Another "ordinary person" has become popular! This time, TikTok has taught WeChat a lesson

After the "Yu Wenliang phenomenon", the "Wen Huijun phenomenon" suddenly became popular. Wen Huijun is another "ordinary person" who became popular after Yu Wenliang. He first became popular in WeChat Moments and then became a phenomenal popularity on Douyin. However, in this battle for traffic, Douyin won a great victory and taught WeChat a lesson. Why is this? Let's take a look at the author's analysis.

Wen Huijun, the mysterious uncle who was dotting WeChat Moments over the weekend, has gained nearly 6 million followers on Douyin.

Some people say that he is another "ordinary person" who became popular after Yu Wenliang. However, compared with Yu Wenliang, who fell out of favor due to his "money-making" remarks after becoming famous, Wen Huijun is well aware of the script of "monetization is the end of traffic". He has already started live broadcasts to accept rewards, and even posted a business WeChat account after becoming popular, preparing for further monetization.

Yu Wenliang and Wen Huijun

Some netizens said in the comment section that Wen Huijun’s income from a live broadcast after he became famous reached 8.4 million yuan.

Unlike many Douyin influencers, Wen Huijun really became popular on WeChat Moments and then became famous on Douyin.

As a national-level application that started out as a social and content-based platform, WeChat is not short of traffic, but it lacks a story that is worthy of attention. So when the story really came, WeChat was not ready to catch up with the popularity that originated from WeChat Moments and push it into a social hot spot.

On the other hand, Douyin, which is good at "creating gods", not only "grabbed" a lot of WeChat's traffic, but also taught WeChat a lesson on how to create content hotspots.

1. Sweeping the Moments, gaining 6 million followers in five days

On WeChat Moments, Wen Huijun fills the screen with selfies of him frowning. On Douyin, Wen Huijun has three accounts, corresponding to three different identities:

One is the "Li'an Wenhuijun Driver Service Department", which updates the funny daily life of the driving school and is responsible for "earning tuition for his son";

One is "Wen Shen", who updates social shake dance, lip sync videos, etc., and is responsible for "funny";

One is "Wen Huijun", who updates deep selfies with sad captions and is responsible for "deep affection". The selfies that flood the circle of friends also come from the account "Wen Huijun".

According to the Chanmama data platform, from the evening of December 16 when the post was posted on WeChat Moments, as of 22:00 on December 20, the accounts associated with Wen Huijun had gained nearly 6 million followers. The cumulative number of viewers of the live broadcast on the "Wen Shen" account also soared from 270,000 on December 16 to 37 million on December 19.

Among the tens of thousands of comments under Wen Huijun’s various accounts, many are from netizens who came here because of his fame. Some even “archaeologically” dug up Wen Huijun’s earliest videos and asked, “Why did this uncle become so popular?”

Observing the points that Wen Huijun uses to attract traffic, first, he targets the funny track, second, he creates a contrasting personality, and third, he triggers emotional resonance.

Looking through Wen Huijun's Douyin videos, we can find that his content is actually very simple and repetitive. A background music of "I don't know whether you like sunny days or rainy days" has appeared five times on the "Wen Shen" account, and the dance shot each time is also very similar.

There are many similarities in the content of Wen Huijun's videos

But Wen Huijun initially targeted the popular funny video track on Douyin. Xiao Yangge, a top anchor on Douyin who has attracted hundreds of millions of fans, became popular on the platform by making funny videos.

At the same time, there is a certain conflict between Wen Huijun's identities as a middle-aged man, a father, and a funny man, and the chemical reaction produced after the collision is attractive enough. From the early videos, we can see that many young people left messages hoping that the driving school coach would be as "funny and easy to get along with" as him, and some people joked, "If my dad is this funny, I don't know how happy I would be."

The most important thing is to create emotional resonance with young people.

The status of the three accounts, "making money during the day, dancing and being funny at noon, and being emo at night", hits the mental state of contemporary young people, making netizens born after 2000 "seeing Wen Huijun is like seeing themselves when they are old."

Post-00s "see themselves getting older"

The hot topics on Douyin also contributed to Wen Huijun’s popularity.

In November this year, the short video "Why do boys rarely post on WeChat Moments" resonated with millions of people, and also spawned content such as "Why do young people not like to post on WeChat Moments". Young people choose to post selfies of Wen Huijun on WeChat Moments, accompanied by sad copywriting, "using memes to speak from the heart" to release their emotions.

According to data from Chanmama, most of Wen Huijun’s fans are between 18 and 30 years old, and many people in the comment section also said that they were “post-00s”.

2. Wen Huijun, "catching" Yu Wenliang's traffic

Both became famous overnight, both are ordinary people with ordinary looks, and both have no professional operation team or organization. Wen Huijun's popularity easily reminds people of Yu Wenliang. They are somewhat similar, yet also somewhat different.

Yu Wenliang, who became famous for sharing the daily life of "ordinary people" in October, soon fell from grace due to inappropriate remarks about "making money" and subsequently lost millions of followers.

In the Internet age where traffic is born and dies quickly, opportunities are fleeting. Even though Yu Wenliang released an apology and explanation video on December 20, the attention was not as high as before, and there were still many negative voices in the comment section.

In the comment section of Yu Wenliang's apology video, there are still many people questioning that compared to Wenliang's way of becoming famous first and then reaping the benefits of monetization, Wen Huijun is better at gaining traffic and started to quickly monetize during the bonus period.

Not only are the contents of Wen Huijun's three accounts vertical, but the settings of avatars, backgrounds, etc. are also clearly targeted, so much so that some netizens joked that "Uncle knows how to do matrices better than even the big internet celebrities."

On December 17, Wen Huijun started a live broadcast while the iron was hot, and also listed the WeChat of business partners in his profile, which made many netizens speculate that he might start live streaming to sell goods. On December 19, some netizens said that Wen Huijun received 6,000 carnival gifts during his live broadcast on December 18. After tax, one carnival can earn 1,400 yuan, and he can earn 8.4 million yuan from a live broadcast.

Wen Huijun himself did not respond to the relevant income rumors, but judging from the special effects of gifts worth hundreds of yuan that flooded the live broadcast room, it can be seen that the income from rewards in recent live broadcasts is indeed considerable.

In fact, as early as December 2022, when Wen Huijun opened his first Douyin account to update his daily life in driving school, he revealed his intention to monetize.

One netizen commented, "Coach, I have taken the test for Part 1 35 times, but I still can't pass it." Wen Huijun replied, "Come here, I will teach you." After accumulating a wave of fans through the driving school coach account, Wen Huijun aimed at online monetization. On March 14 this year, he opened a second account, "Wen Shen", and started monetizing through funny video segments and live broadcast rewards.

Wen Huijun, who aimed at monetizing live streaming from the very beginning and made money openly, is more easily accepted by netizens.

Many netizens were joking about Wen Huijun's statement that he made millions from a live broadcast, saying, "This is the first time I've seen a successful case of someone hoping his father would become a successful person."

In this regard, Wen Huijun and Yu Wenliang are actually somewhat similar: they are both an "ordinary person template" created by Douyin, which makes many Douyin netizens believe that ordinary people can also become famous overnight, driving another explosion of content creation on the platform.

3. Did Tik Tok “steal” WeChat’s traffic?

“This is the first internet celebrity I’ve seen who became popular on WeChat Moments before becoming popular on TikTok.”

Under Wen Huijun’s short video, some netizens joked like this.

To summarize Wen Huijun's path to fame this time, he first became popular on WeChat Moments and then achieved phenomenal popularity on Douyin.

It is impossible to verify who was the first to post Wen Huijun's selfie on WeChat Moments, but the viral spread was obviously due to WeChat's over 1.3 billion monthly active users. However, this wave of WeChat Moments traffic did not flow to Video Account, but instead allowed Douyin to "take advantage" of it.

On the surface, Wen Huijun's traffic did not flow to the video account, firstly because Wen Huijun himself did not open a video account. Secondly, the user base of the video account is relatively mature. According to QuestMobile's "2022 China Mobile Internet Annual Report", the proportion of "post-60s" and "post-70s" on the video account in 2022 was 28.2%, equivalent to nearly one-third of the people over 50 years old, which is obviously inconsistent with Wen Huijun's fan portrait.

From a deeper perspective, although Tencent started out by relying on social networking and content, it does not yet have the ability to create a native hotspot in the short video sector.

Wen Huijun's selfie that flooded the friend circle

The logic of "creating gods" on the Internet is to first discover needs, then create content and meet the needs. This time the demand came from WeChat Moments. Tencent did not create the content, but Douyin, which is good at "creating gods", created the content instead, meeting the needs of young people who like to play with memes and easily snatched away WeChat's traffic.

After Wen Huijun initially became popular, Douyin took the initiative to push content related to Wen Huijun. One user said that he was pushed related content by Douyin on December 17, and only then did he know that Wen Huijun was a Douyin internet celebrity.

All major platforms are competing for traffic. Whoever can come up with content that meets the demand first will be able to gain the upper hand in the battle for traffic.

From the Saudi prince, Yu Wenliang, to Wen Huijun, the Douyin platform has created one internet celebrity after another that has sparked heated discussions across the entire network. It doesn’t matter what’s interesting about them. What matters is that they can help Douyin win repeatedly in the battle for traffic on short video platforms.

The Saudi prince and Yu Wenliang actually meet the needs of users

In comparison, WeChat Video Account seems to be quite "Buddhist". The platform has never produced any native phenomenal internet celebrities, nor does it have a sophisticated "deification" plan, which allows Douyin to easily "grab" the traffic.

In the fast-paced Internet era, traffic is born and dies quickly. Douyin quickly responded and seized the traffic wave of Wen Huijun. The video account regarded by Tencent as "the hope of the whole village" was taught a lesson by Douyin in the hot spot of Wen Huijun. As the "big brother" of content, Tencent needs to speed up the battle for traffic and keep up with the pace of short video platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou.

Author: Wang Zhan, Editor: Si Wen

Source: WeChat public account "E-commerce Online"