The title of scholar, the spiritual needs of the elderly under the taste segmentation

This article starts with a recent Weibo hot search - Xiucai's account ban, and explains the causes and development of Xiucai's popularity. It also analyzes the idol phenomenon of middle-aged and elderly people. This article is suitable for everyone to read and understand the information cocoon of the Internet.

Sometimes, we have to sigh at the power of the information cocoon. Each generation has its own idol. While the post-00s are busy fighting for TFBOYS in the Xi'an Olympic Sports Center, middle-aged and elderly people are flocking to the anchors "Xiucai" and "Yixiao Qingcheng" on the short video platform to express their love in the live broadcast room.

Until the number of fans exceeded 12 million, Xiucai seemed to become popular overnight, allowing many people to see for the first time what the idol of middle-aged and elderly people looks like.

I didn’t expect that idols of middle-aged and elderly people could not avoid the risk of collapse. Just a few days after Xiucai became popular, young Internet users were just starting to go crazy in the comment section with “Come to my mom” and “Come to my dad”, and the account of the anchor “Xiucai” with millions of fans was banned on September 2. According to a “Receipt of Reporting Tax Violations” cited in the media report “Daily People”, on August 15, someone reported Xu Moumou (Xiucai) to the Haozhou Taxation Inspection Bureau of the State Administration of Taxation for suspected tax violations, and the report was accepted on the same day.

Therefore, many people speculated that the ban of Xiucai’s account was most likely related to tax violations. Then the term #秀才封号 quickly became a hot search on Weibo.

1. How did the scholar who was seen as greasy and earthy by young people become a top internet celebrity among middle-aged and elderly people?

If we were to ask what image a scholar has in the eyes of most young people, it can be easily summarized as a collection of action routines, mostly shot in rural scenes, with the content mainly including doing things seriously, pretending to be discovered, raising eyebrows, sticking out tongues, and lip-syncing. Or to put it more simply - the epitome of greasy and earthy.

In fact, if you carefully observe the videos about Xiucai on Bilibili, which has a relatively younger user base, or the videos tagged with Xiucai and posted by various bloggers whose main audience is young people, they are almost all full of various kinds of ghost animals, sarcasm and excessive imitation, and they are quite similar to the previous videos of Fang Touming (a Tik Tok internet celebrity who is famous for imitating the "greasy man").

Of course, Xiucai is far from being extremely popular. In fact, before entering the vision of young people, Xiucai was already considered a top Internet celebrity.

In July 2020, this 39-year-old man from Qiyuan Town, Mengcheng County, Bozhou City, Anhui Province, released his first Douyin video. In the video, he was well-dressed, pretending to look at the camera casually, approaching "shyly", then covering his mouth, lifting his hair, and began to lip-sync some familiar songs.

After just four months, Xiucai's fan base exceeded one million, and his videos were an example of industrialization and homogenization. In his 1,300 videos, he was either lip-syncing love songs, with the standard lyrics being "It's not my fault that I love you, it's because you're too beautiful"; or he was pretending to be secretly photographed and discovered, and then he would cover his mouth, raise his eyebrows, lick his lips, touch his nose, and lift his hair, "flirting" at the screen.

These homogeneous contents hardly hindered Xiucai's path to increasing fans. In 2021, Xiucai began to usher in his highlight moment among the middle-aged and elderly groups. Likes, playbacks and fans all began to grow rapidly. These videos, which seem a bit tacky to young people, are unexpectedly popular among middle-aged and elderly people.

Data from the third-party data platform Chanmama shows that the majority of fans of Xiucai’s Douyin account are female, accounting for 86.98% of the total number of fans, while among Yixiaoqingcheng’s fans, 78.93% of the registered users are male. Among the fans of both, middle-aged and elderly people over 50 years old are the majority.

If this continues, Xiucai may continue to be active among the middle-aged and elderly groups, and become a top streamer under the protection of the information cocoon, instead of being regarded by young people as an "abstract symbol" (which can be considered as some content that young people cannot understand and think can also be popular or is completely inconsistent with their cognition. Its representatives include Sun Xiaochuan, Giao Ge, and Yaoshui Ge), and become a model for ghost animals and imitation.

But unfortunately, the Internet sometimes always presents a completely different world to people for some strange reasons. In May 2023, a 72-year-old lady from Jilin took a train alone to Bozhou, Anhui to "chase stars" and look for a male internet celebrity. Some enthusiastic people advised her not to be addicted to the Internet and pointed out that meeting netizens is "what young people do."

The old lady retorted: "Is it not possible to meet netizens at my age?" Eventually, passers-by called the police because they were worried about her safety.

Afterwards, this piece of news became a corner for young people to enter the online world of middle-aged and elderly people. The door of the information cocoon was kicked open, and the "A Smile That Conquers the City" from Heze, Shandong, and the "Scholar" from Bozhou, Anhui entered the world of young people. Eventually, a new round of Internet wonders began to be built, and young people became more and more fascinated as they watched. However, unlike the middle-aged and elderly people who looked at them with appreciation, young people deconstructed the core elements of the scholar's videos and used them as the cornerstone for building Internet wonders.

The middle-aged and elderly people watch shows for aesthetics, while the young people watch shows for ugliness. But no matter what, whether they are fans of the "sister" or the "brother", the middle-aged and elderly people are not stingy when it comes to giving gifts to the two top stars.

In August, a PK between the two of them caused a sensation on the Internet, with more than 400,000 people watching online at the same time. Enthusiastic uncles and aunts, in order to win the PK for their idols, did not hesitate to spend hundreds or even thousands of yuan to recharge on Douyin, and swipe flowers, sports cars, ships, rockets, and carnivals. This move was also jokingly called "emptying the pension fund of a province" by netizens.

In fact, the growth of the silver economy has been extremely rapid since 2019. However, in the past, the silver economy was almost entirely concentrated in industries such as elderly care, medical care, and insurance. Until this year, with the popularity of Xiucai and Yixiaoqingcheng, people seemed to realize that the silver economy is not just concentrated in areas that have nothing to do with young people.

As shown in Quest Mobile's "2022 Silver Economy Insight Report", the monthly active users over the age of 50 reached 297 million, a year-on-year increase of 12.5%, and the average monthly usage time per person was 121.6 hours, making them one of the important groups on the Internet.

Middle-aged and elderly people also have their own emotions and emotional needs. Just like young people prefer nonsensical and meaningless abstract fun, these videos that look greasy and earthy to young people may just hit the hearts of many middle-aged and elderly people.

It’s just that these needs were often ignored by people in the past, but Xiucai’s sudden popularity has, to some extent, opened up this hidden corner and attracted people’s attention.

2. People who provide emotional value to the elderly

As mentioned above, the reason why both "Xiu Cai" and "Yi Xiao Qing Cheng" are so popular among middle-aged and elderly people is that they have grasped the emotional value needs of the middle-aged and elderly group that have been neglected.

"Social Media Marketing in the Silver Economy in 2023" points out that 80% of netizens over the age of 60 spend an average of 1.5 hours a day watching short videos. The rich content of short videos fills the spiritual gap of middle-aged and elderly people. For the elderly, their social scope is shrinking and their social connotation is shrinking.

Moreover, if we look at it from a psychological perspective, we will find that in the traditional rural society of the past, most emotional patterns were Apollonian. Compared with the so-called love, emotions and other intangible values, the division of roles between husband and wife (such as the common husband working outside and wife working inside) and the role of maintaining the stability of rural society far outweigh the so-called love.

However, with the development and changes of society, people's thinking about emotional patterns began to change. Individualism and romanticism became more and more a mainstream cultural thinking. People began to express their love bravely. At this time, Internet celebrities such as Xiucai and Yixiaoqingcheng, which are aimed at middle-aged and elderly people, just allowed them to meet their once real emotional needs.

But this transition does not happen overnight, or it can be said that this transition is fragmented. It is actually difficult for young people to understand the emotional needs of middle-aged and elderly people. So we see the gap in attitudes between middle-aged and elderly people and young people towards the same internet celebrity.

But it is undeniable that as middle-aged and elderly people gradually become an important user group of the Internet, especially short videos, the differentiation of short video content is almost inevitable.

They may like Jin Dong's affection, Xiucai's tenderness, or Figo's fashion. Therefore, it is only a matter of time before grassroots Internet celebrities, MCN agencies, and capital target this market.

Thus, a wonderful triangle emerged: young people judge "ugly", middle-aged and elderly people judge "beautiful", and capital and institutions began to seriously consider whether this user group can bring them enough profits.

Around 2020, short video platforms differentiated into two categories of middle-aged and elderly bloggers: one is "trendy old people", such as "VK Careless Uncle", "Grandma Wang", "Uncle Mana", etc. They do catwalks, dressing up, skateboarding, and rap. They broke the public's stereotypes about the middle-aged and elderly groups and brought huge traffic through the strong sense of contrast and freshness; the other type is rural Internet celebrities such as "Grandma Tian" and "Three Flowers".

But it is undeniable that the main target users of this type of middle-aged and elderly bloggers are still young people. Whether it is jokes or various fashions, they mainly rely on creating a sense of contradiction and tear between the middle-aged and elderly and the young people to attract traffic.

But with the trend set off by Xiucai and Yixiaoqingcheng, perhaps in the field of silver economy, Internet celebrities will gradually see a new direction - providing emotional value for middle-aged and elderly people.

Author: Innocnet Roland WeChat public account: Morketing