The big anchors "disappeared" on Double Eleven

As the Double 11 Shopping Festival approaches, the live streaming industry has once again become the focus of attention. However, compared with previous years, this year's Double 11 seems a little unusual. This article explores the phenomenon of big anchors "disappearing" during Double 11, and analyzes the industry dynamics and market changes behind this phenomenon for your reference.

The unusual movements of top figures often reflect the turning points of the entire industry.

In September 2023, Douyin e-commerce held an author summit, and the crazy Xiao Yangge with more than 100 million fans and his company Three Sheep became the biggest winners at the meeting. Xiao Yangge himself was named "Outstanding Individual" and Three Sheep was named "Outstanding Organization".

During the subsequent e-commerce promotion, Xiao Yangge's live broadcast room once topped the Douyin Double 11 hot-selling list, with more than 100,000 people browsing his live broadcast room. According to statistics from a third-party agency, during the entire Double 11, with only 6 live broadcasts, Crazy Xiao Yangge achieved sales of about 350 million to 450 million.

Since the rise of live e-commerce, the money-making ability and wealth-making stories of top anchors have attracted countless people's yearning and pursuit. As the most ambitious shopping carnival of the year, Double Eleven has added the most dazzling brilliance to the money myth of live streaming. However, this year's Double Eleven has already kicked off, but Xiao Yangge and his colleagues have disappeared. At the same time, many top anchors have failed one after another before the carnival started, which has also reduced consumers' expectations for the big anchors.

From this perspective, this year's Double 11 presents a strange atmosphere of both quietness and bustle. If the performance of Double 11 can measure the vitality of the e-commerce industry and e-commerce platforms, then it can also test the health or quality of the live streaming business.

And the final result may be as summarized by a top anchor, that is, live streaming e-commerce has reached a very dark moment.

01 The presence of big anchors is getting weaker and weaker

Some people joked that "anchoring is a high-risk profession." Before Double Eleven, "intensive failures" became the key word for the current situation of big anchors.

The most prominent case was that of Brother Yang, who was fined 68.9491 million yuan for promoting "Hong Kong Meicheng Mooncakes" and "Australian Grain-Fed Beef Rolls", which constituted false commercial advertising. The company behind Brother Yang, Three Sheep, was also ordered to suspend operations and rectify the situation within a specified period. Later, the Douyin platform announced that it had suspended the broadcast of accounts under Three Sheep since September 21, urging it to resolve the after-sales compensation issues for related consumers.

The commercial losses caused by the suspension of broadcasting itself are part of the problem, but more importantly, it is the loss of fans’ trust. According to Chanmama data, in the past month, the number of fans of Crazy Xiao Yangge has dropped from 118 million to 115 million, a decrease of 3 million followers.

Simba, who has dominated Kuaishou, is another obvious example.

In early September, Simba had a war of words with Brother Yang and Three Sheep founder Lu Wen over the price dispute of Mrs. Crab hairy crabs, saying that if Three Sheep did nothing, he would pay 100 million yuan to Three Sheep consumers. However, when the compensation information was announced on September 11, the outside world suddenly discovered that Simba's live broadcast function had been blocked.

Although Simba has recently made a high-profile comeback with a series of videos, it is hard to say that his sudden disappearance for a month before Double Eleven had no impact.

Dongbei Yujie once again proved that the simple personality of big anchors is unreliable. On September 23, a blogger said that he bought sweet potato vermicelli from Dongbei Yujie's live broadcast room and sent it for inspection, and found that it was mixed with cassava starch and no sweet potato ingredients. Then the local market supervision department set up a joint investigation team and confirmed that Yujie Media's claim of sweet potato vermicelli in the live broadcast was inconsistent with the facts, and punished it.

Dongbei Yujie previously broadcast live six times a month for two consecutive months, but only broadcast three times in September and none in October. Her number of fans also dropped from 24.3 million to 22.28 million, a loss of more than 2 million followers.

If we look back further, the big anchors' failures are like a never-ending TV series, with episodes that never stop. But the loyalty of fans and the trust of consumers always have a certain limit and cannot withstand continuous consumption. After someone stops being a fan, they are no longer willing to place orders in the live broadcast room.

In fact, judging from the performance during Double Eleven, the big anchors did show a decline to a certain extent. Even the top anchors who specialize in selling goods were not immune.

Tmall’s Double 11 shopping event was officially launched on October 14. After the pre-sale started at 8 pm that night, the pre-sale GMV of Li Jiaqi’s live broadcast room exceeded 100 million in seconds, and many products such as Valentino, L’Oreal, and Colanli were sold out in seconds. MeiOne officials also revealed that the amount of additional purchases in Li Jiaqi’s live broadcast room during Double 11 increased by more than 20% year-on-year.

The performance of the live streaming leader looks good. But firstly, this is due to the fact that they had been warming up for Double Eleven for 10 consecutive days and distributed cash red envelopes worth 500 million yuan; secondly, the GMV of Li Jiaqi on the first day of pre-sale last year had shrunk by half compared with the previous year. Even if there is an increase this year, it is still difficult to restore the past glory.

This is also related to the "failure". In September last year, when promoting the 79-yuan Huaxizi eyebrow pencil, the top promoter suffered a serious blow because of his remarks, "How is it expensive? Don't say that with your eyes open."

In general, the popularity of entertainment stars often has a time limit, and the overall attention that big anchors received during this year's Double Eleven seems to have declined.

02 The platform may be happy to see this happen

Does the platform need big anchors? This question used to be unnecessary to discuss.

Live streaming e-commerce is a standard feature of all e-commerce platforms, and big anchors, especially super head anchors, are the most direct embodiment of the platform's commercial potential. In the competition between platforms, they play an important role in attracting consumers and increasing the popularity of the platform. However, as the live streaming e-commerce format matures and big anchors frequently fail, the pros and cons they bring to the platform are worth careful consideration.

Judging from the attitude of the platform, a signal that has emerged since last year's Double Eleven is that store broadcasts led by brands and merchants are becoming increasingly important compared to expert anchors.

According to the 2023 China Live E-commerce Industry Research Report, brand merchants' store broadcasts accounted for 51.8% in 2023, surpassing the live broadcasts of experts for the first time. Taking Taobao as an example, on Double Eleven in 2023, Taobao had 89 live broadcast rooms with sales exceeding 100 million, of which 64 were store broadcasts; there were 834 live broadcast rooms with sales exceeding 10 million, of which 675 were store broadcasts.

Some industry insiders say that 2023 is the first year of store broadcasting. And this year, store broadcasting is likely to rise further.

At the Tmall Double 11 press conference this year, Meng Xin, general manager of Taotian Group's live broadcast marketing and store broadcast, mentioned their observations on the sentiment of merchants. In the past period of time, merchants used to attach great importance to cooperating with newly emerging top Internet celebrity anchors, because doing so would have the opportunity to immediately increase sales data to an amazing number. But this year, more merchants will pay attention to user retention and steady business growth, and the cooperation with anchors has gradually cooled down.

The key logic here is that fans who place orders in the live broadcast room of big anchors often focus their attention on the anchors. They will thank the anchors when they buy good products, but it is difficult for merchants to accumulate brand assets. Some small and medium-sized merchants complained that paying huge slot fees and commissions to anchors is actually helping others.

In other words, not only consumers are beginning to demystify big anchors, but merchants and brands are also gradually demystifying big anchors.

In addition, if the big anchors have too much say and take away too much traffic, it will be detrimental to the development foundation of the platform itself. Therefore, taking all these considerations into consideration, we can see that the platform has further increased its support for small and medium-sized anchors.

Taobao stated last year that the platform would rather support unknown anchors to become famous anchors. How to make an ordinary person become the next Li Jiaqi may be their goal.

Douyin's e-commerce data shows that in the first half of this year, an average of 560,000 small and medium-sized influencers sold goods every day, with the order volume increasing by 65% ​​year-on-year. There were 170,000 mid-level influencers selling goods every day, with the order volume increasing by 51% year-on-year. Both growth rates far exceeded the 17% of the top influencers.

Kuaishou, which was once publicly challenged by Simba and other top anchors, continues to support mid-level anchors. Its first half report pointed out that it would use external agencies to help mid-level influencers select products, especially to make targeted recommendations based on the fan portraits of mid-level influencers.

As a result, the platform’s demand for big anchors is not as strong as before. In other words, the living space for big anchors has been compressed.

03 The live streaming business has entered its darkest hour

Going further, the problems of big anchors are not limited to this group itself.

At 5 a.m. on October 14, Simba suddenly released a video, once again kneeling on one knee to announce his return. He then released two videos in a row, saying that "big anchors are in danger, and user trust has collapsed," and now is the "darkest moment" for live e-commerce.

Putting aside the self-advertising component, the conclusion given by Simba Video is worth referring to. However, whether it is the collapse of user trust, the anchor's self-inflicted danger or the darkest moment, they are all the consequences of the anchors' frequent failures. What matters is what happened behind the phenomenon.

Chen Duan, director of the Center for Integrated Innovation and Development of Digital Economy at the Central University of Finance and Economics, pointed out that behind the high-frequency incidents is actually the fact that the entire industry is facing a turning point: live streaming with goods entering the stock market, zero-sum game, anchors selling inferior goods as good ones to protect profits, and vicious competition among each other are all inevitable.

A report released by Guosen Securities on September 30 clearly stated that the high-growth era of live streaming e-commerce is expected to end soon.

According to Guosen Securities, since March this year, the growth rate of GMV of live streaming e-commerce, led by Douyin and Kuaishou, has dropped significantly. From May to June, the GMV of live streaming by top influencers on Douyin, Kuaishou and Taobao was halved. Taking Douyin as an example, the growth rate of the content market fell to single digits in the first half of 2024, and the shelf market lacked independent hematopoietic ability, and the overall GMV growth rate fell from more than 60% to about 20%.

A live streamer with millions of fans on a certain platform mentioned to Silicon Star that her recent video traffic is the lowest in the past three years, and it's as if Double Eleven didn't happen. When chatting with colleagues, they also said that the situation has been sluggish recently. She was confused. If it was just her traffic that was poor, then there was something wrong with her video, but "you can't say that everyone on the entire platform has a problem, right?"

The crux of the problem is that, on the one hand, consumers' demand for live e-commerce is gradually becoming saturated, and on the other hand, the supply of anchors is probably also close to saturation in absolute numbers.

The "2024 Douyin E-commerce Expert Growth Report" released in July this year showed that in the past year, Douyin e-commerce added 5.28 million new influencers, a year-on-year increase of 74%, while the total sales of influencers increased by 43% year-on-year, significantly lagging behind the growth rate of influencers.

The report states that "new faces drive new growth, and new opportunities open up new space." For platforms, the entry of new anchors naturally means additional growth, but for anchors who are already in the middle, the live streaming sales track is becoming more and more crowded.

The essence of many problems is mathematical. Many dark moments are squeezed out. The aforementioned anchor lamented in front of this set of data, "Now there are more people who bring goods than those who buy goods."

This is the most terrifying thing, whether it is for big or small anchors.

Author | Li Nan This article is written by the author of Operation Party [Silicon Star], WeChat public account: [Silicon Star Pro]. It is originally created/authorized to be published on Operation Party. Reproduction without permission is prohibited.

The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol.