Image source @ Visual China
Text | Wu Yiyi, author | Salted fish, supervising producer | Wu Shuyi
Internet novelties have been stubble after stubble, and now even the metaphysical track has a backstabbing wave.
From "Alex is the Uncle" who debuted on Weibo in 2010 to Tao Baibai who exploded in Douyin in 2021, from the simple and rude web version of fortune telling to various astrological apps merged between China and the West, the Internet metaphysical track has come all the way, growing in secret and harvesting vigorously.
Especially in the past two years, douyin has worshiped the big Buddha, B station has counted tarot, the public account has sought gossip and six masters, and the wind of metaphysics has been racing for a while, and there is a momentum of great success that is about to be achieved in stages.
However, a brake at the end of 2021 caught the masters standing on the Internet metaphysics track by surprise and ushered in a frozen moment - with the imminent implementation of the "Internet Religious Information Service Management Measures" on March 1, 2022, the Internet metaphysics track is also hanging.
01 Risk
Can't tell fortunes on e-commerce platforms.
In the past two months, many occult enthusiasts have discovered that on the e-commerce platform, online fortune telling and tarot divination, which are still very hot in the first half of 2021, are difficult to retrieve relevant content in the second half of the year.
Nowadays, entering "tarot cards, astrology", most of them show that there are no search results, and entering "divination, fortune telling" will jump to the public welfare page. On Pinduoduo, searching for products related to "divination, fortune telling, tarot" also shows no search results.
Other content communities such as Xiaohongshu, B station, Douban, etc., enter relevant entries, although they can still jump out of the content, but most of the results of the page are hung at the top of a line of risk tips.
In the Weibo Ziwei Doudou Super Talk, some users published blog posts arguing that Internet metaphysics "will turn more into the invisible place" and that "profiteers will be more profitable".
Apparently, an invisible evacuation is taking place on the Internet metaphysical track, and just a few months ago it was recognized as "a good business."
Previously, when Tao Baibai relied on constellations to analyze the vibrato explosion, there were countless media reviews of various grand events in the Internet metaphysics track, from multiple rounds of financing from Weibo head constellation IP colleagues, founder billions of dollar cash- out, to various numerology APP tricks to attract gold, and then to the newly rising constellation bloggers on the short video platform, Chinese and Western metaphysics, while relying on "Internet +" to achieve industrial upgrading, while relying on social media to attract gold to make profits.
At its peak, metaphysics created "gods" and won tens of millions of dollars in financing.
According to the investment community, since 2014, a number of companies whose business is numerology divination have received financing from well-known capital. For example, the "Constellation Goddess", founded by the entertainment industry goddess Mo Xiaoqi, in 2017, received a total of 30 million yuan of A round financing from Zuoyi Capital, Mizuki Capital, Xiaomi and Wei Yue Venture Capital.
Regarded as The "Test" of China's largest constellation community APP, it was invested 19.2 million by Lily.com in 2017. In addition, many metaphysical entrepreneurial projects such as Xingzhi, Zhanxin, Blue Star Man, And Taoxi have received millions, or even tens of millions, of financing.
Although after entering the 20th generation, the investment fever of the Internet metaphysical track has gradually cooled down, and after 2020, it is almost impossible to retrieve new investment and financing information, but thanks to the prosperity of video culture, Internet metaphysical bloggers are rising day by day.
B station, with 660,000 fans of tarot divination UP master, an hour of charge up to 2,000 yuan, WeChat Mini Program, someone sells astrology courses, each lesson from tens of yuan to hundreds of yuan range, in the Little Red Book, there is no lack of opportunities to sell transshipment crystals, imperial guard metaphysical bloggers.
02 Steering
Of course, the emergence of this trend is not accidental.
Since the well-known feng shui big V "Shen Stick Bureau" was sealed in 2018, the Internet metaphysical track has vaguely begun to have this differentiation. On the one hand, since 2018, the successive overthrow of the Shenwan Bureau and AI fortune telling has made investment institutions gradually aware of the uncertainty of the metaphysical track, on the other hand, the self-censorship of the superimposed content platform by policy factors has given practitioners a sense of "guns out of the head bird".
Therefore, compared with the previous team entrepreneurship and enterprise operation, the Internet metaphysics practitioners in the past two years are more inclined to fight alone, large bloggers rely on the traffic exposure of personal IP to obtain advertising monetization, while small and medium-sized fortune tellers are more inclined to 1V1 fees in the community.
Especially after the promulgation of the "Measures for the Administration of Internet Religious Information Services" in 2021, not only have e-commerce platforms removed shops related to divination and fortune telling, but second-hand resale apps such as idle fish have also begun to clean up the metaphysical content in the platform.
Under the undercurrent, a series of Internet metaphysics businesses such as Taobao fortune telling and Pinduoduo divination have fully entered the frozen period, and the entrepreneurial story of fortune tellers moving into office buildings to engage in numerology big data has also begun to fade from public view.
Today, even communities such as testing, which are already relatively head-headed, no longer hang divination, fortune telling, and other contents on the surface, but exist in a more obscure form.
Open the test app, click on the "Ask" tab, will enter the dialogue page, in this page, enter "divination, fortune telling" and other words, will jump out of the sensitive word prompt.
In the app store, the app also conceals metaphysical descriptions and instead positions itself as a "constellation psycho-emotional Q&A community".
03 Camouflage
A deeper conceptual package spread out on the Internet metaphysical track.
The metaphysical APP that started by fortune telling and divination began to paste the "gold" of psychology on the body, and the eloquent metaphysical entrepreneurs began to wash the ground "astrology is not metaphysics, there is a set of meticulous big data system."
In September 2021, some media reported on a new profession - psychological astrologer - from a first-person perspective. At the time, the title read: I am a psychological astrologer, astrology is not metaphysics, it is a set of meticulous big data system.
However, no matter how you go through the full text of the interview, you may not be able to figure out how the psychological astrologer with the flower name "Jiang Panda" is actually big data, she thinks that she is "the translator of the stars and the transmitter of information", but in depth, what kind of information can the distant stars convey?
In contrast, the big data theory of AI fortune telling that has been exposed by CCTV is more reasonable.
Some media have interviewed businesses that sell AI fortune telling software, and merchants said that the database of AI fortune telling software generally stores hundreds of data on facial test results, and these calculations that describe the horoscope are generally prepared templates in advance, including test results that also appear randomly.
"In other words, if you upload the same photo twice, you may have different analysis results; Uploading different photos twice may also produce the same analysis results. Here's a matter of probability."
Yes, probability—or rather, the occult itself is a matter of probability.
Tao Baibai, a constellation blogger who exploded last year, once admitted in an interview with the media that "getting people's resonance and catching people's pain points" is a problem he will consider when writing. And one of his self-described talents is "to be good at finding rules, summarizing and summarizing, and then being able to express his ideas in a way that makes others feel very reasonable, and then subtly making others feel that this thing is very helpful after it is said."
At this end of probability are the diviners, who distill a broad, general, descriptive language that, when exquisitely combined, is exported to the outside world. At the other end of the probability is the seeker, who clearly hopes that the astrologer's prediction is directed at him alone, but in fact the guidance is often obtained from a common interpretation.
What is even more lamentable is that the younger generation clicks on the screen to share today's horoscope, while crossing the Barnum effect and confirmatory bias in popular science videos. They may not be unaware that there are many scientific interpretations behind metaphysics, but they still enjoy it.
Under a popular science post on astrology in the fruit shell, someone summed up the younger generation's pursuit of the occult in this way: the fortune-telling of the previous generation may have stemmed from ignorance, and most of the divination of this generation originated from insoluble solutions.
This bears a distant resemblance to Alain De Botton's lament in "Falling in Love with Romance": "The enduring nature of astrology and fortune telling shows how much we desire to be understood."
Yes, "the astrologer only wants guidance, any guidance can be done", even he himself wonders what kind of business license the astrology hall on the streets of Shanghai has.
04 Market
A few years ago, Pencil Road wrote an industry report related to divination.
The report interviewed a founder from a fortune teller app who thought he was on a market of more than 100 billion. In his view, China has about 1.4 billion people, 16-50 years old target user population accounted for about 45%, of which about 16% of the paid users, their average annual minimum consumption for fortune telling is 1,000 yuan, in total, this is a market of more than 100 billion.
And the products he founded, if they can achieve a market share of 20%, then the average annual market size can reach 20 billion yuan.
But the fortune teller is so busy answering questions for others that he may have forgotten to do it for himself.
When the bell rang in 2022, Gaorenhui no longer had the "999 On-site Feng Shui" business and became a "platform for providing services such as marriage, career, and psychological counseling". Even, in order to avoid risks, the attention push language of the public account has become "system upgrade".
In contrast, the 100 billion market of overseas "masters" is the real 100 billion.
Four of India's largest national businesses, "ABCD", have been summarized: A-Astrology astrology, B-Bollywood Bollywood, C-Cricket Cricket, and D-Devotion Religion.
Among them, astrology is not only considered to be the same national business as Bollywood, cricket, religion, and even has a science and technology path, according to statistics, in India, more than 30 universities have opened undergraduate and master's degrees in astrology. There are even Chinese entrepreneurs who rush overseas to pan for gold.
According to 36KR, an astrology software called Guruji, founded by Chinese entrepreneurs, has received millions of dollars in Series A funding from Lightspeed India and Lightspeed China. The founder's vision is to become "india's largest astrology platform."
Not only in India, but also in the United States, astrology apps are also popular. A 2021 Time magazine article mentioned: "As this session of Young Americans becomes more superstitious, many astrology apps have gained huge business opportunities, venture capital has also provided the latter with a large amount of money, and at most an APP development team Co-Star has received the equivalent of 97 million yuan and $15 million in financing."
Even more interesting is the astrological concept that the company peddled. In addition to hiring astrologers, Co-Star uses astrological information from NASA to track the real-time motion of planets and stars to provide accurate astrological ranges, and it also makes itself stressed about using artificial intelligence to calculate and analyze the data.
Under this set of high-tech astrology, Co-Star's business is indeed booming, and even on social media, astrology has spawned widely popular meme accounts and new micro-social software.
05 A summary
Nowadays, although the e-commerce platform has removed the fortune telling and divination store, there are still people selling this service in the hidden corner of the Internet.
In the astrology APP test, this service has been transformed into a form of emotional counseling, the fortune teller is not called a fortune teller, but a master; in the various metaphysical super words on Weibo, the masters cannot touch the "fate lord" without adding WeChat.
Obviously, the wealth code on the surface is gone, but the business of occult peddling is not yet cold.