Image source: Visual China
In the live broadcast room, an orange cat is burying his head in cooking. Outside the live broadcast room, audience Wang Peng recharged and rewarded a wave of cat food. As the cat food in reality fell into the cat food bowl, the orange cat stared blankly for two seconds, and then continued to eat, Wang Peng in front of the screen smiled.
This is a live broadcast with stray cats as anchors, called Street Cats. According to public information, this app was created by Hello Travel and launched in April 2023, and more than 10,000 cat houses have been laid in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Foshan and other cities, that is, exclusive stray cat live broadcast rooms. Users can watch the process of stray cats eating online online, and give cat food tips for their favorite stray cats.
Currently, each cat house of Street Cat is equipped with three cameras, which is convenient for users to watch the live broadcast from different angles. Users can also recharge through their mobile phones, and feed the stray cats in front of the camera remotely in the App. At present, in addition to cat food, there are cats who prefer to feed food, but users need to recharge more freeze-dried options, and the price of a single feeding is twice that of cat food.
"I've always loved animals, and in my spare time, I visit zoos with mirrorless cameras and telephoto lenses. Wang Peng, a street cat user, told Titanium Media App that he would reward stray cats with food every day in the Street Cat App, and he would also have a sense of satisfaction and healing when he saw stray cats gobbling up.
According to the "White Paper on China's Pet Industry - 2022 China Pet Consumption Report", in 2022, the size of the urban pet (dog and cat) consumption market will be 270.6 billion yuan, an increase of 8.7% over 2021, of which the cat market will continue to grow steadily, an increase of 16.1% over 2021. According to the portrait of pet owners, the number of cat owners in China continues to rise. In 2022, there will be 36.31 million cat owners, an increase of 12.6% from 2021.
Undoubtedly, this is a new business model at the moment when the pet economy is prevalent. With the help of live tipping, the platform can get income, and stray cats can get food. However, this model is still controversial - should stray cats be rescued, and how?
Young people's pet economy has given birth to stray cats "MCN"
Street Cat App user interface
With the rise of webcasting, the term MCN (Multi-Channel Network) has gradually become known to people.
By definition, MCN is an organization that provides content planning and production, publicity and promotion, fan management, signing agents and other services for Internet celebrities and self-media, and charges a certain management fee. As a commercial project, the Street Cat App has a similar logic to MCN, and also has its own business needs.
At present, the main source of income of the Street Cat App is to take a cut from the tips given by users to stray cats. According to the official introduction of Street Cat, these commissions need to cover the cost of software and hardware research and development, the cost of cat house equipment, the cost of server traffic operation and maintenance, the cost of manpower operation and maintenance, the cost of cat food, and the cost of providing stray cats with sterilization surgery funds.
At present, every time a new cat house is added to the Street Cat App, it needs to crowdfund cat food from users for 90 days, and the price of cat food is 12 yuan per day, a total of 1080 yuan, of which the Street Cat App will provide subsidies ranging from 45 days to 65 days.
In other words, a new cat house requires users to provide 300-450 yuan of start-up capital. From the hardware point of view, the cost of a cat house building itself, three cameras, lights, network equipment, and batteries should be on the same order of magnitude as the start-up capital of a cat house, which can be roughly understood as breaking even.
Specific to the income of the reward link, in the current recharge rules of street cats, the amount of recharge to be recharged by users feeding 500g cat food is about 23.8-40 yuan, which depends on the amount of a single recharge, the higher the single recharge amount, the lower the unit price.
According to the data released by the professional animal rescuer (self-media blogger "Jingmao Steel Wool Ball") according to the street cat app, the average daily turnover of each cat house is about 20.5 yuan based on the data of 100 cat houses. Calculated according to this standard, the street cat app will build 15,000 cat houses in 2024, and the annual turnover of the street cat app will reach about 100 million yuan.
At present, the street cat app is mainly able to provide the emotional value needed by young users at a lower cost.
"For young people working in big cities, having a pet is a relatively luxurious thing, not to mention pet food and medical care, many landlords do not welcome tenants with pets is a very real problem, in addition to moving for pets is also a very troublesome thing. ”
Sun Ming, a user of the Street Cat App, told Titanium Media App that now that there is a Street Cat, you can use your fingers to recharge and reward, or just watch the live broadcast, which can also achieve the effect of soothing emotions.
Should stray cats be rescued?
Image source: Visual China
The emergence of the Street Cat App has improved the living standards of stray cats through technological means. But on the other hand, this new business model also brings some problems.
The first is the question of whether stray cats will affect the ecological environment. At this point, there is no consensus in the academic field.
Some experts believe that stray cats and mice will prey on mice, but they will also prey on birds, even domestic pigeons, causing the death of hundreds of millions of birds. However, another part of the view is that stray cats themselves are domestic cats, although they have a certain aggression towards small animals, but they will not have a significant impact on the ecological environment.
"As people feed stray cats with a lot of cat food, wild animals such as weasels, mice, and raccoon dogs that appear in cities are gradually beginning to eat cat food fed by humans like stray cats, and change their living Xi because of human activities." ”
Wang Fang, a researcher at Fudan University's School of Life Sciences, has previously said that raccoon dogs are originally very shy animals, but we found that once they have eaten cat food, a food with high protein content and easy access, they will become more affectionate and even hurt in order to obtain them.
In August 2020, the Shanghai Forestry Department issued a "hunting license" for urban wildlife, and transferred more than a dozen raccoon dogs whose behavior was deviated because they ate cat food in the community to a field more suitable for their lives for "ex situ protection". Wang Fang said, "If there was no cat food in the first place, all this could have been avoided. ”
As far as the social environment is concerned, the emergence of the Street Cat App itself is also controversial.
As a commercial project, there are no relevant regulations on which department will plan and which department will approve the public space occupied by the cat house. Since the total number of cat houses is not too small at present, there is not much controversy in this area in the society, but if one day the cat house encroaches on the road like a shared bicycle, and groups of stray cats in pairs collectively "make cats" during the estrus period, it will inevitably make some people disgusted.
To this end, the official practice of the Street Cat App is to provide subsidies, that is, to help volunteers sterilize stray cats, so as to control the number of stray cats, reflecting the public welfare attribute of the project. Previously, Street Cat had launched the 1001 Street Cat Sterilization Program, and issued 100 100 yuan subsidy coupons every month for the program.
However, judging from the feedback on the Internet, the number of subsidy coupons provided by the Street Cat App is a drop in the bucket.
According to the data released by Street Cat, there were 1.6W+ volunteers at the end of November, corresponding to 100 subsidy coupons, which is indeed in short supply. When it comes to the actual implementation level, Titanium Media App has learned that even if the pet hospitals around the country are group purchase prices, the lowest single price of sterilization surgery is 150-300 yuan (male cats are cheaper).
This means that volunteers who spay and neuter stray cats still need to pay some of their own expenses at this stage, and have some spirit of "generating electricity with love". According to the latest data, as of December 4, a total of 12,463 cats have been neutered through street cats.
In addition, there is some controversy about the treatment of stray cats themselves. Some netizens said that in the humid and hot environment in summer, freeze-dried food may be stored outdoors with the package opened, and there is a possibility that the food will deteriorate. In addition, problems such as cat plague infection and the hygiene of cat houses have a lot of room for improvement in terms of the current work of the street cat app.
The use of technology has indeed brought a new business model: from a commercial point of view, users have satisfied their emotional value through the product, and from the perspective of public welfare, for the rescue of stray cats, the Street Cat App at least solves the problem of "where does the money come from".
As for how to allocate resources more reasonably in the future, improve the well-being of stray cats, reduce the number of stray cats through adoption, improve the environment near the cat house, and strike a balance between development and public welfare, it will be a problem that Street Cat App needs to face. (This article was first published on the Titanium Media App Author/Wu Honglei Editor/Zhong Yi, Wang Peng and Sun Ming are pseudonyms in the article)