title picture/Lost in Translation
The emergence of the hit is no accident
In May of this year, Bilibili opened the "Charging Exclusive" video function for some UP hosts. Through this video payment channel, users can pay specific UP hosts on a monthly basis. Charge to achieve creative support for UP masters. Seven months after the function was launched, the "Charging Exclusive" hit product appeared.
The video "Lost in Tokyo" created by "Ship Pindao", the owner of Bilibili UP with 3.72 million fans, received more than 160,000 people's support after it went online on November 30. According to the minimum 12 yuan monthly charging set by the column where the video is located, "Dakai Dahe", plus the support of netizens through customized charging, the cumulative paid income of "Lost in Translation" has exceeded 2 million yuan, and the video production cost is 400,000 yuan. According to Bilibili’s “charging exclusive” rules, 70% of the proceeds go to Shipindao. One can’t help but sigh that Bilibili users are not lenient at all when paying for high-quality content!
Many netizens who took "First Charge Memories" made no secret of their love for the movie and described it as "the best of the year". As a humanistic documentary, "Lost in Translation" brings to Bilibili netizens not only the unique entry point of the theme, the professional production, but also the deep thinking caused by the issues behind it.
In 2003, a US-Japanese co-production called "Lost in Translation" told the story of the loneliness experienced by two foreigners in Japan. In the movie, Tokyo is full of singing and dancing, noisy and sleepless, but in real Tokyo, there are thousands of lonely Japanese people living in it. "Lost in Translation" is a record of these lonely and confused Japanese people.
In the 2 hours and 8 minutes of "Lost in Translation", the host "Uncle Pancake" of Poverty Road interviewed homeless people, members of Japanese mafia organizations, waiters, love action movie actors and people who specialize in cleaning up "lonely deaths". "A special cleaning team for the elderly's house, as well as several other Japanese of all kinds.
These Japanese people appearing in the camera correspond to the three "traditional issues" of Japanese society: gangs, customs and aging. The documentary's recording of their daily life ultimately goes in the same direction. No matter what type of person they are, what age, what kind of identity, what kind of life, whether it is dreamy, joyful, complicated, changeable, helpless, in the end, They will all face the same problem - loneliness. The entire documentary uses a variety of visual shooting techniques and editing to reproduce the true inner world of the interviewees. It is quite professional in terms of lens, editing and soundtrack. Netizens also highly recognized the work: "This is no better than spending money to watch a movie in a cinema. Is it more valuable?” “This is the documentary produced by the top UP host of Bilibili.”
Uncle Pie was also deeply touched when watching this documentary in another video. It uses a human perspective and a conversational way to record culture. In Japan, The country is quite difficult because "the Japanese themselves are very lonely", "the Japanese are so lonely that all their desires can actually be commercialized", "when you commercialize your desires, you find that people themselves may be just commodities". After quite a difficult interview process, Pindao finally decided to make five interviews into one episode. Japan is a developed country in Asia with a highly atomized society. The various problems it encounters now are also the difficulties that China is likely to face in the future. This is another layer of significance of "Lost in Translation" as a documentary.
Mr. Pancake, who has been a war correspondent and went to the anti-epidemic scene in Wuhan, calls himself a "hardcore gourmet UP master" and often uses the word "大开大合" to describe food in his videos. In his videos, netizens can not only see "million-level photography" and "tens-of-million post-production", but also be moved by the different humanities reflected in the food stories, and feel the professionalism and professionalism of Food Poverty Road. reality.
In 2023, Mr. Pancake and his team went to different cities and regions in Japan several times for filming, and spent 400,000 yuan at their own expense to produce a series of documentaries "Japanese Dabaojian".The first two issues of the "Japanese Dabaojian" series were about the topics of Yasukuni Shrine and Fukushima nuclear radiation. These two documentaries were recognized by netizens for their in-depth, professional and detailed records and reports, and received 4.9 million clicks and 4.9 million clicks respectively on station B. 13 million hits. "Lost in Translation", which reflects the current situation of Japanese life, is the third episode of the series.
Uncle Biscuit admitted in the Amway video that the reason for producing this series of videos and starting the "Charging Exclusive" for the third episode is that on the one hand, he wanted to continue this documentary report that had been formed as early as 2019 (2019 Food Poverty Road and B website co-produced "Cuban Dabao Recommendation" and "Middle East Dabao Recommendation", which were later interrupted due to the epidemic). On the other hand, due to the revenue pressure of the Shipindao account itself, the Shipindao team's cash flow was almost cut off in March this year. , making a "Charging Exclusive" video is a huge challenge. Fortunately, this challenge was successful, which also brought the topic of "paying for high-quality content" to the industry's scrutiny again.
Whether it is an overseas video website or a domestic video platform, from becoming a video platform member and paying for all video content at once, to launching a paid subscription plan for a single channel or video content, the payment model for individual users has been gradually refined. . Overseas, Youtube launched a payment model for individual users in 2018. The most successful domestic content paid by a single creator is the knowledge content payment that was popular in 2016.
However, in addition to knowledge-based videos, how other types of videos should be recognized by domestic netizens and allow users to pay for the content is a big problem.
In 2022, Bilibili launched a "video payment" function. Bilibili's UP master "Duncan" released a collection of 10 paid videos unlocked on a monthly basis for a total fee of 30 yuan. However, netizens believed that the production model of these videos was too expensive. It is simple and involves infringement of the copyright of the material, and the willingness to pay is not high. It is considered an unsuccessful attempt.
In July this year, Bilibili launched the "exclusive charging" function. This function is an upgrade of the charging plan in 2016, changing the "charging" payment model from voluntary, self-determined price, and reward after viewing to The consumption amount is fixed and can only be viewed after charging. It can be said that "exclusive charging" is a great change in the concept of content consumption among netizens. The premise for users to pay is actually their trust in the quality of UP's main works. If you are not careful, you will lose the trust of fans, so the leading UP owners are more cautious about this, but there are also a small number of UP owners who are actively trying this function.
For example, "Hansen Bai JW" with 870,000 fans is one of the first UP owners to enable this feature. Currently, his comic reasoning category maintains a production rhythm of launching a charging exclusive video every month, and the monthly fee is as low as 18 yuan. , 2100 people chose this service.
As for some UP owners who have enabled this feature, it does not mean that all content will be high-quality content, so users need to distinguish the specific content by themselves.
ACGx learned from people close to Bilibili that since the upgraded version of the charging plan was launched, as of early November, more than 400,000 UP owners have subscribed to monthly charging, and the monthly charging income of some leading UP owners may have exceeded 100,000.
Now let’s look back at the reason why “Lost in Translation” became a “charging exclusive” hit, and Shi Pindao’s professionalism in video production, as well as the high quality of the first two videos of the series, “Lost in Translation” "Tokyo" is closely related to the storytelling and emotional value contained in it for a specific audience. As a monthly subscription project, how Shipindao can provide users with long-term value content is another issue worthy of attention. In this regard, Uncle Pancake also explained in the video that "Lost in Translation" is an extra-long version of the video series. In order to ensure that the charging section is all carefully produced unique and interesting content, the team will go abroad every month to shoot in the future. video.
It took several years for domestic video platforms to allow users to accept the membership payment model. Now various platforms such as advanced on-demand and single-film payment have adopted more refined payment models, all of which have experienced repeated changes from content to business. try.To make "charging exclusive" a sustainable revenue model for UP owners, more UP owners like Shipindao need to explore content production and support the Bilibili platform at the operational level, which will obviously cost more. It takes an investment of resources and time to see the future.
