In recent days, there have been frequent "overturning" incidents in the live streaming industry, and Li Jiaqi, the "brother with goods", and Zhong Can, the anchor of Oriental Selection, have successively fallen into public opinion due to inappropriate words.
The anchor frequently "rolls over", interpreted from the perspective of the industry, exposes the current dilemma of live broadcast e-commerce. It will promote the dependence of celebrity anchors, the rational use of IP of top anchors, the foundation of supply chain and the discussion and application of new models of live streaming.
How to expand the business model can open up a larger market, leverage a new growth curve, and become a new topic in the live broadcast industry.
Photo courtesy of Visual China
A 79 yuan eyebrow pencil reflects the anxiety in the live broadcast room
Who hasn't bought something in the live broadcast room these days? The collapse of the head with cargo IP has triggered changes in the entire live broadcast industry to a certain extent.
When Li Jiaqi brought 79 yuan flower Xizi eyebrow pencils in the live broadcast room, he was questioned by netizens about the price increase, and angrily scolded netizens: "After so many years, has the salary gone up, have you worked seriously?" Late on the night of September 11, Li Jiaqi issued an apology on Weibo, but netizens did not buy it. Within a day, its Weibo followers lost more than one million followers.
In another live broadcast room, Oriental Selection called September 18 a good day when interacting with netizens recently, and was also criticized by online public opinion as ignorant and stupid, and Dongfang Selection quickly apologized. And on September 9, Yu Minhong, the founder of New Oriental, apologized on his Douyin account for 2,000 "Dong Yuhui" coming out at the same time to bring goods.
Further on, Simba's fake bird's nest, Weiya evaded taxes, made a friend fake wool sweater and so on. Coupled with the fact that some time ago, the head of tens of millions of fans of Douyin was blocked, and the live broadcast room was stormy for a while.
Anchors frequently "overturn", exposing the current dilemma of live streaming e-commerce.
As the core competitiveness, the "lowest price on the whole network" once achieved anchors, and now it also traps them. At a time when consumers are paying more and more attention to price, the controversy caused by differentiated treatment between live broadcast rooms and brands is also fueling consumers' price anxiety.
Oriental Selection is facing a dilemma in another dimension of the live broadcast room. This team transformed from New Oriental attracts users who are not price sensitive and have higher requirements for quality. But as their influence grew, so did the user base.
Although the nature of the two incidents is different, there are commonalities, IP is the core asset of top anchors and enterprises, but these top anchors and enterprises still do not pay attention to IP protection, resulting in IP abuse or IP damage due to personal words and deeds.
When the live broadcast room becomes a public place in this era, there will be more and more red lines wrapped around anchors in the future. From a business point of view, for the platform side, deep binding to one or two head anchors is not a good thing. The entanglement between Simba and Kuaishou is a lesson from the past, how to maintain the stickiness of the platform without being overly kidnapped by the head anchor, reduce the dependence on super anchors, and reshape the industry ecology is also something that Internet platforms are considering.
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Maintain the live broadcast ecology and de-"star" may become the only way
At present, live streaming has become one of the mainstream shopping methods. In the first half of this year, the transaction scale of live streaming e-commerce was about 1,991.6 billion yuan, and it is expected that the transaction scale for the whole year will reach 4,565.7 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 30.44%. Oriental selection, make a friend has been "listed"; MCN institutions such as Qianxun and Chenfan have successively taken land to build buildings.
Take Li Jiaqi's beauty wrist as an example, it is the real head player in the industry, with a GMV of 65 billion yuan in 2022, and the net profit is more than one billion yuan according to the monetization rate of Oriental Selection and Remote View Technology e-commerce that has been listed. In the recently released "2023 New Fortune 500 Rich List", Qi Zhenbo, the boss of Li Jiaqi and CEO of Meijian, ranked 242nd with a wealth of 15.98 billion yuan, becoming the richest man in the MCN industry. As for Li Jiaqi, who has been in the turmoil in the past two days, his income has also been picked up by netizens, and his income has been calculated to 3600 yuan per minute.
When the dividends given to live streaming stars in the era and special stages are disappearing, live streaming platforms are accelerating the "de-heading" for the purpose of maintaining their own live broadcast ecology.
A typical example is that the Taobao live streaming platform has successively introduced anchors from multiple live streaming e-commerce MCN institutions such as Yaowang, Make a Friend, and Oriental Selection. On the eve of "Double 11" in 2022, there has been a wave of Douyin anchors concentrated on Taobao live broadcast, and many Douyin head anchors and head MCNs including Luo Yonghao and Liu Genghong officially announced their entry into Taobao. Just a few days ago, "Douyin Head" Oriental Selection opened its Taobao Live debut. After constantly increasing the number of store broadcasts and star anchors, Li Jiaqi's share in Taobao Live is actually being diluted, and he has begun to try to run on Taobao Live through the method of matrix number.
Mo Daiqing, a senior analyst at the E-commerce Research Center, said that it is reasonable for live streaming e-commerce to try to "go to big anchors", and the sales of top big anchors reflect a huge resource concentration effect, and the space that small and medium-sized anchors and long-tail anchors can obtain is compressed. It is also not good for merchants, it turns out that consumers can find themselves through the venue, and now they have to pass the anchor, in fact, there is an additional hurdle. In order to be able to enter the live broadcast room of the top anchor, merchants are bound to make concessions and sacrifices. The commission ratio of super-head anchors is generally more than 20%, which is even worse for many small and medium-sized businesses.
At present, the more successful live broadcast room that actively "de-starned" is "make a friend". While Luo Yonghao's participation in live broadcasts has decreased significantly, "Make a Friend" has diversified risks by opening 15 pendant accounts and focusing on cultivating a group of anchors.
Since November 2022, Century Ridge has started a comprehensive and close cooperation model with "Make a Friend". In less than a year, Century Ruike entered the capital market through the backdoor and "made a friend" in the fiercely competitive live broadcast e-commerce track with stronger financial support, which leveraged the company's new growth in performance development.
"Make a friend" to obtain new growth opportunities through de-stardomization has created a feasible path for peers: if the live broadcast room wants to maintain growth, it must first build its own supply chain to ensure the stability of quality control in the upstream and downstream of the entire chain of goods. Whether it is a brand or an individual, live streaming is only used as a channel, and channel sales are no different from self-operated e-commerce.
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How to expand the business model and leverage the new growth curve
According to the "Dianshubao" e-commerce big database, in the first half of this year, the penetration rate of live e-commerce transaction volume was about 27.8%, and it is expected to reach 31.9% for the whole year, with a growth rate of 26.08%, slowing down. Industry insiders believe that the future race will test the all-round strength from content output to platform operation.
The dispute between Li Jiaqi and users focuses on the price level. At present, the effectiveness of the "ultra-low price" marketing strategy has been relegated to the second place. For brands, the price war model has brought a lot of impact. In order to get more traffic and attention in the live broadcast room, brands lose money or use it as an opportunity to buy tail goods. In the short term, this may bring some GMV, but in the long run, this approach is tantamount to self-destruction.
The industry believes that price and welfare are no longer absolute factors for consumers to choose, and live streaming should return to the essence of commodity sales. After getting rid of the shackles of low prices, the live broadcast industry needs to balance price, quality and service, and more refined management from supply chain to marketing.
As Li Jialu, deputy director of the Department of E-Commerce and Information Technology of the Ministry of Commerce, said, the live streaming e-commerce industry is shifting from traffic-driven to product- and content-driven, and has entered a new stage of development characterized by brand self-broadcasting, knowledge anchors, technology empowerment and customized live broadcasting.
From the perspective of the strategic direction of the existing top listed live broadcast companies, there are three major keywords, supply chain, omni-channel and self-operated brands.
Oriental Selection focuses on self-operated brands and focuses on business development, one to improve quality control, and the other to improve profitability. Data shows that as of the end of May 2023, its self-operated product SKUs have exceeded 120; In fiscal 2023, the revenue of the e-commerce sector will be 3.9 billion yuan, and the revenue of self-operated products will be 2.6 billion, accounting for more than 66%.
Cross-platform live streaming is also a strategy for Oriental Selection to cope with new growth. On August 29, Oriental Selection launched its first live broadcast on Taobao, with a GMV of 175 million yuan. Subsequently, 2,000 "Dong Yuhui" appeared at the same time, and it can be seen that the management team of Oriental Selection has actively deployed the work of breaking through the bottleneck of Oriental Selection. But I didn't expect that the market feedback of multiple accounts operating at the same time was so strong, which may also be the key factor for the next adjustment of Oriental Selection.
"Make a friend" is more inclined to do live broadcast industry chain mining, around the upstream and downstream of the live broadcast e-commerce industry, derived MCN services, self-owned brand incubation, supply chain services, live broadcast training schools and overseas e-commerce and other businesses, and make a friend in the multi-platform strategy, than the oriental selection layout. At present, "make a friend" has returned to the head camp, ranking second in June and the first position in the comprehensive strength list of Douyin e-commerce in August.
Industry insiders said that enterprises or anchors can only open up a larger market and leverage a new growth curve if they expand in a business model that suits their brand attributes.
Zhang Liya Finish