Short play: Pitcher manages money: "Spend money like water", loses 100,000 in one night

The trend of short dramas in 2023 is booming and should not be underestimated. Streaming is a key link in the short drama industry chain, and pitchers are the ones who deal directly with money in the entire streaming link. What is it like to spend 70,000 yuan on streaming a day, and what is it like to lose 100,000 yuan in one night? Can a senior pitcher earn up to 200,000 yuan a month? With these questions, the author talked with several short drama pitchers and heads of streaming companies.

The trend of short dramas, which has been booming for a year in 2023, still shows no signs of dying down. Although the growth rate of short dramas has slowed down under the tightening of supervision, the overall market of the industry should not be underestimated. An insider of Douyin short dramas revealed to Tech Planet that the daily consumption of Douyin's market (the cost of short drama advertising) is now 50 million. The daily consumption of 50 million means that the annual investment cost of short dramas on Douyin alone is as high as 18.25 billion.

A widely circulated industry consensus is that the cost of buying traffic accounts for 80%-90% of the total box office of short dramas. Traffic investment is a very critical link in the entire short drama industry chain, and the pitcher is the role that directly deals with money in the entire traffic investment link. Behind Douyin's daily consumption of 50 million is actually the result of the uninterrupted operation of countless short drama platforms and nearly 10,000 pitchers of traffic investment companies.

Take a short drama with over 100 million RMB in 8 days as an example. According to the industry ROI (return on investment) of 1.1-1.2, the investment cost is about 80-90 million RMB. This investment cost of nearly 100 million RMB is the result of countless pitchers investing together. The most experienced pitcher may invest several million RMB alone.

No one can accurately count how many pitchers there are in the industry, because the turnover is too frequent and the companies and cities where pitchers are located are very scattered. But a senior pitcher manager told Tech Planet that there are at least 10,000 pitchers in the skit industry.

The amount of money a pitcher spends in a day can range from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions. The amount of money spent is closely related to the pitcher's ability and rank.

What is it like to spend 70,000 yuan on streaming in one day, and what is it like to lose 100,000 yuan in one night? Can a senior pitcher earn up to 200,000 yuan a month? With these questions, Tech Planet talked to several short play pitchers and the heads of streaming companies.

1. Spending a lot of money, the maximum amount spent on traffic in a single day was 100,000

Spending money is the main part of a pitcher's daily job. The more money a pitcher spends on streaming, the more traffic the short drama will have, the more likely it is to become a hit, and the higher the recharge amount of users who watch the short drama, that is, the higher the box office. A short drama that can't even spend money on streaming is destined to be a "flop" that no one cares about, and it may even lose money. But how to spend the money requires a series of careful planning in advance.

Xiao Wu works as a pitcher in a streaming company. Previously, the company's main business was live entertainment. In 2023, short dramas became the industry's hot spot. The company has artist anchors, so it transformed into short dramas. Xiao Wu also transformed into a short drama pitcher. In addition to attending meetings, tracking industry trends, and reviewing the short drama data and rankings of the previous day, a very important job of a pitcher's day is to create plans for new dramas. Xiao Wu has 5 short drama accounts, and one account creates 40 plans. A drama is about 40 plans. Then a plan usually corresponds to a certain number of short drama materials, and different pitchers set the number of materials according to their own delivery preferences. Some people may have 10 materials in a plan.

Whether the effect of the streaming is good or not depends largely on: the selection of dramas, the materials, and the timing. A senior pitcher will first screen the short dramas. For example, if the company has many short dramas, the pitcher will generally select the dramas with explosive quality from the short dramas he has watched, and then select the material clips edited by the company's editors, and then conduct a small-scale test streaming of the material.

For a newly launched short drama, the test budget is not very large. Xiao Wu told Tech Planet that it is usually 2,000 yuan a day. Some streaming companies have increased the trial and error budget to 100,000 yuan, and the trial and error cycle is 7 days. But usually it takes 3 days to see whether a short drama should continue to be streamed. The head of a streaming company said that the life and death line of a short drama is 3 days. For some dramas, life and death can be determined in one day.

The audience and user portraits of the traffic are almost the default in the industry, and there is no need for the pitcher to set them independently. Xiao Wu said that the general audience of male frequency is mostly male, and the audience of female frequency short dramas is female. The age group is 30-50 years old, and the paid recharge users are people over 50 years old. In terms of the cities for the launch, many pitchers will exclude Beijing and Shanghai, because the traffic in first-tier cities is relatively expensive. In addition, the time period for the traffic is relatively fixed, and the traffic is better during commuting time and at night.

The real test of a pitcher's ability is to decide when to set the paid episode for a short play, how many episodes users are willing to pay after watching for free, and what plots they are willing to pay for. These tasks of understanding human nature all require pitchers to make decisions.

Zhang Quan, the head of the pitching business of a streaming company, told Tech Planet that the beginning and ending of a skit are very important. Generally, the beginning needs to be very exciting, and the golden 3-10 seconds are very important. The more common paid card plots are: face-slapping clips, slapping her; or more gimmicky showing off wealth clips, "I'll give 10 billion"; or shocking and suspenseful clips, a new character appears, "Why is it you?", the character counterattacks, etc. Many routines are used to attract people to pay to watch.

In the past year, Xiao Wu spent 70,000 yuan on a single day. Another pitcher, Ye Rulong, spent 100,000 yuan on a single day.

According to Xiao Wu's recollection, that day he operated as usual and set the one-key start time in advance. The traffic was better at night, especially between 1 and 2 in the morning, so he increased the volume during that time period and ran the volume quickly, and soon reached 20,000 to 30,000.

In Xiao Wu's experience, the consumption of one-click volume cannot be preset too high. If it is set to 10,000, the platform system may push some inaccurate traffic to help with rapid consumption, and the ROI (return on investment) will be lower and the cost will be higher. Xiao Wu sets the regular running volume to 2,000-3,000 yuan.

2. Setting error caused a loss of 100,000 in one night, and the pitcher resigned on the spot

A very important reference data for how much money a pitcher spends and whether to continue or stop investing is ROI. The ROI of different skits and different pitchers varies. The industry ROI is generally around 1.1-1.2. There is no lower limit for low ROI, which may be only 0.4, 0.5, or even lower. The ultimate goal of a pitcher using all means of investment is to increase ROI and thus increase profits.

Spending money and optimizing ROI are the top priorities for a pitcher. Ye Rulong has been a pitcher for four or five years, but his experience as a skit pitcher is less than one year. Although his time is short, he has pitched hundreds of skits and has now become the head of the pitching department.

For pitchers, launching a new drama is their busiest time. How many accounts to use for testing streaming, how to set up payment points, how many materials to prepare, how to set up large and small panels, all these need to be prepared in advance. According to Ye Rulong's plan, a new drama needs to prepare about 500 materials, which are edited by different editors. "For a large short drama platform like Jiuzhou, a drama may have thousands of materials."

Ye Rulong spent 100,000 yuan in a single day when the highest amount of investment flow was spent, and the ROI was 11-12, that is, the user recharged 110,000-120,000 yuan. He told Tech Planet that although he spent 100,000 yuan a day, he actually did not feel any emotional fluctuations. After all, the user recharged money and it came back. What really makes people emotional is losing money, that is, the ROI is not positive, and is less than 1.

However, losing money is a necessary step for all pitchers. The most Ye Rulong has ever lost in a day is more than 10,000 yuan. According to him, that time was because he started too aggressively. He spent more than 20,000 yuan in ten minutes and more than 30,000 yuan in an hour. The backend cannot see the user's recharge amount, so the ROI is unknown. By the time he sees the recharge amount and calculates that he has lost money, it is too late to make adjustments because it is too aggressive. Then it is useless to operate anymore. The money cannot be recovered and the traffic cannot be used. In the future, he can only make optimization adjustments to increase user recharges and recover the losses.

Simply put, pitchers need to keep an eye on two numbers, the flow cost and the user recharge. That is, the money spent is proportional to the user's recharge. When the money spent is greater than the user's recharge amount; ROI<1, it is naturally a loss. How to adjust after losing money? Ye Rulong said that according to specific problems, the first charge rate, recharge, payment card points, and recharge panel will be adjusted in real time. Facing the user's recharge panel, there are three types: large, medium, and small. Large amounts generally start at 40 yuan, and small amounts start at a few yuan.

In terms of losing money, pitchers at all levels have equal chances of making mistakes. Li Zhi, a pitcher at a company in Chengdu, told Tech Planet that a senior pitcher at their company lost 100,000 yuan in one night due to improper operation and wrong settings, and resigned on the spot. She herself lost 10,000 yuan in her first month after joining the company.

Pitchers with less experience will not lose too much money even if they lose money because they consume less money. Xiaobai, a novice who has been a pitcher for four days, revealed to Tech Planet that the most he threw out in a day was 2,000 yuan, and he lost 200.

The probability of losing money is so high that many pitchers are no longer surprised by it. At first, pitchers may feel psychologically burdened when they lose money, feel guilty and self-blame, and be cautious, but later they will no longer feel anything. Xiao Wu said that losses are inevitable and are a must for every pitcher.

Li Zhi said that after becoming a pitcher, she developed a wrong view of money. The money she spent was clearly the boss's money, but she just regarded it as a number.

3. Working all year round, 40% of pitchers earn less than 10,000 yuan a month

Although pitchers deal with money every day and spend money like water, and have no psychological burden when spending 100,000 yuan, their individual income is not so "satisfying". The difference between spending money and making money is very obvious.

The intensity of a pitcher's work is not as easy as one might imagine. Just like a "yin-yang contract", each pitcher has a yin-yang working time. It is called "9 am to 6 pm", but in fact the working time is about 1 am.

Li Zhi's company invests in streaming for his own short dramas, so it's easier than a distribution streaming company. But even so, Li Zhi has to work overtime until 12 o'clock two or three days a week, and then go home and stare at the data until 1 o'clock in the morning.

Wang Xin quit her job as a pitcher after working for only one month. In her opinion, being a pitcher is too tiring. She was extremely busy every day, building dozens of plans, 3-4 accounts, and endless materials. And after get off work, she had to look at materials, make requirements, and make data tables. The key is that the time spent is not proportional to the income. The salary structure of a pitcher is base salary + commission. Generally speaking, the base salary is not very high in various cities, and the commission part is usually about 3-10 points of the profit of the short play. The commission part has a certain threshold. Some companies stipulate that employees can only receive it after they are converted to regular employees. Some commissions are the profit part of the short play. If the ROI is not positive and there is no profit, the pitcher will not get the commission.

Wang Xin is from Shenzhen. She joined a company in Shenzhen. The base salary for pitchers during the probation period is 4,500 yuan. After three months of consumption reaching 1 million yuan, they can be converted to regular employees, and only after that can they receive commissions. Wang Xin's daily consumption is only more than 2,000 yuan, which is far from the company's daily consumption target of 10,000 yuan. She felt that she could not see any hope, so she left early.

It is common for many pitchers to not get commissions, and many of them may only earn a few thousand yuan a month. There are rumors in the industry that a senior pitcher earns 200,000 yuan a month. Ye Rulong said that there may be no more than 5 such top pitchers among 10,000 pitchers. According to him, most of the basic salaries in the industry are 5,000-8,000 yuan. With commissions, 50% of pitchers earn 10,000-20,000 yuan a month. 40% of pitchers earn less than 10,000 yuan a month, only a few thousand yuan.

Even if a pitcher has one year of experience in investment and can create hundreds of thousands of profits for the company, his salary is not very high. Xiao Wu told Tech Planet that in less than a year, he brought 600,000 to 800,000 yuan in profits to the company, and the highest commission he received was 10,000 yuan. With the base salary, his monthly income was less than 20,000 yuan.

In the past, it was possible for a big-name pitcher to earn 200,000 yuan a month in the industry, but now, with stricter regulation and more and more competition in the industry, the Matthew effect is becoming more and more obvious. For many pitchers, earning 200,000 yuan a month is increasingly just a rumor. It has also become more difficult to earn more than 10,000 yuan a month.

As the person in charge of the pitching business, Ye Rulong used to earn 20,000 to 30,000 yuan a month. But now, with fewer new dramas and more distributors, the distribution of old dramas is not profitable, and his income has shrunk by half. Xiao Wu's income has decreased by 30%.

The monthly performance of a pitcher is not stable, and even the daily performance is uncertain. There are gains and losses, which can be called metaphysics. Xiao Wu said that since September last year, he has been losing money for three consecutive months. In these three months, he only made profits for 3-7 days. Xiao Wu's company announced its bankruptcy not long ago.

Author: Zhai Yuanyuan WeChat public account: Tech Planet