Text | Vince An
After the rise of short videos, for Tik Tok, star-making seems to happen overnight. From 2017 to 2018, Xiao Ye gained tens of millions of fans from an unknown ordinary person because of some interesting videos, and even became popular on YouTube abroad.
There is Wen Wan, a former elder sister in Tik Tok, who once became popular with her video of rocking with music in the parking lot, and the number of fans in Tik Tok exceeded 10 million in ten days. In 2018, with a hip-hop dance video, Degula K gained 5 million fans in just ten days. At present, her fans have exceeded 25 million. It is reported that the price of one of her videos is over 400,000, which has surpassed her classmate "Office Xiao Ye".
Even so, the vitality of Tik Tok online celebrity is hard to last. Is this caused by platform users’ aesthetic fatigue, liking the new and hating the old? There is no IP with long-term precipitation, so today, when the live broadcast boom is sweeping, Tik Tok seems to be somewhat behind Aauto Quicker and Ali.
There is no IP in online celebrity, Tik Tok
Everything that is quick may also rot quickly.
On January 6th, the Annual Report of Content Industry in 2020 released by the new list mentioned that only 1.4% of the Top100 accounts in Tik Tok were listed for more than 10 times. Most accounts are quiet or even disappear after a night of scenery, which makes people wonder at the fast iteration speed of Tik Tok and online celebrity.
According to media reports, in August, 2019, two children made popcorn videos after imitating a pop can in Tik Tok. Because they didn’t have relevant knowledge, they were injured in an explosion, and one of them died unfortunately. In view of the suspicion of guidance, on September 17, 2019, one family member and Onogata signed a settlement agreement. Previously, the imitated "Office Xiao Ye" team had paid the two parties a total of about 800,000 yuan in aid.
Since then, Xiao Ye’s office has been closed one after another, and he has not returned until now. At present, the update of Xiao Ye in the office is basically the content of new colleagues, and the broadcast volume is not as good as before.
Wen Wan’s side, before enjoying the bonus of online celebrity traffic, was given the title by Tik Tok. This phenomenal online celebrity used to have a large amount of privacy outflow, and his plastic surgery, dropping out of school and hanging out in nightclubs … were not too likable. And it’s hard to brush Dygula K in Tik Tok. Some netizens questioned, "It’s all the popularity of brushing. I accidentally saw her live broadcast that day, and the live broadcast room was hundreds of people" …
It is worth mentioning that Li Ziqi, with his short pastoral video, has made countless fans around the world, and the total revenue of YouTube and Taobao stores is said to exceed 100 million. In August 2018, her Tmall store "Liziqi Flagship Store" officially opened. On the day when the store was launched, the sales volume of some commodities exceeded 10,000; After three days on the line, the sales reached 10 million yuan, but now the sales of its popular food products only break through 10 thousand per month. According to the Baidu index, its attention has generally dropped by more than 60% compared with the peak period.
A new trip that I can’t catch up with
Some insiders told Yiming. com that the active cycle of short video online celebrity is mostly within half a year.
At the moment when the algorithm is in power, in the fragmented time, if you want to attract attention and praise, you can only do entertainment and eye-catching content. In order not to make mistakes and save time and cost, the creator must seize the platform users in just a few minutes or even dozens of seconds, but in fact, there are very few valuable contents that users can watch in this process.
Of course, short video players are mostly just for fun. Therefore, even the creators who are eager to create powder-sucking through deep content have to compromise the user’s preferences because of the data such as the number of fans and the number of likes, and follow the trend of some short videos.
According to the Annual Report of Content Industry in 2020 released by the new list, in 2019, 53.2% of the accounts were on the TOP100 of WeChat monthly list, 9.7% were on the TOP100 of Taobao monthly list, and 1.4% were in Tik Tok.
"Many online celebrity actually became popular at first without knowing what was going on, perhaps just catching up with a hot spot or catering to a certain trend," a senior practitioner in an industry said in an interview with Yiming. "But they lack the ability to follow up, so even if they stand out at once, they will soon disappear from everyone."
An executive of MCN organization in Shanghai thinks that Tik Tok has a staged content tendency and traffic support, because once the creators make a little achievement, they are easy to form path dependence, and it is difficult to get out of the comfort zone, such as Dracula K. Perhaps at first, everyone was interested in singing and dancing, and Tik Tok also gave such creators a traffic tilt, so that they could get higher-frequency exposure. However, as time goes by, users’ sensitivity to such short videos decreases, and the stimulation threshold keeps increasing, that is, aesthetic fatigue in the usual sense.
In order to revitalize traffic, Tik Tok can only use new forms to incite the ecological development of platform content, as can be seen from the revision of Tik Tok at the beginning of last year. In April last year, Tik Tok announced the full opening of users’ 1-minute video rights, and launched the "Vlog Billion Traffic Support Plan" to encourage ordinary users to record their lives and create content in a richer way.
Prior to this, new users could only shoot short videos for 15 seconds, and it took 1,000 fans to open a video for 1 minute. However, the decline in user stickiness and the increasingly serious homogenization of content have forced Tik Tok to speed up the pace of reform. Moreover, the longer the duration, the more sticky the users are. After all, Tik Tok mainly focused on harvesting the fragmentation time of users.
However, more and more companies are adding vlog to short videos, and platforms such as Baidu Good-looking, Weibo and bilibili are all eyeing up. Subsequently, live broadcast with goods suddenly rose, and Li Jiaqi and Viya helped Taobao refocus, which became a hot topic in the limelight. Aauto Quicker, however, is also working with Xin to cut the cake of live traffic.
Can’t catch the live broadcast, it’s hard to compete.
Live e-commerce has always been a shortcoming of Tik Tok, and advertising business is its lifeblood. Based on the characteristics of algorithm recommendation and centralized traffic distribution, Tik Tok’s advertising has a strong diversion effect, but in this mode, users are not very sticky, and private domain traffic is difficult to obtain and gather, which makes it difficult to form an e-commerce head anchor by relying on the natural incubation of the community.
Anxious, Tik Tok saw Ali and Aauto Quicker laughing and proudly broadcasting the goods, and happened to hit it off with Lao Luo, who was working to pay off debts. According to Tik Tok’s data, the first live broadcast in Luo Yonghao lasted for 3 hours and 17 minutes, with a total of 48.922 million people watching, of which 588,000 people gave gifts, with a total harvest of 36.327 million sound waves, 23 goods were put on the shelves, and the total payment transaction amount exceeded 110 million yuan.
The good performance of the first show made Tik Tok very excited, and the industry even thought that Tik Tok had the strength to compete with Taobao and Aauto Quicker. However, the debut is the peak. From April 1 to now, there are 14 live broadcasts in more than three months. The data of Lao Luo’s live broadcast room has been declining all the way, and the sales volume has dropped by 80% compared with the first one.
To Tik Tok’s surprise, Lao Luo didn’t become the king with goods comparable to Li Jiaqi and Viya. According to the June list data of GMV Monthly List of Live E-commerce Anchors released by WeMedia, Viya, Simba and Li Jiaqi are still in the top three rankings, but Luo Yonghao ranked 47th.
Nowadays, the first generation of online celebrity in Tik Tok has either fallen or failed to grasp the outlet of live broadcast with goods, and is silent and nameless. But Tik Tok itself, except advertising business, has no more sustainable commercial value. Although the trend of live e-commerce is clear, it is difficult for Tik Tok and Tik Tok online celebrity to rewrite their short-lived fate.
On the other hand, it reveals that the core of e-commerce still lies in the control of supply chain, but so far we have not seen the advantages of Tik Tok in these places. Therefore, once the traffic is exhausted, and there is no idea of sustainable and diversified development, Tik Tok can only be on the defensive in the competition of other platforms.