of its current operation.
At present, major platforms have launched relevant content support plans to help the rapid growth of fitness content, which is still completely free for users; and Keep, an Internet fitness platform with paid memberships and value-added services as the main revenue, plans to use more endorsements, activities, courses and other forms to help talents win "good revenue" with good content, Jessie, Saturday Wild, etc. have reached cooperation endorsements with some sports consumer goods brands on Keep.
In contrast, it is more difficult to achieve diversified commercial monetization of traffic in the field of Internet mental health.
According to public data, there are currently 250 million people with mental illness and medical service needs in mainland China, while there are only about 45,000 practicing physicians in the department of clinical psychiatry and psychology. Although the market is huge, it has long been limited by the shortage of practicing physicians, which also makes the entire industry have a low ceiling.
On the other hand, the price of common psychological counseling is between 400-800 yuan, and the unit price of the intervention plan is 548-698 yuan per person, taking the "suspension of the laboratory" as an example. Such a unit price is not low, and the Internet mental health platform has not yet established a brand advantage, which has hindered the development of online counseling to a certain extent.
On this track, although the consumption threshold of meditation and mindfulness products is low, the commercialization model is very single.
Taking The two "exclusive" products in the North American market, Calm and Headspace, as an example, the valuation of Calm C round financing is 2 billion US dollars, and the latest valuation of Headspace has reached 3 billion US dollars. The two companies have been growing for years and still rely on membership subscriptions for most of their revenue.
According to Sensor Tower, the total revenue of the top 10 meditation apps in 2019 was 195 million US dollars, while the combined revenue of Calm and Headspace in 2019 accounted for 75.8% of the total revenue of the global top 10 meditation apps, or 148 million US dollars.
Domestic meditation and mindfulness products have developed more slowly. According to Sensor Tower data, the monthly flow of the "tide" in March was only 50,000 US dollars, but it was already the highest level of domestic meditation apps.
In the era reshaped by the epidemic, people are looking for "antidotes" to alleviate anxiety and get out of difficulties, cloud fitness, Internet "health", have been pushed forward by the sharp increase in demand.
But the difference is that the former has grown into a mature track that can accommodate one or more "Liu Qihong", and the problem of the latter's high threshold is still unresolved. It is only in the face of the exploration of commercialization that both have a long way to go.