New Year's Eve speeches receded, and Luo Zhenyu lost more than 10 million tickets this year

Written by Wang Yuting, a weekly magazine of Finance and Economics

Editor/You Yong

The business of New Year's Eve speeches is not good this year.

On December 28, due to the impact of the epidemic, Shenzhen Satellite TV issued an announcement that Luo Zhenyu's New Year's Eve speech originally scheduled to be held in Chengdu High-tech Zone will no longer be arranged for the audience to enter the venue, and all ticket payment will be refunded in full.

This is the first time that Luo Zhenyu's "Friend of Time" New Year's Eve speech has been held in 6 years. In 2015, Luo Zhenyu shouted out the slogan of "Knowledge New Year", one person and one screen, reviewing the important events of the past year and predicting the business trends in the new year. This form of New Year's Eve speech was once sought after.

Luo Zhenyu once made a wish that the "Friend of Time" project would last for twenty years. Now, halfway through the twenty-year contract, this former "anxiety seller" is now extremely anxious.

Ticket losses are expected to exceed 10 million

According to the original plan, Luo Zhenyu will appear at the Wuliangye Chengdu Financial City Performing Arts Center on the evening of December 31, 2021, with an audience of 12,000 sitting under the stage. Luo Zhenyu will give a New Year's Eve speech lasting more than 4 hours, sharing 53 stories. But the impact of the epidemic has turned 12,000 listeners into 12,000 empty seats.

Luo Zhenyu's biggest anxiety at the moment comes from the direct economic loss caused by the transfer of the speech to the Internet. Since 2016, this New Year's Eve speech that has been planned for more than a month has been regarded as the top priority of Luo Zhenyu's Thinking Creation Company, and the revenue of the annual speech has contributed greatly to the company's annual revenue.

The Revenue of the New Year's Eve Speech is mainly composed of three parts: First, the ticket revenue, according to the Thinking Creation Prospectus, from 2016 to 2019, the ticket sales flow was 8.55 million yuan, 9.34 million yuan, 9.58 million yuan and 12.82 million yuan, and the number of ticket buyers was 5769, 5922, 5781 and 7838 people, respectively, and the average ticket price was 1483 yuan, 1578 yuan, 1657 yuan and 1636 yuan. Even in 2020, when the epidemic has affected, there are still 4.95 million yuan in the account.

"Finance and Economics" Weekly opened the ticket purchase channel and found that this year's ticket price is divided into 980 yuan, 1680 yuan, 2980 yuan and 4680 yuan four gears, the price is higher than in previous years. According to the minimum fare conservative calculation, the revenue generated by offline tickets in 2021 will also exceed 11.7 million.

In contrast, the year-end speech of Wu Xiaobo, another major participant in the New Year's Eve speech and a financial writer, will have a much smaller money-making effect. According to the information disclosed by All Access Education in response to the Inquiry of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in response to the 96% equity of Hangzhou Bajiuling Cultural and Creative Co., Ltd., in 2017 and 2018, Wu Xiaobo's year-end show received 2.5105 million and 2.7152 million ticket revenues, far less than Luo Zhenyu's income in the same year. However, this year, Wu Xiaobo did not sell offline tickets and chose to hold it online from the beginning.

Tickets are only the most obvious part of the speech revenue, and the advertising sponsors located upstream are the real financiers of "Friends of Time". Since 2017, the number of sponsors of New Year's Eve speeches has exceeded 10, and the total sponsorship revenue in 2020 has reached 52.62 million yuan.

There are also many sponsors this year, judging from the warm-up poster of the speech it has released, this year's partners include nearly 10 brands such as Jane One Tile, Pizza Hut, and Six Walnuts. Luo Zhenyu himself also spared no effort to cheer for sponsors on Weibo, and the advertising videos were one after another.

In addition, the broadcast rights of speeches are also a revenue that cannot be ignored. Over the years, the TV broadcasting platform has always chosen Shenzhen Satellite TV, but the video platform has switched from the previous Youku to the current watermelon video.

Knowledge Breaks new year from fire to low tide

The knowledge New Year debut was staged in 2015, which was also the year that Luo Zhenyu founded the APP. Under the outlet of knowledge payment, the New Year's Eve speech accurately cut to the pain points of the times and became famous in the First World War.

According to public data, the second "Friend of Time", that is, the last day of 2016, Luo Zhenyu took advantage of the victory to chase Shenzhen Satellite TV to win the first place in the same period of 11 o'clock that night, which was also the first first of Shenzhen Satellite TV since its establishment in 1984. Although this data has also been questioned by other media since then, it is not easy to break through in the evening party where a large number of celebrities gather.

In the years that followed, the New Year's Eve became another form of carnival after the large-scale singing and dancing evenings. With high-density comparative sentences, legendary business stories and continuous output of golden sentences, Knowledge New Year has gained a group of loyal fans.

They wait in front of the screen on the last night of the year, waiting like a sponge to absorb nutrients, and more young people from time to time use pens to copy golden sentences so that they can find a brilliant subtitle for their year-end summary PPT.

However, after a few years of doing so, there is less high-quality content, the routine is gradually being explored, and the audience who has lost its freshness has begun to have aesthetic fatigue.

"It sounds like chicken soup for the soul, and some don't even give you a spoon." He Run, who has been paying attention to the New Year's Eve speech since 2016, told Caijing Tianxia Weekly that today's speech is more like a large-scale self-touching, and the audience can draw little effective information from it, blindly emphasizing problems and risks, but rarely proposing solutions.

"Why do I have to work so hard for a year, and on the last day, I still have to be so anxious, is it not good to look relaxed?" He Run lamented that after 2020, she has never clicked on any knowledge New Year's link.

And the audience portrait of knowledge speech is becoming more and more blurred. Elderly audiences disdain to listen to the so-called "experience" that lasts for more than four hours, preferring lively cross-talk songs and dances; while younger audiences are increasingly resistant to year-end "painting cakes", and their tolerance for public advertising implants is also decreasing.

Therefore, the loss of audiences has become inevitable, and the decline in ratings is expected. According to the statistics of the 2019-2020 New Year's Eve speech, the "Friends of Time" ratings have fallen out of the top ten, and the New Year's Eve party of various TV stations is still the mainstream.

"Intellectuals" are set up in dilution

Compared with the ebb and flow of the "Knowledge New Year", what is more worrying is that the people of "intellectuals" such as Luo Zhenyu and Wu Xiaobo are set up in dilution.

"I am an intellectual, and all your courses in the end are not the delivery of knowledge, but a clear, trustworthy personality." Luo Zhenyu said this in a previous interview with the media. The voice of the program's comment area was everywhere, and netizens were dissatisfied with Luo Zhenyu's knowledge argument for a long time.

This dissatisfaction can be traced back to the time when Luo Zhenyu participated in the popular variety show "Strange Story", originally he thought that participating in high-topic network variety shows could greatly enhance his personal influence and increase the brand premium by the way. However, many of the views expressed by Luo Zhenyu in the program mostly have a certain sense of overlook, and there are obvious differences of opinion with some contestants.

In the debate field where each episode of the show can give birth to multiple Weibo hot searches, Luo Zhenyu has always been depressed. This phenomenon was also verified in the mentor teaming link, and after the program was broadcast, more netizens shouted, asking teacher Luo Zhenyu to quit the strange "Strange Story".

Also trapped in the label of "intellectual" is Wu Xiaobo. Wu Xiaobo has publicly stated that most people in society are useless people, because the world does not need many people to think about so many problems at the same time, and the elitist color is about to come out and is widely criticized by the outside world.

As everyone knows, with the rapid development of mobile Internet, the threshold of communication access has been lowered, the channels for obtaining knowledge are being greatly enriched, and people are embracing the era of pan-knowledge. The garden floral bloggers on Kuaishou, the digital technology up masters in The B station, and the beauty and wear KOC in the Little Red Book are all evolving into producers and transmitters of knowledge.

On the third day after "Friends of Time" announced the refund, Luo Zhenyu responded to the matter by quoting Teacher Li Songwei on the official WeChat public account of Shenzhen Satellite TV, "There will always be uncertainty in this world." Many people use uncertainty as a reason for their own changes. He saw himself as one of the few certainties in the world.

Luo Zhenyu is still as confident as ever, but there is also certainty: he needs to constantly fight the aesthetic fatigue of the audience to make it possible to sustain this speech for 20 years.

This article is originally produced by AI Finance and Economics, an account of Caijing Tianxia Weekly, without permission, please do not reprint it on any channel or platform. Violators will be prosecuted.