Rhino Entertainment Original
Text|Fat Department Editor|Park Fang
Celebrities are once again the focus of attention on short videos.
On the one hand, Tony Leung launched Douyin, and at the same time released the 40th anniversary special program "Life Halfway Upside" and Douyin's exclusive documentary short film "This Moment, Tony Leung Says to You", allowing fans to talk about his social terror, circle of friends and feeding pigeons in London Square again.
On the other hand, Zhang Da was almost driven "crazy" online, and no one expected that in the end his personality reversal was completed in the public's "sympathy", and Zhang Da also completed self-consistency on his Douyin account, posting a number of short videos of playing terriers. Now, a large number of fun people are waiting for his next live broadcast, wanting to ask if the recent big melon is real.
It also needs to be noted that the short video star strategy in the past two years has changed, and the entire ecological logic is also iterating rapidly.
When the platform circle tends to be covered globally, there are fewer and fewer stars who can continue to drive the activity of the whole platform. In turn, these stars will become the core assets of the platform. For example, Kuaishou's Jackie Chan, Jay Chou, or Douyin's Andy Lau, Sun Yanzi, etc., came forward to do live broadcasts or online performances, and always created national topics.
From this point of view, Tony Leung, the Uranus superstar who recently starred in two movies "Nameless" and "When the Wind Rises", is not enough to meet the needs of the platform.
According to the data, Tony Leung has been online for half a month, with only 2.812 million fans; the first video he released has 2.133 million likes and 160,000 discussions. Andy Lau, who currently has 76 million fans, received 25.86 million likes and 898,000 discussions in his first video, and the meme used in that video was the "Infernal Affairs" rooftop rival that he partnered with Tony Leung that year.
Zhang Da's live broadcast single like data exceeded 10 million, and the number of online users continued to remain at 100,000+, which is already very different from the performance of thousands of views in the past; The three short videos recently released have more than one million likes, more than three times more than before.
Judging from the data alone, short videos seem to be more suitable for Zhang Da than Tony Leung?
Stock era
What kind of celebrities do short video platforms need?
Content is the lifeblood of a video platform, and this is always the same.
As mentioned earlier, in fact, Douyin and Kuaishou have formed a full-circle coverage, and they also have a content ecology running within each circle, but so far short videos are still willing to take out traffic and real money every year to support content output, such as Kuaishou's new photosynthetic plan, which is to take out one billion cash and hundreds of billions of traffic to subsidize creators throughout the year.
The difference may be that the growth task has shifted completely to revitalization in the last two years. According to CNNIC report data, as of June 2022, the number of users of short videos in mainland China reached 962 million, accounting for 91.5% of the overall netizens, and the cost of continuing to drive growth will become more and more unacceptable.
The value of today's content lies in maintaining and maximizing the amount of time and engagement of short video users. This is also the need to create circle-breaking events through national stars, as mentioned earlier.
But for a wider group of celebrities, the ability to create content will become a key part of meeting the platform's needs for activation.
The latest data released by Douyin officially is that nearly 5,000 celebrities have settled in; At the Kuaishou content ecological conference in the middle of last year, the number of stars announced was also 2000+. This data has an increase of about 30% compared with 2020, which also means that there are fewer and fewer stars in the industry who have not yet entered the short video "Yanzhong".
How to rely on content to stand out under this competition? From Liu Genghong, who became well-known by relying on a "Compendium of Materia Medica", to Zhang Dada, who became popular by gathering the "crazy" crowd on the whole network, the audience obviously needs more than freshness.
They learned to bark dogs in the live broadcast room, kissed at clues, questioned Zhang Da why he did not disclose his "romance" with her girlfriend, took the initiative to scold and other famous scenes of contemporary cybermadness, which was enough to make Zhang Da also shout "outrageous".
On the one hand, Zhang Da's direct online communication, coupled with embarrassment in the face of various "crazy" behaviors, makes the atmosphere in the live broadcast room have a kind of pleasure of star identity; On the other hand, Zhang Da's original "disgusting" character meets the "crazy" crowd, which achieves a wonderful dissolution and even makes the audience feel decompressed.
On the other hand, Tony Leung, at present, the six short films of "This Moment, Tony Leung Says to You" have 110 million views, and "Life Halfway Up the Mountain", which is almost a relatively serious personal interview documentary, has nearly 80 million views, which is the same or slightly lower than most Douyin star variety shows.
The reason is that short video audiences are becoming more and more intolerant of this kind of serious, packaged content, especially content that shares life feelings. And Tony Leung's own understanding of national popularity was originally relatively vague, and when the content could not highlight his own characteristics, most of the people who bought it were his fan group.
As celebrity content becomes more and more normal on the platform, viewers will further highlight their preferences and have a good impression of content with a stronger sense of life, more privacy, and more memorable. In this direction, there is no shortage of star cases that rely on personal personalities to create content out of the circle.
In 2020, the era of attracting fans and selling goods with one face has passed, and if you want to break into a world on the short video platform, you can only rely on excellent content and sufficient resources to pay.
Lei Binyi, the head of MCN Carefree Media, who signed Liu Genghong and Zhang Da, said in an interview earlier this year: "We mainly tend to sign stars who can focus on new media. "For platforms and MCN institutions, there are only such stars now, and they can still make money.
Behind a year's concerts and live broadcasts
Star ecological value revaluation
From the perspective of the platform, celebrity settlement is no longer used as a platform to attract attention and achieve drainage and new means.
From 2018 to 2020, short videos had a "three-year pain" with the star ecology. From Chen He eating the first wave of dividends and driving celebrities to enter Douyin, to catching up after Kuaishou K3 in 2019, especially in 2020, Kuaishou first- and second-tier cities accounted for 45% of the audience, all of which made the star group a powerful tool for short videos to drive private domain traffic and complete platform conversion.
But since the second half of 2021, the star strategy has changed in many ways.
The first is the change in star ecological operation. Compared with the Focus trend in 2020, such as traffic stars Yang Mi, Zhao Liying, Huang Zitao, etc. who tend to be younger audiences, or comedians who are not low in popularity on Kuaishou such as Yue Yunpeng and Song Xiaobao; After that, the only ones with publicity were superstars with a full circle of audiences such as Jackie Chan, Andy Lau, and Jay Chou.
The reason is that as platform users tend to the full circle level, content that can still drive the volume of breaking the circle can only create one or two national traffic; In the face of attracting relatively focused stars, there is a certain degree of strategic contraction in the environment of reducing costs and increasing efficiency in the entire Internet industry.
This brings us to the second point, the new value of stars brought by market changes, as the head stars have basically settled in, and the user growth has entered the stock era, the operation ideas around the stars have changed from telling potential users "who we have" to creating a circle event "what we want to do".
Last year, Douyin and Kuaishou saw the opportunity to activate the ecology of the site and create circle-breaking events with several online concerts with national voice. Two similar events were very concentrated in the last year.
Douyin's Eason Chan and Andy Lau live broadcast concerts attracted 120 million and 300 million views respectively; Kuaishou's Jay Chou's "Online Brother Friends Club" on November 19 last year had the highest number of simultaneous online users of 11.29 million, with a cumulative number of viewers exceeding 670 million in 24 hours, and a total of 1.31 billion interactions.
Combined with these changes, it may be concluded that the new value of the star ecology to the platform at present has three aspects: high-quality account assets that stimulate the activity of the platform, content producers across circles, and business value leaders.
In fact, over time, most star accounts and platform incubated talent accounts will become more and more similar, and those that can still generate value to the platform will return to the basic business logic of "face familiarity is a treasure" and stage a "national game".
Douyin and Kuaishou do not lack creators who achieve good data in various circles, but when it comes to creating topics across platforms, celebrities are still the best solution.
It is worth mentioning that in the past two years, whether it is the disenchantment of external public opinion on celebrity groups or the attitude of regulators towards celebrities, it has prompted the platform to start launching more high-quality amateurs instead of emphasizing celebrity traffic, and celebrities will bind personal traffic more with publicity actions to relatively avoid personal topics. As the industry blows new wind this year, there may be changes in this regard.
Based on the above, it can also be seen that as short video platforms enter the stock era, they are entering a new stage in terms of business strategy and content operation. The star ecology that has been embedded in the entire system has been embedded through multiple paths such as appearing in short dramas and live streaming goods, and the role and value of the role and value are being reevaluated.
But in fact, the vitality of this part of the ecology no longer comes from the star ecology, but from a group of "short video stars" based on the monetization efficiency of the short video ecology. As far as the stars themselves are concerned, they are not the national darlings who can create circle-breaking events, and there is no real irreplaceability for the short video business in the stock era.
The money of short videos, stars are not good to earn; And when you can make money by putting a star, the platform is also no longer visible.