Do the elderly who are consumed by the Internet really make money?
In the era of national live broadcasting, the elderly have become the new focus.
The number of elderly people who start live broadcasts on short video platforms has been rising since 2021, and in the live broadcast area of Douyin, one out of ten live broadcasts is broadcast by the elderly.
Click into the small yellow car, you can see that the products they sell are basically some snacks, daily necessities, etc., and the price is close to the people from 0.1 yuan ~ 60 yuan. More than 6 o'clock in the morning to more than 2 o'clock in the morning is the live broadcast time for the elderly, and they will even start multiple live broadcasts in a day.
What's more, these elderly people who live broadcast goods are all based on family difficulties, illness, debts, difficulties in survival and other reasons.
According to the data of Micro Jam Observation, some of them can bring 1W+ within 30 days, and even if the price is converted at one yuan per piece, the monthly income can exceed 10,000.
01 Elderly people who stand on the Internet tide
In fact, for those who are in a difficult situation and want to get help through the right way, it is also a good way to earn a certain income through live streaming.
Not to mention those elderly people who have a hard time surviving and are easily knocked down by the times.
Therefore, for the elderly whose children assisted in opening live broadcasts, netizens are also more willing to place orders for some daily necessities they need.
According to the data of Cicada Mother, most of the fans in the live broadcast room of elderly anchors account for more than 70%, and most of them are young people, and people under the age of 35 usually account for more than 80%.
For example, in almost every live broadcast room for the elderly, there is a group of young people who are helping to shout, placing orders independently, and frantically giving likes to the live broadcast room, and some even want to donate money offline, in order to let the old grandfather and grandmother get off the air and rest early.
What's more, the popularity of the elderly is not lower than that of young bloggers, and some even far exceed most of the young bloggers who can live, and the 95-year-old "years of mother" is one of them.
Up to now, the number of fans of Years Mom has reached more than 4 million. At first, I first made videos, and after the number of fans reached a certain level, with the assistance of my daughter, my grandmother began to live broadcast and bring goods.
When everyone thought that the lives of the elderly would improve, they found that the old people were broadcasting later and later, and the young people fell asleep at 2 o'clock in the morning while they were still live broadcasting, and their spirits were getting worse and worse.
For example, the nearly 60-year-old "old man and a little girl", in more than 40 live broadcasts, most of the time is between 12 and 6 o'clock in the evening.
The 77-year-old "Big Brother in the Countryside" broadcasts live twice a day, from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. and from 12 p.m. to 5 a.m. Even a 95-year-old grandmother has to cooperate with her daughter to shoot videos every day, and she has to cooperate with the live broadcast for up to 8 hours a day.
It is important to note that this is not an isolated case.
Image source: Douyin screenshot
When you become more curious, you will find that things are not as simple as they seem.
To a certain extent, the experience shown by these old people is like a three-stage script of "copy and paste", basically they were born in poor families in rural areas; they encountered great changes in their lives in the middle, either their sons or grandsons or their wives were sick, or their children were abandoned and in debt, etc.; they were forced to have no choice but to appear on camera and make a living on live broadcasts.
In the small yellow car or commodity window in the live broadcast room of the elderly, it can be found that the goods they bring are also highly consistent.
The most common are 9 garbage bags, as well as snacks such as biscuits, soap, hangers, hair bands, etc., and the unit price of customers is concentrated in a few to dozens of yuan. From the perspective of commodity consumption attributes, most of them are female consumers.
And selling miserably is the most common method of live broadcasting, and when these methods are applied to an elderly person in a very appropriate situation, it will easily become a scam.
The picture shows the mother and daughter of the years in the live broadcast
02 Whether there is a team or not, it is impossible to distinguish at all
For the elderly live broadcast time is more and more concentrated in the middle of the night, and the number of live broadcasts in the early morning occupies the majority, it stands to reason that indoor live broadcast, normal time live broadcast, and live broadcast of young people at home are all possible, why let the elderly broadcast live in person, and even often start live broadcast in the early morning.
In fact, some netizens have long questioned the various tricks behind the live broadcast of the elderly.
On social platforms, some netizens posted and shared, and they couldn't stand it and questioned a few in the comment area: "Including why the elderly should stay up late and suffer from the cold, why they can't go indoors for so many live broadcasts, why some young people want the elderly to work, etc." ”
As a result, they were either directly assigned to the account by their official field control and asked, "Then are you coming to the live broadcast?", or they sneered in the comment area and were called jealous bad guys, and even more outrageous they would be kicked out of the live broadcast room.
If you stand from the perspective of operation, you can see clearly, this is the deliberate consumption of the elderly. Behind it is inevitably a professional team such as field control, professional equipment, and young staff.
"City Business Daily" also reported that there are many MCN institutions that use the elderly as "traffic passwords". These MCN agencies operate all over the country and will go to remote areas to find suitable candidates.
Douyin expert @Southwest Greo also released a short video saying that 95% of the elderly anchors with a poor background in the countryside are actors packaged by MCN agencies, and they have their own set of live broadcast operation methods.
The account IP of the old man's late-night live broadcast is available all over the country, and the blogger "Kangyo Hey" chose the majority of Shangrao, Jiangxi Province for field investigation.
Through the intelligence collected by the informant in the early stage, compared with the scenes that appeared in the short video, they locked three accounts, namely Cadillac Grandpa, Grandpa Niu, and Grandpa Beard.
Image source: Station B "Kangyo Hello"
The results of the investigation are embarrassing, the three live broadcast accounts are all carrying false information, they are packaged by their own son-in-law, who drives three hours a day to shoot Douyin, is packaged by his son and team, and gets a commission of 19 points, and is hired by a professional live broadcast team, and the employment fee is only 100 yuan.
However, these are only a small number of people, and there are many people who are bought through employment.
Some of them are not even themselves, but through recording and broadcasting, multiple accounts and different copywriters broadcast live at the same time for a whole night, in order to win the kindness of netizens.
Behind the scenes, the poverty and loneliness of these elderly people may be real, but being bribed by a hundred yuan to show it in front of thousands of people in the form of a live broadcast is also real.
So it's hard not to think of the huge live broadcast industry chain for the elderly, which has been created by hiring a group of old men and women cheaply and writing all kinds of miserable scripts in order to obtain high profits.
On the bright side, these MCN organizations that specialize in looking for the elderly to absorb the merits of netizens in batches may really be able to provide some help to the elderly, but their deception is also straightforward.
But if you think about it, although the old age life of some of the low-level elderly is not peaceful, this "employment" relationship based on the so-called 100 yuan actually adds more heartbreak to the struggle of the low-level elderly.
And these are just the epitome of the whole elderly live broadcast with goods, and there are countless MCN institutions that really use false names to collect money.
03 "There is no harm if there is no false sale"
From another point of view, isn't this infamous for the elderly who really need help?
We don't have to hesitate about this process, we just need to look at the results they left behind, and the result is that they themselves take the vast majority of their profits, wave their sleeves, and leave the infamy of cheating and relying on the old to sell the old.
What's more, after too many real and fake live broadcasts of the elderly appear, netizens will gradually become numb, and even for those elderly people who really have a need to bring goods, young people will avoid them.
And how difficult is it to put an end to this phenomenon of making money by packaging the elderly through live broadcasting?
According to the recent situation of the live broadcast platform, this kind of behavior still exists, but it is the majority of helping farmers in the name of "fruit farmers".
The same scripts such as "meeting fruit farmers on the road, asking the reason for returning late, understanding the situation, and deciding to help farmers" are still visible on the live broadcast platform, and there are not a few netizens who pay for this scene.
On the other hand, the platform has also made new regulations, but it can't keep up with the speed of MCN's transformation.
In June this year, Douyin issued new regulations to vigorously rectify the misery of false sales, and clearly stated that public welfare accounts are not allowed to conduct for-profit behaviors such as live broadcast rewards and e-commerce sales.
For example, the "Zhao Laohan Department Store" mentioned by many netizens has changed from the original focus on "poverty" as the background of the live broadcast to the current clean and tidy live broadcast style.
Image source: "Zhao Laohan Department Store" Douyin screenshot
In short, today's reality is that whether it is live streaming or daily love, it is inevitable that you need to spend time to become a liar and fight wits and courage with a liar.
It stands to reason that in addition to the voluntary live broadcast of the elderly, in the absence of false facts, in addition to alleviating the difficulties of survival, Internet live broadcast is indeed a way to alleviate many problems of the elderly.
However, the elderly who lack live broadcast skills and have information gaps with the Internet will also be willing to cooperate with MCN agencies to carry out live broadcast to a certain extent, which is also unavoidable.
So in the end, the issue of live broadcast for the elderly still appears in MCN institutions, and it all depends on conscience in places that cannot be supervised.
This article is from the WeChat public account "AI Technology Fusion Media" (ID: suxinshe01), author: AI Technology Fusion Media