Behind Liu Qihong's "net red personality", the online fitness traffic war has come to | Krypton gold event

The author | Song Wanxin

Editor| Pan Xinyi

Regarding Liu Qihong's popularity, the data is the best footnote: 7 days of rising fans of 10 million, the number of fans approaching Li Jiaqi, the number of live viewers exceeded 100 million - a top-stream Douyin fitness blogger was born.

The attention and volume of this national movement driven by Liu Qihong is itself a "miracle" of the fitness track. There is no shortage of KOLs in the fitness field, but the former Pamela and Saturday Field are only lively in the circle; there is no shortage of star companies in the fitness field, but Keep and Peloton and the like have not been able to cause a national trend.

Under the background that traditional offline gyms continue to face challenges and the trend of online sports and fitness continues to strengthen, "live broadcast + fitness" has completed the greatest empowerment of each other in Liu Qihong.

In the environment of the decline of live broadcasting on the show and the strong supervision of e-commerce live broadcasting, the platform is sparing no effort to tap the remaining live broadcast dividends in the "home economy". Live fitness is not a new thing, but only Liu Qihong is out of the circle, relying not only on professionalism, but also on tried and tested people to set up packaging.

The reason why Liu Qihong can drive a wave of fitness boom and show great commercial value is based on the premise that the trend of online fitness is becoming more and more obvious. Statistics show that from 2017 to 2021, the compound growth rate of the online fitness industry is as high as 24.1%, and the compound growth rate of the offline fitness industry in the same period is only 6.6%, and it is expected to maintain rapid growth in the next 5 years.

Despite the huge online fitness market, its road to capital realization is extremely bumpy. Even Keep, as the only Internet fitness unicorn in China, has been in a state of loss.

Keep sprinting to the listing of Hong Kong stocks, Liu Qihong's popularity in Douyin undoubtedly made the market think of it. Therefore, regarding Liu Qihong's popularity, the first question that most people think of is almost always: "Why didn't Keep sign Liu Qihong?" ”

But from the perspective of business and capital, what is more worthy of attention are those follow-up questions: In the field of fitness live broadcasting, how much can the "Liu Qihong phenomenon" be copied? With more "Liu Qihong", can the commercialization of online fitness be smooth?

01 There has been a "premeditated" explosion

Liu Qihong signed a contract with Worry-free Media, the largest MCN agency on Douyin, in December 2021, and everything was laid at this time.

A person close to worry-free media showed 36Kr the example of Liu Qihong's cooperation, which was labeled "the godfather of national fitness", "the developer of fitness equipment", "happy family" and so on.

When Wuxin Media selects anchors, "human design" is the core factor of investigation, that is, MCN needs to provide "human design required by the market". Lei Binyi, CEO of Worry-free Media, once told the media: "Our core is still to be a person. People with a sense of network, no matter what changes in the content form, can still be grasped. ”

After the static PPT in the early stage was implemented into a dynamic live broadcast screen, the final picture presented in front of the users of the live broadcast platform was: Liu Qihong and his wife wore couples in the same frame to jump, and at the end of each jump exercise, the two would "nag" with the audience. In the division of labor between the two roles, Liu Ruihong is a professional coach with a sense of humor, while his wife will often "paddle" to close the distance with the audience.

Combined with the characteristics of Liu Qihong's "Compendium of Materia Medica" version of gymnastics, it is not difficult to find that the content design of its live broadcast almost includes several major "traffic passwords": brainwashing, easy to get/easy to learn, laughter points, CP - in essence, Liu Qihong and other Internet celebrities are no different from the core, "fitness" is just the skin.

Only human design is not enough, capital is indispensable.

In the eyes of the above-mentioned industry insiders, Worry-free Media is an MCN with both eyesight and financial resources. "Big wolf dogs, Mao Maojie, Peng Sixteen, etc., are all boss Lei Binyi talked about very early, preemptively signed the contract, and then bet successfully, one after another fire, to make the worry-free so big."

The decision to sign Liu Qihong stemmed from Lei Binyi's early insight into "market needs".

On April 20, Lei Binyi revealed in the circle of friends that there are more and more knowledge live broadcasts about fitness and outdoors on Douyin, and Worry-free Media has newly established a knowledge service division this year. As can be seen in the attached figure, the top 16 of the Douyin live broadcast list were almost slaughtered by fitness-related bloggers.

Lei Binyi, CEO of Worry-free Media, has a circle of friends

The "Douyin Sports and Fitness Report" released by Douyin in March this year shows the tendency of the platform to attract and support fitness content. The report shows that the number of sports and fitness videos in 2021 increased by 134% year-on-year, fitness anchors increased by 208% year-on-year, and live broadcast revenue increased by 141% year-on-year.

In the cooperation journal obtained by 36Kr, Liu Qihong's daily quotation on a single platform in May stated that there were 157,500 short videos on Douyin 20-60s, 210,000 short videos above 60s, 500,000/quarter for short generations, and 1 million annual cooperation authorizations. In addition, Weibo short videos 150,000 / article, Little Red Book grass 15w / article, B station short video 100,000 / article, Zhihu graphic 70,000 / article.

The aforementioned industry insiders reminded that this is only the quotation on April 14, and the data is soaring every day. People familiar with the matter said that the short video above 60s of Douyin has risen to 500,000 / article on the 20th.

02 "Liu Qihong" can't help Keep

Since Liu Qihong broke out in April, keep, the star company that reflected the track, has become even more lonely. Everyone is asking Keep, why doesn't Keep have its own Liu Qihong?

The logic behind this question may be a bit far-fetched, Liu Qihong's business model is essentially MCN red logic, it is difficult to directly graft to keep this company, but to some extent it also illustrates the bottleneck problem of the fitness track: is the talent content a new increment of fitness companies? To what extent can talented people drive the fitness market?

Keep's live content has been doing for two years, but logically it's clearly different from the video platform.

Haidong, a senior researcher at the Keep Motion Research Institute, introduced to 36Kr that from the overall architecture point of view, the content on the Keep platform is divided into two parts: PGC and PUGC, the former corresponding to keep's own research and development of recording and live lessons, and the latter corresponding to "talent lessons".

Specifically, in the live classes in PGC, Keep recruited a team of coaches alone, mostly full-time, who were previously mostly coaches in offline gyms, while PUGC's talent classes, part of which were some native masters who grew up on the Keep platform, and some of which were externally introduced talents, such as Pamela and Saturday Wild.

In other words, Keep's live streaming and talent business operate in two systems and teams.

Haidong explained the reasons behind it, saying that Keep and the live coach have signed a brokerage contract, and there is a team operation live coach similar to MCN inside, and the difference between the talent coach is that Keep has a strong binding force on the live coach, but it is weak for the talent, so the company manages separately, "It can be understood that the live class produced by the coach, the live broadcast is just a form, and the essence behind it is the course itself." ”

When "talent" and live broadcasting are stripped away, the effect is naturally greatly reduced.

However, on the talent side, if it is only as a platform to sign a contract, the lack of binding force similar to MCN, and then the head of the talent to keep, the actual role may only stay at the level of "promoting revitalization and pulling new", and the operability space is small.

Almost synchronous with the online live broadcast, in 2020, Keep began to introduce third-party content on the basis of self-research, that is, the PUGC of the talent, and now the KOLs on the Keep platform have exceeded 1,000 people.

But from the creator influence list released by Keep in 2021, 36Kr found that the top 20 are almost all also B station up owners, and have accumulated a certain number of fans in B station. A Keep insider told 36Kr that the company did feel threatened by diversion from video platforms such as Station B.

In essence, fitness bloggers are a "content business" and "fitness" attributes are in a secondary position. This directly explains why Station B, which has a better user social ecology, and Douyin, which has a better algorithm, first stepped out of the fitness blogger.

Keep's prospectus disclosed in February this year showed that in 2020 and 2021, Keep's average monthly active users were about 29.7 million and 34.4 million, respectively. Meanwhile, Keep has 3.3 million subscription members, more than three times more than 800,000 in 2019, but in the same period, the average monthly paid user was only 365,000, which is only one-tenth of the number of subscription members.

There are naturally reasons behind the poor domestic payment habits. According to the "2020 China Fitness Industry Report" released by GymSquare, only less than 30% of users who are willing to pay more than 50 yuan / month, in addition, 11.5% of online fitness users are unwilling to pay.

Even so, doing paid content and subscriptions is an important focus for Keep to balance the consumer goods business.

It can be seen through the prospectus that its own brand products, including smart fitness equipment, fitness equipment, clothing and food, are keep's largest source of revenue, accounting for more than 50%. However, due to the oem model of Keep, the gross profit of this part is not high, and from 2019 to the first nine months of 2021, the proportion of consumer goods to the total cost of the period is 38.7%, 36.7% and 39%, respectively.

In comparison, membership subscriptions and online paid content accounted for only 30% of the total revenue, but the gross profit margin was as high as 58.8%.

That said, paying for content is the key to Keep hematopoiesis and can increase valuation space in the future. However, this also puts Keep in a dilemma.

In the case of an adjusted loss of 1.2 billion yuan in the past three years, it is obvious that increasing efforts to be a blogger and content will not reduce the burden of loss. The marketing and traffic acquisition costs required are likely to tear the loss gap even larger.

In the prospectus, Keep explains the loss for the first nine months of 2021: strategically increasing spending on traffic acquisition and branding to further acquire, activate and retain users.

In the field of live broadcast or short video, the battle for attention is fought, and the battle line is often stretched for a long time. If you can't fundamentally change the user's fitness habits, as well as the corresponding payment habits, any head fitness master to promote, is only the short video market.

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