Miaoya Camera, is it over?

Are you still using Miaoya?

MiaoYa, which once dominated the entire Internet and was called AIGC's first phenomenal product by the industry, could not escape the fate of rapidly declining popularity once its novelty wore off.

On the user side, the enthusiasm is gone.

"During that peak period of WeChat Moments being flooded with apps, I spent 9.9 yuan and shared it with my friends to get more download diamonds. After that, I never opened either the current APP or the previous mini-programs again." Cheng Xiaoke was deeply impressed by the scene of Miaoya flooding WeChat Moments at that time.

But the popularity only lasted for two or three days.

After that, no one shared the beautiful pictures generated by MiaoYa in his circle of friends, and his friends and office colleagues were not very interested in MiaoYa either.

The data is more intuitive.

The WeChat Index shows that MiaoYa's popularity peaked on July 25, then fell back, and plummeted after entering August. It has now basically calmed down.

Qimai data shows that on the iOS side, the download ranking of the Miaoya Camera APP has risen rapidly in a short period of time since it was launched on July 28. On August 8, the Miaoya Camera APP began to dominate the "social" list and took the first place in the overall list on the 12th.

However, this peak only lasted for a week. After August 16, Miaoya Camera lost momentum and its ranking has been declining. As of now, it ranks around 15th in the "social" list and outside the top 200 in the "application" list.

She no longer has the star power she once had.

However, this is unavoidable.

In fact, it is not uncommon for AI-generated image phenomenal products to become short-lived. For example, data from Sensor Tower's "AI Application Market Insights in 2023" shows that with the iteration and maturity of the DALL-E and Stable Diffusion models, the Al+ image application market has flourished. In the first half of 2023, there were more than 150 related applications, with downloads exceeding 100 million times.

Among them, "Lensa AI" has seen a rapid increase in downloads since its launch in late November 2022, with downloads exceeding 17 million in December. Just over a month later, the number of downloads of "Lensa AI" plummeted, falling below 2 million.

Similarly, for MiaoYa, as an AIGC product application with obvious tool attributes, it itself is not a high-frequency product. Most users are in the "use it and leave" state, and the usage scenarios are also very single.

This is a common problem with Miao duck products.

If they want to maintain long-term vitality in the future, it will test how Miaoyas can generate images around AI and bring more innovative gameplay to the C-end.

Miaoya, you have also realized that you need to come up with something new.

Recently, some users discovered that Miaoya Camera has launched a new feature: hair design. Click on the Miaoya Camera App homepage, and the "Hair Design" channel is on the right side of the screen. Users can choose and match from the given hairstyles and hair colors, and then combine the generated personal digital avatars to create portraits with different hairstyles.

"Power Plant" quoted a person close to MiaoYa Camera as saying that using AI to reconstruct image design and provide customized life services will be the main focus of the MiaoYa Camera team in the next stage.

Although the popularity has declined at present, there is a consensus in the industry that MiaoYa, as the first hit AIGC application in China, has opened the door to the imagination space of domestic AIGC applications on the C-end.

Alibaba’s Zhang Yong was the first to express his support.

It is understood that MiaoYa is an internal project incubated by Alibaba's big entertainment.

After ChatGPT set off a new wave of AI, Miaoya Camera founder Zhang Yueguang and several colleagues established an internal group called "AIGC Breaking Wall Group" in February this year. They spent one month discussing the project direction of "Realistic Portraits" and then spent another three months polishing the specific product "Miaoya".

Since then, with the explosive popularity of MiaoYa, the weight of this product within the Alibaba system has also increased significantly.

Zhang Yong directly cited the example of the popularity of Miaoya, which led to a surge of hundreds of times in computing power demand on Alibaba Cloud within a month, pointing out that the model training and reasoning scenarios brought about by the development of the new generation of artificial intelligence have a very strong demand for AI cloud services. He also said, "With the combination of the new generation of artificial intelligence technology and various industries, Alibaba Cloud will benefit from it in the long run."

Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, which was just spun off from the group, really needs the popularity of MiaoYa to tell its own story.

Even on August 23, Zhang Yong took the lead in organizing a face-to-face closed-door exchange meeting called "Xixi Forum" at Xixi Wetland in Hangzhou. In this event, which is known as the half of the big model industry, Zhang Yueguang was also invited by Zhang Yong to sit and discuss with a group of bigwigs.

An obvious fact is that currently, entrepreneurship and innovation in the field of large models and AIGC are in full swing. The temporary popularity of Miaoya Camera is enough to stimulate the interest of large AIGC manufacturers in exploring the C-end market, and also allow entrepreneurs to dig for gold.

The market believes that there will be more popular apps coming out.