yingke Content review center located in Changsha, Hunan,
Aperture Live Breaking down has made the entire industry feel a little chill.
, former founder of Huya Live, Gu Feng, in a column article in 2016, has gradually become a reality, "more than 200 live broadcast websites will die one after another next year." In February this year, Yingke CEO Fengyousheng , who survived the battle of life and death, also said, "With the end of 2016, the battle in the live broadcast industry has also ended." Yingke, which is valued at 7 billion yuan and achieved tens of millions of daily active users, is undoubtedly the winner of last year's live broadcast war. The tenacious survivors of mobile live broadcasts such as Yingke, Yibo, and Huajiao will collectively compete with the main game live broadcast players YY and Douyu collectively enter the second half of 2017, and the death list of the live broadcast industry may become longer and longer. The traffic melee of
mobile live broadcast has made this new social mode highly popular. However, what most people see is the prosperity that is floating on the surface: the number of APP downloads that cost hundreds of millions of yuan, the comprehensive bets of social giants Facebook and Twitter, and the daily income of professional anchors over 10,000 yuan... On the other side of the coin, is the money spent like flowing water, the expensive technology investment and operating costs are clearing out a group of players who cannot hold on.
's powerful operational capabilities are the life and death line of the live broadcast platform. How to conduct self-examination of content with an annual cost of over 100 million yuan? What new forms of live broadcast social interaction will be there when entering the decay period? Yingke founder and CEO Feng Yousheng recently disclosed the above issues in detail with Titanium Media.
content self-examination: The decline of the small live broadcast platform, in addition to market reasons, is another heavy pressure in the relevant departments' unprecedented strict supervision of the live broadcast industry. According to statistics from Titanium Media, in 2016 alone, relevant departments issued 6 relevant policies and laws.
plus existing policies and regulations in the field of Internet information dissemination, to make a live broadcast platform, it will face supervision from many institutions at different levels, 13 major laws and regulations, including the State Council, the Ministry of Culture, the State Internet Information Office, etc.
"Online Performance", regulators use these six words to define new industries including e-sports live broadcast and pan-entertainment live broadcast in the shortest time. The explosive growth of content on the live broadcast platform has caused new live broadcast competitors to pay expensive tuition fees after 2015.
New policy and law in 2016 (Picture: Titanium Media)
Content Review Image Recognition Technology Supplier is a company from Guangzhou, which has been reported by the media many times for its abundant production of "yellow appraisers". In the summer of 2016, Zhong Zhengyang, general manager of Yingke Hunan Branch, "come to Changsha with a backpack on his back". Since then, the content review center in Changsha, Hunan has been officially established. Previously, Yingke's content review was completed in Beijing, where labor costs are more expensive, and was completed by some third-party part-time auditors. For the consideration of the overall disaster recovery mechanism, Yingke has also set up an audit center in the second city outside Changsha - Yongzhou . "Yongzhou has more than 100 auditors." Zhong Zhengyang told Titanium Media.
In February this year, a reporter from Titanium Media met some of them in his office in Changsha. The average age of this group of young people is about 25 years old. The duty method is commonly known as "three shifts", which ensures uninterrupted review of 24 hours a day.
audit system monitors all the live rooms on the platform around the clock, and takes a picture every 2 seconds, and spreads it on the computer screen in front of the auditor in chronological order. If an auditor with a unique identity number is found to be involved in dangerous driving, smoking, gambling, or minors alone, the auditor will directly remove the live broadcast from the live broadcast, or take different degrees of punishment measures, including warnings, ID bans, live broadcast account bans, etc.
has some content that cannot be recognized by machines and can only be manually. In the live broadcast screen, "the anchor is in the main driver's seat and the vehicle is moving" requires manual review. The Yingke platform strictly prohibits "live broadcast while driving", which is considered "unsafe" by the review mechanism; minors under 18 years old will also be banned from live broadcast without a escort.The audio, text and other contents in the live broadcast interface of
, Yingke's audit backend has established a keyword database to achieve text review. Through machine recognition, 60-70% of audio can be automatically detected and filtered.
The employees engaged in the audit have a doctorate degree, and there are also young people who are only 25 years old who have just left the university campus. They get a monthly salary of 3,500 to 4,000 yuan, and most of them live in collective dormitories arranged by the company.
to calculate the calculation: According to data released by the Changsha government, the average social salary of this city in 2015 was 4,699 yuan. According to the monthly salary of 4,000 yuan per Yingke auditor, the entire audit team plus nearly 1,000 administrative personnel, and the labor cost alone is nearly 50 million yuan a year. Feng Yousheng revealed to Titanium Media that if the technology and equipment procurement costs (about 80 million), Yingke's investment in content self-inspection throughout the year exceeds 100 million.
(Titanium Media asked ten questions to Yinke auditor Chen Yang.)
Early operation: Aesthetic victory
The first auditor in Yingke is Feng Yousheng himself. "We must deeply understand your lifeline and the sword of Damokli." Feng Yousheng, who had been a civil servant in his early career, was sensitive enough to self-examination of content. When the Yingke team was only more than 20 people in the early days, Feng Yousheng and Yingke co-founder Jessie personally reviewed and filtered it in the background.
But in the early review, more importantly, they personally decided "what kind of anchors Yingke welcomes"?
Before Yingkes appeared, YY and 9158 cultivated the inherent image of Chinese people for anchors, but e-sports live broadcast is a small circle after all, far from the lives of ordinary people. The large platform in the PC era built barriers. "How to be different from them" is the most anxious question that makes Yingke who just started in 2015.
Because Feng Yousheng developed a social product for international students before Yingke, international students became the earliest batch of anchor users of Yingke, and the "professional atmosphere" show anchors may have their ID blocked directly. Therefore, you rarely see exaggerated microphones exposed on Yingke’s anchor page. “Ugly” and “low-looking” in Yingke even have no chance to become anchors. Feng Yousheng constantly guides users to “keep the beautiful ones.”
As for the criteria for judging "beauty", Feng Yousheng's simple answer is to look at the "appearance quadrant" and "life status".
They even rejected the entry of "Tianyou", a well-known anchor, who is recognized as China's first generation. An early anchor confirmed to Titanium Media that "it was indeed rare in the early days." Rejecting an anchor who could be "sky-high-priced" on a certain platform is equivalent to rejecting traffic. "It was the most difficult when I first started to compete for resources," Feng Yousheng admitted. Since there is no contract or guild signing in the anchor operation strategy, we can only rely on products to attract them and only rely on natural growth of users.
In March 2016, Yingke clarified its brand proposition - "Let live stream become the mainstream lifestyle." Early restraint determined Yingke's temperament and also led to explosive growth. In May 2016, Yingke's MAU exceeded YY for the first time, becoming the first in the industry.
Of course, compared with YY and Huya, Yingke, who does not need to pay the contract fee, saves a lot of financial expenditure. In the next year, Yingke spent nearly 400 million yuan on brand advertising and marketing to quickly occupy the market, which is a later story. Where did the money be spent on
? The entire tour of BigBang was named " Fu Yuanhui " in the Olympic marketing campaign, and purchased a large number of film advertisements from theaters. Yingke made a big hit in 2016. The director of " I am a singer " Hong Tao was watching Fu Yuanhui's live broadcast, and called Yingke headquarters directly to invite him as the exclusive live broadcast platform.
is like Taobao sellers letting "kid" enter the Chinese conversation dictionary, the popularity of "baby" and the popularity of Yingke happen at the same time. In May 2016, Lei Jun released a drone product live on Xiaomi live broadcast. For the first time, he made a "heart-to-heart" gesture in the live broadcast room.
Xiaomi also launched a live broadcast. Lei Jun compared the "heart-to-heart" gesture in the live broadcast room. The stable user scale and reputation of
have brought many partners to Yingke.On Double 11 in 2016, Tmall also became an Yingke large customer and tried to do interactive marketing through live broadcasts. Yingke COO Jesse participated in the impressive Double 11 live broadcast. "The second row is left for us to do live broadcast cameras, right behind Jack Ma."
"Attenuation is normal." The paradox of
live broadcast social networking is that 99% of people are just watching and do not contribute content; 1% of people who contribute content are also highly differentiated in content production capacity.
"Live broadcast is actually a very high threshold. The difficulty lies in a person who goes live broadcast for two hours a day for several consecutive months. This is very difficult." Because of this, Yingke discovered last year that "monthly user growth is very difficult." Even Momo, who relies on live broadcast to obtain a 12-fold profit growth, still feels that the live broadcast has begun to decay and begins to focus on short videos.
people will be tired. Many users who are addicted at first no longer open the live broadcast client. Those anchors who "are using their lives to do live broadcasts" come and go. At the end of 2016, the most fanatical stage in the live broadcast field was coming to an end, and the user growth of most platforms began to approach a straight line.
One day, anchors will find that they "no content to broadcast". Professional anchors have relatively high content, but they also have a life cycle. They are facing the pressure of constantly obtaining new traffic.
Wang Mixiao, a former Yingke anchor who runs an internet celebrity brokerage company, told Titanium Media reporters that "no content to broadcast" is becoming a collective anxiety of the anchor group. After working as an agent for more than a year, she has seen too many young people who want to make money through anchors. "When Amao and Agou chat, dare to say that they are anchors? The current platform has too high content repetition, and anchors and users will be tired. If you want to have the ability to attract enough traffic, the final destination must be to have their own products and brands to sell. "
's Chinese-style reward model allows the platform to have money to make money and also makes anchors a new profession. The way Wang Mixiao and his partners started was very simple, "The beginning was to turn a bunch of beautiful micro-businesses into anchors." Just like an internet celebrity opening a store on Weibo , diversion of traffic to their e-commerce business through the live broadcast platform has become the most mainstream "parasitic" business model at present. is the most optimistic form of anchor agents who are parasitic on the Inke ecosystem. The latter is attracting more people to become anchors and copying the "TV shopping" form to an e-commerce platform with huge traffic.
Some anchors even joined hands with the team behind them to use the "ranking brush" method to maintain their ranking and reputation on the platform. Wang Mixiao told Titanium Media that the threshold for maintaining "Yingke's top anchor" is very high, and only by spending a lot of effort to maintain reputation can we bring more value monetization to anchors. In mid-February, Yingke organized media and some anchors to visit the South China headquarters. A detail was talked about: a male anchor who was invited to visit was picked up by a fan's Maserati as soon as she got off the plane. Most of the live broadcast platforms of
are launched through strong operation teams to launch live broadcast activities, talent competitions, etc., which is precisely to make the anchor "some of them can be said". At present, Yingke's operation team is also considering the diversification of live broadcast content. In fact, there are a large number of demands that have not been met by the core users set by their appearance and talent. Feng Yousheng said that in 2017, more exploration will be made in the form of "live broadcast +" - such as "live broadcast + customer service" - to make the content of the community more diversified. The game live broadcast product is also under internal testing.
Feng Yousheng’s perspective on “attenuation” is a bit different, “I hope my users will be the best release customer once a week”. In his opinion, for a new form of social products, such opening frequency "is truly long-term".
added the new battlefield
Yingke launched the short video function in September last year, adding a "short video" function option to the "+" main button of the live broadcast, which is equivalent to adding a "moments" to the anchor, and the short video forms a timeline on the anchor's personal page. From the perspective of product strategy, Yingke's original intention of entering short videos is to drive live broadcasts and user content production.While the live broadcast of
is declining, short videos have begun to explode (this Titanium Media report once detailed inventory of short video competitors), Feng Yousheng, who joined the competition, is not in a hurry to launch an independent short video product. In his opinion, one of the cards of Yingke is "a large number of users who are capable of contributing high-quality content", and 70% of them will become contributors to short video content.
Feng Yousheng said, "I won't go to the road of Toutiao and Miaopai", because in his opinion, most short video platforms do not have their own moats; and short video tool APPs "have not formed a user positioning and community atmosphere." Feng Yousheng doesn’t seem anxious because others’ shortcomings may become an opportunity for Inke.
At the moment, what makes Feng Yousheng the most anxious still comes from the product experience, "Is the experience of tens of millions of users happy?" At present, the mainstream live broadcast method of major platforms is one-to-many, where anchors speak or perform, and the audience chats in text. "This is a kind of communication that is not in line with human nature. In theory, fans are right to ask the anchors with voice."
For Feng Yousheng and Inke, the war in the live broadcast field in 2017 "will happen in the extended field of the live broadcast industry, and the industry will return to the level of content upgrade and social itself to (re-make) judgment."
The last round of live broadcast war solved the most basic "companiment" needs of human nature, and Inke's end is not live broadcast, it is still some distance from the new social mode of being wanted to be. (This article was first published on Titanium Media, reporter/Congcong, Chen Zheng, editor/Congcong)
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