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Text丨Xu Yunze

Editor: Ai Luo

"Losing fans" has become a performance art that has attracted large-scale onlookers and has become an Internet spectacle in 2024.

What’s special about this spectacle is that it happened on a variety show. Recently, the production team of the interactive reality show “Let’s Farm” released a notice announcing the recruitment plan for the new season. This was interpreted as the production team will replace the existing artists and add new ones in the future, which caused quite a bit of controversy.

Public information shows that "Let's Farm" is composed of the "Ten Hardworking People" farming team, including Chen Shaoxi, He Haonan, Jiang Dunhao, Li Gengyun, Li Hao, Lu Zhuo, Wang Yiheng, Zhao Xiaotong, Zhuo Yuan and Zhao Yibo. The "Ten Hardworking People" have also gained a large number of loyal fans over the course of two seasons.

When the program's recruitment announcement seemed to indicate a "replacement", fans reacted strongly. The number of fans on the official Weibo account of "Let's Farm" dropped from nearly 2 million to over 1 million, and there is still no sign of stopping the decline. Currently, "Hehuoren" (the nickname of the program's fans) has applied for the "Guinness World Record for the number of fans lost", hoping to use this action to check and balance the program and safeguard the interests of the "Ten Hardworking Days" artists and fans.

"Hehuoren", a fan of the show "Let's Farm", applied for a Guinness World Record for the official Weibo account losing followers

The number of fans of the official Weibo account of "Let's Farm" has dropped below one million, compared to nearly 2 million before.

Fans vs. breaking the circle have become natural enemies. The key to supporting the longevity of the program may also ruin the program.

Different from conventional slow variety shows, "Let's Farm" not only uses a large proportion of newcomers, but also has a unique format: after interviewing more than 300 singers, actors, and trainees, the program team sent the selected artists to the first scene of farming. Ten young people knew nothing about farming from the beginning. In 190 days, they sowed, irrigated, fertilized, operated the farm, and established a farmer's market on 142.8 acres of land.

The second season saw even more upgrades, with new reclaimed land added to expand the planting area, attempts at new agricultural planting, enhanced labor professionalism, and even the learning and practice of professional application of water-fertilizer integrated irrigation, soilless cultivation, greenhouse farming and other technologies.This form and content give "Let's Farm" a relatively unique sense of development and growth system. The "Ten Hardworking Days" have gone from being unknown "amateurs" to a "boy group" and "farming idols" who can perform on the stage of the Spring Festival Gala. They are considered a breath of fresh air in domestic entertainment variety shows.

"Let's Farm" and its derivative variety shows have a Douban score of 9.0+

With a solid fan base, the program "Let's Farm" has not only successfully attracted investment with traffic dividends, but has also tried more direct traffic methods many times, such as launching various program peripherals, holding paid concerts, and even letting artists live broadcast and sell goods. Although it has also been criticized, these actions are still within the framework of traffic and fan economy. From another perspective, being able to enjoy traffic and fan economy dividends means that you must abide by the corresponding rules. The most fatal bug of the "replacement" suspicion is also here:

Fan circles and becoming bigger and stronger are naturally a pair of opposites and complementary relationships. To maintain a stable fan circle, it is necessary to continuously strengthen the moat and continue to forge feelings and stickiness in the original "Ten Hard Days" stock pool; and to break the circle and become bigger and stronger, it is indeed necessary to open source. Capital needs more interfaces to expand capacity, including but not limited to adding new people, connecting to more operating forms, and entering the incremental market.

So far, in the competition between fans and breaking the circle, I am afraid that no person or organization dares to say that they have found a suitable and reusable measurement formula.

Taking several famous variety shows as examples, the celebrity reasoning reality show "Celebrity Detective" (now known as "Great Detective》) has reached its ninth season, and still has to face the controversy about the ratio of permanent guests to flying guests. In addition to the concern and closeness to social hot spots, and the continuous innovation in content and visual presentation, the audience's expectations for the logical reasoning, control ability, and chemistry between the star artists are the key to the longevity of the program. Artists who have been verified by the audience and ratings are obviously an important guarantee of the program's quality, which is also the audience's expectation of the program."Acquaintance Bureau"The expectations are significantly higher than the uncertainty"Flying Guest"s reason.

The originator of outdoor competitive reality showRunning Man》 is even more obvious. Every time there is an upgrade and iteration over the past ten years, whether the resident hosting artists change will attract attention.Deng ChaoThe program once said "We are family" with a poor pronunciation, and even the logo design of the program is magnifying and strengthening the direction of "keeping" the original intention. The "brotherhood" and "family" feelings inspired by the high-intensity and challenging process setting are the most critical factors for the longevity of this program.

Members of "Ten Hardworking Days" gather together (data map)

Investors are eager to achieve success, and variety show artists face identity dilemma

It is worth noting that the show "Let's Farm" has not actually reached the point where it must make a decision on whether to break through the fan base or the general public, in terms of scale or profit. To some extent, the fans' intense reaction is a response to the usual routines of domestic entertainment investors.The program team and the "Ten Hardworking Days" members, who started out relying on "program fans", encountered a crisis of trust just when they had just secured a solid fan base and the IP was about to mature.

After the recruitment notice caused controversy and a wave of losing fans, Jiang Dunhao, one of the members of "Ten Qintian", published a long article to respond to some questions, assuring fans that "newcomers are new employees of the company Ten Qintian, but not new members of Ten Qintian. Ten Qintian will only be 10 of us", but at the same time he mentioned that the program team is protecting the members from "leaving the land" to pursue other dreams. The director of the program team also issued a statement in response, implicitly expressing that the program needs to open up new scenes and that new comrades will join. These responses reveal contradictory information, and in fact point out the possible real inside story. In addition to capital and the program, there should be some members who hope to have other developments independent of the program.

The director of "Let's Farm" forwarded Jiang Dunhao's long article, promising that "ten hard days will only be ten hard days"

For a long time, variety shows have been at the bottom of the domestic entertainment "contempt chain", and variety show stars have been burdened with a lot of baggage. In an environment where talent shows, slow variety shows, and life-like reality shows are all developing, variety shows can show the real multi-faceted aspects of artists in a more three-dimensional and richer way, and some celebrities who do not have works for the time being can maintain exposure, stage and camera. In recent years, good variety shows have helped many celebrities to "turn over" and "rectify their names", and also allowed more "living people" to appear in the entertainment industry. But we have to admit that getting rid of the identity of variety show stars is still a dilemma that most people need to face. This is probably the deep-seated problem of the "Let's Farm" replacement storm. In addition to the way of appearing as a team in the "Ten Sons of Qintian" that is tied to the program format, how much chance of winning can any individual member have in developing in other fields of the entertainment industry such as film, television, and music?

"Ten Hardworking Days" will appear on CCTV Spring Festival Gala 2024

We cannot judge the success or failure of any party in the market. Content vs. traffic, investors vs. idols, have always been a big test in the entertainment industry, waiting for every young person who embarks on the road of traffic.

Programs like "Let's Farm" that debuted freshly and had a simple original intention are essentially a form of business. From this perspective,Platforms have IP liquidity to consider, programs have cast control to consider, and artists have development space to consider, but the fans' feelings and emotions may eventually be the first to be abandoned.This kind of abandonment can certainly be accused of burning bridges after crossing them, but in the context of widespread traffic anxiety and internal circulation, there is probably no other way to solve the problem.

Perhaps, when variety shows are of higher quality and more "worthy", and their content attributes and business models are more mature and self-consistent, artists can truly use variety shows as qualified and high-quality "works" to show themselves. More importantly,The entertainment industry can explore a healthy development path, the blind anxiety about traffic can be truly alleviated, and a win-win trust mechanism can be established between investors, artists and fans., like the initial appearance of "Let's Farm" and its ten young people, its many internal conflicts can be better landed.