AI beauties, forming groups to sell goods on Douyin

With the advancement of AI technology, AI beauties have appeared on the Internet and started to bring goods. Let's take a look at the specific situation of this matter~

"Personally tested by a single mother born in the 1980s, click on the window below to purchase."

At first glance at the homepage of the Douyin account "Xiao Yimei" with millions of followers, it seems that this is a blogger with a personality and good looks.

A closer look reveals that the "sister-in-law" has overly delicate skin, never shows her hands, and has a very dull expression. Many of her videos are also marked by the platform as "content suspected to be AI generated."

"Xiao Shumei" is not a real person, but an AI-powered blogger. However, according to statistics from Xinbang's Douyin data tool Xindou, "Xiao Shumei" is estimated to have brought in about 50,000 to 75,000 yuan in sales in the past 30 days.

The editorial department of Xinbang discovered that AI-based bloggers like "Xiao Yimei" are appearing in large numbers on Douyin. For example, I searched out 10 bloggers of the same type in just a few minutes.

What these bloggers have in common is that they all use AI beauties to enhance their account personalities, and then use them to sell goods. For example, "Chunxiang" has less than 100,000 fans, but has sold more than 110,000 items in total.

How do AI seeding bloggers increase their followers and realize their profits? Is this a replicable AI commercialization path? Let’s find out today.

1. How to create an AI blogger?

The threshold for creating an AI blogger is not high.

First, you need a Douyin account with more than 1,000 followers in order to activate the product showcase function; then you need to be able to use AI tools such as Midjourney to facilitate the creation of beautiful pictures; finally, choose products from channels such as Douyin Selected Alliance and earn commissions by selling goods.

The above is an online introduction to how AI bloggers can be used.

Referring to accounts such as "Wenrou" and "Xiao Yimei", this type of AI bloggers basically do not do live broadcasts, and their monetization model is mainly based on selling goods through video trailers.

The video content of the AI ​​grass-planting blogger mainly consists of three parts: a beautiful cover picture with the product price and name, several product detail pictures, and a few sentences of product introduction.

There are no real people, no videos, and no product copywriting with novel angles. Compared with the common real-person bloggers, the content of AI bloggers is simple, but their traffic is not bad.

Previously, "Wenrou" had released a video promoting Old Beijing cloth shoes, which included an AI beauty cover and product details, but ultimately received 4,202 likes.

The sales path of AI seeding bloggers has also been run smoothly. According to Xindou data statistics, in the past 30 days, the cumulative estimated sales amount of accounts such as "Wenrou", "Xiaoyimei" and "Xiaojiu" has exceeded 50,000 yuan.

In the e-commerce industry, using AI technology to sell products has always been a hot topic. From AI digital people in the local life field to the AI ​​beauty bloggers who are quite popular on Xiaohongshu, relevant practitioners have tried many ways to play.

In contrast, although the content of AI bloggers like "Wenrou" is rough, their low cost and low difficulty make it possible for one person to operate dozens or hundreds of accounts at the same time.

Although at present, there are no particularly outstanding cases of sales performance of individual AI bloggers, but if the number of accounts is multiplied by 10 or even 100, the corresponding sales data may be a very impressive number.

2. What is the basis for AI bloggers to promote products?

While popular anchors are desperately trying to make videos and live broadcasts, why can AI bloggers who can tell the authenticity at a glance not only attract a lot of fans but also achieve commercial monetization?

On the one hand, the fake Jin Dong incident has proved that there are indeed a large number of users with poor discernment on the Internet.

In the eyes of industry insiders, AI bloggers who can tell the authenticity of products at a glance may be difficult for many netizens to tell apart, and they may even invest their true emotions into it and eventually place an order.

Taking "Chocolate, Little Lemon" as an example, the video content of this account is basically emotional topics such as "most of the diseases of men are effeminate" and "the better the character of a man, the less sociable he is". However, a closer look reveals that perhaps because of the abuse of special effects and filters, or perhaps because of the use of AI to create, the video content of "Chocolate, Little Lemon" not only has a single scene and angle, but the voices in different videos are different, and the mouth shape does not match the copy, which looks very AI-like.

But it is precisely this kind of content that has made "Chocolate, Little Lemon" not only attract the attention of 10.47 million fans, but also received many heartfelt messages from netizens in the comment section.

In fact, there are already many similar accounts like "Chocolate, Little Lemon" on Douyin. Their user portraits mostly focus on men over 40 years old. At the same time, they use the image of beautiful women to output emotional chicken soup in batches, and finally monetize through product showcases and exclusive memberships.

These accounts prove that AI-based content has a considerable audience. In the eyes of professional e-commerce professionals, AI-based bloggers such as "Wenrou" may not have any technical content, but for some middle-aged male netizens with weaker discernment, "single mother born in the 1980s" may really be attractive.

This may also explain why the AI ​​blogger did not choose the image of a young and beautiful girl, but instead was closer to the image of the "middle-aged and elderly men harvester" and "A smile that conquers the city" that became popular last year.

On the other hand, the live streaming e-commerce industry has repeatedly proved that both "goods bring people" and "people bring goods" can attract a group of consumers.

In fact, many videos of AI-promoting bloggers are actively or passively marked as being generated by AI, but this does not prevent them from continuing to sell products.

It has been observed that the accounts of AI bloggers such as "Wenrou" mostly list low-priced department stores. Department store products have the widest potential consumer base, and the low price of 9.9 yuan including shipping greatly reduces the user's consumption decision-making costs.

High-frequency videos make up for the lack of traffic for individual videos. According to statistics from New Douyin, accounts such as "Wenrou", "Xiaoyimei" and "Shishi Department Store" publish around 200 videos per month.

In fact, this model of bringing in goods with large quantities has long been verified. On Douyin, accounts including "Qitong Good Things", "Qiaoqiao Good Things" and "Fengpai Good Things" all promote low-priced general merchandise such as paper towels, plastic wrap, and laundry detergent by posting a large number of grass-growing videos.

For example, as of now, "Qiao Qiao Good Things" has released a total of 47,000 grass-planting videos, with an average of 10 videos released every day. The estimated sales amount in the past 30 days is about 2.5 million to 5 million yuan.

In comparison, real-person grass-growing accounts such as "Qitong Haowu" choose to use real people to appear in order to achieve higher conversion efficiency, while AI grass-growing bloggers such as "Wenrou" choose to use AI to produce pictures, thereby achieving higher production efficiency.

With the advancement of AI technology, when Stable Diffusion and DALL E can efficiently produce more realistic pictures, and when Sora can directly generate grass-planting videos, AI grass-planting bloggers will inevitably improve content quality and production efficiency, and ultimately further enhance their ability to bring goods.

3. What are the pitfalls of AI bloggers?

Generally speaking, AI bloggers are just a way of bringing goods by using AI technology to achieve higher production efficiency. There is no difference between them and real people bringing goods. However, in actual implementation, AI bloggers have many difficulties:

First, the authenticity is questionable. Personalities like the "single mother born in the 1980s" are real-life personalities that take advantage of the weak discernment of some users and are suspected of fraud.

In addition, for display products such as clothes and cosmetics, there is not much difference between AI recommendations and real-person recommendations. However, if it is products that require actual use, such as household appliances and skin care products, as well as products that require real-person tasting, such as food and alcohol, there is no way to talk about AI testing.

AI science blogger "shine" discovered that a certain AI blogger had recently posted an advertisement for health products, which was suspected of false advertising (the advertisement has now been deleted).

Second, the difficulty of commercial replication. The biggest advantage of AI seeding bloggers is low cost and replicability. If they want to increase their commercial value, AI seeding bloggers must take the matrix route, mass-produce accounts of the same type, and publish a large number of seeding videos.

However, from the platform’s perspective, these accounts and content are easily judged as low-quality, and then subject to traffic restrictions or even account closure. The operators of AI seeding bloggers must "fight wits and courage" with the platform. Not only must they obtain a sufficient number of ID cards to open accounts in batches, but they must also be able to manage a large number of matrix accounts that may be punished by the platform at any time.

Third, the risk of account violations. AI grass-planting bloggers mostly choose to sell low-priced department stores, which is determined by the characteristics of the account. However, in the field of low-priced department stores, compared with low-profit branded goods, only three-no products and white-label products have sufficient profits. If AI grass-planting bloggers do not select products strictly, they are likely to violate relevant laws and regulations.

In addition, some AI-based bloggers use real people as templates, which may involve copyright infringement. Recently, a Ukrainian girl named Olga Loiek posted a video saying that an account on a Chinese platform had stolen her image and used AI technology to generate videos, making her AI image shout "China-Russia friendship lasts forever" as a Russian beauty, thereby attracting fans and promoting Russian specialties.

On the whole, AI bloggers like "Wenrou" are engaged in typical "sewer business". If they can do a good job of risk control, individuals or small teams may have good returns in the short term, but if they are regular troops, the gains may not outweigh the losses.

In fact, in addition to the high-profile play of "Liu Yexi", the industry is also trying more different AI-driven ways of bringing goods. For example, "Drink Only Boiled Water" uses AI technology to generate beautiful women videos and has accumulated 530,000 fans on Douyin.

In the future, if AI tools such as Sora can achieve low-cost mass production of grass-planting videos similar to "Qitong Good Things", the potential of AI grass-planting bloggers may be further released.

Author: Yun Feiyang WeChat public account: Xinbang