The new account attracted 7 million fans and the first broadcast sold 150 million, but Dong Yuhui was "not safe"

Dong Yuhui's new account @与辉同行 officially launched on Douyin, becoming a highly anticipated live broadcast room in 2024. However, after the public opinion crisis of the "small composition incident" of Oriental Selection was resolved, Dong Yuhui's future is still full of challenges. This article leads us to follow Dong Yuhui's journey of breaking the circle and explore his future development path. Let's take a look!

With 3 million followers gained in a single live broadcast, Dong Yuhui’s new account had a “good start” and became the first live broadcast room to attract attention from the entire network in 2024.

At 7pm on January 9, Dong Yuhui's new account @与辉同行 officially went live on Douyin. The opening show was a talent show by seven new anchors. Compared with the veteran anchors of @东方选主账号, such as yoyo, dun dun, and mingming, the number of fans of the new anchors before the start of the show was concentrated between 100,000 and 400,000.

At 8 pm that night, Dong Yuhui and New Oriental founder Yu Minhong jointly broadcast live. When talking about the establishment of @与辉同行, Yu Minhong lamented that without the twists and turns of the "Little Composition" incident, @与辉同行 would not have been established so quickly, "although I still hope that incident will not happen again."

Dong Yuhui also mentioned that he was so nervous that he didn’t sleep well the night before, and Yu Minhong comforted him, “Don’t set any tasks, I don’t care about your sales.”

This "KPI-free" live streaming sales campaign has brought in a lot of wealth. As soon as the broadcast started, the number of people online at the same time exceeded 100,000, and even exceeded 1.7 million during the peak period. The entire live broadcast lasted more than 4 hours, and the total GMV displayed on site exceeded 150 million, ranking first on the Douyin sales daily list, with a total of 1.28 billion likes.

One month has passed since the "Little Composition" incident, and the public opinion crisis of Oriental Selection has been resolved. The newly opened live broadcast room seems to have fought a beautiful debut battle. So is Dong Yuhui really safe? With 150 million yuan in sales, is it the first show that is the peak, or is the second Oriental Selection about to be born?

1. The first show brought in 150 million yuan in sales, a live broadcast miracle that was publicized in advance

It has been exactly 19 months since Dong Yuhui became popular on June 9, 2022, and the premiere of his new account @与辉同行.

At the starting point of his popularity, on June 9, 2022, Dong Yuhui was just a member of the Oriental Selected Anchor Group, and the cumulative GMV of his live broadcast room that day was only around 3.5 million yuan.

At that time, Dong Yuhui was selected by traffic because of his "bilingual teaching" and became the son of luck, becoming the one with the most fans in the @东方选主账号. As of press time, his account has 23.958 million fans, while @东方选主账号 has only 31.488 million fans.

After the explosion, Dongfang Zhenxuan's performance has been rising steadily, and its stock price has also risen. Because he is considered to be the hero who turned the tide, Dong Yuhui has won the favor of his mother-in-law and the support of off-site workers. In the "Little Composition" incident at the end of last year, many passers-by spoke up for Dong Yuhui, and even Luo Yonghao specially opened a live broadcast to give advice to "Little Dong", angrily accusing Dongfang Zhenxuan of being stingy and asking "Little Dong" to fight for more reasonable interests.

The power of public opinion pushed Yu Minhong to make a quick decision. On December 16, Oriental Selection issued a personnel appointment and dismissal notice, Yu Minhong concurrently served as CEO of Oriental Selection, and Sun Dongxu was dismissed from the CEO position. On December 22, the board of directors of Oriental Selection announced that Sun Dongxu had resigned as the company's non-executive director, effective immediately. At the same time, Dong Yuhui was appointed as the cultural assistant to the chairman of New Oriental Education and Technology Group, and concurrently served as vice president of New Oriental Culture and Tourism Group.

About a week after Sun Dongxu left, @与辉同行 opened a Douyin account and later announced that it would start broadcasting on January 9. The entire preparation time was very tight. @与辉同行's affiliated companies are 100% controlled by Oriental Selection, and the total merchandise transaction volume of the new account is included in Oriental Selection's financial report.

@与辉同行first show poster

Obviously, this live broadcast is meaningful to Dong Yuhui's team, his mother-in-law, and the Douyin platform. It is worth mentioning that on January 7, the Douyin app also published a special message on its official WeChat public account that @与辉同行 will live broadcast on January 9. The platform took the initiative to help a new account build momentum, which is enough to show that this will be the first hit live broadcast room in the new year.

Highly sticky fans are Dong Yuhui's biggest confidence. Although operating independently, the @与辉同行 team still works in Zhongguancun E-World. On the first day of the show on January 9, fans from many places sent barley and flowers to Dong Yuhui's new studio.

The purchasing power of mothers-in-law (a nickname for Dong Yuhui's fans) speaks for itself. That night, the yellow bike posted a link to the product, and the @与辉同行 live broadcast room entered the self-service ordering mode. Before Dong Yuhui started talking about the product, the sales in the live broadcast room were close to 10 million. Afterwards, several linked products were sold out during the presentation.

Some products in @与辉同行 live broadcast room

In terms of live broadcast style, Dong Yuhui's new team still maintains a similar rhythm to @东方选. In addition to singing many songs such as "Mountain Songs Are Like Spring River Water" and "Rice Fragrance", they still extend some small knowledge points or folk stories when explaining the products, adding entertainment and knowledge attributes in addition to sales.

In terms of product selection, @与辉同行 live broadcast room put a total of 191 items on the shelves that night, including home appliances, food and beverages, books, daily necessities, etc. Some of the products overlapped with the Oriental Selection live broadcast room, but there were no Oriental Selection's own products.

According to the anchor, @与辉同行's current product selection is led by a new team, and they have received a lot of consumer suggestions from the comment area. It is worth mentioning that the four products with the highest live sales are all food, and they have all appeared in @东方选直播室, but due to differences in product specifications, the prices are not the same.

@With Hui's first show, the product with the highest sales

According to the real-time information of the live broadcast room, as of 10:22 pm on January 9, the cumulative sales of @与辉同行 reached 150 million. As of press time, @与辉同行 has released 49 videos and has 7.774 million fans, which is equivalent to 1/4 of the main account of @东方选.

In contrast, the popularity of @东方选直播间 on that day was much lower than that of @与辉同行, but its sales performance was higher than usual. Sanyancha showed that @东方选 sold 361,800 items on that day, with an estimated sales of 31.9923 million yuan, ranking third on Douyin's daily list.

According to @与辉同行直播室, the new team currently has 71 people, including anchors who volunteered to join and personnel who were assigned by the parent company of Oriental Selection after sorting out the team. When there are more people, @与辉同行 will launch a series of strategic deployments after the new year, such as outdoor shooting and going abroad.

2. Is Dong Yuhui safe?

It seems that Dong Yuhui's first show was full of support from fans, outstanding results, and he had a good chat with his boss. But in fact, this live broadcast was also the beginning of Dong Yuhui's solo responsibility, and the real test is still to come.

After the "Little Composition" incident broke out, everything developed in a direction that no one expected. Kass believes that Dong Yuhui will face at least three more challenges in the future.

First, the live streaming e-commerce industry is highly inward-looking, and users will always be attracted to newer and better content formats.

Live streaming e-commerce is not a simple sales job, and competition in the industry is becoming increasingly fierce. The "involution" is particularly obvious in Douyin e-commerce.

Judging from the data, the popularity of the Oriental Selection Live Room soared in June 2022, precisely because of the bilingual teaching-style sales model. On the one hand, many viewers are paying for feelings. As an old listed company and a well-known leading education company, New Oriental still occupies a place in the hearts of parents and students. Old fans still often support the Oriental Selection Live Room, that is, "I watched New Oriental English teaching when I was a child, and I watched New Oriental English selling when I grew up."

On the other hand, the key factor for the Dongfang Selection live broadcast team to stand out is that they actively upgrade new gameplay and use content to reduce the dimension of other live broadcast rooms. As netizens commented, "Dongfang Selection interprets the new interpretation of knowledge payment, allowing cultural people to sell goods through live broadcast."

However, @与辉同行’s positioning is very similar to that of the main account of Dongfang Zhenxuan, and there is a lot of overlap in the first selection, which may make many users confused and aesthetically fatigued. The success of the first live broadcast was due to the hard work of loyal fans, but it is still unknown how the results will be in the future.

Secondly, with the change of identity from anchor to project leader, even top star Dong Yuhui may not be able to handle the task.

In the @与辉同行 project, Dong Yuhui seems to have become the role that Sun Dongxu played in the @东方选主账号. He is not only the anchor, but also needs to participate in product selection and manage the team. Dong Yuhui said during the live broadcast, "I couldn't sleep before because I didn't know where to go and was confused; now I can't sleep because I have to think about how to pay the employees as soon as I wake up, which is stressful."

In addition, Dong Yuhui shoulders the important task of expanding the territory. Regarding the positioning of @与辉同行, Dong Yuhui summarized it as "the live broadcast room for Oriental Selection to explore new businesses", that is, on the basis of adhering to the original intention of agricultural products and meeting the daily needs of consumers, exploring the possibilities of books, culture and tourism.

Admittedly, the cultural and tourism track is a tough nut to crack, the user decision-making costs are high, and the challenge of achieving high GMV in the live broadcast room is huge.

Previously, New Oriental’s cultural and tourism products were hotly debated due to their high prices. The topic #董宇辉’s fans were discouraged from entering the cultural and tourism live broadcast room# was even on the hot search on Weibo. At that time, a product called “21-day in-depth cultural tour in Hangzhou for two people” was priced at 29,800 yuan, and fans called it expensive.

As of press time, New Oriental Travel's Douyin store has displayed 16 products, with the lowest price of 4,798 yuan and the highest price of 29,600 yuan, and most of the projects do not include round-trip transportation. Among them, the best-selling one is the 6-day, 5-night tour of Xi'an Guanzhong Culture Study Tour, priced at 9,680 yuan, with more than 300 copies sold; in addition, the sales of many projects are only in the single digit, such as the 7-day, 6-night tour of Hainan Hongtian Village English teaching charity study tour, which sold 1 copy at a price of 10,880 yuan.

Sales volume of New Oriental Cultural Tourism Stores

In the first show, @与辉同行 did not put cultural tourism products on the shelves, probably due to price considerations. In terms of the average price of products, a total of 2.437 million items were sold in the first show, with an average price of about 70 yuan per item, which is lower than @东方选.

Third, popularity among passers-by and online reputation may be a test that limits the continued expansion of Dong Yuhui and @与辉同行 IP.

If you step into the fan circle game, you will inevitably suffer. After Sun Dongxu was dismissed and the "small composition" incident came to an end, Dong Yuhui's reputation among passers-by has shown signs of decline.

Xiaohongshu netizens commented on @与辉同行debut

Kas found that many users who were originally fans of @东方选 main account began to criticize Dong Yuhui. These fans have cut ties with @与辉同行. In their view, Dong Yuhui did not explain the creation problems of the "small composition" earlier, which caused a public opinion crisis and he is no longer worthy of love.

An interesting detail is that @与辉同行 displayed the names of all the staff members in the subtitles at the end of the live broadcast, just like the cast and crew list at the end of a movie.

@与辉同行 live broadcast screenshot

This reminds me of the beginning of the uproar caused by Dong Yuhui's "small composition" incident a month ago. It was because @东方选小编 was dissatisfied with Dong Yuhui enjoying the halo while the hard work of the people behind the scenes was buried. Dong Yuhui's move was interpreted by some netizens as "he has always been very careful", but some netizens said, "It's a bit of a show, he is the beneficiary of the small composition! And not all the people behind the scenes are willing to reveal their names!"

A seemingly flawless operation can cause annoyance to passers-by. Dong Yuhui seems to be a bit "unpopular". The new live broadcast room @与辉同行 was born because of Dong Yuhui. Will it also fall into a public opinion crisis or a greater risk in the future?

Author: Lou Xingchui

WeChat public account: caasdata (ID: caasdata6)