Image source @ Visual China
Wen 丨 Photon Planet, Author 丨 He Furong, Editor 丨 Wu Xianzhi
The head of business of a head MCN agency told Photon Planet: "Now it is getting easier and easier to cash out mid-waist and even tail masters, and there is no one to vote." ”
After a number of head anchors thunderstorm, the topic of a wider range of mid-waist masters has been continuously improved, and both platforms, institutions and brands are more aware of the importance of the mid-waist to the entire industry ecology.
With the peaking of traffic growth on various content platforms, many people believe that they are currently at the end of content entrepreneurship, and this conclusion mainly comes from the fact that the probability of the industry growing out of the head is getting lower and lower.
Content and creator saturation, changes in platform support mechanisms, and serious homogenization of content are the main reasons that hinder the growth of talents as heads.
For a period of time, the influence of the head has been continuously magnified, and they once had the strongest monetization ability and a great deal of voice in terms of platform and brand. More mid-rise and tail creators have become the runners of this wealth-making activity.
However, as the industry moves towards refined operation, the monetization logic of the entire content ecology is also more perfect and benign, many brands no longer rely solely on the number of fans as the delivery standard, and the industry is changing from extensive marketing with wide hands to rational delivery in pursuit of precision and cost performance.
More and more mid-rise masters, and even tail masters, are being seen in the process.
In a content ecology, the waist and tail creative groups undoubtedly account for the largest proportion, and if the platform wants to form a benign creative ecology, it must not ignore the commercialization of this group.
Based on the appeal of the platform, brand side and other parties, these talents seem to be ushering in the spring.
There is no shortage of mid-rise talents for advertising
Short videos are becoming the direction of employment for young people.
A short video practitioner said that as long as you have ideas and understand creativity, content entrepreneurship is still a good window in recent years, and most of the creators who can do the middle waist of the platform will be more moist than ordinary workers.
More and more people are flocking to this industry, but it also reflects the increase in market demand. Content marketing has exploded in recent years, and many emerging brands have relied on content to break the circle and make articles on content.
This also indirectly fuels the growth space of content creators.
Xie Wen is a post-95 Xiaohongshu clothing and wearing graphic blogger, whose fans are about 120,000, and more than 100,000 fans have been called a waist master on the Xiaohongshu platform. In September 2020, shortly after entering the workplace, she learned about the operational logic of platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Douyin because of her work, and then began to send Xiaohongshu notes for the first time.
She has her own main business – working in a small company with relatively plenty of time. "I noticed that there were a lot of bloggers sharing their outfits on the Little Red Book, which felt very interesting, at that time, I simply liked to take pictures, and sent some wear content in the original intention of sharing." Unexpectedly attracted a lot of fans.
It wasn't until she received her first promotion offer two months later that she decided to see it as a viable side hustle, when she had only about 1,000 followers.
"At that time, a relatively niche clothing brand asked me to send a photo, and a note was about 150 yuan." The first advertisement was not expensive, but it aroused her desire to create.
As the number of fans gradually grew, she received more and more promotion invitations, and the monthly income of tens of thousands of fans was several thousand yuan. According to her, the number of fans in 1-30,000 hours of a promotion of the offer is about 600 yuan, 3-50,000 hours of each about 1,000 yuan.
Two months ago, her fans grew to 100,000+, and she quit her job to become a full-time wear blogger. Because its content is vertical enough, Xie Wen's monetization path seems to be going relatively smoothly. "Little Red Book is now just about working more, and your income depends on how often you update and receive ads." Now Xie Wen's monthly advertising is controlled at about five or six, and now her income has far exceeded her monthly salary at that time.
With the launch of douyin graphic content, its douyin number is also taking advantage of the platform traffic support gradually improved.
An MCN person who specializes in Xiaohongshu said: "Xiaohongshu has hundreds of fans as vegetarians, thousands of KOCs, and more KOLs. Generally, the number of fans at 600,000+ can be regarded as the head of the platform. According to the needs of the brand, as long as your content is good, you can generally receive advertisements, and the difference is in the price. ”
In addition, Photon Planet learned from a Douyin middle-waist shop explorer in Chongqing with more than 2 million fans that he promoted a store in the same city at about 8,000 yuan, and the price in different places was higher. Coupled with the support of the platform for local life business now, the realization of such talents is more optimistic.
With the gradual improvement of the ecosystem of each platform and the change of brand demand, the fan theory has not worked. On the contrary, those account positioning is accurate, the content quality is good enough, and the middle waist masters in the growth period are becoming more and more popular.
Brand demand tends to be rational
"Now the brand side is not a fool, some are for product publicity, some are for sales conversion." The brand side chooses you must have his standard of measurement. An intermediary between the docking brand and the MCN agency said.
She also said that in the past one or two years, the factors to be considered when the brand side chooses the talent to promote have obviously increased compared with previous years, and the price, the number of fans, fan portraits, the number of forwarded likes of the work, and the amount of data conversion in the past will be seen. Now no matter which platform it is, the delivery is to look at the "quality" rather than the "quantity".
Compared with the previous more pursuit of the head, focus on the number of fans of the delivery method is not the same, now the industry has formed a more mature set of marketing methods, brands know better what they want.
The above-mentioned MCN person told Photon Planet that during the recent 2021 Double Eleven period, the water of freedom of YSL and the delivery of Nature Hall are some waist numbers, that is, the number of fans on Douyin is millions, and the fan base is dominated by mature female users.
"It's mainly about product positioning, which is different and the audience is different. For example, YSL Water of Freedom has said that it is not suitable for little girls in many grass content, and it is recommended that mature women aged 25+ plant grass. ”
The advantage of selecting mid-waist talents with accurate audiences for delivery is that the overall price is not high for the brand side, and most of the fans of mid-waist talents are vertical enough, so the brand placement is more accurate. The audience of head masters is wide, and their precision range will also shrink synchronously.
The net red food brand "Wang Full" is to break the circle in Xiaohongshu through content promotion. It reaches a wide audience in advertising with intensive mid-rise KOLs. Wang's popularity on the whole network not only relies on the high fit of its products with the tastes of young people, but also closely related to its advertising mode that focuses on traffic investment in the middle waist.
Yao Jing, founder of Wang Fengfeng, once said, "From the perspective of new media, we feel that the traffic is sinking more and more from the head, for example, the original few bloggers who rely on the head can drive some user volume, but now you will find that users are more and more dispersed, may now be thousands of small bloggers, but their stickiness with users is also very good, and this change in traffic has also given new brands the opportunity." ”
At the same time, the above-mentioned intermediary said that due to the saturation of the growth of many head large fans, brands are more inclined to mid-waist masters in the rising period when launching. On the one hand, because the head price is too high, it is impossible to reinvest for a long time. In addition, because the fans in the growth stage are relatively more active, the middle-waist bloggers with a relatively high explosive rate have become the best choice for many brands.
In addition, with the rise of content platforms such as short videos in recent years, live e-commerce and content e-commerce have continuously broken the traffic distribution principle of traditional e-commerce centralization, and more emerging domestic brands have thus ushered in the opportunity to break the circle.
The increased demand for the mid-waist group in the market is closely related to its own differentiated advantages. More and more mid-waist masters have been seen, which is also the result of the refined operation of the industry.
Mid-waist master = benign ecology?
From the perspective of the platform, it is also the trend of the times to support mid-waist masters.
In the past year or so, the head platforms based on Douyin, Kuaishou and Taobao Live have introduced support plans for mid-waist talents. One of the most typical is the rapid and drastic de-heading, supporting the mid-waist.
Recently, Taobao Live Weiya, Sydney and other head anchors have thunderstormed, which further confirms that the risk factors attached to the platform when the influence of the head talent is too large are also greater. Too much dependence on the head is not conducive to the long-term health of the platform ecology.
Whether it is Kuaishou Simba, or Taobao Weiya, Li Jiaqi, the platform relies too much on the head and is easy to fall into the contradiction of the game between the two sides. Especially in the live streaming industry, once the head is formed, it will continue to strengthen, and as the head anchor continues to accumulate private domain traffic, the platform's discourse power will continue to weaken.
This is not what the platform wants to see.
And for content platforms, the original head of the talent continues to grow, and the opportunity for new people to grow into the head is becoming more and more slim. For brands and platforms, the wider mid-rise is something they have to rely on.
A Douyin account incubator said: "The powder of the douyin head is already difficult, one is because the overall traffic growth space of the platform is not large, and the second is that the growth cycle of the head master has passed and has reached the downhill stage." ”
The old man's powder tends to stagnate, and the chance of the new person growing into the head is also small.
"Nowadays, more and more institutions incubate talents in the way that they shoot whatever they want. For example, this time the disguise is very hot, then we copy. On the whole, the homogenization of platform content has been very serious, in this rapid iteration, hot spot operation mode, there is actually no content barriers, so the red cycle is shorter. ”
For institutions, the general trend of the industry is also weakening the dependence of the head of the master. An insider of an MCN agency in Hangzhou told Photon Planet that around 2019, the proportion of revenue obtained by the institution relying on the head talent was as high as 80%, and by last year, this proportion had dropped to about 40%.
"General institutions are the largest proportion of mid-waist and tail talents, and now they generate a higher and higher proportion of revenue, which is conducive to increasing the anti-risk ability of institutions."
With the increasing number of commercialization channels in the industry, the sources of revenue are more diversified. For example, the improvement of soft power such as highlighting marketing planning, as well as enhancing the monetization ability of waist and even tail masters, etc., are all in the dependence of decentralized institutions on the head.
It is well known that transitional dependence on a small group of people is an unhealthy ecological structure, and even the head, they do not have the ability to continue to produce, so transitional dependence will only increase the uncertainty of the future growth of the institution.
Shortly after the Sydney tax evasion incident, its company's live e-commerce business was directly shut down, and many people will wonder why such a large company would be scattered because of a person's thunderstorm. This is the result of relying too much on the head.
This phenomenon is not a benign internal ecology for both institutions and platforms, so weakening the influence of the head has a common demand in the industry.
Note: Respondents are pseudonyms.