"abandoned", "defected", Li Jiaqi was "hollowed out"

Written by/Changfeng

Editor/Li Kexin

Li Jiaqi, who has been off the air for 3 months, is still eye-catching in his performance on Double 11 this year.

As in previous years, Li Jiaqi once again brought considerable GMV data to brands and Taobao in this annual promotion festival. Star map data shows that Li Jiaqi's sales exceeded 10 billion again, reaching 14.708 billion (based on page price and sales volume). Although it is not as amazing as the 21.5 billion yuan previously reported on the Internet, such results are already remarkable.

Unlike previous years, this year Li Jiaqi has more and stronger competitors on the site.

After experiencing the temporary or permanent closure of "one brother" and "one sister", Taobao's awareness of risk diversification has been further strengthened, and it has also felt more strongly the traffic benefits of big anchors.

Embracing higher and more stable GMV is Taobao's most urgent desire at present, and it is not uncommon to frequently introduce popular anchors, Luo Yonghao of Douyin's top echelon, Liu Genghong, who is in the limelight, and MCN institutions such as Yaowang Network and Worry-free Media have entered the market before this year's promotion festival, including many new anchors with outstanding achievements.

According to data released by Tmall, Luo Yonghao and the MCN agency "Remote Hope Dream Station", the sales of this Double 11 exceeded 100 million yuan, and were included in the TOP3 list of new anchor transactions, of which Luo Yonghao's live broadcast room attracted more than 10.18 million fans in 20 days, creating a new record on the platform.

Although this Double 11 does not have the figure of Weiya and Sydney, the Bee Wish Club and Shiitake Mushroom formed by its assistants are still very competitive, especially the Bee Wish Club, which ranked second in the TOP3 of new anchor transactions on Double 11 this year.

In addition to external competitors, Mei ONE, which suffered huge losses due to Li Jiaqi's suspension of broadcasting, also began to allocate some resources to promote newcomers. After the resumption of broadcasting, Li Jiaqi's several assistants in the live broadcast room showed more time, and gradually had his own loyal fans.

Changes in the internal and external environment have made Li Jiaqi's live broadcast career challenging.

01. "Abandoned": brands no longer bet on "one basket"

In the past two years of Double 11, the outside world's attention to Li Jiaqi has no longer been limited to sales data, but has broadened to the sales price of Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room. In the past, Li Jiaqi has always been synonymous with the lowest price on the whole network, but in the past two years, the bargaining power of big anchors such as Li Jiaqi has decreased significantly.

Now watching Li Jiaqi's live broadcast, it is rare to hear the phrase "the lowest price on the whole network", and the discount has also entered a stage depending on the situation.

The odd and even faction quoted the views of Li Jiaqi's fans that Li Jiaqi's live streaming rules have changed greatly this year compared with last year. Its live broadcast room only sells a small amount of spot during Double 11, and more often it is doing pre-sale of goods, during which it will not directly quote, but predict the purchasing power through fan additional purchases. Once the team has the data, it talks to the merchant about the price and inventory, and then determines the amount of coupons and issues them in limited quantities.

Behind the decline in Li Jiaqi's bargaining power is the "de-heading" of the brand side.

When a brand heard Li Jiaqi ask for a 10 yuan reduction in the price of the product in "Offer 2 for All Girls", he said, "This is not a 10 yuan problem."

In the past, in order to promote the brand and improve GMV, brands and merchants paid a lot of pit fees and commissions to find big anchors to bring goods, and at the same time they had to meet the low price conditions of big anchors and reduce the price of products. This not only narrows the profit margin of the brand side, but also breaks the price matrix, resulting in the price of high-end products on the brand side being the same as that of mid-end products, resulting in products of different stalls competing with each other.

Various unfavorable factors have made the brand side shift from completely relying on big anchors to self-reliance in terms of product promotion.

In the past two years of Double 11, Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room has been sold expensive, and L'Oreal and Shiseido, which cooperate with Li Jiaqi, sell cooperative products in their respective official live broadcast rooms, and the price difference is more than 100 yuan, causing a "price difference incident".

Low price is Li Jiaqi's core competitiveness, and now this competitive barrier has disappeared, while the big anchors in the industry have shown a state of rapid emergence and full of personality characteristics. Luo Yonghao, who can tell jokes, Oriental Selection, who can teach English, and Xiao Yang, who became popular by relying on violent assessments, all grew into head anchors shortly after entering the live streaming industry.

Although these anchors are not as "red and specialized" as Li Jiaqi, in the context of consumers entering the exhaustion period of live broadcast goods, because they provide different live broadcast content and establish their own personalities, they often have high fan stickiness. For Li Jiaqi, the pressure of external competition is increasing.

In addition to increasingly powerful opponents, the adjustment of e-commerce platforms and MCN institutional strategies has also brought uncertainty to Li Jiaqi's live broadcast career.

After the short/permanent suspension of big anchors such as Li Jiaqi, Sydney and Simba, the platform and MCN institutions have been increasingly aware of the crisis, and now, Li Jiaqi's Taobao platform and its MCN institutions are investing a lot of resources to support new forces.

This year, Taobao invited a large number of off-site top anchors to settle in, Douyin's Luo Yonghao and Liu Genghong opened a live broadcast room on Double 11 this year, and Li Jiaqi's MCN agency Mei ONE also invested a lot of resources to support its assistant group, and the industry seems to have entered the stage of "marginalizing Li Jiaqi".

02, "defected": the platform marginalized "voice"

In the past two years, Taobao has lost big anchors one after another, which has made Taobao, which is already in a traffic crisis, more anxious.

In order to make up for this loophole, Taobao has opened up its firepower this year and aggressively recruited popular anchors outside the station. Douyin fitness anchor Liu Genghong, Weibo mother and baby blogger "rice cake mother", rooted Kuaishou "Xiao Shenlong" and so on all received "ferry tickets" from Taobao, and after Luo Yonghao, the head anchor of Douyin with outstanding performance on Double 11, entered Taobao, he was even supported by Taobao.

According to a late report, Luo Yonghao's MCN agency made a friend after receiving the invitation to Taobao Live, almost "came without hesitation", because from the resources given by the platform, it is full of sincerity, including the opening location of the Taobao APP, the golden position on the Taobao homepage on the day of pre-sale, and various off-site traffic resources.

But during this negotiation, Ali and a friend disagreed on what to name the live broadcast room. In order to let fans understand Luo Yonghao's settlement more intuitively, make a friend and hope to use the name of the institution, Taobao hopes to name the live broadcast room "Luo Yonghao", and finally Taobao got what he wanted. Late pointed out in the report that this is the only disagreement in this negotiation, which shows Taobao's desire for the head anchor to attract traffic.

At the same time, Taobao, which does not want to be completely subject to the head anchor, is also discovering new anchors by holding new anchor selection competitions and independent training, and through such methods, the platform has now emerged Zhu Zheng, a creator in the funny field, and a rich teacher with rich styling, while vigorously supporting waist anchors.

These two categories have contributed a lot to the GMV of the platform's promotion festival this year. According to official data, the pre-sale guidance amount of Taobao waist anchors increased by 365% year-on-year, and new anchors increased by 684% year-on-year. Among them, live broadcast organizations also achieved a significant increase of 165% year-on-year.

In the process of improving the live broadcast ecology, Taobao Live's strategy has also changed. In September this year, Taobao announced that it would enter the era of live streaming 2.0, establishing a content-centric traffic creation field in addition to the traffic consumption field.

It turns out that the anchor of the content can indeed impress the fans more, especially in the context of the public's fatigue with the "hawking" live streaming goods. Oriental Selection achieved overnight popularity under the condition that anchor Dong Yuhui brought goods in Chinese and English, and "Crazy Little Yang Ge" became the first anchor on Douyin with more than 100 million fans because of his sitcom and violent evaluation in the live broadcast room.

In contrast, Li Jiaqi's "oh my god" is very monotonous, losing the advantage of "the lowest price on the whole network", the competitiveness is further weakened, and Taobao allocated resources to content anchors during this period, making it more difficult for Li Jiaqi to break through. After all, in the year he entered Taotao in 2016, Li Jiaqi achieved rapid growth of fans with the help of these resources.

At that time, the number of Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room fans exceeded 100,000 a year, and during that period, this number was already very good.

But at the moment, he can't stand the continuous beating of the back wave, and Li Jiaqi is constantly making adjustments.

Prepare detailed Excel before the promotion to help consumers understand the discount of various products; After the end of the promotion, in the fan WeChat group, post a special Double 11 after-sales link; Launching "All Girls' Offer" and Li Jiaqi's small class, Li Jiaqi tries to distinguish from the current simple "shouting" delivery and develop to a delivery model with content and high-quality services.

In addition to the platform, the MCN agency to which Li Jiaqi belongs, Mei ONE, has also changed the previous all-in Li Jiaqi strategy and began to incubate new anchors.

03, the epilogue of "sole favor": holding the "upper position" of the assistant broadcast group

Mei ONE was once Li Jiaqi's strongest support.

Unlike other MCN organizations, there was no anchor matrix at the beginning of its establishment, and all resources were invested to only make Li Jiaqi an IP. On the one hand, this is because of the limited talent engaged in this industry at that time, and on the other hand, it is due to Mei ONE's judgment of the market, believing that the public pays more attention to the price of standard products such as beauty. Based on this, Mei ONE feels that there is no point in cultivating multiple anchors, and making an IP bigger and "hitting the floor" is the key.

But with the continuous staging of big anchors such as Li Jiaqi's non-stick pan sticky pan, Simba selling fake bird's nest, and Taobao's super head anchors fell into tax evasion last year, the maverick Mei ONE also had to train multiple anchors to share the risk, the difference is that Mei ONE did not directly start from scratch like the traditional MCN agency, but based on Li Jiaqi's popularity, another super popular assistant broadcast group was created.

Since January this year, Li Jiaqi has rarely appeared in the live broadcast room on time, and the first hour or two has basically become a special session for the assistant broadcaster. This way of reducing Li Jiaqi's personal appearance time and tilting the live broadcast camera and duration of the live broadcast room to the assistants. This is a low-cost, efficient way to incubate new streamers.

Last year, anchors such as Wei Ya and Sydney disappeared in the industry because of tax evasion, and in order to continue the live broadcast business, the MCN institutions to which the two anchors belonged began to establish an assistant broadcasting group.

As soon as these broadcast groups went live, they were supported by fans.

According to the investment community, the fifth live broadcast of "Shiitake Mushrooms", composed of the Sydney broadcast group, reached 4 million views. The first live broadcast of Weiya's "Bee Surprise Club", which started broadcasting in February this year, had 1.15 million views on its first live broadcast, and it had entered the 10 million level by the time of the fifth live broadcast. And Luo Yonghao, who has just entered the Taotao on Double 11 this year, averaged only about 4 million views per game in the first 5 games. At the same time, the newly launched "Bee Wish Club" also appeared on the Tmall Double 11 new anchor TOP3 list.

Today, ONE has also embarked on this path. In September, the first thing Li Jiaqi did after resuming the broadcast was to introduce a new assistant group in the live broadcast room, so that they could directly join the battlefield of Double 11.

Under the operation of Mei ONE, Zhu Wangwang, Qingzi and other assistant broadcasters gradually became popular. Since the broadcast of "All Girls' Offer 2", Want Wang's popularity has risen, becoming the "leader" of many girls becoming beautiful and independent, and on social platforms such as Xiaohongshu, posts related to Want Want often get a large number of likes and comments.

After obtaining traffic, ONE began to build a live broadcast room for the assistant group. On the first day after the end of Double 11, Li Jiaqi officially announced the news of the opening of a new live broadcast room of "All Girls" during the live broadcast. Comparable to the strength of "Bee Surprise Club", the average number of views per game in the first 5 shows of "All Girls" is about 5 million.

This kind of construction of anchor matrix and expansion of traffic pool around core advantageous customer groups may be the main direction of future competition for institutions. This also means that the era of beauty ONE all in Li Jiaqi has also come to an end.

Surrounded by strong external enemies, platforms and MCN institutions have "defected" to the new generation, and Li Jiaqi's live broadcast career is full of challenges. But this is not only a problem faced by Li Jiaqi, in the context of the "hawking" goods is about to go out, all similar anchors are facing transformation, how to make a faster and smoother transition is the next problem he needs to think about.

When one day the anchors collectively step up to the stage of "content + professionalism", it means that the live streaming industry has ushered in a healthier and longer stage of development.

This article is from iDoNews