Source: New List
A song "Promise" was swiped all over the Internet, and Guo Youcai became popular and out of the circle.
He combed the big back hair that was popular in the 90s of the last century, wore a pair of silver-rimmed glasses, wore a retro-style wide suit, wore a red and white striped tie, and wore a pair of black leather gloves on his hands, and sang this old song hoarsely in the live broadcast room:
Behind Guo Youcai is Heze South Station, which has been out of operation for many years, and the yellow low-rise building reveals a sense of age. He also added an extra retro yellow filter to the live broadcast room, which was full of nostalgia.
Even if his singing skills are not professional, Guo Youcai injected rich feelings into his singing, and used his slightly vicissitudes of voice to bring many audiences back to the 70s and 80s, recalling the green years.
At the beginning of May this year, Guo Youcai's live broadcast of singing "Promise" became popular, and many slicing or handling videos were forwarded hundreds of thousands of times on platforms such as Douyin and video accounts, and more and more netizens poured into his live broadcast room to listen to the scene.
According to Xindou, the Douyin data tool under the new list, the number of viewers in Guo Youcai's live broadcast room was about 100,000-200,000 at the end of April, and the number of viewers of each live broadcast remained above one million after May 3, and the number of viewers of a single live broadcast on May 16 exceeded 27.74 million, with more than 100 million likes.
Screenshot from New Shake
Guo Youcai's number of fans is soaring all the way.
According to Xindou data, since May 9, the account "Guo Youcai (Brother Heze Shu)" has begun to increase its fans at a high speed, with 3.14 million fans in 3 days, and 1.13 million fans in one day on May 15 alone. As of now, the number of Douyin followers has reached 6 million, and more than half of them are 31-50 year olds.
Heze, a small city in Shandong, also became famous overnight, and Heze South Railway Station, which has not had a passenger train stop for a long time, is full of people, with a daily passenger flow of nearly one million. The local government built roads overnight, expanded the South Railway Station Square, and provided tourist services, hoping to capture this wave of traffic.
What many netizens don't know is that this is actually Guo Youcai's third popularity on the Internet, the first time was "Hezebu" in 2017, the second time was in 2022 live broadcast Lianmai sang "I Really Love You", and the third time was this "Promise", which really went out of the circle.
Guo Youcai's three popularity
How to describe the feeling of this kind of explosion on the Internet? Guo Youcai said in the video: "I felt that I would be satisfied if I could blow a spring breeze, but I didn't expect to harvest a whole spring given by everyone." ”
3.14 million fans in 3 days: no one knows about the barbecue for five years, and the song "Promise" is heard all over the world
Guo Youcai's popularity lies in the fact that he can sing, but he is not so good at singing.
The original singer of "The Promise" is Taiwanese singer Li Yijun, and the song was released in 1995. Li Yijun's singing is soft and tactful, full of sadness, while Guo Youcai's interpretation is a different style, bold and direct, and heartbreaking.
Many netizens left messages saying that his singing voice "has no skills, it is all feelings", from which "ordinary people do not succumb to fate and struggle hard".
Soon, netizens discovered that Guo Youcai's personal experience happened to be a true portrayal of "ordinary people who do not succumb to fate", and his singing voice without professional skills is inspirational evidence of struggling against fate.
Such a story of an ordinary person's counterattack not only undertook the traffic of "The Promise", but also pushed Guo Youcai's image to the front of the stage, and the popularity reached a higher level.
Guo Youcai's personal story shared on his previous account
This young man who looks retro and vicissitudes is actually a young man born in 1999 and only 25 years old this year. His real name is Guo Zhuang, and because he likes Chinese studies, he named himself "talented" and "middle way".
According to Guo Youcai, he was born in a rural family in Heze, Shandong Province, and when his mother died when he was 10 years old, his father formed a new family, and he was "wandered free-range".
Due to the difficulties of life, he dropped out of school at the age of 13 to work, repairing trams and other chores, and once earned 2,000 yuan a month, but he also slowly saved some savings. In 2017, he started a business and opened a restaurant, which eventually closed down; In 2019, he started another business with his fiancée Su Chang and ran a barbecue stall, and he has been doing it for five years, until now.
During these difficult entrepreneurial days, Guo Youcai was also groping for short videos and live broadcasts.
In 2017, his account was also called "Guo Youcai (Carry forward Hezebu)", and he played "Hezebu" on Kuaishou, which is a kind of foot-out-of-eight running pace, cutting a pot lid, wearing leggings, and having the temperament of a spiritual guy.
In 2022, Guo Youcai changed his account and sang live. He has always had a musical dream, and while running around for a living, he taught himself to sing. He didn't have the money to go to a professional music school, so he bought a tutorial for 6 yuan online, and gritted his teeth and bought a guitar for 300 yuan.
At that time, not many people watched his live broadcast, and the turning point occurred in September 2022, when he and the million-fan anchor "Brother Dayuan" sang "I Really Love You" in a microphone, and the number of online people in the live broadcast room exceeded 10,000 for the first time, with a wave of small-scale traffic and popularity.
It's a pity that the good times didn't last long, and Guo Youcai, who didn't know how to use traffic at that time, caused controversy because of the goods, and the account did not continue to operate. Until November 2023, he registered the Douyin account of "Guo Youcai (Brother Heze Shu)", tried live singing again, and took the nostalgic route.
Guo Youcai gets up at 7 o'clock in the morning every day and rushes to Heze South Station at 9 o'clock to broadcast the live broadcast, which is where he often played when he was a child. He feels that he can feel the simplicity of his predecessors and the precipitation of stories here, "as soon as I get there, I feel like I have traveled through."
In this way, the popularity of his live broadcast room began to grow slowly from 0, hundreds, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and then millions and tens of millions, and all kinds of gifts in the live broadcast room were brushed non-stop. With a grassroots background, a simple image, an inspirational dream-chasing story, and an emotional singing voice, Guo Youcai has embarked on a path of counterattack by ordinary people.
Guo Youcai's live broadcast room soared in popularity, and the screenshot came from Xinji
A song brings fire to a city, and millions of tourists emerge at Heze South Station
After the fire, Guo Youcai still lived a life of singing during the day and selling barbecue at night.
Perhaps because he learned the lesson of bringing goods after becoming popular last time, he did not immediately use traffic to monetize, but only sang live with his account, and he also said that "live streaming is not in the plan".
After the broadcast, he rested for a while and began to skewer barbecue skewers to prepare for the barbecue business in the evening. For him, "singing during the day is a dream, and barbecuing at night is life".
However, whether it is dreams or life, there are millions more onlookers than before.
The barbecue stall was crowded with netizens and anchors who came to visit, and when it was not opened, it was crowded, and Guo Youcai cheered as soon as he appeared, like a fan meeting.
I don't know how many people actually came to eat barbecue, but it can be determined that most of them came to shoot or live broadcast Guo Youcai to sell barbecue. The mobile phone on the scene was put around, and the live broadcast room where he made a barbecue was broadcast alone, and there were thousands of online viewers.
There are too many people who shoot Guo Youcai, and some people aim the camera at his fiancée Su Chang. In the past few days, the story of Guo Youcai's counterattack has become popular together, as well as the story of him and Su Chang supporting each other so far, and the sentence "A good wife helps me Qingyunzhi, and I also have a good wife with ten thousand taels of gold" has touched many netizens.
The place where there are more people than the barbecue stall is Heze South Station.
The station, which has been out of operation for many years, is now surrounded by three floors inside and three floors outside, and the locals are amazed that the South Station is blocked by traffic, and even Guo Youcai said that he should go to the live broadcast site early now, "I can't squeeze in if I go late."
It has been reported that the single-day passenger flow of Heze South Station in the past few days is nearly one million. Guo Youcai's live broadcast background is no longer only a yellow station building, but also a dense crowd of people, here he is broadcasting, and a group of people are broadcasting there, some of them have changed the name of their Douyin account to "Guo Youcai live broadcast", wanting to get a piece of the traffic.
The pouring traffic fell from the sky, and the local Heze also tried their best to catch it.
With the phrase "the live network is stuck", China Mobile and other operators will drive the communication vehicle to the site and increase the base station to ensure the smooth network. In order to allow tourists from other places to have a better travel experience, Heze built roads, expanded the square, arranged toilets, increased volunteers, and provided free water and big pot dishes overnight.
At 8 o'clock in the evening of May 15th, the lights of "Heze South Station" were re-lit, which made many Heze people cry with emotion: this is the light in the hearts of the post-80s and 90s.
Including Guo Youcai, every Heze person is working hard to promote his hometown. Every interview video and every live broadcast that Guo Youcai has become popular will invite netizens to come to Heze to take a look; Dashuo, an Internet celebrity from Cao County, Heze, also came to score points for Heze, shouting the familiar sentence "Shandong Heze, Heze South Station 666".
Guo Youcai's popularity is not only a pure path for Internet celebrities to get out of the circle, but also makes "a song with a city on fire" a collective carnival.
Guo Youcai, another ordinary person who was "selected" by traffic?
There are more and more people imitating Guo Youcai.
Douyin searches for account names related to "Youcai", and you can find a bunch of Li Youcai, Wu Youcai, Liu Youcai, etc., most of them also add a parenthetical suffix like Guo Youcai, you are called "Brother Heze Shu", then I will be called "Brother Huaihua Shu" and "Brother Cangnan Shu".
Guo Youcai is called "Brother Shu" because he likes the movie "Hello! Mr. Tree", most of the people who follow the trend may not have seen the movie, but anyway, just follow the call.
There was a wave of nostalgia in the live broadcast room, the old station, retro filters, and nostalgic makeup became a popular match, and the anchors stood on the local station square, revealing the big characters of "Yantai West Station", "Lanzhou West Station" and "Chengdu East Station", and sang classic old songs. An anchor named "Li Youcai (Chengdu Shuge)" has almost every live broadcast, with a popularity of more than 100,000+.
"Isn't this plagiarism of Guo Youcai?" Some netizens questioned in the live broadcast room.
The anchor "Qianqianqianer", who was broadcasting live, replied angrily: "I'm just rubbing traffic, but I don't learn if I know one thing, it's a kind of staying in place." She wore a retro white dress wedding dress from the 90s of the last century, stood in front of Lanzhou West Railway Station, and also added a nostalgic filter to the live broadcast room, singing other old songs of Li Yijun in the original song of "Promise".
There are also some anchors who not only imitate the live broadcast venue and live broadcast style, but also imitate Guo Youcai's appearance. There was an anchor who looked similar to Guo Youcai and looked exactly the same as Guo Youcai at first glance, and was mistaken by many fans for Guo Youcai himself.
This is a stage that every popular person will go through, being imitated, copied, and rubbed off on traffic popularity. For many people, going viral is hard to come by, and there may be more opportunities to imitate an already successful case.
Some people are puzzled: There are so many people who work hard, why is Guo Youcai the most popular?
He is not the only one who is nostalgic, he is not the only one who supports each other with his lover to get through the difficulties, and he is not the only one who can sing old songs, but now Guo Youcai is popular. Some commented that this is another person who was selected by the traffic algorithm, and the algorithm pushes whoever is popular, "The network has no memory, today he is popular, tomorrow it may be Li Youcai and Zhang Youcai."
However, the algorithm may be one of the factors, but one of the logical bases of the algorithm is also to see whether the person can be liked by the public.
Amateurs or grassroots who can get out of the circle and become popular basically have a similar path: first use works or topics to attract attention, and then use the extraordinary stories of ordinary people to impress netizens, from the former coat brother Zhu Zhiwen, to the popular "Chengdu Disney" Nomi, and then to Guo Youcai, everyone never gets tired of watching the counterattack stories of the little people.
Not everyone can understand what "The Promise" is singing, but many people can resonate through a dream-chasing story.
Guo Youcai seems to understand everyone's pursuit and imitation of him after he became popular, he said that he doesn't mind: "Maybe everyone also sees their own shadow in me." ”
Guo Youcai and Li Youcai, who imitated him, met and blessed each other
However, network traffic is always difficult to last for a long time, Heze can use the hospitality of a city to leave more tourists, and for Guo Youcai, the popularity will subside one day, after all, the iron Douyin, the top stream of flowing water.
He and his family are also psychologically prepared for this, and his fiancée Su Chang thinks that "the Internet is just a floating cloud, or do some work in a down-to-earth manner."
In their planning, the song will continue to be sung, and the barbecue stand will continue to open. But the story will not draw a happy end here, after the grassroots become popular, are they still the ordinary people chasing their dreams? After being praised as a "god" and having wealth and resources, do you really not forget your original intention or do you want to slay the dragon and eventually become an evil dragon?
No one dared to give an affirmative answer.
But there seems to be no shortage of "Guo Youcai" on the Internet, no matter what the outcome is, more "Guo Youcai" will still counterattack with dream chasing stories, which is a verified and tried and tested "traffic routine".