I heard that AI red envelope covers are super profitable

If ordinary people want to make money using AI, the Spring Festival is the best time.

This special traditional holiday is full of various small opportunities to please people: Spring Festival couplets, window stickers, family portraits, auspicious words... They are related to pictures and texts, have their own popularity, and everyone has a need for them. Just describe them to a large model as you would normally speak, and you can get works with amazing effects.

AI Spring Festival couplets, but they don’t look very smart | Webpage screenshot

On Xiaohongshu, the content of "AI red envelope cover" has frequently squeezed into the front page since more than a month ago, and there are many claims that "earn 30,000 in 10 days" and "you can do it if you have hands" . The cover with the highest number of likes is a dragon in the style of Hayao Miyazaki, which is very visually shocking. This post has 14,000 likes and more than 30,000 comments. Fans spontaneously "one-click four-link" - forwarding, liking, collecting, and leaving comments, just to get a red envelope cover drawn by AI.

Most liked posts | Screenshot

It’s even more exaggerated on Douyin. A blogger said that 500,000 people have received the AI ​​red envelope cover he made, and more than 30,000 people received it in one hour.

The desire to make money is like the fireworks outside the window, ready to explode at any moment.

AI Good Dragon

Nooo's Xiaohongshu account used to post mostly landscape photos with exquisite composition. This month, it has been replaced with various bright red and blue AI red envelope cover photos.

"I roughly calculated how much money others could make from selling, and thought I might as well give it a try," said Nooo. He was a university student in Beijing and wanted to find a part-time job during the winter vacation. Beijing was too cold in winter, so he set his sights on AI red envelope covers.

Comparison of Xiaohongshu pages before and after Nooo (swipe to view) | Screenshot

His goal is to make the pictures "no AI flavor". After more than a year of AIGC, most people have become immune to the "AI at a glance" pictures with smooth texture and prominent gloss . This cannot break through in the fierce New Year red envelope cover business. In this business, there are independent designers, design studios, technicians specializing in AI, and even professional painters with their own fans. The cover drawn by AI must be outstanding, at least not too mediocre.

Creating an AI-styled image requires long-term study, but there are shortcuts. There are too many generous prompts shared on the Internet. Bloggers post a picture and a corresponding prompt, and those who are interested can just copy and paste it. More advanced ones have also summarized the formula, "style + subject + scene color", or "role + background + task + output method". Search the name of an artist on the Internet, and you can make it look decent.

"Spell" tutorial on Xiaohongshu｜Screenshot

Nooo bought a shared Midjourney account on Taobao, holding the prompt words he saw on Xiaohongshu in his left hand and Youdao Dictionary in his right hand, and began to create. He took the dragon as the theme, and the production process was not stable. Either the head was missing, or the claw structure was messy. After finally adjusting it, the color was wrong. Because it was a shared account, he had to wait for other people who logged in at the same time to use it before he could use it . It took more than ten minutes to make a picture.

After two or three days of repeated adjustments and attempts, Nooo finally found a dragon with a suitable shape and harmonious color matching. In order to stand out from the competition, he did not use this picture directly as the cover, but generated other elements such as paper-cut pavilions and auspicious cloud patterns separately and then spliced ​​them together, which is equivalent to "half manual and half intelligent".

Nooo’s AI red envelope cover | Provided by the interviewee

Later I discovered that AI dragon drawing is the simplest part of this business.

Difficulties in business

Always after production

After AI generates the image, it needs to be made into a red envelope according to WeChat's requirements and submitted for review. First of all, there is a threshold. Individuals who can make WeChat red envelope covers must have a public account or video account and have at least 100 followers.

So, on Xiaohongshu, users who rushed into this business temporarily attracted fans online . They posted their IDs under the popular posts of AI red envelopes, calling on each other to follow, hoping to break through the threshold restrictions together.

Examples of corporate red envelopes displayed on the WeChat platform | Screenshot

It is still not easy after crossing the threshold. WeChat's review standards are strict - there are mandatory requirements for the width and height pixels of the red envelope image, color configuration, and the length of the creator's name. There are also requirements such as the picture should not be too complicated, the color of the picture should not be too close to the color of the text, etc., which need to be judged by yourself.

Many people go crazy at this step. The modification of AI pictures is not like manual work, where you can easily modify details individually. Most people can only make adjustments through prompts. Regardless of whether the adjustments can be made in place, it is also a problem whether the prompts can accurately meet the needs.

Screenshot of audit requirements

Nooo turned to Taobao again and bought a Photoshop outsourcing service, handing the adjustment task back to the person. In order to make the creator's name displayed on the red envelope more festive, he also changed the name of his personal public account. When it was unsuccessful, he had to queue up for three or four hours to appeal to the customer service. His heart, which was originally excited about drawing a dragon, became cold after four repeated reviews.

AI self-employed people are here

What’s even more difficult is promotion.

Red envelope covers sound like a small business, but today they have developed into something of an "industry" . In addition to direct sales, there are also people who buy pictures from other places and then sell them, people who take on customized pictures, people who use giving away red envelopes as an excuse to accumulate fans or attract traffic, and even people who specialize in WeChat audits. Some comments say that the price of red envelope covers was "19.9 or 29.9 in previous years, but this year it has risen to 2.9 or 4.9", which shows how fierce the competition is.

In previous years, most of the participants were professional designers and illustrators. I thought that this year the impact of AI would sweep across this business. However, an illustrator who only draws original red envelopes told me that the impact is not significant, “The groups of people are different. People who like to consume original works cannot accept the style of AI.”

Original artist's trailer | Screenshots

On the contrary, compared with the mature "real person" artist accounts, the AI ​​self-employed people who just rushed into this business this year do not have the traffic advantage of the former. Under a popular post promoting the AI ​​red envelope cover as profitable, there are many comments about unsold products, such as "Why is mine being ignored?", "No one buys it after I make it?", "The traffic is so poor that there is no traffic even for giving away." Finally, the poster had to post a reply at the top, " Don't rush in on a whim. This is very dependent on hit products. If there are no hit products, the input-output ratio is likely to be very low ."

I found Nooo in the reply to this post.

"I entered the market late. Many people were already doing this on New Year's Day," Nooo said after reviewing his entrepreneurial experience. "The regular operation of the account is very important. Some people who are illustrators can sell well by doing this. The fan base is very important."

There are money-making tips everywhere | Screenshot

In order to make small profits but quick turnover, Nooo's red envelope covers were finally priced at 3.8 yuan. After deducting Tencent's platform fee of 1 yuan per cover and the commission of the Xiaohongshu store, the actual profit from selling a cover is 2.5 yuan, which still includes the cost price.

After the red envelope passed the review, he sent the purchase link to his classmates, but no one responded except for a few good friends. He left a frustrated comment under the popular post, " This is really bad " - but he didn't expect it to become popular. Now this comment has become his main traffic pool, bringing him two or three customers a day.

"Now all I have to do is sell them," said Nooo. His current income is around 200 to 300 yuan, which means at least he has made back his investment.

The tide has just come in, let’s swim!

I also met a developer who created an AI red envelope cover platform. On his platform, you don't need to buy another account, just enter the prompt word, and you can generate a red envelope cover that has been matched with the format. If Nooos are self-employed, this former Tencent senior engineer named idoubi is a wholesaler of AI red envelopes - but he is only responsible for the drawing step, and the process after the review still needs to be done by the user himself.

idoubi’s AI red envelope cover platform｜Screenshot

This "wholesaler" chose to go all in on AI this year, just like many other "trendsetters" - it has developed GPT conversation robots, group chat summary robots, personal knowledge bases, AI wallpapers and other products. But each has its own obstacles, such as the lack of promotion and privacy issues, so the conversation robots and group chat summary robots have been temporarily shelved .

For people with a technical background, it is not that difficult to be a wholesaler of AI covers. It took idoubi only one hour to build the red envelope cover platform. "It is essentially the same workflow as building a website, but the API is different." He connected to Open AI's DALL·E 3 model, paid for it himself, and then connected it to users on the platform. Each user has one free trial opportunity, and then they have to pay 10 yuan/3 sheets.

The segmented applications have indeed brought AI production closer to ordinary people. You can see many interesting prompts on it, such as "Yang Chaoyue holding a panda and sending red envelopes", "Chinese dragon in a bikini", etc. For each image generated, idoubi has to pay 1 yuan . Now the platform has generated 3,336 AI covers.

Some interesting prompt words and generated effects | Screenshots

However, there are not many people who are willing to pay. Idoubi said that marketing and promotion are his shortcomings.

However, idoubi was pleasantly surprised that the project's "traffic came very quickly", with up to 10,000 visits a day. The website also received over 1,000 stars on Github, making it the most well-received project he has tried so far. For an independent AI developer who is still exploring, this is a good New Year's gift.

God of Wealth is the most popular prompt word, and I wish you prosperity in the Year of the Dragon｜Screenshot

“I don’t have enough confidence to say that AI will definitely make me rich overnight, because apart from development capabilities, I don’t have all the other resources, connections, marketing, traffic and other capabilities yet,” idoubi said. “ When an opportunity arises, it is actually rare that only one or two people can see it , and there are only a few people who can actually make it happen.”

He plans to continue exploring the direction of AI business in the new year, but this time he will focus on things other than AI.

Planning and production

Source: Guokr

Author: Ruiyue

Editor: He Tong

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