The formula for hit products created by internet celebrities!

Li Ziqi became popular on YouTube. This is not cultural output, but the result of the common "explosive product formula".

Recently, Li Ziqi has been very popular and has been on the hot searches on Weibo. The topic of "whether she is a cultural export" has attracted 800 million views, and even the People's Daily and CCTV have commented on it.

Many people asked me: Is Li Ziqi really popular on YouTube?

Yes, come on, data.

According to data from HypeAuditor, an international internet celebrity statistics platform, Li Ziqi currently has 7.5 million fans. As for the growth curve, it is also a linear and nearly exponential shape, which is typical and very healthy.

The key point is that we pay attention to the sub-rankings.

In the "How-to & Style" category, based on a comprehensive analysis of the number of fans, positive reviews, interactions and other data, Li Ziqi's overall influence in the United States ranks fifth.

The top four include three female beauty bloggers and one male fashion brand blogger - True Capitalist Style.

From this perspective, Liziqi is truly a breath of fresh air in the eyes of Americans when it comes to lifestyle—the American version of “Longing for Life”.

Looking at this column of data, I suddenly felt a little emotional and it felt very magical.

If we flash back to five years ago, who would have thought that there would be Chinese people on a list of American Internet celebrities? Times are really changing.

In fact, it is already the end of 2019, and social media has witnessed the growth of a generation. YouTube and Facebook in the United States are both 15 years old, while Weibo in China is 10 years old.

Over the past decade, various celebrities with unique characteristics have emerged on social platforms in China and the United States, and have gradually formed their own strategies for developing internet celebrities - influencing each other and each with its own characteristics.

Today, I will show you the "hot product formula" that helped Chinese and American Internet celebrities become famous.

New category*new traffic=new influencer

Over the years, in various meetings and discussions inside and outside the company, I have remembered a recognized formula for rapid growth:

New category*new traffic=hot product

This is not only effective for physical products such as lipstick, milk tea, and desserts, but also for virtual content products.

"New category" refers to novel video content, and "new traffic" refers to explosive new platforms.

Li Ziqi’s content is a new content category of “beautiful life in the countryside”. To date, it has developed into a unique new complex of "vlog + Chinese style + countryside + food + beauty + handicraft".

According to people in the industry, this new content category is truly "something you can only encounter by chance but not seek for."

In 2016, Liziqi just started shooting short videos and settled on the "Meipai" platform. Although she had some fame, she always felt like something was missing. She once mentioned that she had given up several times.

When she had only 10,000 followers on Weibo, she met a noble man named Mr. L who helped her and brought her new traffic. Weibo also supported high-quality original content and short video traffic. It was precisely with this new traffic that Liziqi was finally able to "break out" among the general public and even "go overseas" to gain fans. Therefore, it is not difficult to understand why Li Ziqi wrote a long article in response and specifically thanked Weibo when she was faced with the greatest doubts.

In the same year, the number of Weibo users began to surpass Twitter, and the new traffic pool further expanded.

Today, Liziqi has more than 20 million followers on Weibo, and the number of top authors on the Weibo platform has exceeded 780,000.

Looking at the United States, the formula "new category * new traffic = new internet celebrity" also holds true.

In early 2015, a young Asian American couple uploaded a video of their 4-year-old son trying out a new toy to YouTube. They didn't expect that a new category was being conceived.

A few months later, a video finally went viral - the unboxing of a giant toy capsule, with over 1 billion views. Open a capsule that is taller than you and take out more than 100 Disney toy cars. The visual impact and excitement this gives to the children is comparable to a girlfriend seeing 100 lipsticks unboxed.

After that, the parents discovered the formula for hit products and eventually formed a unique new category of children's products: "vlog + children + toy trial + visual impact". As new categories of content gradually stabilized and YouTube itself grew rapidly, the boy received a steady stream of new traffic.

This boy is Ryan, now a top internet celebrity on YouTube with over 22.9 million fans. As a result of the joint growth, the total number of monthly active users of YouTube has exceeded 2 billion, and nearly 600 hours of new content are created every hour.

Ryan also became the highest-earning YouTube blogger ranked first in 2018 by Forbes magazine, with an annual income of 22 million US dollars.

If you think about it carefully, all kinds of bloggers who have become popular in China and the United States have grasped the formula of "innovative categories + new traffic". To put it bluntly, you have to have characteristics and actively increase your followers.

PewDiePie, who has been number one on YouTube for many years, has over 100 million fans. Although his main job is a game anchor, what really makes him stand out is the new categories - his natural and funny personality and his eccentric and lively editing style. As an “old” internet celebrity, new traffic naturally took off thanks to YouTube.

There are also many Chinese gaming anchors who apply this formula, such as Miss, who has established herself in the "Beauty Game" category, and JY, who started a new category called "Werewolf Killing". They are also actively striving for new traffic across major platforms: Huya, YY, Bilibili, Weibo, etc.

In terms of fashion and beauty, new categories are emerging in an endless stream. Dope 2111 in the United States created a new category by doing makeup for various movie and game characters; in China, the well-known Li Jiaqi created a new category by trying out lipsticks.

Competition in the beauty category is particularly fierce, and the fight for new traffic is naturally fierce.

In the United States, outside of YouTube, more beauty bloggers are taking off thanks to Instagram’s exponential user growth rate, and super-large bloggers with tens of millions of fans often appear.

Li Jiaqi is a representative who seized the opportunity of the rapid growth of short videos and live streaming platforms and took off. Now he has spread his influence all over the Internet, and appearing on the hot searches has become a daily routine.

New traffic*new model=new profit

With the help of new traffic from major platforms such as YouTube and Weibo, countless grassroots creators have accumulated fans and gained public attention.

Then what?

Commercialization.

How to help internet celebrities monetize and make money is what Chinese and American platforms and the entire industry are constantly working on. Only after being able to monetize in a healthy and sustainable manner can the value of internet celebrities be truly recognized by capital, and the public attention they gain can be transformed into assets, and the common prosperity of the platform and internet celebrities can be maintained. This requires the platform to continue to innovate and be open and inclusive to creators, MCN organizations, and merchants.

Looking at social platforms, the advertising model is still the core of monetization.

There may be slight differences between China and foreign countries. Foreign countries emphasize advertising revenue sharing, while in China, advertisers are more likely to cooperate directly with Internet celebrities.

After being acquired by Google, YouTube, relying on AdSense's long history and experience in helping website owners monetize, naturally applied this approach to supporting content creators. This also created a new model, and other platforms in the industry such as Facebook followed suit.

Simply put, as long as you have more than 1,000 fans and the cumulative viewing time exceeds 4,000 hours, you can get a 55% commission from the advertisements inserted by YouTube in your videos.

This part of the revenue is actually very considerable, because the advertising prices in developed countries are high, which is strongly related to the country's economic situation and prices.

Let’s take a look at Li Ziqi. According to the Noxinfluencer tool, her profitability from a single video is as high as $160,000.

Because of this simple and crude model and high income, many creators do not have to worry about monetization and can just focus on creating content. Therefore, there are a lot of purely public welfare and educational content on YouTube.

The domestic model is more about making money directly, with Internet celebrities directly connecting with commercial promotion opportunities and promoting them in various ways in their videos. The most common source is private messaging within the site. For example, Vlog blogger "Shi Yi Shi Jing Yue" said in an interview that 100% of advertising opportunities come from Weibo.

Of course, fans on different platforms have different levels of acceptance of advertisements.

Zhihu community claims to be professional, but if it is discovered that answers are paid, readers often do not buy it.

But platforms like Weibo and Bilibili are more tolerant. When seeing the advertisement, fans would joke about being "forced to operate". Li Xueqin also said in an interview: I like Weibo because the platform has cultivated the habit of users (accepting bloggers to monetize).

However, in the eyes of the platform, there is always something wrong when internet celebrities and businesses always do things in private. One is the regulatory pressure, and the other is that the platform also wants to "make a living."

In 2016, commercial regulatory agencies such as the US FTC, the UK CAP, and the French DGCCRF introduced new regulations requiring that if the video content is not original content but has received any form of sponsorship, the audience must be made aware of it. Otherwise, both creators and platforms could be held liable.

Therefore, the Branded Content tool was launched for advertisers and influencers at the same time. Advertisers can find influencers and see their historical collaborations, and influencers can also accept advertisements. After the cooperation, relevant signs will be displayed on the advertisements. Nowadays, domestic social platforms have also built similar tools.

In addition to advertising, an important profit model for internet celebrities is to sell goods through e-commerce, or even create their own brands, such as Li Ziqi's eponymous food brand. The most typical example here is Zhang Dayi, who has tens of millions of fans on Weibo. This year, her company, Ruhnn Holdings, also successfully went public in the United States.

To date, e-commerce remains the main way for Weibo content creators to monetize. According to Weibo’s full-year data for 2018, the e-commerce monetization revenue on Weibo reached 25.4 billion. During Weibo’s #HuaHuaWanWanJie# event in April this year, 200 big V users sold 330 million in just three days.

In order to promote online influencers to sell products, major platforms are exploring new user experience models, such as patch product showcases on various short video apps, and e-commerce live broadcasts connected by Weibo and Taobao.

Of course, YouTube influencers also sell goods to generate cash. Ryan, mentioned above, has already launched toys of the same name, and even entered Walmart's physical supermarkets. Of course, the platform also provides a similar window display function.

How else can you make money besides letting fans watch ads and buy things?

The most direct way is to let you pay directly. For example, the obvious “charge” button on Bilibili allows fans to directly transfer money.

There is also a more comfortable way, which is to pay money to become a "loyal fan" and at the same time you can get certain virtual services. For example, paying for knowledge, watching exclusive videos, viewing high-definition pictures, participating in exclusive live broadcasts, Zhihu's "Yanxuan Membership", Weibo's "V+ Membership", etc.

American platforms are also following this model. For example, YouTube’s “channel membership” costs $4.99 per month. What you can get is entirely determined by the blogger himself.

end

After more than a decade of development, Chinese and American social platforms each have their own characteristics.

• YouTube started out as a video platform and has now become the most comprehensive video content platform.
• Starting from private relationships, Facebook has expanded outward and has become a platform for sharing and distributing news and entertainment information.
• Instagram started out by taking beautiful photos, and now has gathered all kinds of trendy and fashionable celebrities, representing a new generation of lifestyle.

——Every American platform has blossomed into a large number of places, and there are camps of internet celebrities who are holding their ground.

• WeChat starts from acquaintance relationships and cooperates with official accounts and Moments to control private domain traffic and graphic and text influencers.
• Starting from the two-dimensional world, Bilibili’s inclusive culture has become a gathering place for young people to express their opinions.
• Kuaishou and Douyin entered the market with short videos, recording the real and beautiful face of China.
• Various vertical field platforms such as Douyu, Xiaohongshu, Zhihu, etc. are springing up everywhere.

Weibo is the most inclusive social platform in China. Internet celebrities from rural towns to first-tier cities can gain a foothold and rise to higher status on Weibo. Just as Lydia Li, the author of Full Stack Marketer, said: "Li Ziqi came out of Meipai, Li Jiaqi came out of Douyin, Hesenburg came out of Zhihu, and Wanwan came out of Douban. No matter how niche the platform is, the top players finally became popular on Weibo."

The Chinese and American platforms are similar at their core.

For example, the formula "new category + new traffic = new internet celebrity" and the exploration of the platform's commercialization path.

What makes me happiest is the cross-platform popularity of internet celebrities in China and the United States.

You want to ask me, is this cultural export?

I don't think so. After all, we are all human beings. What we want is not who outputs what to whom, but an opportunity for mutual appreciation and a platform for communication.

Perhaps, the online social platform is the Tower of Babel that appeared in the Bible.

Author: Han

Source: Han’s Silicon Valley Growth Notes (ID: HanGrowth)