text | Value Planet, author | Tang Fei, editor | Weber
"Kuaishou's No. 1 Brother" Simba once again stood on the opposite side of Kuaishou.
"You dare to ban all my anchors. I dare to sue your platform for no cash flow. I dare to stand in front of the Hong Kong Securities Regulatory Commission and report it with real name." In a live broadcast on April 20, Simba spoke fiercely said.
The Kuaishou platform did not save Simba any face. Because of these outrageous remarks, the account "Xin Youzhi Simba 818" was banned. Subsequently, Simba quickly switched to the anchor account owned by Xinxuan and started broadcasting, but was soon banned again for excessive remarks that violated community rules.
After his four anchor accounts of "Xiao Luo", "Xu Jie", "Jia Jia" and "Dan Dan" were blocked, he found an assistant who had never brought live broadcasts before to create a new account and start broadcasting. After calming down a bit, he said, "Kuaishou doesn't need me" and said he would "retire".
At present, apart from the live broadcast room, Simba has not been able to really expand the second curve, and there is no cross-platform layout action. Therefore, Kuaishou Live Broadcasting Room is still Simba’s “cash cow”. If Kuaishou Live Broadcasting is really lost, Simba’s income may drop sharply.
As the "big brother of Kuaishou", Simba's Kuaishou account has 99.99 million+ fans, and many of his "apprentices" have fans of 50 million. In the "Top 10 Accounts with Estimated Sales of Kuaishou Live Broadcast Delivery in 2023" released in the new list, "Simba" and "Dandan" have a record of bringing in goods of over 10 billion yuan throughout the year, firmly ranking among the "top 10 accounts" in the Kuaishou delivery list. One brother and one sister.” The two of them brought in nearly 29.6 billion yuan in goods throughout the year, 1.4 times the cumulative sales of the other eight anchors. In the entire top ten list, Xinxuan Group occupies six seats.
But there are also many "grievances" between Simba and Kuaishou. Previously, Simba expressed his dissatisfaction with Kuaishou many times in live broadcasts, and even asked Kuaishou to ban certain people's accounts. These personal and emotional conflicts further heightened tensions between Simba and the platform.
01
In 2023, Simba’s estimated sales on Kuaishou’s live broadcast will be about 12.5 billion yuan, leading the company behind him by a cliff, with the amount being almost 2.8 times that of the latter.
Due to Simba’s influence and outstanding contribution in the Kuaishou e-commerce system, he has always been called the “Kuaishou First Brother”.
Picture source: New List
But "there are many popular people and right and wrong", the relationship between Simba and Kuaishou is very subtle. On the one hand, Kuaishou needs top anchors like Simba to gather fans and increase revenue through influence. On the other hand, the "restless" anchor Simba also gives Kuaishou a headache.
In the past few years, Simba has been banned by Kuaishou many times for various reasons.
At the end of December 2020, due to the "sugar water bird's nest" incident, Simba's personal account was banned by Kuaishou for 60 days. During 618 in 2021, Simba questioned Kuaishou's traffic restrictions because there were too few fans watching the live broadcast room, and his account was banned for 7 days. In September 2021, Simba angrily criticized the Kuaishou platform again in the live broadcast room, and was subsequently banned for 7 days. Two months later, Simba's live broadcast room was banned for 60 days due to "inappropriate words and deeds in the live broadcast room." On March 8, 2023, Simba's live broadcast function was banned for 48 hours due to "excessive remarks" during a live broadcast on the Kuaishou platform.
Counting this time, Simba’s live broadcast room has been blocked 6 times, ranging from 2 days to 60 days.
Simba not only challenged the rules of the Kuaishou platform again and again, but also had many conflicts with the brand.
On April 16, 2022, Simba had a disagreement with his partner "Playboy" during a live broadcast, saying that "Xinxuan prohibits the sale of 'Playboy'. This 'Playboy' is not that 'Playboy', and this brand is China is squatting. I will never choose this product in my life." In the end, the two parties broke up.
Two days later, Simba and his anchor Dandan sold a product called "ypl sun protection cooling pants". However, the brand ypl issued a statement saying that the product was not officially authorized and did not belong to the ypl brand. It stated that it would take legal measures to hold relevant sales and production companies accountable.
In October 2023, Mousse Co., Ltd. cooperated with Simba to sell a large black cow soft leather bed with a market price of 20,000 yuan. Subsequently, media reported that the Mousse brand requested to terminate the cooperation and removed another mattress that Simba had originally planned to carry.
In addition to his "hot temper" externally, Simba is also not harmonious with his internal colleagues and apprentices.
html On March 30, the Internet celebrity "Cat Sister" with tens of millions of fans on the Kuaishou platform publicly accused her master Simba on Weibo, accusing him of practicing PUA on her, and bluntly said that Simba cursed people and the platform.
Picture source: Weibo @猫女-sunshine version
On December 12 last year, Xinxuan CEO Guan Qian announced her resignation after less than a year in the job, and Song Tieniu (Lanshan) succeeded Guan Qian as the group CEO. Information shows that Guan Qian has previously worked at Tencent, LeTV, and Alibaba.
Guan Qian's departure was called by the outside world as the result of "the conflict between professional managers and the master-apprentice system."
needs to point out that as the head anchor, Simba is the center of traffic, but as the co-founder of Xinxuan Brand, Simba is also the center of the entire team. In the process of external communication and internal management, Simba still has a lot to improve.
may be aware of these problems. Since last year, Simba has intentionally reduced the number of live broadcasts on his account. In addition to live broadcasts on important promotion nodes such as 618, Double 11, and the New Year Festival, Simba mostly uses the "platform" of his apprentice's live broadcast room. form appears.
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The conflict between Kuaishou and Simba is a typical story of "Success is Xiao He, failure is Xiao He".
In 2016, 26-year-old Simba decided to join Kuaishou. When he first entered the platform, Simba mainly attracted popularity by telling about his entrepreneurial experience and random lottery activities, but these contents could not attract traffic for a long time.
Later, there were more and more live broadcast software on the market, and product homogeneity became more serious. Kuaishou platform began to introduce live broadcast to bring goods to increase revenue.
html More than 20 years of business experience have made Simba very comfortable in the process of bringing goods. In the first year of bringing goods, his team's live broadcast transaction volume reached 40 billion, and he himself contributed 13.3 billion. Later, Simba established his own Xinxuan team, which later became the largest of the six Kuaishou families.In 2019, Kuaishou went public in Hong Kong. The prospectus revealed that Kuaishou e-commerce achieved GMV of 59.6 billion that year, of which the Simba family accounted for nearly 22%. In the years since, Simba and his family have been an important part of Kuaishou’s live streaming e-commerce revenue.
However, as the story develops, these achievements seem to have become Simba's confidence to challenge the platform.
In fact, although Kuaishou has never admitted “de-Simbaization” in public, it has been doing so. After all, excessive concentration of traffic on a few big anchors is not only detrimental to commercialization, but also carries huge risks.
In 2020, Kuaishou e-commerce gmv reached 680 billion, and the Simba family’s share dropped to 6%. By 2022, this share will further drop to 5.5%. Kuaishou said in a later announcement that "as of 2023q3, the proportion of waist and tail experts in the overall gmv of experts has increased to close to 50%, and the ecology of experts continues to be optimized."
Zhang Yipeng, the head of Kuaishou E-commerce Marketing Center, once said bluntly: "I may not be able to sell Simba, Li Jiaqi, and Wei Ya as a mid-waist anchor. If I bring 10 anchors together, the volume will definitely be larger than before."
In addition to "cutting" Fan” big anchor, Kuaishou also strongly encourages businesses to self-broadcast.
In 2023, Kuaishou launched the "Chuanliu Plan" for merchants who have expert distribution and stable self-broadcasting. It plans to provide 60 billion traffic to support merchants throughout the year. The plan aims to promote merchants' self-broadcasting and distribution to form a virtuous cycle. The traffic between experts and merchants grows in the same direction, creating new increments and improving operating efficiency.
Retail e-commerce industry expert and founder of Bailian Consulting Zhuang Shuai believes that Simba is no longer that important to Kuaishou. More and more brand merchants are choosing to open flagship stores in Kuaishou, and new forces are rising rapidly. Their product selection capabilities and The platform has stronger operating capabilities and is more in line with the requirements of the new Kuaishou e-commerce ecosystem.
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According to iResearch estimates, China’s live streaming e-commerce market will reach 4.9 trillion yuan in 2023, with a year-on-year growth rate of 35.2%. Compared with the early stages of industry development, the industry’s growth rate has declined to a certain extent, but it is still releasing growth signals. iResearch predicts that the compound annual growth rate (cagr) of China's live streaming e-commerce market will be 18.0% from 2024 to 2026, and the industry will show a steady growth trend and enter a stage of refined development in the future.From the platform side, Douyin, Kuaishou, and Taobao live broadcasts have formed a "three-legged" situation in China. In 2022, the three will have a combined market share of approximately 91% in the live broadcast e-commerce industry (Note: NetEase data are for reference only) . Under high concentration, the direction of the industry has changed.
Source: Minsheng Securities
A live broadcast practitioner said that from the background data, there are three account types that perform very well. One is the anchor with a distinctive personality, and the other is the anchor with a fan base and a certain degree of influence. anchor, and the third is an anchor with relatively strong private domain operation capabilities. It just so happens that there are relatively successful cases in the above three directions. Typical examples are Dong Yuhui and Oriental Selection, which formed word-of-mouth through high-quality content and completed the accumulation of traffic. Celebrities such as Lin Yun, Zhu Dan, Xu Dongdong, Jia Nailiang, and Fu Seoul themselves have a certain degree of topicality and influence, and they have also had smooth sailing after transitioning to live broadcasting to bring goods. On the contrary, those anchors who have become famous have chosen to "quit bravely" in recent years.
Crazy Little Yang, the head anchor of Douyin, rarely appears in the live broadcast room and has shifted his energy to short dramas. Luo Yonghao also announced his withdrawal from Douyin live broadcasts and brought goods, and Simba also proposed the idea of "retiring" . Today, the industry has transitioned from a high-growth stage to a stage of pursuing “certainty.” This certainty is more reflected in AI technology, merchant private domains, content, etc. So we see more and more AI technology being introduced into live broadcasts, and digital people can already support live broadcasts for several hours; top anchors are beginning to try to launch their own apps, trying to "privatize" the traffic in the live broadcast room; professional The "grass-growing ability" of sexual and interesting content is getting stronger and stronger, etc.
Looking forward to the future, with the improvement of relevant laws and regulations and the standardization of platform operations, vulgar live broadcast behaviors such as showing off bravery, PK drinking, swearing and vomiting will gradually disappear. Only those who focus on serving consumers and meeting their new needs will Only the live broadcast room can continue to operate for a long time. The ban on Simba this time may be a great opportunity for the Simba team and the Kuaishou platform to sort out and sort out business processes and standards.
