According to the data released by the 2023 Live Partner Industry Conference held in Aauto Quicker, the live broadcast situation is very good.
In the past year, the number of high-quality live broadcast anchors in Aauto Quicker exceeded 100 times, the number of cooperative guilds increased by 50%, the number of guild anchors increased by 44%, the broadcasting of guild anchors increased by 52%, the revenue scale of guild increased by 43%, and the number of guild anchors with monthly income exceeding 10,000 increased by 32%.
This increasing data undoubtedly makes the confused young people see a glimmer of light again.
In fact, the seeds of becoming online celebrity have been deeply buried in the hearts of many young people since the live broadcast of the myth of making wealth was written. According to previous data, as of the end of 2022, the total number of anchor accounts in the live broadcast industry has exceeded 150 million, of which the daily average number of new anchors is 43,000.
Nowadays, although young people are in deep trouble, they are envious of Li Jiaqi’s daily income, and at the same time, they are greedy for Xiao Yang’s grassroots counterattack, eager to become the next lucky one by relying on live broadcast, which makes more and more young people take anchor as their first choice.
In 2023, even greater online celebrity began to stroke of bad luck. First, Li Jiaqi’s improper remarks provoked public anger, and then Brother Xiao Yang was questioned because of the live broadcast style. At the end of the year, the drama selected by Dong Yuhui and Dongfang was bloody and exciting … The head anchor was treading on thin ice in the current market environment, which made countless people feel that this was a new opportunity for them to get more traffic.
Although the upsurge of online celebrity is getting higher and higher, there is another set of cruel data behind it, which shows that most anchors may not be as glamorous as expected. As early as 22 years ago, online celebrity industries began to usher in a continuous wave of salary reduction. There are 95.2% anchors whose monthly income is less than 5,000 yuan, and only 0.4% anchors whose monthly income is more than 100,000 yuan.
In the era when intelligent algorithms and traffic are king, online celebrity, a profession, is becoming an extremely serious deviation field for survivors. As the saying goes, everything is online celebrity. But the invisible place is the live broadcast of most young people with online celebrity dreams, which is real and cold, emitting dangerous light.
If you are addicted, you will "die"
Counting several phenomenal "god-making" events in 2023, whether it is logic or probability, is no different from winning the lottery. In short, it can be summed up in two words: relying on life.
In May, a song "Digging, Digging and Digging in a Small Garden" was contagious in various short videos, and the number of fans of blogger "Teacher Huang" soared by 5 million. Subsequently, Yu Wenliang and Wen Huijun became an instant hit in ways that ordinary people could not understand and illogical flow logic, which made many spectators call the current platform "abstract".
In September, Yu Wenliang released his first video. In the video, he was topless, and his camera was awkward. With the popular BGM in Tik Tok, he instantly won more than 100,000 praises. In December, Wen Huijun, who also had no talent, performed a dance in the live broadcast room. The cumulative number of viewers in two hours was nearly 30 million, and the number of real-time viewers was 100,000+. It can be said that the red ones are very capricious and random.
And their amount of money is even more amazing. Take Wen Huijun as an example. On December 18th, Wen Huijun received 6,000 carnival gifts for a live broadcast, earning a total of 8.4 million yuan. What is this concept? At present, the monthly salary of fresh graduates in third-and fourth-tier cities is only 4,000 yuan to 6,000 yuan. No wonder everyone yearns for overnight success.
And these lucky people often face two important problems in the follow-up.
First, the creativity of content is seriously insufficient. Once the next hot spot appears, it will be quickly covered, and the so-called popularity will be quickly lost, and it is impossible to form a real fan conversion. Second, in the world of algorithms, if there is no huge investment cost, the platform will not continue to gain more benefits, and it is only a matter of time before it disappears.
These two fates are also fulfilled in online celebrity like curses.
To give a typical example: Teacher Huang’s children’s songs obviously can’t continue to "resound" short videos. After becoming popular, she tried to bring goods. However, due to various reasons, the cumulative GMV of the five live broadcasts is only 1 million yuan, which can’t keep up with the fraction of the bloggers’ record of bringing goods. After bringing goods, there are still a large number of users taking customs clearance. Coincidentally, the previously popular Duck Head Brother also transformed to bring goods, but the cicada mother data shows that the average sales of Duck Head Brother’s live broadcast room is 1W-2.5W, and the average UV value is only 0.2. They are still so popular, not to mention those small anchors who have dreams of online celebrity in Qian Qian.
Although many netizens spoke highly of the professionalism of these two people, a casual amateur anchor will inevitably lack a complete set of commercial delivery procedures behind him. Among them, the flow is the key. There is no denying that the end of online celebrity is carrying goods. Even the head anchor should continue to actively invest.
Because with the rapid increase in the number of live broadcasts and the commercialization of the platform, natural traffic in the public domain has been diluted to almost negligible.
According to relevant practitioners, the daily investment cost of the anchor with cargo in Tik Tok is as high as hundreds of thousands. In the eyes of electric merchants, if GMV is going up and the revenue scale is large, the cost cannot be stingy. Even Zhang Xiaonan, CEO of New Oriental Live Studio, once said bluntly that there is a large investment marketing fee to pay.
Looking through the financial statements of major MCN companies, we can see that every online celebrity that can stand tall cannot do without real money. Take Ruhan as an example. As early as the second quarter of 2016 to the fourth quarter of 2018, Ruhan revealed that its marketing expenses in online celebrity increased eight times, and the per capita marketing expenses in online celebrity were 630,000 yuan.
At that time, it was the easiest time for online celebrity to hatch.
Until now, more and more marketing costs of live broadcast with goods are not affordable for ordinary people or enterprises. To some extent, Mr. Huang’s experience has taught countless young people who aspire to be anchors. For them, popularity has always been just the beginning. If they want to survive for a long time, no matter how strong their talents are, they are like a lot of money.
The capital and platform have never thought about long-term investment for ordinary people who are randomly popular, and will only quickly find the next goal after the heat subsides. So, after the hot spot, we saw that Yu Wenliang’s "ordinary people set up" collapsed quickly and was chased by netizens. After the traffic carnival, Wen Huijun’s atmosphere cooled down. According to the data of the new list, the number of fans of Wen Huijun’s three major accounts has plummeted, and the main account "Wenshen" has also appeared a large number of fans since December 25.
Most amateur online celebrity can’t escape the above constraints. When the algorithm doesn’t need any persuasion, it just invisibly shortens their popularity path. The traffic carnival attracted on the basis of no connotation can’t stand the test of time, and it is their only fate to be forgotten after being hit by traffic.
For netizens, which live broadcast room to buy things is not to buy?
"Big Brother" is not enough.
In the minds of some young people with online celebrity dreams, even if they can’t catch the east wind of live broadcast with goods, they can eat this bowl of rice just by their looks, talents and even casual chatting, which is also the initial form of the anchor’s career. In the era of the show, the live broadcast room was like a colorful ten-mile foreign exchange, and it was full of the smell of drunkenness.
The legend of the first eldest brother is everywhere.
According to the news report on the interface, Tik Tok and Aauto Quicker and other head live broadcast platforms, the monthly flow of live broadcast rewards reaches 3 billion yuan, and the annual flow at least exceeds 36 billion yuan. And platforms such as YY, which made a fortune in the show, continue to reward business year by year. According to the ten-year performance data released according to YY live broadcast, in the ten years since its establishment, it has conducted 370 million live broadcasts and watched more than 154 billion people.
Among them, the audience sent more than 446 billion virtual gifts, and the anchor and partners were divided into nearly 30 billion yuan.
However, smiling at the camera, money came one after another like snowflakes, which was once the key reason why young people wanted to be anchors. From the birth of Internet live broadcast to 2024, the lying-win logic reflected by online celebrity’s economy has never changed.
However, whether it is live show or live broadcast with goods, it has become a traffic business until now. A long time ago, those big spenders became live signs carefully forged in the live broadcast room, and some live broadcast companies even derived special "operators" for this purpose.
Today, is there really anyone who is obsessed with rewarding?
In the hottest years of live broadcast, the love and hate between the anchor and the big brother on the list can feed half of the press, but in the past two years, similar incidents have been obviously less. In other words, in the context of the great degradation of the entire consumer market, even the top one can’t pay much. There are facts to prove it. According to media statistics, there are only more than 2,000 accounts in Tik Tok that have been rewarded to level 50 (with a recharge of more than 1.3 million). Although this data has not been officially released, it is also of some reference. Among these more than 2,000 accounts, there are many guild operating accounts.
So, how many anchors are there in Tik Tok? According to the data of Tik Tok two years ago, more than 50 million anchors started live broadcast on the platform. The consumption behavior of the entire Internet users has undergone earth-shaking changes in the past two years, and some small anchors have deeply realized that the cold winter has come:
"In the past, 100 people watched the live broadcast and 10 people rewarded it. Now there may be only one." In the past, the live broadcast of the show was lost in the torrent of online entertainment, the anchor’s hormones were declining, and the wallet of "Big Brother" was also tightening. According to the industry consulting data, by mid-2022, the number of users of China reality show was 186 million, a decrease of 7.93 million compared with six months ago. The reason is that there are too many anchors and the eldest brother is not enough.
Not only that, the live broadcast industry has grown infinitely, which has led to the mud and sand in the social world of the Internet. The continuous control of platforms and rectification policies has repeatedly tightened the freedom of this line to always touch the bottom line, further limiting the "financial resources" of the anchors. For example, Tik Tok introduced the "health score" system in 2024.
Interestingly, young people who want to get rich are still asking for live entertainment to make money, and the platform has given up before them.
Take Aauto Quicker as an example. Before and after 2019, the source of Aauto Quicker’s performance was highly dependent on the entertainment live broadcast business. At that time, the income from live broadcast in Aauto Quicker once reached more than 80%. At present, the proportion of Aauto Quicker’s live broadcast revenue in the total revenue has dropped below 35%, and e-commerce and advertising have replaced it.
Tik Tok has long been a pioneer in e-commerce, and has also started to support high-quality content in live broadcast content. According to statistics, in the past year, more than 1 billion live broadcasts were conducted on the Tik Tok platform, and the number of anchors in the fields of opera, folk music, history and popular science increased rapidly, among which the number of non-legacy anchors increased by 61.72% year-on-year.
It is obviously not easy for ordinary people to show their faces in the live broadcast room again.
Can being a online celebrity help young people?
Young people’s dream of online celebrity probably began to brew in 2019. In that year, a report on college students’ job hunting intention showed that emerging careers such as live broadcast, online celebrity, new media operation and online game sparring were highly sought after by young people, and 54% of the post-95 generation’s most desirable emerging career choices were also anchor and online celebrity.
In the blink of an eye, five years have passed. Young people’s longing for the myth of online celebrity seems to have not disappeared. In the first half of 2023, the cumulative live broadcast sales of e-commerce platforms were 1.27 trillion yuan, the cumulative number of live broadcasts exceeded 110 million, and the number of active anchors exceeded 2.7 million. In the past two years, almost every young person has to face the pressure of employment. When confused, the live broadcast room has become the last pure land.
In fact, the stress signals released by the whole workplace, such as salary cuts, layoffs, and precarious business, are also very common in the field of live broadcast. Around 2019, the anchor was a high-paying job. Today, the salary of the small anchor is not as real as the delivery.
According to the Data Report of E-commerce Talents in double 11 in 2022, the recruitment budget of relevant employers in the e-commerce industry will decrease in 2022. Although the job demand will increase by 9% compared with the same period of last year, the average monthly salary will decrease by 5% year-on-year. The tide of anchor pay cuts has repeatedly invaded the live broadcast room of young people’s dreams.
By 2023, the situation will be even more severe. According to the statistics of the first quarter of 2023 released by Ai Media Consulting, the monthly salary of most anchors is currently around 6,000-8,000 yuan. Compared with the salary of the same period last year, it has dropped by as much as 30% year-on-year, and even the salary of other related personnel in the live broadcast industry has dropped by about 20%.
Most anchors can feel that their hourly wages are shrinking. Take Hangzhou, the capital of online celebrity, as an example. Before that, even the hourly salary of anchor in Hangzhou was around that of 100 yuan, but now it only started at tens of yuan. According to media reports, in 2022, the average salary of anchor in Hangzhou was around 12,000 yuan, and in 2023 it generally fell below 8,000 yuan.
Looking at the enterprise side, there are countless interest links involved in the whole live broadcast industry at present: platforms, enterprises, brands, anchors … The increasingly crowded market makes it difficult for enterprises to control the detailed costs.
Take Yaowang Technology, which has a large number of star anchors, as an example. From the end of 2019 to the beginning of 2020, Yaowang Technology ate up the live broadcast bonus, and once took 16 daily limit in 25 trading days, and its share price soared by about 400%.
But by 2023, the head MCN could not hold on. The latest financial report data shows that in the first three quarters of 2023, the operating income of Yaowang Technology was 3.444 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 13.42%; The net loss attributable to shareholders of listed companies was 450 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 317.39%. Among them, the revenue in the third quarter was 1.181 billion yuan, down 4.39% year-on-year, and the net loss was 241.7 million yuan, turning from profit to loss year-on-year.
And the worry-free media, which occupies half of Tik Tok and online celebrity.
In the past two years, the worry-free media, which made its fortune in the show, deeply realized that the wind direction of live broadcast was changing suddenly and began to work hard to turn to e-commerce towards the show. However, the huge talent matrix has made some enterprises too big to fail. So far, Worry-Free has only successfully hatched Guangdong couple, Redundant and Mao Mao elder sister, little bear, and chubby little fish mother in more than 100,000 online celebrity.
More importantly, just these people are still carefree and spend money at all costs. Take Guangdong couples as an example. In June 18, 2023, Guangdong couples created a transaction volume of over 1.34 billion yuan GMV, but behind the disappointing results is crazy welfare marketing. It is reported that Guangdong couples have prepared 10,000 iPhones 14 for this purpose, and if the data is true, this cost alone will account for at least 70 million yuan.
To this end, Li Guoqing publicly criticized it for destroying the ecology of live broadcast, and even calculated an account for 51-worry Media: Guangdong couples pumped five iPhone every two minutes, and more than one million phones were streamed every hour. According to the gross profit margin of 18%, the streaming accounted for 12%, and goods compensation and blessing bags accounted for 10%. Not only did they not make money, but they also lost money.
But this still can’t stop the madness of many live broadcast rooms. Because everyone in online celebrity knows that if we don’t roll now, we may really have no chance. Who is not burdened with huge costs, just to be abandoned by traffic later?
The online celebrity dream of ordinary people, in fact, should also wake up. After all, the era of being able to give birth to a big anchor has passed, and even the big anchor is now in danger at any time. For thousands of small anchors in Qian Qian, it depends not only on their lives, but also on their capital and luck. However, these cannot be obtained by hard work, and most of them can only become the "fuel" of online celebrity’s economy, and the magnificent flames continue to attract waves of young people to fall into it.
Tao is always reasonable, and once used the wrong name, the internet and the new media in the science and technology circle. WeChat official account, WeChat of the same name: daotmt. This article is an original article, and any form of reprinting without retaining the author’s relevant information is declined.