Produced | Tiger Sniff Commercial Consumer Group
The author | Zhaoxi
The title image | Visual China
"It is impossible to copy Liu Qihong."
For a time, Liu Qihong became a prominent student of the fitness circle and the traffic circle.
Starting from the first live fitness broadcast on February 18, Liu Ruihong quickly transformed from a "river and river" past artist to a phenomenon-level traffic master. As of press time, Liu Ruihong's Douyin fans have exceeded 50 million.
The "classical" super anchor circle has further allowed Liu Tohong to gather traffic potential: in Hangzhou, the two female anchors have faded out of the jianghu since 2021; under the influence of the Shanghai epidemic, Li Jiaqi, a brother of Taobao Live, is trapped in logistics, and the number of views in the live broadcast room has fallen off a cliff.
The rapidly popular Liu Qihong became the new favorite of the media, and even triggered the "innermost moment" of the media circle at the beginning of 2022: nearly a thousand media accounts tirelessly wrote this miracle like the Proposition Essay Contest - which made Liu Qihong and the worry-free media behind it make a lot of money: business offers skyrocketed. A brand direction Tiger Sniff revealed that recently, they asked Liu Qihongfang for a price of 1 million.
It is worth playing that Liu Qihong, who once tried to bring goods, refused to go back to the old road after turning red, as of now, Liu Qihong still takes fitness live broadcasting as his "main business".
This makes a dry fitness traffic master extremely excited - countless MCNs and individuals, with the dream of "copying Liu Qihong", sleepless.
On June 9, 2016, Wuhan, Hubei Province, Liu Ruihong's new book "Fitness, You Can Change Your Life" was signed. The "fitness coach" personality has always accompanied Liu Qihong.
The popularity of the fitness track has allowed these dreamers to further smell the taste of "monetization": in 2020, the number of people who regularly participate in sports in China reached 435 million, an increase of 27 million over 2019. At the same time, the trend of online sports and fitness has increased, and in April 2021, the monthly active users of the Internet sports and fitness platform reached 54.79 million, with rapid growth. Some investors have told Tiger Sniff in 2021 that fitness and pets are one of the few contrarian growth tracks in the state of "weak consumption".
But is fitness flow really that good?
A Shanghai fitness blogger with millions of fans told Tiger Sniff that throughout April, the team did not receive a single commercial order. There is also a fitness blogger with three million followers, and the advertising revenue has plummeted to 1/3 of the previous one.
Also, there are already calm people who soberly see that Liu Qihong cannot be copied.
For example, Liu Lin, who wrote the first quote, is the founder of a sports and fitness MCN organization with more than 100 fitness bloggers. Recently, many celebrities and celebrities have found him, hoping to enter the fitness live broadcast. After several rounds of evaluation, he concluded that "it can't be done."
Replicable Liu Qihong?
Under the heyday of fitness traffic, most of them are hard-working but difficult to become the "next Liu Qihong" people.
"I don't choreograph much after work." There is a hint of exhaustion in the tone of the post-90s girl Tianai (Little Red Book account: @天愛lice). As of now, Tianai has 23,000 followers on the platform. In today's age of traffic explosion, that number may seem negligible, but it makes her feel comfortable.
In addition to being a content creator, Tianai worked as a teacher at a dance institution for three years. From kindergarten interest classes to university modern dance majors, and finally becoming a dance teacher, she is like a dancer. She had become accustomed to the presence of dance, like a pair of lovers with deep feelings but slightly tired of each other.
There are many constraints on being a teacher in an institution, and in the past three years, Tianai has spent more time teaching dance, but rarely choreographing — and choreography is crucial for everyone who loves dance deeply.
In June 2020, Tianaifa's dance video received more than 4,000 likes on The Little Red Book, when she had only 1,000 followers. This is her highlight moment: in front of the floor-to-ceiling window, under the bustling night of Wangjing and the light sunset, the girl danced a piece of "Under the Sea" with her soft body, although it was a dark silhouette, it was like a dream. Of these elements, I don't know which one touched the so-called traffic password, which leveraged four times the number of likes of fans.
But since then, Tianai has not reaped an amazing growth rate, and it took her a year and a half to rise to 9,000 followers.
The next turning point came from a dance choreographed by Tianai for the students, and after uploading the choreography video of "So Many People in this World", she received 10,000 likes. Since then, her account seems to have entered the next level of traffic pool, rising by 14,000 fans in half a year.
On another platform, Heavenly Love did not reap the same good fortune. Although the big brother brushed thousands of yuan gifts for her on the second day of the live broadcast, Tianai still gave up the Douyin platform.
Graduated from the modern dance major of Beijing Normal University, Tian'ai has slender limbs, a small skull, slender legs but muscles, and can show extraordinary strength and human beauty when dancing. It is the type that professionals say is "excellent conditions", and ordinary people look at it and think it is a star.
Tianai laughed and said that he did not grow up when he was a child, and it was not until high school that he transformed into the batch of "good conditions" in the teacher's mouth.
Pretty girls tend to be "stared at" on TikTok, but don't necessarily get the same amount of traffic. MCN company for Tianai has taken a video of internet celebrities, bought a shake +, and advised her to live stream the fans, but she is busy with a pass, and the likes are still single digits.
Compared with the traffic world, Tianai is easier to find rhythm in the real world: this is also the real situation faced by countless fitness and dance creators - after realizing that the traffic world cannot become a "super traffic", it turns to the traffic world to combine itself with the real world.
At that time, in the comments section and private messages below the Tianai video, people began to ask her where to go to learn to dance, as well as videos urging her to choreograph. A wonderful sense of responsibility motivated her: "I seem to have regained my connection to dance. ”
Urged by this motivation, she ended her three-year experience as an institutional teacher and opened her own dance studio in Jianwai SOHO, Beijing. The unit price of Tianai's course is not low, the single hour price of small group classes is 218 yuan, and the cheapest card price is 3999 yuan.
The "good" that the traffic world brings to Tianai more realistically is drainage, the studio has just opened for two months, and there are more than 100 students drawn from the old customers and the little red book.
Tianai is the true epitome of countless traffic masters: the traffic world does not bring them a "road to popularity", but the enrichment and supplement of real life.
The deep logic behind this is that Liu Ruihong is difficult to copy, and for many creators, it is not necessary to take liu Qihong's road.
The broader context is the pandemic. After the epidemic, the "competition" for fitness traffic on major platforms has made the birth of the head fitness traffic master "arrow on the string".
Relevant people told Tiger Sniff that in 2020, Kuaishou and a number of well-known fitness brands launched a number of well-known fitness brands to launch a total of 884,000 video works under the topic of "#客厅健身房", with a total of 6.45 billion reads. "Stay-at-home fitness" has become a new trend.
KEEP told Tiger Sniff that KEEP launched a live class that covered almost the whole day. Live lessons can not only maintain the freshness of the content, but also realize real-time interaction between users and coaches, providing a real sense of body and scene.
Users can PK with users online at the same time through the data connection of smart hardware such as bracelets, and this competition atmosphere can help users reduce the loneliness of solo sports, which is particularly precious in today's normalization of epidemic prevention.
Major fitness brands are competing for deer. In the spring of 2020, the well-known gym chain J&J, Welsh Fitness, Super Orangutan, One Trillion Wade, and Luck Sports have opened online live teaching within six days.
After Luo Yonghao's heat receded, Douyin has been lacking a live broadcast superstar, seeing the right window, waiting for the opportunity, and pushing Liu Qihong into the top stream with one hand. As an artist, Liu Qihong's market sensitivity and mass base are a dimensionality reduction blow compared to fitness institutions or fitness bloggers. As well, Worry-Free Media's husband-wife combination file methodology also adds to it.
Various factors are staggered, and Liu Qihong's explosion has become a pure necessity and a pure accident.
53.76 million fans, this number is almost the same as the number of monthly active users of the whole network sports and fitness platform ("2021 China Sports and Fitness Industry Report"). If this is interpreted as Liu Qihong's live broadcast room, it is obviously unrealistic to bring together people who love fitness on the whole network.
It is not difficult to imagine that the vast majority of people clicked on Liu Qihong's live broadcast, not for exercise, but just to catch up with the trend and get a glimpse of the style of this novel traffic superstar.
At present, the rise of Liu Qihong is making the "fitness traffic master" battle of major platforms white-hot: various platforms have called on bloggers to participate in Liu Qihong's topic activities in an attempt to share in this wave of traffic. The trickle rushed into the sea, and finally pushed Liu Qihong's heat to a higher level.
But this is further sliding the fitness traffic circle into a false boom.
Gradually blowing up the fitness foam
Fitness traffic masters used to make money easily.
In 2017, when Liu Lin laid out the fitness MCN, the douyin short video had not yet risen, and the artist team generally believed that receiving self-media advertisements was self-reducing. International big names and well-known brands have a lot of market fees and launch needs, and only graphic bloggers can undertake it.
"As long as a blogger has a good image, takes photos diligently, operates self-media, and incubates a little, advertisements will come pouring in." Liu Lin said.
In addition to sports brands such as Adidas, Puma and Columbia, beauty, daily chemicals, luxury goods, and automobile brands have also pounced. Every day, 5-8 brands find Liu Lin and hope to cooperate. These days lasted for two full years and two years.
Behind the fitness account MidoriLau is a couple, the actor is midori, a green-haired and lively girl, and behind the scenes is her boyfriend Lao Chen.
In 2018, the two began to work as fitness bloggers, and within 4 months, they had 100,000 fans, bringing them 10,000-20,000 yuan per month. Lao Chen held deep hope for the prospects of self-media, quit ali's job, and did the behind-the-scenes work of the account full-time.
The midori with green hair and wheat-colored skin is highly recognizable.
Later, short videos rose up, and bloggers who were known for their words and pictures were blocked out. Within a few months, a large number of fitness public accounts stopped changing.
After the epidemic began, the industry entered a crazy inner volume. Fitness bloggers have a low threshold and lack of professionalism, and can win with stature and appearance. A large number of unemployed fitness coaches, artists, models, and athletes have poured into the self-media platform, and a large number of marketing numbers have also entered the game, resulting in more and more difficulties for newcomers to become fans, and the development of the elderly is difficult.
At the same time, the platform is becoming more and more tightly controlled by traffic, and the scale of advertising is becoming more and more strict.
In 2020, Midori has also resigned as a full-time blogger, but the incomes of her and Lao Chen are still at the level of 2018 and stagnant. At their worst, they considered giving up their blogger careers several times.
MidoriLau is not alone, in 2020, the fitness traffic circle "difficult to make money" is becoming more and more serious, and the logic behind it is: there are more fitness bloggers who want to share the cake, but the cake has not become larger.
Due to weak consumption and the epidemic, brands have reduced their market launch fees. "Brands that used to advertise every quarter suddenly didn't appear for half a year, a year, or even two years." Liu Lin said.
Even before some brands have survived the agreed launch time, the company has already collapsed. Liu Lin revealed that a certain protein powder brand built an e-commerce platform, paid a big anchor to bring a shipment, and found that it could not be sold at all, but the money had been burned out.
The same is true of the fitness service platform.
Coming and going, seven or eight fitness service platforms in the entrepreneurial tide have disappeared in this unending fitness traffic feast. I don't know if they can survive to this day, whether they can eat this wave of dividends from the rise of fitness traffic.
A tired fat red cat lies on a yoga mat after exercise. During the pandemic, the concept of fitness training at home has become popular.
In July 2021, Lao Chen and Midori extracted knowledge points from professional literature and their existing knowledge system, and gave them a relaxed and bright way of expression, and finally made a satisfactory video work "How Long Does It Take to Lose 1 Kilogram of Pure Fat [Beginner's Notice]", which was praised 263,000 in Xiaohongshu and 1.389 million views on Station B.
"Content is still a watershed." Since then, they seem to have opened the second vein of Ren Dou, continuing the humorous popular science route, and the Little Red Book has risen by 170,000 fans a month, exceeding the number of fans in the past year. Now, they have 916,000 followers in Little Red Book.
But they still dare not say that they have touched the fate of the traffic. The power of the "invisible hand" of the platform is so great that the elusiveness of the audience's behavior is still difficult to understand.
"The flow of works with 80 points will not be bad, but it will receive feedback of 60 points, 80 points, or 90 points, uncontrollable and unknowable." Lao Chen said, "The biggest difficulty is to find the right positioning, and find a balance between our cognition and the audience's cognition." ”
Because they have a clear understanding of the form and style they are good at, they have never operated Douyin and Kuaishou accounts, nor do they plan to follow the trend into fitness live broadcasting. Most of their peers and friends have the same attitude: "Those who used to do live broadcasts will continue to do it, and those who did not do live broadcasting before will not do it now." ”
MidoriLau has formed a healthy revenue structure, with knowledge payment accounting for 30%, business cooperation accounting for 60%, and each platform traffic incentive accounting for 10%. Currently, they are the top three bloggers on the KEEP knowledge payment list. During the Shanghai risk control period, business cooperation plummeted, but the continuous income of knowledge payment supported them.
"Layout of the whole platform", "formation of the matrix", these seemingly natural methodologies have great obstacles in actual operation. This is caused by differences in platform style, user preferences, long and short videos and live broadcast logic.
In any of the craze that's all the rage, sticking to yourself seems like a cliché. But in today's era of rapid traffic and rapid death, it may be a delicate iron law.
At present, in front of countless MCNs and individuals who are eager to copy Liu Qihong is a gamble: even if they invest millions or even tens of millions, they may not be able to "smash" the next Liu Qihong. The deeper lifeline question is, if you can't become a super traffic master, can the existing fitness market make the mid-waist fitness flow mature and broad enough to obtain a "realization pool"?
At a time when people have not yet figured out the way out, the new "fitness traffic battle" has quietly started: on April 25, the Douyin National Fitness Program was officially launched, and Wu Dajing and other famous generals appeared in the traffic world as leg training instructors; almost at the same time, Kuaishou's sweat gym has been launched, and Ren Ziwei and other famous generals have officially opened waist and abdomen training courses.
In the Internet world where traffic is slightly "changed", fitness traffic may already be in the Red Sea...