Kuaishou live broadcast, no "number one"

Simba’s relationship with Kuaishou has always been very delicate. He has been banned by Kuaishou many times for various reasons. Let’s take a look at the author’s analysis.

Simba, the "number one brother of Kuaishou", once again stood against Kuaishou.

"If you dare to ban all my anchors, I will sue you until your platform has no cash flow. I will stand in front of the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission and report you under my real name." Simba said fiercely during a live broadcast on April 20.

Kuaishou did not give Simba face either. Because of these outrageous remarks, the "Xin Youzhi Simba 818" account was banned. Afterwards, Simba quickly switched to a Xinxuan anchor account to broadcast, but was soon banned again for violating community rules due to his radical remarks.

After his four anchor accounts, "Xiao Luo", "Xu Jie", "Jia Jia" and "Dandan", were blocked, he found an assistant who had never live-streamed goods and created a new account to start live-streaming. After calming down a little, he said, "Kuaishou doesn't need me" and said he would "retire".

At present, apart from the live broadcast room, Simba has not been able to truly expand the second curve, nor has he made any moves to cross-platform layout. Therefore, at present, the Kuaishou live broadcast room is still Simba's "cash cow". If he really loses Kuaishou live broadcast, Simba's income may drop sharply.

As the "Kuaishou No. 1", Simba's Kuaishou account has more than 99.99 million fans, and many of his "apprentices" have fans of 50 million. In the "Top 10 Kuaishou Live Streaming Sales Estimated Accounts in 2023" released by Xinbang, "Simba" and "Dandan" have been ranked as the "No. 1 Brother and Sister" on the Kuaishou Live Streaming Sales List with a total sales of over 10 billion yuan throughout the year. The two brought nearly 29.6 billion yuan in sales throughout the year, which is 1.4 times the total sales of the other eight anchors. In the entire top ten list, Xinxuan Group occupies six seats.

However, there are also many "grudges" between Simba and Kuaishou. Previously, Simba had expressed his dissatisfaction with Kuaishou many times in live broadcasts, and even asked Kuaishou to ban the accounts of certain people. These personal and emotional conflicts further exacerbated the tension between Simba and the platform.

1. Simba has his own problems

In 2023, Simba's estimated sales through live streaming on Kuaishou are about 12.5 billion yuan, far ahead of "Shi Da Piaoliang" who ranks behind him, with the amount being almost 2.8 times that of the latter.

Due to Simba’s influence and outstanding contributions in the Kuaishou e-commerce system, he has always been called the “No. 1 Brother of Kuaishou”.

Image source: New List

But "fame brings trouble", and the relationship between Simba and Kuaishou is very delicate. On the one hand, Kuaishou needs top anchors like Simba to gather fans and increase revenue by selling goods through influence. On the other hand, the "restless" anchor Simba also gives Kuaishou a headache. In the past few years, Simba has been banned by Kuaishou many times for various reasons.

At the end of December 2020, Simba's personal account was banned by Kuaishou for 60 days due to the "sugar water bird's nest" incident. During the 618 period in 2021, Simba questioned Kuaishou's flow control because there were too few fans watching his live broadcast room, and his account was banned for 7 days. In September 2021, Simba angrily criticized the Kuaishou platform in the live broadcast room and was subsequently banned for 7 days. Two months later, Simba's live broadcast room was banned for 60 days due to "inappropriate words and deeds in the live broadcast room." On March 8, 2023, Simba's live broadcast function was banned for 48 hours due to "excessive remarks" during the live broadcast on the Kuaishou platform.

Including this time, Simba’s live broadcast room has been blocked 6 times, with the duration ranging from 2 days to 60 days.

Simba not only repeatedly challenged the rules of the Kuaishou platform, but also had conflicts with brands many times.

On April 16, 2022, Simba had a disagreement with his partner "Playboy" during a live broadcast, and said, "Xinxuan prohibits the sale of 'Playboy'. This 'Playboy' is not that 'Playboy'. This brand was registered by China. I will never choose this product in my life." In the end, the two sides parted unhappily.

Two days later, Simba and his anchor Dandan sold a product called "YPL Sun Protection Cooling Pants", but the brand YPL issued a statement saying that the product was not officially authorized and did not belong to the YPL brand. It also stated that it would take legal measures to hold the relevant sales and production companies accountable.

In October 2023, De Rucci and Simba cooperated to sell a large black cow soft leather bed with a market price of 20,000 yuan. Later, media reported that the De Rucci brand requested to terminate the cooperation and removed another mattress that Simba was originally scheduled to sell.

In addition to his "hot temper" towards others, Simba also does not get along well with his colleagues and apprentices.

On March 30, the internet celebrity "Cat Sister", who has tens of millions of fans on the Kuaishou platform, publicly accused her master Simba on Weibo, accusing him of using PUA against her and bluntly saying that Simba had cursed people and the platform.

Image source: Weibo @猫妹妹-sunshine version

On December 12 last year, Guan Qian, the CEO of Xinxuan, who had been in the company for less than a year, announced her resignation, and Song Tieniu (Blue Mountain) took over as the group CEO. According to information, Guan Qian had previously worked at Tencent, LeTV, and Alibaba.

Guan Qian's departure was described by the outside world as the result of "the conflict between professional managers and the master-apprentice system."

It should be pointed out that as a top anchor, Simba is the center of traffic, but as the co-founder of the Xinxuan brand, Simba is also the center of the entire team. In the process of external communication and internal management, Simba still has a lot to improve.

Perhaps aware of these problems, Simba has been intentionally reducing the number of live broadcasts on his account since last year. Except for live broadcasts on important promotional events such as 618, Double 11, and New Year’s Festival, Simba mostly appears in the form of "standing on the platform" for his apprentices' live broadcast rooms.

2. “Success and failure are both due to Xiao He”

The conflict between Kuaishou and Simba is a typical story of "Success and failure are both due to Xiao He".

In 2016, the 26-year-old Simba decided to join Kuaishou. When he first joined the platform, Simba mainly attracted popularity by telling his entrepreneurial experience and random lottery activities, but these contents could not attract traffic in the long run.

Later, as more and more live streaming software appeared on the market and product homogeneity became more serious, the Kuaishou platform began to introduce live streaming to sell goods to increase revenue.

Years of business experience made Simba feel at home in the process of selling goods. In the first year of selling goods, his team's live broadcast transaction volume reached 40 billion, and he himself contributed 13.3 billion. Later, Simba established his own Xinxuan team, which later became the largest of the six families of Kuaishou.

In 2019, Kuaishou went public in Hong Kong. The prospectus revealed that Kuaishou's e-commerce achieved a GMV of 59.6 billion that year, of which the Simba family accounted for nearly 22%. In the following years, Simba and the Simba family have been an important part of Kuaishou's live e-commerce revenue.

However, as the story develops, these achievements seem to have become Simba's confidence in challenging the platform.

In fact, although Kuaishou has never publicly admitted to "de-Simbaization", it has been doing so. After all, excessive concentration of traffic on a few top anchors is not only not conducive to commercialization, but also poses huge risks.

In 2020, Kuaishou's e-commerce GMV reached 680 billion, and the Simba family's share fell to 6%. By 2022, this share further fell to 5.5%. Kuaishou said in a later announcement that "as of Q3 2023, the proportion of mid-level and tail-level influencers in the overall influencer GMV has increased to nearly 50%, and the influencer ecosystem continues to optimize."

Zhang Yipeng, the head of Kuaishou's e-commerce marketing center, once said bluntly: "I may not be able to sell as much as Simba, Li Jiaqi, and Wei Ya as a mid-level anchor. If I have 10 anchors working together, the sales will definitely be greater than in the past."

In addition to "cutting down" big anchors, Kuaishou also strongly encourages businesses to broadcast their own content.

In 2023, Kuaishou launched the "Chuanliu Plan", which is aimed at cargo owners who have influencers distributing and stable self-broadcasting. It plans to provide 60 billion traffic to support merchants throughout the year. The plan aims to promote a virtuous circle of merchants' self-broadcasting and distribution, create new volume through the same-direction growth of traffic between influencers and merchants, and improve operating efficiency.

Zhuang Shuai, an expert in the retail e-commerce industry and founder of Bailian Consulting, believes that Simba is no longer that important to Kuaishou. More and more brand merchants are choosing to open flagship stores on Kuaishou, and new forces are rising rapidly. They have stronger product selection and platform operation capabilities, and are more in line with the requirements of Kuaishou's new e-commerce ecology.

3. The live streaming industry has entered a “transformation period”

According to iResearch, the scale of China's live e-commerce market will reach 4.9 trillion yuan in 2023, a year-on-year growth rate of 35.2%. Compared with the early stage of the industry's development, the industry's growth rate has declined to a certain extent, but it is still releasing growth signals. iResearch predicts that the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of China's live e-commerce market scale will be 18.0% from 2024 to 2026. The industry will show a steady growth trend in the future and enter a refined development stage.

From the platform side, a "three-legged race" has been formed in China among Douyin, Kuaishou, and Taobao Live. In 2022, the combined market share of the three in the live e-commerce industry will be approximately 91% (Note: data from the China Internet Network Information Center is for reference only).

Under high concentration, the industry trend has changed.

Image source: Minsheng Securities

A live broadcast practitioner said that judging from the background data, there are three types of accounts that perform very well. The first is the anchor with a distinctive personality, the second is the anchor with a fan base and a certain influence, and the third is the anchor with strong private domain operation capabilities.

It just so happens that there are relatively successful cases in the above three directions, such as Dong Yuhui and Dongfang Zhenxuan, which have accumulated traffic by building word-of-mouth through high-quality content. Celebrities such as Lin Yun, Zhu Dan, Xu Dongdong, Jia Nailiang, and Fu Shouer have a certain degree of topicality and influence, and they have also been smooth sailing after the transformation to live streaming.

On the contrary, those anchors who have become famous have chosen to "retire bravely" in recent years. Crazy Xiao Yangge, the top anchor of Douyin, has rarely appeared in the live broadcast room and has turned his attention to the field of short dramas. Luo Yonghao also announced his withdrawal from Douyin live broadcast sales, and Simba also proposed the idea of ​​"retirement".

Today, the industry has transitioned from the high-growth stage to the stage of pursuing "certainty".

This certainty is more reflected in AI technology, merchant private domain, content, etc. Therefore, we see more and more AI technology being introduced into live broadcasting. Digital people can already support several hours of live broadcasting. Top anchors have begun to try to launch their own APPs and strive to "privatize" the traffic of the live broadcast room. Professional and interesting content has become more and more "grass-planting ability", etc.

Looking ahead, with the improvement of relevant laws and regulations and the standardization of platform operations, vulgar live broadcast behaviors such as fighting, drinking, swearing and spitting will gradually disappear, and only those live broadcast rooms that focus on serving consumers and meeting their new needs can continue to operate for a long time. The ban on Simba may be a great opportunity for Simba's team and Kuaishou platform to sort out and organize business processes and standards.

Author: Tang Fei, Editor: Weber

Source: ValuePlanet (ID: ValuePlanet)