Author/Jia Yang
Last December, Marie got married.
For a time, "Ma Rui married" and "Who is Ma Rui" were on the hot search. The younger audience found that the president of the Care and Gossip Growth Association, who had been in vogue in the entertainment industry such as "Ice And Ice" and had millions of "little wives", had left the public's field of vision for so long.
This was Ma Rui's intention.
In the creative mode of UGC+PGC in Guanba, President Ma Rui was a hub. And when the policy sword was cut down on Zhuo Wei, the National Scout and Guan Ba, Ma Rui and the two co-founders Wu Jie and Yang Yuan were confused and drunk. Then, the three of them quickly developed a new development strategy in just 3 months of anxious quarrels.
In September 2017, Guanba was fully upgraded to "Huihuo", with three short video products high-profile transformation into PGC institutions, while Ma Rui himself began to hide behind the scenes and take the initiative to "de-presidentize". Guan Hachi is good at capturing and provoking the public's voyeuristic gossip, and Huihuo is "committed to becoming a discoverer, researcher, and promoter of entertainment culture." Later, when entering and leaving various short video summit forums, Ma Rui's identity is more of an Internet product operator than a content producer Internet celebrity.
The fire was born on the eve of the outbreak of short videos, but it is not accurate to say that it rises in the wind. In Ma Rui's view, this pro-son who has been single-handedly supported, "it is just needing business, and it is difficult to collapse", unless it has to grow into a unicorn in a short period of time. But "In some places, the deeper you dig, the smaller the space that may be widened around you." As a management and an idol, Ma Rui's dual roles seem to have hit a bottleneck.
Marie was never a peaceful person. In his words, he has felt special since childhood, and the motto of high school, "Be a person who can influence others," has been used to this day.
At the beginning of 2019, a year and a half after GuanBa was upgraded to Huihuo, according to Chopped Pepper Entertainment Investment (ID: ylwanjia), Ma Rui turned around again and joined the new studio as a partner and CMO, and established Ma Rui Studio under the new set. Returning to the role of an artist, "half of the focus is on the studio side, and the other half is focused on the integration with the new set business."
Ma Rui, who "loves to toss", has given himself several months off, taking care of his sick father, and after getting married, he has brought himself new challenges and identities. During the more than a year of re-entrepreneurship exploration, the pattern of content entrepreneurship has changed greatly.
The fire is not finished to be continued
In August 2015, Guanba received a total investment of 15 million yuan from three institutions, Tencent Shares, Geek Help Venture Capital and Ping An Innovation Investment Fund, with a valuation of over 100 million yuan. It is the first person in that wave of self-media to get financing. At that time, the phrase "We don't produce gossip, we are just porters in the entertainment industry" became a slogan familiar to almost all netizens.
Content entrepreneurs in a wider range of fields usher in the spring. In December 2016, "Li Mingbeast" joined Baidu as vice president with a team, and almost before and after the same year, the listed company Legg Mason Culture (in collaboration with Legg Mason Holdings) acquired the majority stake of the same uncle for 217.5 million yuan.
It was an era of national gossip. A large number of entertainment studios such as Fengxing Studio, Famous Detective Xiao Wu'er, All-Star Detective and so on compete in business, and Zhuo Wei, the "first paparazzi of Chinese mainland", even perfectly put his business on the news ideal of "piercing the illusion and social supervision", and "see you on Wednesday" once became the focus of netizens' attention. The energy of Guan Ba is also not to be underestimated.
Millions of "little wives" (Ma Rui's term for his readers' fans) provide a steady stream of news, and In the content production process of UGC+PGC, Ma Rui is a "repeater" and "reading comprehension mentor". Discredited and well-deserved traffic king. At that time, There were three main sources of revenue for Guanba: Youku's video revenue, column sponsors, and the power of capital.
Yang Yuan, CCO of Guanba, previously said publicly, "We have always been profitable, and the cash flow on the book is very rich."
Then, as we all know, in mid-2017, a number of self-media, including serious gossip and poisonous tongue movies, were shut down like autumn winds sweeping away leaves. The tide of content entrepreneurship is frozen in an instant. Since then, on the way to "survival", the poisonous tongue has expanded from content to e-commerce and the whole industry chain; Guanba has transformed from "content + advertising" to "content + advertising + 2B service", and "principle, bottom line, sense of proportion, and orientation" have become a program; some content entrepreneurs have collapsed.
Ma Rui's career trajectory changed suddenly, after being criticized by the leaders for "excessive snooping on the privacy of celebrities" in Hunan Tv, young and courageous to start a new stove to do self-media; after this incident, while moving forward, taking a step backwards, to train Guanba's upgraded Huihuo into a "network version of Hunan Radio and Television" to be an industry researcher and promoter.
Ma Rui realized at that time that it was necessary to "de-grow the fire." "There was once a speech about how we kill an Internet celebrity, that's the meaning, if Lao Luo is there one day, Lao Luo is the bottleneck of this enterprise." Same thing.
Although the positioning is clear, after the comprehensive upgrade of "Guan Eight" to "Huihuo", it is still constantly exploring the direction. Among the app, WeChat, and Weibo omni-channels, the biggest position is Weibo. Several matrix numbers add up to more than 7 million fans, the large "will fire" as an entertainment industry information platform, high-frequency content updates to maintain a high degree of popularity, but also won the "Weibo 2018 top ten influential entertainment bloggers" name. But the main form is already graphic, and previous high-profile video PGC has been rare. In addition to 2C PGC content, Weibo is also an important carrier in the data and marketing services provided by Huihuo for stars and episodes.
WeChat also maintains stable content output, reading and comments, with an average reading of 30,000 articles.
The performance of the APP is not very eye-catching in comparison: among the three short video products announced by the earliest official announcement, "Huihuo MIAO Music" was the earliest to stop in the first half of 2018, the trend coldplay program "Huihuo Planet" was no longer updated in May, and the star quiz program "Huihuo No NG" was not updated after August. Huihuo APP has become a carrier that gathers PGC account content, with less content and an average reading volume of 2000-3000; and the reader community that was originally the hottest in the Guanba period, lit into the hottest circle, and the latest message came from 1 month ago. Ma Rui said that this is not the main business of Huihuo, and it has not been done for a long time.
According to Ma Rui's previous public disclosure, in May 2018, there were 100 people on fire, distributed in Changsha and Beijing.
Ma Rui recalled the experience of Huihuo and sighed to Chopped Pepper Entertainment (ID: ylwanjia): "To be honest, it is difficult for a company like Huihuo to collapse, and it is just needed business. However, the business of Huihuo itself has its strengths and weaknesses. The strengths are stable enough, the industry is deep enough, and the influence is large enough. But at a certain stage, it may have to be combined vertically and horizontally. During this economic cycle, it may take some time to think about other businesses around it. ”
After that financing in 2015, there has not been a new round of public capital injection. The registration information of Huihuo was changed in early December 2018: CEO Wu Jie officially succeeded Yang Yuan as the company's legal representative, and Ma Rui and Yang Yuan withdrew from the company's director seats at the same time. The registered capital was also reduced by 54.71% to 438,692 yuan. Ma Rui explained that this is just a normal change in information such as industry and commerce, "Now the main controller is Wu Jie, and in the past it was also Wu Jie, but it was not reflected in the list in the past, and now it is reflected." ”
Data source: Tianyancha APP
The three musketeers who have been partnering with entrepreneurs since 2014 - Wu Jie, a former executive of Hunan Television, Yang Yuan, the youngest producer of Hunan Television, and Ma Rui, the host who knows the internet the most, bid farewell and started again after 5 years.
"The fire was built by our own hands, it is our own birth, won't I miss it?" Of course. Ma Rui told Chopped Pepper Entertainment (ID: ylwanjia), "But at that moment you make this decision, you are responsible for others, and at the same time, you have to be responsible for yourself." So, instead of you causing trouble for others all day in these things. You might as well change the environment for yourself so that you can get more possibilities. ”
"There are no conspiracy theories and unpleasantness." Ma Rui said frankly, "But to tell the truth, you will see it after a long time, and you don't need me to explain it." "The new set and Huihuo have reached a strategic cooperation, and there will be more cooperation opportunities in the future."
Defect to the new set
"I've never been a particularly affectionate entrepreneur." Ma Rui told Jiao Jiao (ID: ylwanjia) that the choice of career is very important for the decade from thirty to forty years old, and there are three roads in front of him, the first is to start a new business and start from scratch, the second is to go to the platform, and the third is to be a partner.
Ma Rui combed it down, and he hoped to join such a place where the future is very growing, the status quo is relatively stable, and he is more successful. Choosing a new set, in addition to professional freedom, is also associated with another factor. After getting acquainted with Yin Xingliang, the founder of the new set, 3 years ago, "a few younger entrepreneurs in the circle are considered to be an entrepreneurial mutual aid group, and the growth of each other's companies is accompanied by each other", so Ma Rui understands some of the problems that occurred during the growth of the new set and the future direction. This series of work began in July and August 2018 (leaving Huihuo) and did not settle until December.
On January 8, 2019, Ma Rui joined the new studio as a partner and CMO and established Ma Rui Studio under the new set.
Founded in 2012, the new studio is now the largest film and television creator community in China, relying on this community platform, focusing on the production of new media film and television content, with new studio pictures, new studio short videos, new studio academies, paid materials and other content business lines. Founder Yin Xingliang dropped out of college to start a business, and the deeds of 4 young people starting a company after 7 years with a valuation of nearly 1.2 billion yuan are widely spread in the industry.
With the expansion of the scale of Internet users, users' habits of watching video content are changing, and the form of content and broadcast channels are also changing. Fragmented time and the influx of various APP platforms have contributed to the rise and iteration of the online movie and short video industry.
NetU is currently the most lucrative business on the new set. According to the new studio's 2018 interim financial report, the company's operating income in the first half of the year was 145 million yuan, of which the distribution income of Wangda was 112 million yuan, accounting for 77.5%. In the first half of 2018, it achieved a net profit of 1.42 million yuan, turning a loss into a profit. In 2018, the new studio occupied four seats in the top ten of iQiyi's annual sub-account list with many works such as "Siping Youth", "Special Mission", "Nine Door Admiral", "Pagoda Town River Demon", "New Zombie Mr.", etc., and set a new industry box office record at the beginning of the year with "Town Soul Mage" broadcast on Youku. Its production of "Male Fox Chat Zhai 2" also won the top 10 broadcasts on tencent platform.
The new studio network movie project has produced and distributed a total of 180 films, with more than 2.3 billion plays on the whole network and 800,000 film and television producers participating.
In the field of short video, the new studio is one of the largest MCNs in China, with more than 20 vertical short video content brands, signed more than 150 celebrity creators, and cooperated with short video platforms such as Watermelon Video and Penguin to develop micro-drama micro-variety shows and other content, and jointly produced "Happiness List on the Road", "Shenma Tour Group" and other short video content.
However, according to Ma Rui, in 2018, the growth of several pieces of business on the new set was quite obvious, and the business was more balanced, like interactive (e-commerce business in Hangzhou), which at least increased by two to three times compared with the first half of the year. "That's why I chose the new set." Just joined the new set team, Ma Rui has begun to work overtime with the heads of various departments until late at night to do year-end business inventory.
Ma Rui's studio on the new set is in the line of fire. The studio's publicity director told Ylwanjia, "The team's goal now is to make Ma Rui re-debut as an artist. In other words, after more than a year of walking on thin ice, Ma Rui returned to the road of idols.
Ma Rui teased, "We often joke, the new set, you guys are making chips, right?" His task on the new set has three aspects, one of which is, "The new set is influential enough on the 2B side, but at this stage, especially in this environment, the company also needs to have some 2C-side, out-of-the-circle influence, which I can help." ”
Second, in terms of marketing and marketing, the four major blocks of film, short video, interaction and online community are all related to it and can play an interactive and connected role.
Third, Ma Rui, who has accumulated many years of experience and resources in the traditional film and television industry, has brought more content genes to the new set and developed new media entertainment content. "For example, the short video business, the whole of 2019 needs to do a lot of larger micro-variety projects." Another point is that the possibility of Ma Rui Studio lies in a relatively new form of artist management model. A team of agents who really understand content and can do content. "At present, the studio has only one artist, Ma Rui, and it is not ruled out that more signings will be ruled out in the future.
In the micro-variety show "Happiness List on the Road" promoted by Ma Rui, the new set cooperated with Watermelon Video to unite many celebrity couples such as Tian Liang & Ye Yiqian, Wang Yuan & Ke Wang Yu, Yutou & Zuomu, Ma Rui & Zhu Zhu, etc., to present the most authentic and natural life content in their daily life.
At present, the cold winter of the film and television industry has not passed, and NetDa has become an important customer for film and television bases around the world to start as usual; and with the gradual maturity of the short video industry, PGC and MCN are seizing more resources and traffic. Although from the first half of 2018 to turn a profit, the performance of the new set is getting better and better, but the overall environment is not good, the liquidity of the new third board is low, the cost of information disclosure is not small, so it coincides with a number of new three board film and television companies, and the new set announced a few months ago to apply for delisting. However, as a multi-service operation, it has seized the outlet of the Internet University and short video outlets, and the winter capital of the new set is its professionalism and experience.
Ma Rui said that the new set hopes to let everyone see some better works with long tails, not just the way of fast moving consumer goods stuck to short videos. At the same time, I also hope to establish a more certain and stable connection with the industry, including cooperation with artists, certain production companies, and certain platforms.
"To put it mildly, when users and all of us content creators get together, it's like a grand confession. A thousand Hamlets, with their own unique opinions and judgments, we can't control them. We do a good job of the previous presets, believing that their conversion rate will become higher. ”
Entering a new stage, Ma Rui will use the entertainment gene and the new studio to produce what kind of collision, open up what valuable industrial direction, innovative content, we wait and see.