The number one female anchor of TikTok @朱瓜瓜 has stopped broadcasting for more than a month. Also off the air is @岳老板 who once became a hot topic due to his outstanding acting skills in selling products.

As we all know, live streaming with goods is an industry that can make a lot of money, and the top anchors are making a fortune every day. Among them, Boss Yue even charges more than Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya with his hourly slot fee of 570,000 yuan. For such a profitable top anchor, suddenly stopping the broadcast is obviously a decision that will result in huge losses. What made them make such a decision?

At present, there is no unified answer in the industry as to why these two people stopped broadcasting, but one thing that is clear is that they were affected by regulatory policies, and the adjustment of platform policies led to a series of shocks, which ultimately led to: suspension of broadcasting.

It has been observed that this wave of impact has a very wide range of impacts, and Zhu Yue and the other two are just more representative figures among them. On a larger scale, a storm caused by regulation is severely impacting Douyin's live streaming e- commerce. This industry trend, which has just been born less than a year ago, has come to a crossroads, and there is a lot of fog ahead.

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Rumor has it: At the end of November, MCN leaders from Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Beijing, Chengdu and other places gathered in Beijing and stayed up all night to discuss how to deal with the regulatory pressure brought by the policy and what the future path should be.

In November, three national departments successively issued policies related to live streaming sales, and the signal of state supervision of the live streaming sales industry was very obvious.

On November 6, the Advertising Supervision and Management Department of the State Administration for Market Regulation issued the "Guiding Opinions of the State Administration for Market Regulation on Strengthening the Supervision of Online Live Marketing Activities".

It clearly states that it is necessary to strengthen the legal responsibilities of relevant entities, strictly regulate online live streaming marketing activities, and investigate and punish illegal online live streaming marketing activities in accordance with the law.

On November 13, the Cyberspace Administration of China drafted the "Regulations on the Management of Internet Live Marketing Information Content Services (Draft for Comments)" and solicited public opinions.

It is clearly stated that live broadcast room operators and live broadcast marketing personnel shall not publish false information, deceive or mislead users; they shall not fabricate or tamper with data traffic such as attention, views, likes, and transaction volume.

On November 23, the State Administration of Radio and Television issued a "Notice on Strengthening the Management of Online Show Live Broadcasts and E-commerce Live Broadcasts" on its official website, strictly regulating various behaviors involving live broadcast platforms, live broadcast hosts, and live broadcast rewards for minors.

There are three policies, the first two are "opinions" and the last one is "notification". "Opinions" are to set principles, and "notices" are to set methods; opinions are to put forward requirements, and notices are to ensure implementation. The change in wording shows that the regulatory decision has been made and there is no room for discussion. All practitioners can do is cooperate and make corrections.

Among them, the "Notice on Strengthening the Management of Online Show Live Broadcasts and E-commerce Live Broadcasts" issued by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television is the top priority. Uncle Ni has attached the full text at the end of the article. Practitioners are requested to read it carefully.

These three documents put forward very detailed and clear rectification requirements for the live streaming e-commerce industry, which is already very extensive. This means that the entire industry will enter a period of stagnation and rectification from December. There are many directions involved, so I will not elaborate on them here. I will only select four points that have a significant impact on the industry for interpretation:

Fighting fake data

Article 9 of the notice points out: For live broadcast rooms with high click-through rates, inflated transaction volumes, large amounts of “rewards”, and business categories prone to problems, a human-machine combined key monitoring and review mechanism should be established to track program dynamics, analyze public opinion and causes, and take timely measures to prevent directional deviations and problems.

This is a core clause that has caused a major impact on the industry. Under the provisions of this clause, major live broadcast platforms have begun to crack down on behaviors such as robots increasing traffic, faking orders to fake transaction volume, selling acting scripts, and fake lotteries, followed by a series of chain reactions.

Take Douyin as an example. After the platform rules were adjusted, the live broadcast robots nicknamed "Terracotta Warriors" in the industry could no longer be used. Then everyone discovered that the traffic of most anchors after they started broadcasting decreased by an order of magnitude. The number of anchors with tens of thousands of people online decreased to a few thousand, and the number of anchors with thousands of people online decreased to a few hundred. In order to avoid being exposed, more anchors chose to stop broadcasting.

Of course, the issue of the Terracotta Warriors being banned mainly affects mid-level anchors, while the impact on top anchors is relatively small. It’s not because top anchors don’t buy Terracotta Warriors, but because the interests behind top anchors are huge. They can completely solve the problem by buying a large number of second-hand mobile phones to build a dedicated computer room. After all, the price of a second-hand mobile phone is only around 100 yuan. Recently, a rumor that a top organization bought 7,000 second-hand mobile phones overnight for emergency response has been spreading in the industry...

For the top anchors, the greater impact lies in issues such as fake orders and script sales. On the one hand, it seems that the water content in the transactions of the top anchors is a situation that is difficult to avoid; on the other hand, Boss Yue’s problem is that he has taken "script sales" to a certain level and became a hot topic, which successfully attracted supervision for the industry. It is necessary for him to keep a low profile for a while and avoid the limelight.

Top accounts become the focus of scrutiny

Article 8 of the notice points out that it is necessary to focus on the management of top live broadcast rooms, top anchors and accounts, and live broadcast sales activities with high traffic or high transactions, and strengthen compliance inspections.

This one is basically a precise strike against the top anchors, requiring the platform to raise its supervision of the top anchors to an institutionalized requirement; combined with the external China Consumers Association's naming of top anchors such as Wang Han, Li Xueqin, and Li Jiaqi, and many landmark events in which Simba's "Bird's Nest Syrup" was debunked by Wang Hai, it can be said that the attitude of the top leaders to catch typical cases is very obvious, and it is also the core reason why many top anchors choose to temporarily avoid the limelight and are unwilling to commit crimes against the wind.

In addition, although it is not explicitly stated in the notice, since the Simba incident, the supervision of fake goods in live broadcast rooms has been raised to a new level. For practitioners in the live broadcast industry, everyone understands:

Domestic products are the ones that can really provide profits. The gross profit of imported or branded products is very low. Therefore, in the past, people often relied on selling: domestic products or brand-specific products to make money. However, there is actually no strict boundary between these products and counterfeit products. The result of digging deep into many supply chains is: factory products are labeled...

Apart from Taobao Live, which is centered around brand, short video live streaming has always been more inclined towards factory goods and white-label products. These problems left over from historical development and the era of high profits caused by information asymmetry seem to be coming to an end with the advent of supervision.

Do not provide opportunities for illegal and unethical artists to leave the country

The first article of the notice points out: Effective measures must be taken to prevent illegal and unethical artists from being given opportunities to appear on screen and speak publicly, to prevent and curb the spread of bad habits such as showing off wealth, worshipping money, vulgarity and kitsch in the live broadcast field, which will impact the core socialist values ​​and pollute the online audio-visual ecology.

As the segment with the highest profit margin but also the most disputes in the live streaming e-commerce trend, celebrity live streaming is naturally an important target of supervision.

On the one hand, it is difficult for "immoral artists" represented by Fan Bingbing and Li Xiaolu to do live streaming with goods through platform recommendations; on the other hand, it is rumored that in conjunction with the notice of the Radio and Television Bureau, corresponding policies have also been introduced in the film and television industry: the live streaming behavior of ordinary artists has also been strengthened, and many stars who still rely on film and television as their main industry have also begun to stop broadcasting recently...

Many institutions predict that next year will be a year of declining popularity of celebrity live streaming, but some institutions have begun to do the opposite: focusing on signing some out-of-date celebrities who have already retired from the film and television industry, hoping to train them to do live streaming and bring goods, in order to fill the market gap caused by regulation...

Implement the principal responsibility and integrate person, number and certificate

Article 2 of the notice points out that platforms that launch online show live broadcasts or e-commerce live broadcasts must earnestly implement their main responsibilities, strive to improve the various management systems, responsibility systems, content security systems, and human and material supplies for online live broadcast businesses, actively participate in industry culture construction and industry self-discipline, and jointly promote the standardized, orderly and healthy development of online show live broadcasts and e-commerce live broadcast activities.

The regulatory details have been worked out and the direction of punishment has been determined, so who will take responsibility? Therefore, as a complement to the regulatory details, a series of detailed rules for implementing and defining the main responsibilities have also begun to be implemented.

These details can be condensed into one sentence: in the future, people, certificates and numbers must be unified to conduct e-commerce live broadcasts… Although it seems to be just a relevant regulation that requires re-issuing certificates and licenses, it has caused great difficulties for institutions in actual operation;

The ownership of most anchor accounts belongs to institutions, but under the person-ID-number rule, the system will directly compare the anchor's face with the portrait on the institution's legal person ID card. If they do not match, it will be judged as a violation and there is even a risk of account suspension.

The model of combining person, account and certificate is in direct conflict with the current management relationship between MCN and anchors. For agencies, Internet celebrities are already very difficult to manage, and there is often a risk of termination of the contract after the IP is cultivated. Once the ownership of the account is further bound to the anchor, this risk will be further increased, making the already unprofitable MCN agencies even worse. The current suspension of the accounts of many agency anchors is based on this adjustment.

November can be called a disaster month for the live streaming industry. The first words many practitioners said when they saw Uncle Ni were: We are in such a mess!

In November, under the double attack of the three regulatory arrows launched by the national ministries and commissions and the continuous naming of top anchors by the China Consumers Association, the problems that existed in the live e-commerce industry in the past: traffic fraud, order fraud, supply problems, and one-time transaction pit fee problems, all surfaced and became important contents of supervision, which further led to the decline of the industry's voice and the direct silencing of its trend attributes.

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Will live streaming e-commerce still be okay? This is the question Uncle Ni asked most practitioners this month, and most of the optimistic friends put their hopes on the efforts of the platform.

After all, when facing regulatory pressure, the platform, institutions and anchors are actually standing together. The platform will give institutions and influencers some buffer space. For example, regarding the issue of integrating person, number and certificate, most platforms give institutions a three-month buffer period through the whitelist method to re-manage the anchor's certificate account information.

However, the platform's operating space is obviously limited, and what no one expected was that after Double Eleven this year, Douyin, which planned to go public in Hong Kong, made a series of major adjustments to live streaming e-commerce, which ultimately made the situation of the anchors worse.

The feed stream, which was previously known as an industry bonus and could provide cost-effective live streaming traffic, suddenly became very difficult to obtain starting in November.

Starting from November, several ByteDance employees began to announce in the merchant live broadcast group: It is expected that in November and December, the live broadcast conversion targets under the Douyin account promotion are expected to be [all] moved to product promotion.

In other words: after the strategy is launched, Douyin account promotion no longer supports the function of live streaming (whether it is video or direct feed). If you want to invest in live streaming, you must use Luban to promote products. To open Luban, one must first meet the requirements of the Youlian library brand, and then must undergo assessments of various aspects of store operations such as the small store novice village, Luban novice period, and Luban delivery rate.

This means: the threshold for investing in feed flows has been raised. Customers with high-quality brand capabilities can obtain promotion qualifications through on-site training, but most merchants will only be able to obtain traffic through DOU+ in the future.

The current industry trend has been to adjust in this direction, and the feed entrance for AD users is expected to be offline at the end of December.

At the same time as the feed flow was migrated, the introduction of the reputation score for selling goods in December meant that stricter requirements were placed on the host's conversion rate and the user's praise rate, making it more difficult to get live streaming traffic on Douyin.

Starting from December, many merchants received a reminder: starting from December 10, if the reputation of the goods is lower than 4.0 points or the historical record is lower than the industry average, they will not be able to launch DOU+ or establish a feed flow plan, which directly limits the anchor’s ability to obtain traffic.

In the e-commerce industry, the rules for traffic distribution often represent the rules for profit distribution.

Before TikTok applied for listing, the feed stream function had already completed its historical mission of brushing up the platform's turnover. Now, further raising the feed threshold means that the future development direction is to abandon small customers, concentrate traffic on large head customers, and gradually move towards the brand mall of traditional e-commerce.

If live streaming e-commerce before 2021 used to belong to small and medium-sized businesses and anchors, then in 2021 there is only one protagonist of live streaming e-commerce: brand!

Under the closed system of Douyin, the platform has firmly grasped the core power of traffic distribution. As the Douyin e-commerce system as a whole moves towards branding, factory goods are gradually withdrawing from the stage of history (since August, Douyin's factory goods have been severely restricted, so lower-profit brand specials have been popular for a time), which means that the positions of the anchors and brands, who are currently in a strong position, will be swapped next year. Under the closed brand authorization of Douyin, once the anchors do not cooperate with the brands, they will have no goods to sell. Although the actual operation is not to this extent, the overly strong position and high-premium profit level of income may no longer be maintained...

For anchors, perhaps the new opportunity lies in more brand services, becoming the Baozun of the Douyin era, and making DP (Douyin service provider) bigger and stronger...

But no matter how to describe it, with the promotion of a series of policy supervision, platform adjustments and the industry’s own development laws, by the end of 2020, the wild growth era of live streaming e-commerce that was once dazzling and exciting has come to an end!

Boom! ! !

listen! This is the death knell of the times, tolling for you, for me, and for the good times that have passed!

Author: Uncle Ni

Source: Uncle Ni’s Dark Time (nishu-think)