The 9.9 yuan photo album was discontinued after a week, are the hippocampi stable now?

With the iteration of AI technology, physical photo studios are facing a crisis. Starting from Miaoya Camera, this article details the current situation of Miaoya Camera, its impact on physical photo studios, and its own limitations. It is recommended for students who want to understand product operations.

Who wouldn’t want to experience being a celebrity for a day, especially when it’s only $9.90!

Two minutes ago, she was trying on a handsome cowboy suit, and the next second, she changed into a delicate Qing Dynasty princess. This is impossible in real life, but an AI photo camera can make it happen. A few weeks ago, an AI photo generation application called "Miaoya Camera" swept the Internet.

"Beauty is really a basic need. I shared the registration invitation picture on WeChat Moments at 10 o'clock last night, and more than 300 people joined overnight. The conversion rate is really high!" Advertising person Martha (pseudonym) told Retail Jun that the release of the photo of the Miaoya camera caused a small stir.

Out of curiosity, I tried it myself. I uploaded a frontal photo and then 20 photos of my daily life from different angles . Then a message popped up: "There are 5,485 people ahead of you who are making digital avatars. It is estimated to take 15 hours."

After a night of anticipation, the retailer's digital avatar was finally completed. He tried to change into different styles such as ancient style, Hong Kong style, and girly JK style , which attracted the attention of his colleagues in the office.

In the real feedback of "this one looks like you" and "Wow, this one is good, I saved the money of taking ID photos", I felt that AI was going to subvert the photography business. Is this really the case? Will physical photo studios soon become the outcasts of the times?

1. 9.9 Photo Gallery

The Miaoya Camera is really popular. According to Xiaohongshu data, the number of views of Miaoya Camera related notes has exceeded 2.5 million. In addition to various posts evaluating Miaoya, AI Barbie photo, B612's AI avatar and other AI imaging functions have also become popular.

The logic behind this is not difficult to understand. The wave of videos and pictures launched by Douyin, Kuaishou, and Xiaohongshu has further strengthened the importance of appearance, and the public is flocking to it. Qingshan Capital once pointed out in a report that a product with better aesthetics is more likely to be accepted by a large area and multiple levels of users in a short period of time, thereby occupying the market and user minds.

This has also given rise to the development of the photo business. According to the "2022 Photography Industry Analysis Report", the target population of the photo market is concentrated on women aged 18 to 44, which has exceeded 200 million and will continue to grow in the future.

However, going to offline stores to take photos is a cumbersome task, so trying "fast, convenient and cheap" AI photo shooting has become a natural choice .

However, it seems that the popularity of Miaoya Camera has died down. Miaoya Camera originated from WeChat Mini Program. When searching the WeChat popularity index, you will find that its peak popularity index is around 18.7 million. It only took a week (July 23-29) from its emergence to its popularity and then back to normal. The popularity index on July 31 was 2.35 million, down 24.3% from the day before.

Compared with the recent hot topics such as ChatGPT and City Walk, the popularity of Miaoya Camera is more ordinary. ChatGPT and City Walk have been popular for a month or two, and their popularity index as of July 31 was still above 30 million, and the daily month-on-month decline rate of popularity was also lower than Miaoya.

The popularity of Miaoya Camera only lasted for a week. Xiao Ming, a netizen who is keen on trying various AI photo taking software, had already guessed this result: "Thinking back to the popular AI portrait products in the past, such as B612 Beauty Camera, Lensa AI, Midjourney, and ZAO, they were all "weekly throwaway products" like Miaoya. Once the excitement wore off, they were quickly forgotten."

Indeed, taking photos is not a high-frequency demand, and the templates for AI applications are limited, so the public can easily lose interest. Therefore, the speed of updating photo templates and whether the gameplay can continue to innovate are important factors that affect the length of time users continue to use the app.

Not to mention the hard evaluation factors such as photo quality and the degree of restoration of the real person's appearance. Take the Miaoya camera as an example. According to the current evaluation, it can be regarded as a high-quality imitation of a real person's photo. Clicking "more like me" a few times can also fade the inflated feeling of the original photo's skin texture, which is why it has become popular.

However, due to the fixed style of the templates, most users said: "Not all generated photos are similar, only a few of the templates are more similar."

If you browse the comment section of the review post, you can always see the official account of Miaoya collecting user feedback under the post. Since its official launch on July 17, a new set of templates has been released almost every day, but this update frequency has not kept Miaoya Camera evergreen. The subsequent data leakage risks involved in the user privacy regulations have made users more cautious.

Overall, the MiaoYa camera is like a gust of wind, coming quickly and going quickly.

2. Difficult Photo Studio

Perhaps you have also noticed that there are fewer and fewer photo studios on the streets nowadays. It is no longer the case that you can see photo studios and photography studios within a short walk.

The data also proves this. According to the 2020 data from Qichacha, about half of the traditional photo studio companies have been registered or revoked. Compared with the same period in 2019, the number of related company registrations in my country in the first five months of 2020 fell by 10.9% year-on-year.

The capital boom faded around the same time. According to Qichacha, photography agencies including Tianzhenlan and Panzi Nürenfang either raised no funds or stopped raising funds in 2019 or 2020.

At the same time, controversy about photography agencies has grown: "The photos seem to be carved from the same mold." "The hippocampus has the ability to make different people become the same person."

The same template, clothing, movements, expressions, and even the face shape are basically edited to be similar. Some netizens posted dozens of identical ID photos taken by different consumers at Hippocampus or Tianzhenlan, which is indeed easy to be dazzled.

There are also blank-face ID photo templates on the Internet, which can be used as long as the facial features are added.

Nowadays, the homogeneity of finished products has become a hurdle in the development of photography agencies such as Hippocampus and Tianzhenlan. Another hurdle is experience.

Taking Hippocampus as an example, the form of "online appointment + offline photo taking" was originally intended to save time for both the store and consumers, but there are many cases where customers are forced to wait after arriving at the store as scheduled.

"We were scheduled to have a photoshoot at 4:30 pm. We had to sign in an hour in advance, but there were too many people so we had to wait until 5:30 before makeup started. After putting makeup on, we had to wait again. After eating at the mall, we came back and waited until 8:30 before the photoshoot started. The staff also made a mistake with the clothes we booked, which delayed us for a while. The photoshoot started at almost 9 pm. The photographer said a few words and took a minute to finish the photoshoot."

This is the personal experience of a netizen. After reading it, I also felt that I couldn’t remain calm.

Although, in order to alleviate the situation of disorderly appointments and the need to wait in line, Hippocampus has introduced measures that will cancel the photo shoot or negotiate a postponement if the customer is late, the reality is that many consumers often choose to make appointments for photo shoots in the morning time period based on the guides circulating on the Internet, which leads to a situation where store employees are "busy in the morning and idle in the afternoon."

If a consumer's photo shoot is cancelled due to being late, the staff will have to spare energy to appease and explain, resulting in a sudden surge in workload in the morning. It seems that there is a big contradiction between the standardized photography process of Hippocampus and the random changes of consumers.

In addition, from a business model perspective, this is a problem that Hippocampus and Tianzhenlan cannot avoid.

In an interview with "Late Post", Huang Yihan, the founder of Haima Photo Studio, carefully disassembled Haima's operating model: customers make appointments online, makeup artists and photographers receive standardized training, and there are 34 standardized touch points on a ID photo. When retouching the photos later, they are first transmitted to the headquarters' Manyu cloud for unified processing and then returned to the store for one-on-one modifications based on consumer opinions.

Generally speaking, consumers will only experience the same type of photos once. In order to increase traffic and repeat purchases, Hippocampus must continue to update more photo templates, which requires a lot of training for makeup artists, photographers and other employees. If the frequency of updates is too high, it will inevitably affect the training effect, and thus greatly reduce the quality of service.

Nowadays, photography agencies such as Hippocampus and Tianzhenlan have become the standard products of consumers who "just want to get by but have peace of mind". There are rumors in the industry that Hippocampus plans to create an AI program to cope with the impact.

3. Barriers to Ritual

AI photo studios are not the only ones impacted by this technology. Online image processing software like Meitu Xiuxiu is also panicking. Wu Xinhong, the founder of Meitu Xiuxiu, once said that he is “working day and night on researching AI technology and testing.” A screenshot of a sentence by Chen Jianyi, senior vice president of Meitu Group and president of the Imaging Industry Business Group, is circulating online:

"I was planning to meet with people from Meitu in Xiamen. But they said the company was facing a life-or-death situation because of AI, so they didn't have time to meet."

The continuous maturity of AI technology is forcing Meitu to change its mind. At the 2022 strategic meeting, Wu Xinhong proposed the tone of "preparing for danger in times of peace" when facing AI, but now it has changed to "preparing for danger in times of danger."

Specifically, at the first Meitu Image Festival in 2022, Meitu released six products including Meitu ID Photo and Wink, five of which were related to AI. At the second Image Festival this year, Meitu launched a large visual model and six AI functional products.

Meitu's response measures paid off. According to the 2022 financial report data, Meitu achieved full-year profitability for the first time that year, and VIP subscriptions became the company's largest source of revenue.

In addition, according to the discussion of the strategy department, Meitu plans to launch a new application. In addition to realizing monetization through VIP subscription business, it also integrates AIGC related functions to promote paid penetration. It is not difficult to foresee that Meitu will also deeply integrate AI technology.

In the future, for Hippocampus and Tianzhenlan, to win consumers, they still have to rely on technology, innovation and service details. By binding current hot spots and launching limited templates, if they can really put enough effort into the sense of ritual, they will still have some competitiveness.

However, in the face of the constantly iterating and mature AI technology, the cost for consumers to buy more adapted, high-definition and diverse photos, or more natural and refined photo editing effects will only become lower and lower.

Comparing the two, one can't help but ask with concern: Where is the next step for physical photo studios?

Author: Wu Shaoge

Source: WeChat public account "New Retail Business Review (ID: xinlingshou1001)"