April 4, 2023 | Total Issue 3195
The day before April Fool's Day, a UP master of station B with nearly 4 million fans, "King Xu who eats by his face", issued a notice of suspension, which attracted people's attention. Just the day before, "-LKs-" with 3.11 million fans and "Weird Jun" with 2.64 million fans on Station B announced that they would stop changing.
Some media summarized this phenomenon as "station B UP main initiates a stop tide", which has aroused widespread discussion.
A B station insider responded that the statement of "stopping the tide" is not accurate, but that some UP owners stopped changing for personal reasons, not a collective behavior.
Follow-up news said, "-LKs-" just want to give himself a vacation, "Weird Jun" is not compatible with the MCN to which he belongs, and "Xu Dawang who eats by his face" is making a video and can't make ends meet + wants to give himself a vacation. According to this, two of the three UP masters are only temporarily suspended, and the media's claim of "stopping the tide" is indeed inappropriate.
The reason why this news can become a hot spot is that it has successfully provoked the emotions of two sets of people.
One is the main of small and medium-sized UPs. Since Station B adjusted its internal incentive mechanism last year, UP owners have received less and less platform revenue, and the same video views, revenue has almost fallen by half. On the other hand, short video content similar to Douyin Kuaishou invades site B, and the content exposure and revenue that these UP owners spend a lot of effort to do are not as good as the copy and paste of marketing accounts, and it is common for them to have grievances against the platform.
The second is station B users. From "small country widows" to those seeking a larger business stage, the number of video advertisements on the homepage of station B has increased visibly. Liver purification, mite removal, lamb noodles, bone conduction, shampoo, facial cleanser, shower gel, car fragrance, men's perfume, private part care... Ads that cannot be removed bring great discomfort to users.
The successive stops of UP owners are just coincidence, but the collective subconscious outbreak of small and medium-sized UP owners and users, using the topic to vent their dissatisfaction with the platform, is inevitable.
The voice of scolding capital and scolding the platform may be late, but it will never be absent. Compared with Station B's wrongful grievances, one of the most worthy topics for discussion in this incident is: content creators struggled all the way and finally became big, and the final outcome was that there was no way out?
01
Two days before the so-called "B station UP main stop is more trendy", senior advertiser Jiang Chacha released an article through the WeChat public account of "Chacha Sauce", with a very shocking headline: This year, millions of KOLs can no longer receive advertisements.
The original text is not long, only a few hundred words, but it basically explains the current situation of content creators, that is: now is the era when it is difficult to monetize with fans.
Compared with other platforms, Station B faces a more special situation. The user ecology dominated by young people determines the lack of its consumption potential, and for a long time, in addition to Pinduoduo is still routinely launching some UP masters, you can hardly see other big brands on this platform.
The poor conversion rate is on the one hand, and on the other hand, the traffic that the B station UP owner can generate is also difficult to compete with the Internet celebrities of Douyin Kuaishou. From the perspective of playing data alone, of course, the distributor would rather choose a platform with good data.
In addition, the deep-rooted community culture of station B is not friendly to capital, although some fans will be pleased with the UP owner who received the advertisement and thank the father of the gold owner, but station B has never lacked users who dislike and despise capital, and the voice of boycott and ridicule will be intuitively reflected through barrages and comments. For brands, who would want to be the wrong person and spend money to buy ugly?
Moreover, the people who hold the power to cast are generally older, and the B station that prides itself on the youth community may not even be in their sight.
02
Some people may ask, the above is just the general environment, there are always people who can receive the delivery, right? Yes, but they have to face other problems.
In the "Stop the Tide" incident, an UP owner named "—A passer-by-" listed the "seven deadly sins" of station B on Weibo, one of which wrote, "Station B has no commercial integrity".
It is understood that station B will crack down on UP's private order taking behavior, and once discovered, it will limit the streaming video and reduce the weight of the account. In order not to lose the big because of the small, most of the UP cooperated, but in the process of cooperation, they found some "small actions" of the platform, that is, pushing the business order that belonged to them to other UP owners.
If there are more such things, the blow to the UP master is huge. On the one hand, it has caused a crisis of trust in the platform among UP owners; On the other hand, "content is king" has become an empty phrase in monetization, creators must not only do a good job in content, but also learn to observe words and colors, and have good relations with some departments.
03
Does hiring solve this problem? Absolutely.
In fact, a person's energy is limited after all, and in order to produce better videos, it is nothing new for the head UP to be run by a team. Someone specializes in copywriting, someone is responsible for shooting, someone is responsible for the cover, someone is responsible for business... The boast that a person is a team may only occur in the early stage of entrepreneurship, and if you want to become bigger and stronger, raising a team has become an inevitable choice.
But the problem is that small and medium-sized UP owners who fight alone may be able to support themselves with platform revenue, while the head UP owners who cannot receive the placement cannot support a team even if they have millions of fans.
"King Xu who eats by his face" made it clear in the stop video that if it hadn't been for the bonus period of video creation and saved some family resources, this account might not have lasted now.
For these UP owners, the impact of the adjustment of platform revenue is minimal, but the era of millions of fans selling meat muffins on Taobao to make a fortune has passed, and the emerging live streaming goods are difficult to have their place, and the only business order on which to survive either does not, or must share profits with the platform, or is sideways... If you don't disband the team, there may be only a dead end.
"Xu Dawang, who eats by his face", said at the end of the video: "After a period of rest, I will continue to make videos, but more as a hobby." In other words, this is no longer a business that needs to be bigger and stronger.
Recalling the craziest time of content entrepreneurship, the head self-media even often regarded listing as the ultimate goal, recruiting and being spirited. Who would have thought that in just a few years, from ideal to reality, it would suddenly become a number and a half-life, and he would still be a light pole commander when he returned.
Problem exposure is the beginning of problem solving. The stagnation of the industry and the decline in income caused by the economic environment need to be borne by the platform and the UP owner, and the future way out can only be to find a way to rush out of the canyon together.
【Text/Xu Xinqiang】