Huya Live Operation Data Analysis

In order to have a deeper understanding of the live streaming platform, this article combines the data of 35,000 Huya live streaming rooms and is prepared to analyze the current situation of the platform from a data perspective. enjoy

On April 3, Linen Investment Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tencent Holdings, exercised its equity and purchased 16,523,819 shares of Huya Class B common stock for a total purchase price of approximately US$262.6 million. At this point, Tencent became Huya’s largest shareholder, with voting rights increased to 50.1%. Previously, Tencent was already Douyu’s largest shareholder, holding 37.2% of the shares. This also announced that Tencent had successfully integrated the three major live streaming giants, Huya, Douyu, and Penguin Esports.

At the same time, the epidemic has also pushed the live streaming industry to the forefront. The number of daily active users of game live streaming platforms represented by Douyu and Huya has increased by more than 25% compared to before the Spring Festival (data source: QuestMobil China Mobile Internet Database). New fields such as catering, education, and fitness have also begun to explore the possibilities brought by live streaming. In order to have a deeper understanding of the live streaming platform, Aze started with Huya Live and prepared to analyze the current situation of the platform from a data perspective.

01 Data Overview

First, find the server request that returns all the live broadcast rooms that have been broadcast on the live broadcast page of Huya Live, and then get all the live broadcast room links through the python request package. After obtaining the live broadcast room link, enter the live broadcast room page and parse the page information to obtain the data we want, such as the number of subscriptions, popularity, live broadcast room title, etc.

Through the above method, we found that on the evening of April 9, there were 35,653 anchors broadcasting and 613 live broadcast sections. The data dimensions captured for each live broadcast room include title, announcement, link, anchor, popularity, subscription, section and related live broadcast rooms .

02 Sector Analysis

First, let’s take a look at the proportion of each live broadcast section. The top five sections in terms of live broadcast volume are: Honor of Kings, League of Legends, Peace Elite, Star Show and CF Mobile Games. The top seven live broadcast sections account for about half of the total number of live broadcasts, which means that the number of live broadcasts in a large number of sections is very small. Here we classify sections with less than 300 live broadcasts as others.

Among the sections with a relatively large number of live broadcasts, in addition to popular games, there are star shows, dating, appearance, outdoor and two-dimensional. Most of the live broadcast content on the Huya live broadcast platform is still mainly based on games and talents.

So, does it mean that the more sections are launched, the more popular they are? On the one hand, if you only look at the total number of subscriptions and popularity, there is indeed a completely positive correlation, that is, the more live broadcasts there are, the greater the total popularity and total number of subscriptions. As shown in the figure below, each circle represents a section, and the size of the circle represents the number of live broadcasts. It can be seen that the larger circles are distributed in the upper right corner of the figure, which means they have a larger total popularity and total number of subscriptions.

However, if we use average subscriptions and average popularity instead, we will find that some sections with a small number of live broadcasts have high average popularity and subscriptions. For example, King of Glory Simulation War, DOTA2, console games and Watch Together, these are sections where Huya platform can expand the recruitment of anchors in large numbers, because the higher average popularity and number of subscriptions mean that there are many users who particularly love this section, while the number of anchors in the section is relatively small.

Among them, the dating section, as a larger section, has a very high average popularity, but its average number of subscriptions is relatively low. From this, we can infer that a large number of users enter the dating section on a whim and do not have regular subscriptions to anchors. Users come and go, so compared to the content, the title and cover of the live broadcast room have become important means to attract users. (For this reason, Aze opened the dating section for the first time. It is indeed full of color, fragrance and taste. Friends who are interested, please move on your own.)

Careful friends may have noticed that both pictures above have introduced a new value: relative popularity, which is calculated as: relative popularity = popularity/number of subscriptions.

Aze believes that this is a parameter that can be used to find the most promising section, because a higher relative popularity means there are more interactive users and fewer subscriptions. In this way, the anchors in the section need to think more about how to convert viewers into fans. Because relative popularity is an average, if you compare the relative popularity of all sections, the top sections will all have only single-digit live broadcast numbers.

Therefore, Aze has limited himself to the top sections with more than 10 and more than 100 live broadcast rooms and higher relative popularity. There are basically no identical plates in the two pictures, which shows that this classification is effective.

Let's take a closer look at the relative heat chart for blocks with more than 10 rooms. The higher the relative popularity of a block, the more rooms it has, which means more potential. Dream World, My Name is MT4 and Conquer are all niche sectors with great potential. On the third day after grabbing the data, Aze found that the number of live broadcasts of my name is MT4 had risen to more than 120.

For sections with more than 100 rooms, we can see more common sections, among which mobile games account for a large proportion. Huya Live can appropriately increase some live broadcast activities or fan feedback for the mobile game section to improve the viewing rate of the audience in this section.

03 Anchor Analysis

After reading the section, let’s take a look at the anchors on the Huya platform. First of all, at the indicator level, the average number of subscribers of the anchor is about 22k, and the popularity is 54k. The TOP30 anchors divided by subscription numbers and popularity basically have the same proportion as the popular sections. It can be seen that there are more TOP popular anchors for mobile games such as Honor of Kings, and more TOP subscription anchors for PC games such as League of Legends, which is in line with the current trend of the rise of mobile games.

Compared with TOP subscriptions, TOP popularity also includes live broadcast rooms of e-sports events, which means that most users who watch the games do not have the habit of subscribing to live broadcasts of events. It should also be noted that since only the data of the live broadcast rooms that started broadcasting on that day were captured here, some well-known big anchors may not be on the list.

If we use relative popularity to select the TOP30 anchors with more than 1,000 subscribers, we will come to the same conclusion as before in the section, that is, the "watch and leave" phenomenon in the dating section. If you filter by subscription count greater than 10,000, you’ll get a similar distribution, but you’ll see some mid-region streamers with more potential. If the guilds on the Huya platform can identify these anchors in advance and train them more, they may be able to cultivate the next phenomenal anchor.

In addition to exploring subscription numbers and popularity, titles and live broadcast room announcements can also help us understand the ecosystem of Huya Live. Here Aze generated word clouds for titles and announcements respectively, so you can intuitively see how the anchors like to name their posts.

"Welcome to the live broadcast room" Such a straightforward title is actually the favorite of anchors. "Free parking space for fans" is the usual signboard of game anchors. Most technical anchors may say that they are "the No. 1 top ranking instructor in the country", and female anchors may use "Young sisters are online together every day". High-frequency words such as "newcomer", "new anchor", and "first day" also indirectly confirm the speed of reshuffle in the live broadcast industry.

The bulletin board is filled with reminders about the broadcast time and thanks for the analysis, and is also one of the channels for the anchor to contact fans.

Finally, among these more than 30,000 live broadcast rooms, about 700 are linked to other live broadcast rooms. For example, the live broadcast rooms of players of the same professional team and the anchors of the Huya Live Guild will be connected to each other, and links will be placed above the live broadcast rooms.

Here we convert all the related live broadcast rooms into a relationship network, and we can find some major live broadcast communities such as DOTA2 and food broadcasting, as well as many relatively small communities such as online schools and professional teams. We can also find the Huya Guild with a large number of subscribers.

In general, the communities on the Huya platform are relatively scattered and each forms its own faction.

04 User Analysis

When it comes to live streaming, there are bound to be stories about various tycoons spending huge sums of money to reward the anchors. Aze also particularly wants to capture the users' reward data to see whether the big anchors on the platform can earn millions a month. However, all user data on the Huya website, including nicknames, levels, rewards and barrages, are encrypted. Due to limited technology, we can only sigh in despair for the time being.

However, after some searching, I found a website called Toubang Data, which actually had the reward data of major live streaming platforms. That’s right, Huya Live’s monthly paid gift revenue was 773.1 million yuan, and there were 134,800 wealthy people who gave more than 1,000 yuan in rewards every day on average! If the data on the top list is true and correct, the 84.35 active anchors mean that the anchors who started broadcasting at 21:00 on April 9 only accounted for 4.2% of all anchors, which is just the tip of the iceberg.

This also means that the data analysis in the previous article only applies to the corresponding time point. If the data is re-captured in the afternoon or late at night, the results may be completely different.

From the value of gifts in different sections, we can see that although the number of active users and active anchors in the game section account for the majority of the platform, the real money-making sections are the appearance star show and dating sections. This reminds Aze of the time in 2015 and 2016 when many people were not optimistic about Huya and Douyu, believing that it would be difficult for them to break the curse that game live streaming was not profitable. Now it seems that they really do not need to break it, and instead make profits through appearance star shows and dating sections.

05 Conclusion

In summary, as one of the largest live streaming platforms in China, Huya has a large number of top-quality anchors and daily active viewers. After evolving from YY Live, it still relies on game live streaming to make its main profits through appearance shows and making friends. There are many small live broadcast communities scattered within the platform, and professional e-sports competitions play a very important role in the cultivation of communities. In recent years, we can also see Huya’s efforts to promote live broadcasts of competitions.

In addition to the large head sectors, we can also notice that there are many potential sectors with few anchors but high popularity that are worth Huya's in-depth development. The dating section has a special functional attribute that leads to the phenomenon of viewers “coming and going”. How to convert viewers into analysts may be a common topic for the hosts of the dating section.

Although the anchors of PC games such as League of Legends still have the most subscribers, we can see a trend of popularity shifting towards mobile game anchors. As the number of mobile game players increases rapidly, mobile game live streaming will also become the absolute "king" sector.

Looking at the impact of this epidemic on the live streaming industry, although Huya's main sectors have seen significant growth, a large number of emerging live streaming platforms in niche areas are occupying new live streaming markets, such as Xueersi in the education field, TT Live focusing on fitness, and so on. For Huya, while continuing to consolidate its existing strong sectors, how or whether to seize these emerging live broadcast sectors has become an important issue.

Author: Aze Data

Source: DataSpeaks_shushuo