▲On August 2, 2021, the opening ceremony and main forum of the 2021 Global Digital Economy Conference were held at the Beijing National Convention Center. The host of the "Time and Space" session of the Global Digital Economy Conference and the AI synthesis anchor "Yani" appeared. Figure/IC photo
The metaverse has not yet arrived, but the virtual digital people as the basic life forms of the metacosm have taken the lead and become the darlings of the investment community, and have begun to be applied in all walks of life to export productivity for society.
Virtual beauty blogger "Liu Yexi" attracted more than 8 million fans after uploading 6 short videos; players lined up for hours to take photos with virtual Internet celebrities "Fish Too Idle"; which moment made you realize that after the virtual people were around, the reading volume quickly exceeded 210 million.
Virtual digital people are becoming a real problem.
▲Virtual idol Luo Tianyi performed on the same stage as a real person. Figure/IC photo
How top-notch virtual idols make money
From a technical point of view, virtual digital people are divided into two types: real person drive and computing drive, and A-SOUL is the first type of application case. This popular top virtual idol girl group at the moment is composed of a virtual image skin and a real person behind it.
At present, because the business model is not yet clear, live broadcasting is the team's main means of exposure and monetization. In addition, commercial channels such as participating in talk shows, TV shows, evening parties, accepting interviews, business endorsements, and selling peripherals are also gradually expanding.
The reason for the A-SOUL explosion can be summarized into three points: the strength of the technical level, the stage skills of the idol trainees as "the people in the middle", and the high-intensity emotional interaction between A-SOUL members and the operation team and fans.
Backed by two large enterprises, A-SOUL has industry-leading full 3D real-time motion capture technology. The facial expressions of the virtual idol are meticulous, and even the hand movements can be dynamically synchronized with the "middle person", and the five members of A-SOUL can give the audience an experience that has never been felt before, and its technology can be described as a "dimensionality reduction blow" for the virtual anchor who fights alone.
Compared with live idols, the public image of virtual idols is easier to manage effectively, and there is almost no "negative public opinion", so there is no need for crisis public relations. Of course, this does not mean that the work of the operations team will be easy. For example, the A-SOUL operation team is called "tool people" by A-SOUL and fans, in addition to the regular artist economy, fan operations, their business also includes technical optimization, planning plans, writing live scripts and copywriting, and publishing articles in the form of columns every Tuesday to seriously answer fan private message questions.
Virtual anchors and fans have a strong emotional resonance, and the fans' feedback is to go to major platforms to drain A-SOUL - brushing the bullet screen in other live broadcast rooms, leaving messages in the comment area, and making two-creation videos to link A-SOUL and artists with their own traffic.
A-SOUL gradually broke through the circle layer, and the fan team continued to grow.
The "Great Voyage" of Station B, also known as the live broadcast fleet, can be seen as a paid VIP of a certain anchor, with three titles, from low to high: captain, admiral, governor. Opening a "captain" requires a fee of 198 yuan / month, so a "ten thousand ships" anchor (live account sitting on more than 10,000 "captains") to the B station to bring direct economic benefits of at least 1980,000 yuan / month.
Bella, the captain of A-SOUL, is the first virtual anchor of Station B to complete the achievement of "Ten Thousand Ships" - according to the live data provided by the A-SOUL data group, on July 16, 2021, on the day of Bella's birthday party, in the past 3 hours, Bella recorded 1747269.3 yuan.
▲ On July 16, 2021, Bella's birthday party was broadcast live on the day of the revenue data summary. Figure / B station A-SOUL data group "personal space" screenshot
In January this year, A-SOUL member Jia Le participated in the recording of a TV station program. According to the program's disclosure, in November 2021, the overall market revenue of the virtual anchors stationed in Station B was 54.66 million yuan, while the "top stream" Jia Le had 2.14 million yuan in the month.
On March 8 this year, A-SOUL's group submitted a prospectus to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. According to the prospectus, with the help of A-SOUL, the revenue of pan-entertainment related to virtual artists increased from 21.08 million yuan in 2020 to 37.87 million yuan in 2021, up 79.6% year-on-year, and the gross profit margin increased from 56.5% to 77.7%.
The success of A-SOUL has caught up with the "time, place, and people" of the domestic virtual anchor industry. High-cost technical equipment, skilled artist management, long-term high-investment cultivation, high-stakes business model, created this "blockbuster".
▲ A-SOUL member Bella reached the record of 11,000 on board. Photo/Screenshot of the poster of station B
Virtual anchors have become a new way of playing e-commerce
Cheng Weizhong, founder and CEO of Zhongke Shenzhi, introduced to Xinjing Think Tank that the current virtual digital people in China are still mainly based on the stock market, that is, the combination of virtual digital people with short video business and e-commerce live streaming.
At present, the live e-commerce market has entered the second half after precipitation, showing a polarized ecology, on the one hand, the MCN institution holding the head anchor resource, on the other hand, the brand that sits on the product and supply chain to seek self-broadcasting.
Both poles have their own limitations and risks: the first type relies too much on the head anchor, and once the person's "human design" collapses, it will bring disaster to the institution. In addition, the personal energy of the anchor is also limited. The high-density live broadcast frequency allows anchors to be locked in the goods and lose the opportunity to link up with other formats; while the second type of brand self-broadcast is limited by the monotonous category and is difficult to meet the diversified needs of users.
The emergence of virtual anchors has broken this deadlock. Virtual anchors greatly improve the stability of anchors, reduce institutional risks, 24-hour customized interactive services can meet personalized needs, but also to achieve IP fission, open up new growth space for live e-commerce.
At present, the fully digital virtual anchor is indeed a cost-effective choice, they will replace some anchors to complete the tooling work and simple interaction, but still can not replace the real anchor.
With the development of technology, fully digital virtual anchors with deep learning capabilities may gain higher market share.
Taking virtual anchor KOL Guan Xiaofang as an example, its business scope involves commodity planting, brand cooperation, and live streaming and selling goods. In March 2022, the personal account "Guan Xiaofang is not panicked at all" was founded on a short video platform, and continued to release short videos of life theater and live broadcast with the brand.
Analyzing the live broadcast data of Guan Xiaofang given by the live broadcast platform, it can be seen that Guan Xiaofang, the "virtual anchor of e-commerce", has improved the efficiency of fans and interaction between live broadcast rooms. The "number of fans" increased by an average of about 130% month-on-month. The "total number of visitors in the interval" increased by about 45% on average month-on-month. The "average number of people online" increased by about 35% on average from the previous month. The number of "live likes" and "comments between live broadcasts" increased by about 150% on average month-on-month.
At the content production level, virtual person live broadcasting also attracts some anchors who are not suitable for showing the original image to the public to participate in UGC content creation (user-generated content), which indirectly enhances the participation and activity of platform users, and customized interactive special effects greatly enhance the interest of live broadcasts.
"From this point of view, virtual people are helping people show their inner beauty, not replacing the value of people themselves," Li Yazi, head of the Kuaishou Y-tech Special Effects Technology Center, told Xinjing Think Tank, "From the communication level, virtual people have stable personality traits, which can make the brand's concept and value better disseminated." ”
She believes that the fully automatic virtual human anchor has broad application prospects, can be used as a feature of the live broadcasting tool in addition to the live broadcast, to help merchants improve efficiency and revenue, the current pain point is the key technology needs to be optimized, so that users can have a smoother experience.
Three "Production Modes" of Digital Virtual Anchor IP
In the short video and live broadcast platform, the incubation, cultivation and growth of digital virtual IP have formed a fixed model.
Lu Yingjie, head of Kuaishou virtual person products, introduced to Xinjing Think Tank, "This model is basically consistent with the training model of real anchors and big V, and many MCN institutions have this kind of operational ability. At present, there are roughly three types of active virtual idols on major platforms, corresponding to the upgrading and iteration of formal content.
The earlier category is the picture-level virtual idol, which produces pictures for fans, with high picture accuracy, a sense of design, low production costs, and high production efficiency. However, in the community where short video content is the mainstay, the characters and plots that pictures can convey are very limited.
In contrast, video-level virtual idols, through video content and fans, are much more expensive and complex than the production costs and complexity of pictures, and have to go through script design, modeling, binding, motion capture, face capture, post-production and other links. "This content carrier can make virtual idols more vivid and expressive, so most virtual idols at present output content in this way."
Nowadays, live-level virtual idols interact with fans through real-time live broadcasting, "because of the technical threshold of real-time rendering, there are currently fewer virtual people who can do real-time live broadcasting." In real-time rendering, limited by hardware resources, the presentation effect of virtual idols is reduced by data compression. But there is no doubt that the interactivity of such anchors and the sense of fan experience will be more direct and impactful. ”
In Lu Yingjie's view, the factors restricting the rapid and large-scale development of virtual anchors are mainly production efficiency and production costs, "On the whole, the development direction of virtual anchors is from pictures to video and live broadcasting, and when the production cost and efficiency problems are solved, the competition is content creativity and operational capabilities." ”
▲ On March 1, a Spanish exhibitor used a tablet to showcase the digital virtual person in the conference room scene at the Mobile World Congress 2022 in Barcelona, Spain. Photo: Xinhua News Agency
The 100-billion-level scale market is about to come out
At present, the business field of the domestic virtual digital human market is diversified and vertically subdivided, but the competition pattern is not yet mature, and the number of head companies is limited. In addition, there are also professional virtual digital human companies that diversify their small and medium-sized customers.
According to the postdoctoral fellow of the School of Journalism and Communication of Tsinghua University, "the domestic Z generation (referring to the generation born between 1995-2009) has a stronger perception and adaptability to the Internet, strong consumption ability, and they constitute the main consumption force of virtual digital people", overall, "domestic virtual digital people enterprises pay more attention to stylization and specific professional to B, to C field, in order to cash in on the technical value faster; while foreign companies focus more on C, To provide humane assistants and emotional care for people as the core. ”
On the other hand, "in the specific business operation, the number of head companies with strength is small, and the production cycle of enterprises is long, the cost is high, the commercialization is not good, and the return cycle is relatively long." Yuke said.
▲Schematic diagram of the virtual digital human industry chain. Figure/Qubit 《2021 Virtual Digital Human Deep Industry Report》
At present, the application of virtual digital people in the industry is mainly in the six major fields of film and television, media, games, finance, cultural tourism and education. In the previous stage, the virtual idols and virtual anchors among the virtual digital people have developed relatively mature and obtained full commercial recognition.
At this stage, the frontier application field of virtual digital people is virtual twins, which have begun to gain recognition from industry parties, capital and users through metaverse social apps. In January this year, only 20 days after the launch of the meta-universe social APP "Gel", it rushed to the top of the Free List of the Apple Store due to its high download volume, becoming the first social APP with a popular super WeChat in the past two years.
According to qubits "2021 Virtual Digital Person Deep Industry Report", the overall scale of virtual digital people in mainland China will reach 270 billion yuan in 2030. Thanks to the potential of virtual IP and the start of virtual twins, the corresponding identity-type digital virtual people will dominate, with a scale of about 175 billion yuan by 2030, and will gradually become the main interactive carrier of the metaverse.
At present, the mainland has issued the "New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan" and the "National New Generation Artificial Intelligence Standard System Construction Guide", which will promote the development of the underlying technology of digital virtual people and integrate with various industries, and will also promote the growth of industries and enterprises in related fields.
According to the public data analysis of Youke, the number of financing in the field of virtual people has reached nearly 100 in the first month of 2022, and the amount of financing has exceeded 400 million yuan. Beijing is the region with the best financing status for virtual digital people enterprises in The country. In 2021, 27 virtual digital human companies across the country received financing, of which 41% were Beijing-based enterprises, with a financing amount of several billion yuan.
The virtual digital human industry has a high ceiling, diversified tracks, and a clear path for realization, and there is a lot of room for development in related industries in the future.
Written by Li Xiaoxiao, researcher at Xinjing Think Tank
Editor/Currie
Proofreader/Li Lijun
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