Liu Qihong, one person won the whole Keep

Between "high-quality fitness like a fitness master" and "a young version of square dance that can be danced with hands and feet", most of China's 300 million fitness people eventually took sides with action to go to the latter.

Liu Has spent nearly a month to grow 60 million fans, while Keep has spent seven years to save 34 million monthly active users. At the same time, "Future Consumption" roughly calculates the daily life of Keep in the same period, which is about 6.5 million.

Looking at Liu Qihong, the highest live broadcast in the past month, the number of viewers reached 52.567 million, and the peak online number was 4.01 million, it is worth mentioning that here is not the entire number of people entering the whole live broadcast, if the number of viewers of the live broadcast on the spot is counted, the probability is flat or even more than keep's daily life.

In addition, this is only one and a half hours of live broadcast user data in a single day, and does not include the traffic generated by clicking into Liu Qihong's short video and its matrix number every day.

During the May Day period, Liu Qihong also diverted the flow of his trumpet "Liu Qihong Fat Oil Click", which began to release the live course collection on May 3, and within a few days, it had risen from 0 fans to 7.18 million (as of press time).

Keep, which ranks first in online fitness with monthly activity and exercise times, has a crack on the content side as the cornerstone of the platform, and whether this crack will become larger and larger, and finally become the fatal injury of Keep, it is still unknown.

Crises always come from invisible places

In fact, the starting point of this rift is not Liu Qihong, but as early as 2020.

At the beginning of the epidemic this year, staying at home became the norm, a large number of gyms were closed, and the rise of online fitness also allowed a large number of people to use their free time to make short videos.

You can see that vibrato, B station, little red book, there are many hundred thousand million level bloggers are from this period, take the fitness field, the content producers are full-time mothers, fitness coaches, fitness enthusiasts, etc., in addition to a large number of portable extranet courses + follow-up videos.

According to the data of Xiaohongshu, during the Spring Festival in 2020, the fitness notes released by users doubled compared with the same period of the previous year. In the quarter after the Spring Festival, video consumption in the fitness category rose by nearly half, and releases increased by about 20%. This year not only has a night of popular Pamela, but also a few months of fans hundreds of thousands of ordinary bloggers, such as "V sister is me", "pliers mother Amanda" and so on.

There is traffic, there is monetization, naturally it will attract more and more people to influx, "Douyin Sports fitness report" shows that in 2021, the number of Douyin sports fitness videos increased by 134% year-on-year, the number of creators increased by 39%; fitness anchors increased by 208% year-on-year, live broadcast revenue increased by 141% year-on-year.

The 2021 Kuaishou Fitness Rookie Forum also gave a set of data, Kuaishou Live Fitness anchors exceeded 600,000 people, has more than 15,000 people who focus on sports and fitness, and produces nearly 20,000 short videos and more than 10,000 live broadcasts every day.

A large number of a variety of UGC fitness content is flooded in the major media platforms, robbing each other of the user's time, but also will inevitably divert the keep user time, although the current two models are not in a competitive dimension, but from the content level alone, in such an era of extremely rich supply, keep irreplaceability has become weaker and weaker.

From the perspective of Keep's prospectus, its sales and marketing expenses in 2019 were 296 million yuan, accounting for 44.6% of the total revenue, and by 2021, Keep's sales and marketing expenses have doubled, as of the end of September last year, its sales and marketing expenses were 818 million yuan, accounting for 70.6% of the total revenue.

Keep's high customer acquisition costs directly affect its profitability, and while revenue continues to grow, losses continue to widen. In 2019-2020, Keep lost 735 million yuan and 2.243 billion yuan, respectively; in the first three quarters of 2021, Keep lost as much as 2.458 billion yuan.

Last year was a key year for Keep to impact the listing, in order to hand over a better report card to the capital market, in the marketing pull new blood, frequent actions. Spring Festival smashed TVC advertising to promote the activity of reducing excess meat for good meat for new year goods; then through the spit conference and its artists to promote its live class launched in February; in April became the official partner of "Longing for Life"; in August, it officially announced that Yi Qianxi became its brand spokesperson...

How effective is the new effect of spending a lot of marketing expenses?

As of the first three quarters of 2021, Keep's marketing costs increased by 342.1% to 818 million yuan from 185 million in the same period of 2020, although the monthly active number in the third quarter of 2021 reached a peak of 41.75 million, but the actual pulling effect was far less than the scale of investment, and the monthly active activity only increased by 27.5% compared with 32.75 million in the same period of 2020. 12 to 1 input-output ratio, cost-effective is really not high.

In contrast, several media platforms, especially Douyin, which has stronger entertainment attributes, have a monthly active population of up to 700 million. The community is destined to have a circle, and even if it goes out of the circle, it cannot be compared with the traffic of the pan-entertainment platform. Compared with the Small Red Book community with wide eating, drinking and entertainment attributes, the circle covered by Keep will be narrower, and what it does is an anti-human self-discipline business, which is why Keep has gradually encountered bottlenecks in traffic.

Qu Gao and widowhood and elegance are appreciated together

Among China's 300 million fitness population, most of the people who planed out high-level sports groups and regular fitness habits are actually sports whites, and Keep is mainly anchored by this part of the group.

However, most of these sports whites are ordinary people who fish for three days and dry the net for two days, and are not self-disciplined enough, keeping the solution for them is that systematic fitness classes + sports data records, the former gives you a step-by-step, targeted exercise experience, and the latter gives you a small sense of motivation to punch and share with the community/friend group.

"Let 100% of people be able to work out with the same high quality as 10% of fitness experts", this is the brand vision depicted by Keep founder Wang Ning in his early years. But nowadays, self-discipline is an anti-human business, which is difficult to do after all, and the more complex and professional things are, the easier it is to bend high and low, but the more "directly" the more "elegant and popular" things, is the traffic password.

Liu Qihong's gymnastics are aimed at the general public, basically everyone can follow, unlike many specialized courses in the past, which indirectly excludes some super small white people.

More importantly, the sense of entertainment and atmosphere provided by live classes is not provided by other sports courses, and the reason for sports has changed from self-discipline, an anti-human starting point, to fun and atmosphere. Of course, there are still a large number of people who are watching or joining in the fun, this group of people supported the basic disk of Liu Qihong's traffic, which Keep can't pull with money, which is the power of entertainment and "elegant and customary appreciation".

Some people must say, what can a Liu Qihong do, shuttlecock exercises always have a time to jump, and the Materia Medica always has a time to listen to vomit. In fact, Liu Qihong is only a representative work of Douyin to create vertical field content, although its explosive power may also exceed that of Douyin, but in fact, there are thousands of "Liu Genghong" behind it.

There are many external views that Liu Qihong's popularity is inseparable from the support of Douyin and the tilt of traffic resources. In the past few years, several new media platforms have been supporting vertical content one by one, aiming to increase user activity and explore greater commercial space, such as the previous outbreak of catering content, which has triggered discussions in the industry about the impact of Douyin on local life platforms.

There are also Zhang classmates who have become popular in the past 3 months, relying on recording rural life in northeast China, and now the number of fans has reached nearly 20 million, which is actually the product of the content of vibrato supporting the three rural areas under the background of the rural revitalization strategy.

As early as the epidemic in 2020, Douyin launched the "Douyin Gym" activity, and soon after Liu Qihong became popular, Douyin launched the "National Fitness Program", and at present, Li Ruotong, Chen Yanxi, Zhang Lanxin and other stars have been invited to relay celebrity fitness live classes on Douyin.

More importantly, there is no targeted invitation, and the product mechanism of Douyin also determines that after a blockbuster, there will be thousands of explosive models to keep up, content creators will follow the traffic, and content distribution will follow the taste of the public.

This is even worse news for Keep, which means that the big traffic platform will suck up a large number of content creators.

If there is no traffic as an attraction, then take the initiative to sign up. Around 2020, Keep signed head fitness bloggers such as Pamela and Saturday Wild.

However, signing a contract not only has to pay for the content purchase fee for the bloggers, but also can't stop the bloggers from "getting rich" on the platform with greater traffic, such as Pamela who opened a live class on Douyin a few days ago (but was scolded very badly because of the recording).

At the same time, in addition to signing bloggers, the update activity of many bloggers is declining, and it can be seen that many bloggers who distribute content on all platforms are far less updated than other new media platforms in Keep, and many bloggers who have been very popular since nearly a year or two have not opened accounts in Keep.

Keep's own data will be more intuitive, the prospectus shows that as of December 31, 2021, there were 7600 recorded classes from fitness experts, fitness professionals and content providers, which is obviously not comparable to the massive fitness short videos of the Douyin Little Red Book.

In fact, Keep has long felt the diversion of external platforms, vigorously developed PGC and PUGC content, and turned part of the content into a paid system, but how difficult it is to pay for content payment, the examples of audio and video platforms that have lost huge losses year after year have been numerous, and how high the irreplaceability of these paid content is, it is also debatable.

So then there were private label goods and offline gyms. Among them, the development of the offline gym Keepland's previous pure self-operated model was not smooth, and the store contracted significantly, and then changed to the self-operated + cooperation model, and the transformation effect of the new model is still unknown.

As its largest revenue pillar, private label merchandise sales, the growth rate has slowed down in the past two years and the growth rate has been lower than the overall market for two consecutive years, with private label revenue in the first three quarters of 2021 increasing by 33.6% compared with the same period in 2020, while the overall revenue growth rate is 41.3%; in 2020, the growth rate of this business is 60.8%, and the overall growth rate is 66.9%.

At the same time, from the perspective of its gross profit margin, Keep's own brand has not yet formed a relatively large brand potential, still in the stage of low-price sales, in 2020 and the first three quarters of 2021, Keep's own brand gross profit margin was 36% and 29%, lower than the industry average.

The difficulty of the private brand road we also mentioned in the previous article, with Keep's current traffic volume does not support the sale of private label goods in the form of independent stations, so we also see that Keep has stores on major platforms, but also hopes to introduce external traffic into the station through goods. However, once you go to the major platforms to open a store, it has become one of a large number of similar brands with many choices and full price comparisons for consumers.

At present, from online content to private label goods to offline gyms, Keep has covered all levels of fitness user needs through multiple businesses. However, regarding the entire commercial closed loop, there is no strong data to demonstrate the effect of its mutual transformation.

In addition, its content side as a basic disk has been diverted by external platforms, and platforms such as Douyin will most likely have further strength in the fitness field. The next online fitness market may also have variables.