Taobao Live’s mentality has changed

Behind the model of connecting and getting along with anchors, the essential problem Taobao faces is: how to handle the relationship between content and shelves in the e-commerce ecosystem.

From ardent pursuit to being overwhelmed, the way the platform and the top anchors get along has undergone a huge change in just a few years.

Super heads have the dual effects of attracting traffic and negative risks. Simba and the Three Sheep publicly tore each other apart, and Xiao Yangge’s live broadcast room went wrong because of the mooncake incident. These are just recent events. If the Internet still has memory, it will not forget the crisis storm that Yu Minhong, Li Jiaqi, and Wei Ya once experienced.

Superheads have their own survival rules. Xiao Yangge, Simba, and Wei Ya have retired behind the scenes as a master-disciple handover, while Dongfang Zhenxuan has avoided the pressure of public opinion by "separating".

How does the platform resolve this problem?

Recently, a friend shared with us his achievements and experience in joining Taobao Live for two years. To a certain extent, we can see the changes in the platform's mentality towards different anchors, as well as the evolution of the relationship between the two.

Essentially, the problem Taobao faces is how to handle the relationship between content and shelves in the e-commerce ecosystem.

01 Acclimatization and discomfort

Jiaogepengyou is one of the organizations that joined Taobao Live. Two years later, they feel the most deeply.

In 2022, Jiaogepengyou entered Taobao. In the nearly two years since its entry, Jiaogepengyou has accumulated more than 12,300 hours of live broadcasts on Taobao, served nearly 9.72 million consumers, cooperated with more than 4,500 brands, and achieved a transaction volume of 3.8 billion yuan. Meiwan, the live broadcast agency where Li Jiaqi works, had a GMV of 65 billion yuan in 2022.

But this does not affect Cui Dongsheng, vice president of Jiaogepengyou, who regards Taobao Live as an ideal development platform. "From the perspective of user habits, Taobao Live is more like a CBD. Our various institutions open their own shopping malls in it. Through long-term operation, we can continuously deepen the appeal to customers to make repeat purchases, and finally form an online shopping business model."

In his eyes, the future of live streaming is likely to be like Taobao Live. The reason is that Taobao Live was developed the earliest, which means that Taobao Live has gone through the period that most live streaming e-commerce companies have gone through. To some extent, it can be understood that its overall rhythm is faster, "even a pioneer in some rhythms."

But making friends is not the entire picture of Taobao’s live broadcast ecosystem, it is just one of the mature teams introduced.

In the past two or three years, Taobao Live has been actively introducing anchors from outside - there are Luo Yonghao and Liu Genghong who grew up on Douyin, Zhang Xiaohui who is widely known on Xiaohongshu, Zhu Yici from Bilibili, and Li Dan who crossed over from talk show.

Looking back now, these expert anchors all experienced varying degrees of acclimatization after experiencing a brief moment of glory: some broadcast intermittently, some stopped broadcasting, and some even directly deleted all traces of their Taobao live broadcasts.

For example, Zhu Yici, a popular online celebrity on Bilibili, officially started broadcasting on Taobao Live on July 27, 2022. The live broadcast lasted for 6 hours on the first day of broadcasting, attracting more than 2.66 million people to watch and interact. But in July this year, Zhu Yici could no longer be found on Taobao Live.

When Zhu Yici first joined Taobao, he talked about Taobao Live, saying, "Previously, live broadcasts were very lively, but some viewers may have been just watching the fun and did not make any deals. Taobao Live is currently the most mature platform for selling goods and making deals. In addition, the new policy support is more friendly to new anchors."

The problem is that every external anchor has his or her own native platform, and the differences in content ecology between the platforms make it difficult for the traffic they have accumulated on their native platforms to migrate to another platform in a short period of time.

In fact, Taobao Live is positive and optimistic in this regard, or it is making every effort to avoid the situation of acclimatization.

On Double 11 last year, Cheng Daofang, then head of Taobao Live, mentioned at a media communication meeting that Oriental Selection had grown relatively smoothly in the Taobao ecosystem. He also recalled and analyzed why there was no problem of acclimatization and why it was able to take root so successfully.

He mentioned, "Dongfang Zhenxuan currently has a lot of products in its own hands, and they control the supply chain and brand of the products, but frankly speaking, these products are not easy to explode because the average customer price of food is there... Basically, most of their hot-selling products are assembled by us (Dongfang Zhenxuan)."

However, about half a year later, Oriental Selection suspended its Taobao live broadcast.

02 Conflicting attitudes towards anchors

Since its inception, Taobao Live’s mission has been to respond to new changes in user demand interfaces and to face traffic anxiety head-on.

This business was launched in March 2016. Zhao Yuanyuan was a key figure in the rapid development stage of this business. He created two super anchors, Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya, and helped Taobao Live go from 0 to 1 and then to the peak.

However, while Taobao is enjoying the results, its attitude towards super anchors has always been contradictory.

Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya are the two business cards of Taobao Live, and they are also the source of traffic explosion, but the risk of negative effects is also obvious: the super heads are observed like through a magnifying glass and may fail if they are not careful; at the same time, it also forms a traffic siphon effect, affecting the prosperity of the middle and lower parts. Some people have said that nothing can grow under the super heads.

The first person to fade out of the live broadcast room was Wei Ya. After the tax evasion scandal, she never appeared in the public eye again, and turned to train her successor behind the scenes. Soon Li Jiaqi also encountered a network disconnection due to touching on a sensitive incident, and then stopped broadcasting for three months before gradually returning. But this was not the end. After his comeback, he was involved in public opinion storms like Hua Xizi many times.

After the Wei Ya incident, the e-commerce manager of a certain brand once talked to Kaibo Finance, saying that the cooperation intentions of the brands and merchants around them were still transferred to Li Jiaqi's team, and they would not consider moving "downward" in the short term. As for whether Taobao will change the traffic rules in the future to make it more conducive to the growth of mid-level and vertical anchors, he believes that "we still need to wait and see."

As a "product of the times", super-head anchors have commercial value that is difficult to replace, but the risks associated with their monopoly on the platform are constantly exposed. "De-head anchoring" is gradually becoming a consensus among major platforms, and Taobao Live has to take this into consideration.

In 2021, when the top anchors encountered problems one after another, Cheng Daofang took over the Taobao live broadcast business unit from Yu Feng. At that time, one of the thorny issues facing them was how to reduce their heavy reliance on top anchors.

As a result, Taobao Live stepped up its "talent grabbing mode". This strategy, which was launched in 2020, has taken a bigger step after Cheng Daofang took office. To this end, Taobao Live has not only launched various support policies and plans, but also optimized the platform traffic algorithm distribution logic.

In September 2022, Xu Luo (nickname), then head of Taobao Live's new ecological business line, told the media, "We have basically discussed everything you can think of." At the same time, Taobao also announced that the goal of Taobao Live in 2022 is to add 100 accounts with more than one million followers. "In fact, we have no upper limit, the more the better."

By 2023, Taobao Live continued to introduce new users. On Double 11 that year, Taobao Live explained that the real purpose of introducing new users was more out of consideration of user logic. "Doing this itself will not bring much GMV revenue, but as long as users come, we are willing to do it."

Accelerate, accelerate, and accelerate again.

At the end of 2023, Taobao directly established a content e-commerce division, merged the Taobao live broadcast and shopping teams into one business department, and connected live broadcast, short video, and pictures and text. In the words of Cheng Daofang at the time, "In 2024, Taobao's content and e-commerce will change from addition to multiplication."

Perhaps the effect of introducing foreign players was not long-lasting, so Taobao Live switched from "recruiting mode" to "training mode". In February this year, Taobao established its own live broadcast e-commerce company, supporting novice anchors with a fully managed operation model, which was managed by the Taotian Live operation team.

The company's head Yuan Ge once introduced that the hosting model is equivalent to a new anchor incubation camp, helping new anchors and institutions reduce initial operating costs and reduce investment risks.

Soon after, the platform held a Taobao content conference and revealed the real reason behind the launch of the full hosting model - to attract anchors with personality and fan base to join Taobao. This includes entrepreneurs, who were opened to them in June this year.

In fact, at the beginning, the service groups faced by the hosting model were mainly three types: celebrities, KOLs and MCN agencies.

Among them, celebrities are an important group supported by the hosting model. Chinese celebrities such as Li Fei'er, Wang Lin, Jin Sha, and Hong Kong celebrities such as Chen Songling have all started their first live broadcasts on Taobao Live since April this year. Jin Sha and Chen Songling also marked their MCN as a "hosting center" on their personal homepages on Taobao Live.

But at present, the frequency of these celebrities' live broadcasts on Taobao is not very high.

From the "replay" of Li Fei'er's "live broadcast status" in Taobao Live, we can see that since the official premiere on April 10 this year, a total of 8 live broadcasts have been held in half a year, but the highest "views" remained at the official premiere, with 3.433 million views, which is still a long way from the 10 million+ views that Li Jiaqi maintains on a daily basis.

03 The unsolved problem of the relationship between content and shelves

Behind the contradictory attitude towards the anchors is actually Taobao’s content anxiety and strategic fluctuations.

Taobao Live carries the mission of content strategy, but it has always been testing the edge of contentization and has not found a solution to the problem.

In 2022, after Dai Shan became the president of the China Digital Business Division, contentization was regarded as an important strategic direction for Taobao. At the beginning of this year, Taobao also established a special, cross-alliance contentization team. The leaders of the team are all core backbones of various businesses at the VP level or above.

It is worth noting that short videos were an important focus of the content strategy at the time, and "DianTao" was the corresponding product. The general idea was that merchants would accumulate fans through short videos, promote products, and further leverage live broadcast transactions. Like most platforms, "short and live linkage" was the effect Taobao expected.

However, in terms of content direction, Taobao initially hoped to focus on the products themselves rather than generalizing the content like Douyin and Kuaishou.

Yang Guang, then president of Taobao Tmall Industry Development and Operation Center, said in an interview with 21st Century Business Herald in October 2022, "Taobao's choice to produce consumer decision-making content in the live broadcast market is based on our user needs. The moment users open Taobao Mobile, their purpose is relatively pure, to buy the products they like. Therefore, Taobao does not produce purely entertainment content. This is our positioning."

But this route was quickly corrected. The following year, Taobao Live started to host variety shows and crosstalk shows. On Double 11 in 2023, the official message released became "The overall user participation and duration have changed greatly. The merchant ecosystem plus this year's content ecosystem are both relatively good explosions."

The user time that the Internet was once obsessed with is not a panacea in the transaction ecosystem. While Taobao Live is building a content ecosystem, it also needs to emphasize shelf capabilities.

For example, on Double 11 in 2023, the official emphasized that the live broadcast e-commerce industry has entered the middle and later stages and is returning to the essence of e-commerce. This year, Taobao Live has increased its investment in store broadcasts.

He mentioned at the time, "This year, the positioning of store broadcasts (on Taobao Live) has also changed. In previous years, we regarded store broadcasts as a marketing tool for stores, but this year it has become a new battlefield for merchants to operate." But about 8 months later, Cheng Daofang officially announced his resignation and was no longer responsible for Taobao Live and Guanguang related businesses.

For Taobao, the relationship between shelves and content remains an unresolved issue.

Especially as live streaming e-commerce has developed to this day, when we talk about shelf e-commerce, the boundaries between the two sides have become increasingly blurred. Do the unique advantages of shelves still exist?

Jiao Ge Pengyou, who has survived in the Taobao Live ecosystem for two years, believes that these two things will never converge.

Cui Dongsheng explained to Xinmei Daybreak that in terms of motivation, the two sides have differences in underlying design. The core pursuit of live e-commerce is to increase traffic conversion rate, rather than the cost control pursued by shelf e-commerce. The two sides are like whether to put promoters at the entrance of a supermarket or to set up a big promotion stage.

Therefore, in his opinion, these two things will not converge, but merge. "In the past, live streaming e-commerce was able to exist and operate independently, and it operated very well. But in my opinion, in the future it must be linked with shelves and have a long-term linkage. This is the way to go in the future."

Cui Dongsheng further explained that as traffic becomes more and more expensive and users lose interest in live streaming e-commerce, the ROI of the live streaming front-end will become lower and lower, and this ecosystem will no longer be able to develop sustainably.

But from another perspective, live e-commerce is actually a triggering field and a marketing field, and what follows is its repurchase and shelf life. At this time, if the crowd is converted from short-term to long-term operation, it will generate a huge increase in ROI.

Written by Li Huan Edited by Zhai Wenting