To tell you a truth, live streaming is not as profitable as imagined. Not long ago, the Guangdong E-commerce Summit Forum announced the top 50 net income of online anchors in 2023, among which the income of Crazy Brother Yang and Simba exceeded 3 billion. Li Jiaqi ranked third with an income of 2.2 billion.
I believe that everyone has seen a lot of similar data over the years, so it gives everyone the impression that these top Internet celebrities are almost making money every day. But in fact, is that really the case?
Let's take a look at the financial report recently released by Dongfang Selection to know the truth. In the half year from June to November 2023, Dongfang Selection will have sales of 5.7 billion, revenue of 2.7 billion, and net profit of more than 200 million.
At present, Dongfang Selection has at least tens of millions of fans on Douyin alone, and it is also the top three in the live broadcast agencies. But their half-year profit is about 200 million.
We must know that not all of the more than 200 million fell on Dong Yuhui's head. Dong Yuhui is just the core anchor of the shareholder, and his income comes from the company's basic salary and equity dividends. According to the data revealed in the previous small composition turmoil, Dong Yuhui's annual income is tens of millions.
In fact, whether it is Li Jiaqi or Brother Xiao Yang, they are all the same as Dong Yuhui behind them, they also have financiers, in other words, they are part-time workers and shareholders of the company. Therefore, the data published online is not their personal income.
Because Li Jiaqi and Xiao Yang's companies are not listed, we don't know the specific performance, but similar to Dongfang Selection, we can probably guess that making money must be making money, but it is not as exaggerated as everyone imagines that they will make billions a year.
Because many people were deceived by these data, they also plunged into live broadcasting. In fact, the cost of a large live streaming agency is unimaginable.
For example, Dongfang Selection, their revenue is as high as 2.7 billion, but the profit is only more than 200 million, which means that the various costs are as high as more than 2.4 billion. The first organization must hire anchors, for example, in addition to Dong Yuhui, there are many anchors under Dongfang Selection.
We saw Dong Yuhui alone in front of the stage, but there are countless staff behind it. At present, the total number of employees selected by Dongfang has exceeded 1,587, and the supply chain team alone has 643 people. The labor cost of Dongfang Selection in the reporting period was 143 million.
Brother Xiao Yang also revealed a data before, the company needs to pay 50 million wages to more than 9,000 editors online every month, and this alone is 600 million a year.
In addition, Dongfang Selection also has a large number of self-operated products, which will cause inventory costs. There are two modes of live streaming, the first is that the manufacturer will cooperate with you and give you commissions and even advertising fees to let you bring goods. Another is self-operated products, that is, you purchase them yourself and then sell them in the live broadcast room.
Taking Dongfang Selection as an example, the number of self-operated products has reached 264. In addition to inventory costs, there are also warehousing and logistics costs. In 2023, Dongfang Selection will add three more warehousing networks in Qingdao, Kunshan, and Xinjiang.
In addition, Dongfang Selection has two major costs, the first is marketing. If you bring goods on the platform, you need to invest in traffic costs on the platform, and the platform doesn't give you so much organic traffic for no reason. Dongfang Selection invested 560 million yuan in marketing in half a year. The second is the cost of research and development, which they spent more than 70 million yuan.
After calculating various costs, the profit margin of Dongfang Selection is about 5%. Therefore, live streaming is not as profitable as we imagined. The reason why big anchors can lead well is because they have a strong team behind them, manpower, technology, and logistics.
For ordinary people, you can't make a lot of money with live streaming at all, if you are diligent enough, it's still okay to make short videos to earn some advertising income.