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Economic Observer reporter Qian Yujuan On August 2, Li Jiaqi appeared in Mango Super Media's variety show "Breaking the Thorns 4", performing crossover singing and dancing, which surprised his fan Liu Xia. After all, in the past two months, Li Jiaqi has appeared in the live broadcast room only a few times, and instead, the assistant broadcasters take turns to live broadcast and sell goods.

Many fans complained that the live broadcast room without Li Jiaqi had a worse viewing experience, and Liu Xia also felt the same way. She found that even in a special live broadcast, the assistant's ability to talk about products in the C position (core position) was far behind Li Jiaqi, "either talking nonsense or not speaking well." Liu Xia, who already had a lower desire to buy, now had no intention of spending.

As a super head anchor, Li Jiaqi once set a record of 389 live broadcasts in a year, and he did not dare to take a day off. But two years ago, he began to deliberately reduce the number of times he was in the live broadcast room. At the same time, Mei ONE, the multi-channel network (MCN) agency signed by Li Jiaqi, formed a group of assistant anchors represented by Assistant Wangwang. The assistant anchors not only appeared in the daily live broadcasts, but also frequently appeared in the prime live broadcasts at 8 pm on Friday.

At the beginning of this year, Li Jiaqi's assistants conducted a performance report. After Want Want finished the performance report, Zheng Ming, founder and chief operating officer of Mei ONE, said: "Replicating Want Want's success is a crucial task." Li Jiaqi also stated that he would give the assistants more time and more opportunities in 2024.

The above-mentioned events are believed by the outside world that Mei ONE has taken an important step towards "de-Jiaqi-ization".

The story of big IPs retiring and top anchors giving up their traffic is not only happening in Mei ONE, but is also happening in more and more top MCN agencies: Luo Yonghao has reduced the frequency of appearing in the "Make Friends" live broadcast room since July last year; Xinxuan founder Simba slowed down the pace of live streaming sales at the beginning of this year; the "Crazy Xiao Yangge" live broadcast room of the Xiao Yang brothers stopped broadcasting for a month in March this year...

However, e-commerce industry expert Feng Huakui believes that it is still difficult for these top anchors to retreat to the second line. "At some critical moments, they still have to broadcast live in person, otherwise the GMV (gross merchandise volume) of the live broadcast room will be ugly."

01 Avoiding the risk of over-capping

Cheng Wenqiang used to serve as assistant to the chairman and vice president of marketing at Ruhnn Holdings, a listed company operating internet celebrities in China. He bluntly stated that the relationship between super-head anchors and MCN agencies is rather complicated. "A super-head anchor can make an MCN agency successful, but a super-head anchor can also destroy an agency."

Before Wei Ya and Li Jiaqi became top anchors, Ruhan Holdings continued to receive financing due to its successful incubation of the internet celebrity Zhang Dayi, and went public in 2019. But a year later, as Zhang Dayi encountered public opinion shocks due to negative events, Ruhan Holdings, which relied heavily on top internet celebrities to open self-operated stores and live broadcasts to make profits, saw a rapid decline in revenue and was eventually delisted in 2021.

In Cheng Wenqiang's opinion, once a host becomes a super-head, all resources within the organization will be tilted towards this host, making it difficult for mid-level and long-tail hosts after the super-head to share resources equally. On the other hand, if an MCN organization does not have a super-head host, it will neither have a top influence nor institutional vitality. "The vitality of an MCN organization is closely related to the vitality of the super-head host."

Qianxun, an MCN agency that rose to prominence thanks to Wei Ya, has learned a lesson. After Wei Ya left the live broadcast room due to regulatory factors, Qianxun's "Bee Surprise Club" live broadcast room is still operating as a top live broadcast room. Although it has not been able to create another anchor as versatile as Wei Ya, it will combine five or six anchors to achieve Wei Ya's ability to bring goods.

A person who has worked in management at multiple MCN agencies said that similar to the "successor" logic of Qianxun, Mei ONE added two live broadcast rooms, "All Girls" and "All Girls' Wardrobes", in addition to Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room; agencies such as Jiao Ge Pengyou and Oriental Selection have also launched a matrix layout outside the main live broadcast room, allowing the former assistant broadcast group or new anchors to gradually take on the main responsibility.

The person in charge of Jiaogepengyou said that the agency has cultivated multiple new live broadcast rooms using the "small anchor + operation ability" model. The data he provided showed that when Luo Yonghao was a resident of the "Jiaogepengyou" live broadcast room in 2022, the GMV of Jiaogepengyou was 7 billion yuan, but when it no longer relied on Luo Yonghao in 2023, the GMV increased to 12 billion yuan.

In terms of training new anchors, Xinxuan, which is known for its "jianghu spirit", and Three Sheep have similarities. The above-mentioned MCN agency manager said that the two super anchors, Simba, the founder of Xinxuan, and Xiao Yangge, the co-founder of Three Sheep, have recruited multiple different types of apprentices and asked them to open various live broadcast rooms. "The agency will equip these live broadcast rooms with its own supply chain and the best business team and other resources, and then cooperate in operations."

02 Cultivate successors in batches

Supporting assistants or apprentices of top anchors is the model used by Mei ONE, Xinxuan and other institutions to train successors. MCN institutions Wuyou Media and Yaowang Technology (hereinafter referred to as "Yaowang") mainly recruit anchors with high appearance and celebrity status, and their mechanism for training new anchors is also very different from the former.

According to Chanmama data, during this year's "618" mid-year promotion, the throne of the weekly sales of Douyin live streaming was occupied alternately by Yuhui Xingxing, the Guangdong couple and Jia Nailiang. Among them, the Guangdong couple and Jia Nailiang were regarded as the core IP and top anchor of Wuyou Media and Yaowang respectively.

When Yaowang entered the live streaming track in 2019, Wei Ya and Li Jiaqi were already at their peak. After a year, Yaowang became one of the top agencies, mainly due to its constant attempts to sign various celebrities.

"It's basically a horse racing mechanism. We clear out the lagging ones and add to the good ones, but we won't hold a large position in just a few of them." A middle-level person at Yaowang quoted the company's chairman Xie Rudong as saying that it was costly and labor-intensive for institutions to negotiate cooperation with celebrities, they had limited experience and were very unstable, but Yaowang had no other way out at the time.

The above-mentioned Yaowang middle-level personnel revealed that most of Yaowang's celebrities are copying the experience of the live broadcast business ecosystem of institutions, "setting benchmarks and running links". Unlike some institutions that put all the resources, operations and cargo on the top anchors, Yaowang adopted a model of one studio with multiple celebrities and talents, sharing experience and supply chain at the beginning, which allowed it to accumulate and form middle-end capabilities earlier.

In the opinion of the above-mentioned Yaowang middle-level personnel, most super anchors who want to transform and launch new live broadcast rooms often rely on the fission ability of the team to slowly lay out the matrix live broadcast room from top to bottom. However, Yaowang's business expansion model is different from the former. Its more than a dozen studios can be used as large and medium-sized platforms to allocate the live broadcast room pallets they are responsible for, focusing on celebrity derivative accounts and mid- and low-end anchors, and can expand the scale of the live broadcast room at a lower cost.

"Once the operating model and mechanism of the organization is formed, it will be possible for any star to do live streaming to sell goods. It doesn't matter if A or B comes. If C leaves, D can sign a new contract." said the above-mentioned Yaowang middle-level person.

03 "Super Head" addiction is still there

With the retirement of top anchors, brands’ attitudes towards them are also changing.

The founder of a domestic beauty brand said that the brand had joined the supply chain library of the live broadcast rooms of super anchors such as Wei Ya a few years ago, hoping to use the IP effect of the anchors to drive brand awareness. Today, he feels that brand channels are becoming more and more fragmented, and whether to enter the live broadcast room of super anchors has long diminished.

The founder of another domestic home furnishing brand said frankly that his mentality has changed. In the past, he had serious concerns about traffic and GMV, so he made his team devote time, energy and category resources to cooperate with super-head anchors for a long time, which was a huge investment. It was not until some super-head anchors stopped broadcasting that he found that after reducing cooperation with super-head anchors, although the brand's sales did not increase, its profit performance improved.

However, super-head anchors still have advantages in many aspects that other anchors cannot match.

Economic Observer learned from insiders of Taobao, Kuaishou and other platforms that from a long-term development perspective, live broadcast platforms are increasingly supporting merchants' self-broadcasts, mid-level anchors, and long-tail anchors. However, the platform needs the explosive power of top anchors, especially at some major promotion times or large live broadcast sales venues, to aggregate traffic from the B-end (corporate client) and C-end (individual user end) through the IP effect.

The above-mentioned Yaowang middle-level person said that super-head anchors help improve and maintain the supply chain capabilities of the organization. In the first two months after Dong Yuhui became popular, the organization's employees laughed at Dongfang Zhenxuan for being "inexperienced", not being able to grasp the rhythm of quality and control, and having too high a degree of monotony in product selection. But four months later, Yaowang's business team found that the richness of Dongfang Zhenxuan's pallets increased rapidly, and a lot of supply chains were added.

In the view of the above-mentioned middle-level personnel of Yaowang, brands come for the traffic. The super-head anchor effect allows brands to quickly become their fans and gradually form a highly cost-effective supply chain system. "An organization with no experience at all can grow and mature in just a few months."

But in sharp contrast, it is difficult for small anchors to get good products. The above-mentioned Yaowang middle-level person revealed that the sales channels of MCN agencies need to match the scale, and they often allocate "substitute" products to mid-level anchors and long-tail anchors. The agency does not pursue the sales data of these products, but hopes that they "don't have major problems and don't have counterfeit and shoddy products."

For the successor, how to attract fans of the top anchors in the organization is also a big challenge. Liu Xia admitted that even for a Li Jiaqi fan like her, it is difficult to love the assistant anchors like Wangwang as well. She also saw on social media that many fans are calling for Li Jiaqi to return and stay in the live broadcast room.

By imitating Xiao Yangge's exaggerated live broadcast style, three sheep's apprentice anchors such as "Seven Boss" and "Red Light Yellow" took advantage of the situation. However, Economic Observer noted that on platforms other than Douyin, such as Xiaohongshu and Weibo, these apprentice anchors have not yet achieved cross-platform or even cross-circle development.

In addition, the top anchors always have a sense of crisis about losing fans, which makes it difficult for them to leave the scene completely. Big IPs such as Li Jiaqi, Simba, and Xiao Yangge are still in and out of their live broadcast rooms during their retirement, and occasionally appear in the matrix live broadcast rooms of their MCN agencies.