"They are all veritable superheads, and their every move affects the company and even the platform. While they enjoy flowers, fame and fortune, they are also being counterattacked. ”Written by Li Huan
Edited by Zhai Wenting
2023 seems to be a year of collective water reversal for live broadcast e-commerce.
The Dongfang election turmoil ended with the removal of CEO Sun Xudong and the appointment of Dong Yuhui, but a series of dazzling company operations seem to have just begun.
On December 26, a new account created for Dong Yuhui was established. On the second day of the establishment of the new account, Dong Yuhui's new account rose by more than 600,000 fans overnight The topic appeared on Weibo's hot search, and as of the evening of the 28th, the number of fans has risen to 1.73 million. It can be expected that Dong Yuhui's personal freedom will be greater in the future, and the economic benefits will also increase.
However, this studio, which is regarded as Dong Yuhui's personal studio, is actually still 100% controlled by Dongfang Selection, and the GMV of the new account is included in Dongfang Selection's financial report. Even the main body behind the account, the legal person of the holding company is the ousted Dongfang Xiaosun.
I don't know if the mother-in-law, who was angry before, can fully understand the complex relationship between Dong Yuhui and Dongfang Selection, at least these measures have temporarily calmed public opinion.
But is the internal contradiction resolved?I'm afraid no one dares to guarantee it.
At the end of the year, Mei ONE transferred the equity of its company to Li Jiaqi's mother, and this small detail was captured by the Tianyancha app. The delicate relationship and distribution of interests between institutions and super head anchors is always an unstable factor and may be detonated at any time.
2023 is destined to be an uneven year for live broadcast e-commerce.
In addition to the turmoil between Dongfang Selection and Dong Yuhui, Li Jiaqi will be haunted by the crisis in 2023. Because a sentence when selling Huaxizi eyebrow pencil angered consumers, Huaxizi also fell into a brand image crisis. Soon after, Li Jiaqi was involved in the price control turmoil of Hai's and Jingdong's procurement and sales. Brother Yang, who has always maintained an exaggerated and humorous style, was criticized by vulgarity, and then there were controversies such as quality control.
"They are all veritable superheads, and their every move affects the company and even the platform. While they enjoy flowers, fame and fortune, they are also being counterattacked.
No one likes this risk, and no one can fully digest and grasp this unknown and huge risk. In 2024, it may be the dividing line of the fate of super head anchors.
After the water is reversed, does it have to be calm?
First, there are many dangers
No one thought that Dong Yuhui, who has a likable personality and has never done anything wrong, has detonated the workplace topic under the current social mood because of the division of labor in several promotional copywriting in the live broadcast room-honest workers against dirty capital. Fans incarnated as trade unions to seek justice for Dong Yuhui.
Public opinion was turbulent, and soon the contradictions pointed to the internal management problems of Dongfang Selection, and the core figures of the incident such as Dong Yuhui, Yu Minhong, and Sun Dongxu were listed on the hot search for more than ten days. In the end, it was Yu Minhong who personally came forward to calm the anger of the people and stabilize the morale of the army.
As a result, Dongfang Xiaosun was removed from the position of CEO and replaced by Yu Minhong. Dong Yuhui became a senior partner of Dongfang Selection, received a share award from the company, set up his own studio, and was given a month's long vacation.
It seems that Yu Minhong is choosing one of the two, protecting Dong Yuhui and giving up Dongfang Xiaosun. But the problem is far from being an either/or.
The contradiction between the super anchor and the company in the live broadcast industry has been going on for a long time, and Dongfang Selection is not the first, nor will it be the last.
In addition to the controversy behind Dong Yuhui's popularity, personal efforts are still the biggest contribution to the company's operation, and the fluctuations and trends of fans' collective emotions are also great unstable factors. It may even burn the streamer and the company.
Li Jiaqi has the deepest experience of this.
Li Jiaqi, who disappeared for 109 days and did not come back until September last year, just over a year after his comeback, caused an incident because of an eyebrow pencil**After that, he was cautious in his words and deeds, but he did not exchange for calm. Two months later, he was once again involved in a scuffle with Jingdong Procurement and Marketing, and Hai's.
Throughout the second half of 2023, Li Jiaqi spent the turmoil, which is completely different from Dong Yuhui's merit dispute, and Li Jiaqi's two crises are related to the products in the live broadcast room.
In the live broadcast room, Huaxizi eyebrow pencil is 79 yuan (plus two refills) is expensive or cheap, anchors, brands, and consumers have their own opinions;Whether the "reserve price agreement" signed by Jingdong's brand Haishi and Li Jiaqi exists, the truth may not be so important.
Brother Xiao Yang, a man who is known as the second largest number of fans on Douyin, will be crazy in 2023 and will be frequently riddled with negative **.
In April 2023, the "Public Opinion Analysis Report on Live Streaming Consumption Rights Protection" showed that among the 14 anchors covered in the report, the public opinion on rights protection involving Crazy Brother Yang was the largest, accounting for 2927%。The problems involve false publicity, product quality, misleading, delivery problems, returns and exchanges, and uncivilized delivery.
At the beginning of 2023, Brother Xiao Yang began to sell the products of his own brand Xiao Yang Zhen Xuan in the live broadcast room, and during the year, a number of ** merchants cooperated with Xiao Yang Zhen Xuan were ordered to rectify by the Market Supervision Bureau.
In addition to quality control issues, Brother Xiao Yang was frequently named because of his vulgar live broadcast style. Those who know the history of Xiao Yang's popularity know that these exaggerated and absurd local performances are the reason why they were loved by traffic at the beginning.
It's just this love that now the audience and the market have a new way to interpret it. Whether it is Brother Xiao Yang, Dong Yuhui, or Li Jiaqi, after sitting on tens of millions of fans, while gaining recognition and love and transforming into purchasing power, every word and deed is also being attacked and tortured.
As Dong Yuhui and Yu Minhong mentioned when clarifying the live broadcast of the turmoil, now everyone likes Dong Yuhui, I can bring sales to Dongfang Selection, what if one day because of which sentence I said wrong, it will affect the company?
The second and third layers of contradictions
Live streaming has gone through its 7th year. The problems between the top anchors, platforms, and brands are constantly exposed, and the contradictions are becoming more and more intense.
The platform is the soil for the anchor to survive, and the anchor is the nourishment that makes the platform richer, and the two are mutually beneficial and symbiotic and complement each other. Douyin, Kuaishou, and Xiaohongshu all need to use anchors to attract people's attention and bring them a steady stream of traffic and considerable transaction volume.
While relying on anchors, jealousy and gambling will also occur.
On Kuaishou, Simba and other big anchors coerced the Son of Heaven to make the princes The story was staged, and the platform had to weaken the power of the Simba family.
Douyin hopes to solve the problem at the root and adjust the distribution mechanism of traffic. Founder** reported that since the second half of 2017, Douyin has weakened manual operations and strengthened algorithm recommendations. With a centralized traffic distribution model, the platform plays the role of the hand of God.
Therefore, Douyin does not have a fixed support object, most of them are iron-clad platforms and Internet celebrities. Dongfang Selection was abruptly suspended on Douyin with a similar "stuck neck". Although in the follow-up public response, Dongfang Selection said that there were no contradictions and conflicts with Douyin. However, on the day of the stoppage, Dongfang Selection announced the transfer of its own APP to start broadcasting.
In fact, although the anchor and the live broadcast room are both content producers of the platform, they have no actual initiative. "Financial World Weekly" once interviewed a person in charge of a live broadcast e-commerce platform and said that Douyin itself does not want to create super anchors, because if the platform relies too much on super anchors, it is equivalent to being manipulated by others. 」
For the sake of interests, if any anchor dominates, the platform may lose its bargaining power. This is the same problem that all platforms are worried about in the attention economy. **The way to check and balance is to support middle-waist anchors, rookie anchors and vertical talents.
The Tatsuren also had their own siege. In addition to the constraints of the platform, their relationship with the institutions behind them is also delicate.
MCN agency is the booster of Internet celebrity anchors, Dongfang Selection is a super-large MCN agency, Dong Yuhui is a veritable head, Mei ONE has Li Jiaqi, Bee Surprise Club has Wei Ya, and Weinian has Li Ziqi.
One of their common characteristics is that after these well-known anchors and influencers, there is no second head anchor or influencer. The distribution of the interests of the anchor is very important. Compared with Dong Yuhui, who selected himself as a salesman in the East, Li Jiaqi is more closely bound to Mei One.
Li Jiaqi is not only the top anchor of Meione, but also a partner. This is a concession made by Mei ONE on his own initiative, giving Li Jiaqi a more practical right to speak. After the Dong Yuhui Essay incident, Luo Yonghao posted on Weibo to defend Dong Yuhui, hoping that he could get a fair distribution of market value. In his blog post, he wrote that both Luo Yonghao and Li Jiaqi took most of the proceeds from the institution, while Dong Yuhui only received a fraction of the profits.
Earlier, the most intense contradiction between the institution and the talent was Wei Nian and Li Ziqi. The two sides spent more than 800 days because of the equity dispute. At the moment when the traffic is fleeting, Li Ziqi, who has disappeared and stopped, has not yet returned.
The conflict of interests with MCN institutions is only one of them, and in 2023, Li Jiaqi and Dong Yuhui will have many public opinion crises, indicating that the relationship between anchors and users is not unbreakable. Every move of the anchor is closely watched, and the slightest carelessness will cause an uproar.
Brands are sandwiched between anchors and platforms, and conflicts are also on the verge of breaking out.
In the past and even today, the low price of the live broadcast room has always been the source of motivation for the anchor's call. A large number of fans gather in a live broadcast room to achieve a large number of orders, which has an instantaneous pulse effect.
Brand merchants have to use platforms and anchor channels to sell products, but in this process, the pricing power of products is often transferred to the party with strong traffic. So in 2023, Li Jiaqi and Brother Xiao Yang will feel the pressure from the **turmoil.
3. Reduce risks and seek change
On December 18, Dong Yuhui re-identified with Dongfang Selection, senior partner and others, and appeared in the live broadcast room of Oriental Selection with Yu Minhong again. At the same time as announcing Dong Yuhui's official return, it seems to be the beginning of the road of de-glorification of the Oriental selection account.
That night, Yu Minhong said that in the future, Dongfang Selection and Dong Yuhui will jointly set up an independent studio, establish and develop a new account, and reduce the frequency of live broadcasts in Dongfang Selection.
When everyone thought that this matter was about to come to an end, Luo Yonghao didn't think so. In his opinion, if you just rely on Dong Yuhui to make money alone, no matter how much money is allocated to him, Dongfang Selection is still just a MCN in the capital market, and only by completing the de-Dong Yuhui can you tell the story of an e-commerce company or a brand product company, and the valuation of these two types of companies is worlds apart, so there will be variables in the future.
De-super-head is the only way for live broadcast e-commerce to transition to a stable commercial body. Luo Yonghao's Make a Friend live broadcast room is a typical example of the industry's de-heading.
Luo Yonghao revealed in a blog post on December 16 that the de-Luohua of making a friend is basically completed, and now whether he broadcasts it or not, the impact on the company's revenue is only a few percentage points. At the same time, however, he stressed that this was done 100 percent with his personal cooperation. 」
In the midst of the changes, a trend that everyone can observe is that whether it is **, Douyin, or Xiaohongshu, **, there are more and more self-broadcasts and store broadcasts by merchants. It is more obvious that in 2023 Double 11, ** the store broadcast is running.
This is the first time that a merchant has achieved breakthrough results in the form of store broadcast instead of delivery in the 7 years since the live broadcast was launched. The storecast has become an accelerator for the brand's business.
Not long ago, Cheng Daofang, the person in charge of the live broadcast, told Xinberry Daybreak and others that in 2023, live broadcast e-commerce will enter the middle and late stages, and now it will return to the essence of e-commerce and compete for goods, ** and services. Merchants who know more about goods, that is, people with professional backgrounds, will have more opportunities to conduct e-commerce live broadcasts.
From an internal perspective, 2023 is the first year of the outbreak of store broadcasting, and more professional merchants will stand up for shopping guides in the future. According to data, in the past year, there have been more than 27,000 live broadcast rooms in stores with a turnover of more than one million, and nearly 4,000 stores with a turnover of more than 10 million.
Double 11 is a node where store broadcasts are concentrated. In Xiaohongshu, on Double 11 in 2023, storecasting has also become a new growth engine for Xiaohongshu's e-commerce. In the past, it was more likely that real brand owners or brand designers sat in front of the screen, but now more store broadcasters are full-time employees of the brand. Shopcast has also logically become one of the trilogy of Xiaohongshu's merchant operations.
Unlike Xiaohongshu and Douyin Kuaishou, as of today, there is no head anchor born in ** e-commerce. This is influenced by WeChat's decentralized product philosophy, which is suitable for the growth of the brand.
Li Hao, the founder of Karth Academy, mentioned in his advice to brands and merchants that will enter the market in the second half of 2023 that merchants should have matrix operation thinking. ** number is not completely centralized distribution, there is a strong social recommendation logic, and the matrix operation can cover different audiences in a refined manner.
So we also saw that the down jacket brand Yaya, which adopted the matrix style of play, took the lead in running out. Suki, the head of public relations of the down jacket brand Duck Duck, revealed that in November last year, Duck Duck officially launched the first e-commerce business, and finally the GMV in the peak season of 2022 exceeded 30 million yuan.