Tik Tok’s “new god” is “out of fashion” in just half a month?

This article mainly introduces the "deification" process of Guo Youcai, who became popular on Douyin, and analyzes the reasons behind it. It is recommended for friends who are interested in Douyin operations to read and watch.

Fifteen days after becoming famous, the rapidly advancing Guo Youcai slowed down his pace.

On May 22, Guo Youcai said in a live broadcast at the Heze National Flower Expo Park that he would stop broadcasting for three days to rest his voice and "learn something". Prior to this, he was reported by netizens for "making bad remarks" and his grassroots personality was frequently questioned. At the same time, the chaotic live broadcast of "a group of demons dancing wildly" at Heze South Station also attracted attention from all parties. Heze officials announced the suspension of all entertainment activities and persuaded people to leave many vulgar live broadcasts. Being reported did not bring Guo Youcai's celebrity career to an abrupt end: on the 22nd, more than 420,000 users followed his account; on the 23rd, Guo Youcai appeared in the live broadcast room as scheduled, saying that he "did not want to disappoint everyone who came from afar", and in this live broadcast, he turned off the reward function.

In the ten days since he became famous, Guo Youcai seemed to be riding a roller coaster of traffic, rushing straight to the top: his cover song "Promise" topped the QQ Music Hot List, his personal account had over 10 million fans within ten days, and his live broadcast reward income was as high as 3-4 million. He was also hired as the Heze Tourism Ambassador, and his love story with his girlfriend, "My good wife helped me to reach my lofty ambitions, and I gave my good wife ten thousand taels of gold," broke through the hearts of fans. In a short time, Guo Youcai became the "new god" of Douyin.

In recent years, Douyin has become popular with the trend of "creating fast gods". Experts become popular quickly and disappear quickly, and even the logic of becoming popular and disappearing is hard to grasp. After rising to the peak of traffic, the experts who quickly fell include Yu Wenliang, Wen Huijun, and even Wang Po of Kaifeng. Now, the halo and curse of "limited top flow" are quietly approaching Guo Youcai.

Compared with those "old gods", Guo Youcai's popularity model is obviously richer. Even if this popularity is an accident created by the Douyin algorithm, Guo Youcai's ability to control short videos and live broadcasts cannot be ignored. In addition, the "grassroots" struggle story, the nostalgia of old songs in the 1980s, and the unexpected involvement in the male emotional track, all these layers of packaging have added chips to his fame.

01 A live broadcast carnival of creating gods

In mid-May, Heze South Railway Station ushered in a limited carnival. This abandoned railway station was suddenly swept by traffic and turned into a large live broadcast base, with a population density catching up with that of a tourist attraction.

Before the live broadcast location was moved to the Heze National Flower Expo Park, Guo Youcai and the Heze South Station behind him were the new "check-in points" for netizens. With a cover version of "Promise", Guo Youcai ushered in his peak traffic. In the past month, his number of fans has soared from 110,000 to 12.68 million, achieving the miracle of 10 million fans in ten days. Fans joked that "no one asked about the barbecue for five years, but the world knows about the promise once it is made."

Guo Youcai was able to attract so much attention in a short period of time. In addition to the "invisible hand" of Douyin, Kas believes that there are two points that cannot be ignored. The first is that Guo Youcai himself is not an amateur outside the short video and live broadcast ecosystem; the second is the audience empathy triggered by grassroots narratives.

Although he stated in his profile that he is "a rural guy who has been selling barbecue for five years", Guo Youcai is no stranger to the operation of short videos and live broadcasts, and has staged "three forays into the celebrity circle":

In 2017, grassroots talents attracted traffic by playing with abstraction and earthiness. Guo Youcai also tried to replicate this. In the early days, he performed the "Heze Step" on Kuaishou, shouting "There are rows of people on the main road in Heze, only the male god Guo Youcai", which was full of earthiness; in 2022, Guo Youcai and Dayuange sang "Really Love You" live on the mic, ushering in a small peak in traffic. Before he completely went viral and became a top streamer with tens of millions of fans, Guo Youcai's Douyin account had accumulated 110,000 fans, and the number of viewers for a single live broadcast reached 210,000.

Cover songs alone may not be enough to support Guo Youcai's fame. In essence, Guo Youcai's popularity is another successful example of "grassroots narrative": after the hit song "Promise", people's focus gradually shifted from his works to Guo Youcai himself, and labels attached to him include "grassroots counterattack" and "inspirational".

Netizens favor grassroots narratives. Part of the reason is that they love the wildness of ordinary people, which has not yet been manufactured by celebrities or packaged and produced by factories. Part of the reason is that they love the refreshing feeling of grassroots "counterattack", which is similar to the old male-oriented literature shining into reality. Whether it is "becoming famous overnight" or "God rewards hard work" or "don't bully the young and poor", they can all be regarded as spiritual massages in today's era.

The most important thing about grassroots narratives is to tell a good story. Nomi, who became famous for his post “Thank God, thank God, I want to diss you”, has also told an inspirational story of how he escaped poverty in Daliangshan Mountain. Guo Youcai’s story is also inspiring. On the Internet, the story of him spending 6 yuan to buy music lessons, live-streaming during the day and selling barbecue at night, and counting today’s income with his girlfriend shivering in the cold weather is widely circulated.

Guo Youcai is also intentionally cultivating a grassroots image. In his account @郭有才 (inspirational version), he recounts his past struggles, and the camera shows a standard rural living room in Shandong. When singing "Promise", he imitates the outfit in "Hello, Mr. Tree", with a beard, a slicked-back hair, an old-fashioned suit and a floral shirt, and behind him is the deserted Heze South Station.

This narrative is undoubtedly successful. On Douyin, Guo Youcai's live broadcasts became popular every day. At the peak, his live broadcast room had more than 44 million viewers. Jiemian News confirmed that Guo Youcai's best live broadcasts received rewards of up to 3 to 4 million yuan.

02 Tik Tok’s “newly created god”, is it unpopular in just half a month?

If Douyin has a "Revelation of Top Streamers", a small part of it may be about the "fall of top streamers". Past experience shows that the more rapidly a celebrity climbs to the top of traffic, the faster he will fall. This is the case with Yu Wenliang and Wen Huijun. The former lost fans rapidly due to his "money-making" remarks in the live broadcast room and the "collapse of ordinary people's personality", while the latter disappeared quietly after a grand live broadcast carnival.

Guo Youcai is not without the risk of "falling".

On the one hand, in the current entertainment ecosystem, the success rate of amateurs breaking into the celebrity circle has increased through short videos and live broadcasts, but the chain reaction brought about by fame may also be much more intense. Celebrities pushed into the spotlight face not only the scrutiny of the audience, but also the influx of anchors from all directions to reap the dividends of "second-hand live broadcasts."

Heze is not a city lacking in internet celebrities. From "Cao County 666" to "One Smile Allures the City", Guo Youcai is just another person chosen by traffic. But when the celebrity performances enter the public domain, the anchors who follow the trend and come to take advantage of the popularity not only boost his popularity, but also push things to another extreme. Before Guo Youcai, it was Wang Po from Kaifeng who fell into this dilemma.

On May 20, a netizen reported the chaotic live broadcast at Heze South Railway Station under his real name. The Heze authorities had to give up the ambition of "one person making a city popular" and set about rectifying the live broadcast environment. Guo Youcai was also reported for making bad remarks during the live broadcast. On the same day, #We must cut off this cancer of internet celebrity that harms children, which became a hot search.

However, the greater danger actually comes from Guo Youcai himself. After becoming famous for his "grassroots narrative", Guo Youcai has been frequently questioned about whether his grassroots persona is fake.

In stark contrast to the grassroots persona he strives to create in his account @郭有才 (inspirational version), is the petty-bourgeois lifestyle presented in the Douyin videos of his girlfriend Su Chang: she often goes out for drives in a convertible, travels abroad, eats luxurious meals, and luxury goods can be seen everywhere in the photos she posts.

Some Zhihu netizens also pointed out that Guo Youcai did run a barbecue stall in 2019, but then switched to live streaming. In 2022, he became a small internet celebrity by making videos. Because the live streaming traffic deteriorated, he started making videos again with the persona of "setting up a stall to save money to marry a wife." The barbecue stall was a prop for photo-taking, and live streaming was his main business, and "grassroots" was just a carefully packaged persona.

According to the Tianyan APP, Guo Youcai is also associated with a company called Shandong Guozhongdao Culture Media Co., Ltd., which was established in March last year with a registered capital of 3 million yuan and was deregistered in April this year. At the same time, Jiemian News also confirmed that Guo Youcai is indeed operated by a local life company, and he recently joined a new company.

All these things have caused cracks in Guo Youcai's "grassroots" persona, which is a dangerous signal for the popular talent. In his previous article "40 million fans IP, fell in the spring of 2024", Kas mentioned that in 2024, people will probably be more strict in examining the fictional content of top bloggers, and the direction of public opinion is very clear, that is, fiction that is not clearly marked may be suspected of deception and bad guidance. "Falsification" in personality is likely to cause the talent to fall from a high position.

At the same time, after gaining tens of millions of fans, Guo Youcai's traffic seems to have hit the ceiling, and the speed of increasing fans has slowed down significantly. It is difficult for his live broadcast room to replicate the grand occasion of more than 44 million viewers. For Guo Youcai, who only relies on live broadcasts to attract fans, people's sense of novelty is short-lived. If he cannot continue to attract the attention of the audience, once the aura of explosive popularity disappears, he is likely to become the next "limited top streamer".

03 In the barren male emotional arena, there will be more "Guo Youcai"

Let’s go back to the starting point of Guo Youcai’s popularity. There is a point that is easily overlooked: by covering "Promise", Guo Youcai inadvertently stepped into the barren male emotional track.

The original song sung by Nuoyan expresses the sadness and remembrance of lost emotions, while Guo Youcai's version is more direct and heartbreaking. Netizens joked that his cover was "all emotion, no technique", while others praised him for singing out "the loneliness of a bachelor and the sorrow of a widow", which can be summarized as "middle-aged people are miserable and desolate".

According to Chanmama data, the majority of Guo Youcai's video viewers are male, accounting for 64%, of which the majority are aged 31-40, accounting for more than 50%. It can be said that "The Promise" became a hit because it triggered the projection and empathy of a large number of middle-aged men.

In Guo Youcai's grassroots counterattack narrative, another frequently mentioned story is his love story with his girlfriend Su Chang. His mother-in-law did not despise him and encouraged him to "start a family first, then a career", and his girlfriend Su Chang never left him. These stories have become "my virtuous wife helped me to achieve my lofty ambitions, and I will repay my virtuous wife with ten thousand taels of gold", which have been circulated on the Internet. Browsing the comments under Guo Youcai's videos, whether it is praising his mother-in-law for "being good at judging people and having a positive outlook on life", or putting himself in his shoes and expressing the feeling that "Su Chang won the bet" and "What the world lacks is Su Chang", the emotional needs of middle-aged men are fully exposed.

This reminds me of @大圆哥, who also gained nearly 8 million followers in a single month with an emotional video. On October 14 last year, Dayuange released a video titled "Love rises with the wind, but the wind stops and the heart is still hard to calm down", which received 14.63 million likes.

This work is themed "Regrets in Love" and tells the regrets of Da Yuan Ge and his ex. Although they miss each other, they finally stop being polite. The story is not complicated, but the feelings after the passage of time are mixed. The audience unconsciously puts themselves in Da Yuan Ge's shoes, thus gaining emotional resonance and spiritual resonance. Similarly, on Douyin, among Da Yuan Ge's account fans, men have an overwhelming advantage, with a male-to-female ratio close to 9:1.

On TikTok, emotional content is habitually considered exclusive to women, and many accounts focusing on women's emotions have been created, such as @乔七月 and @姜十七. However, the popularity of male-oriented short dramas such as "龙傲天" and "逆击" also shows that there is no shortage of audiences in the male emotional track, and the demand is growing.

At present, the supply of this type of content is still insufficient, and judging from the popularity of Da Yuan Ge and Guo Youcai, the male emotional track may be a new direction for future creators to break through.

Author: Jiang Bei; Source public account: Kas Data (ID: 736105)