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The "breakup" between Oriental Selection and Dong Yuhui lifted the last veil of "de-super anchorization" of live streaming e-commerce companies.

As an e-commerce company, Dongfang Zhenxuan initially relied on Dong Yuhui's popularity to rise rapidly. However, since the "Little Composition" incident in 2023, Dong Yuhui gradually disappeared from Dongfang Zhenxuan's live broadcast room. Recently, Dongfang Zhenxuan has announced that it will sell "Yihui Xingxing", the company where Dong Yuhui independently sells goods, to Dong Yuhui. At this point, the two sides have completed the decoupling.

A few years ago, Li Jiaqi, Wei Ya and other "first generation big anchors" became popular, digging out the first pot of gold for the live broadcast e-commerce industry. For a time, discovering, cultivating, and even competing for such big anchors with top popularity and money-making ability became a compulsory course for many e-commerce companies and platforms. However, today, the live broadcast e-commerce industry is undergoing a quiet transformation: platforms and e-commerce companies have begun to get rid of or reduce their dependence on big anchors, strengthen their control over traffic and users, and avoid the dilemma faced by Dongfang Zhenxuan on whether to stay or leave Dong Yuhui.

Compared with Dongfang Zhenxuan, Jiaogepengyou took action earlier. As early as 2022, the company's big anchor Luo Yonghao withdrew from the management, and the proportion of his live broadcasts and sales revenue gradually decreased. While "getting rid of Luo Yonghao", Jiaogepengyou tried to create a diversified layout to offset the impact of the super anchor's "fading out" on the company.

Major live streaming platforms are also redistributing traffic, shifting the benefits originally used to support big anchors to brand-operated live streaming rooms (hereinafter referred to as "store broadcasts") and live streaming rooms of mid-level influencers.

Store live streaming has grown rapidly, and its market share has surpassed that of expert live streaming in 2023. For many brands, store live streaming sales have exceeded 50% of their total live streaming sales.

In the past, super anchors could rely on their popularity to get the “lowest price on the entire network” from suppliers, but now they are gradually losing this core advantage.More and more people have discovered that many brands offer lower prices in their official livestreaming rooms than top anchors. Even if the prices are the same, the gifts given out by store broadcasters are more attractive.

The "magic power" of big anchors to bring goods is visibly fading: during the "6.18" period in 2024, Li Jiaqi brought nearly 2.7 billion yuan in goods on the first day of pre-sale, a figure that fell by nearly 50% compared with 5 billion yuan in the previous year. On Douyin, Xiao Yangge failed to make it into the top ten of the sales list. Simba was even banned by Kuaishou for a month before "6.18". In order to retain brands with good sales, many top live broadcast rooms have also begun to partially cancel the "pit fees" paid by brands to anchors.

In essence, the business logic of live streaming is still the traffic model of the Internet era. Wherever there is traffic, there is the right to speak. And the super anchors who gradually fail to retain consumers have also become the target of "sharing" traffic.

When "live streaming + selling goods" appeared on e-commerce platforms, people inside and outside the industry were extremely confused about this new model. Different from the traditional e-commerce model, live streaming selling goods takes a different direction.

Traditional e-commerce has broken the limitations of offline retail by allowing unlimited display of goods, so that people’s shopping is no longer limited to offline physical stores. This change has triggered a series of changes in the merchant side, supply chain, logistics system, consumer habits, etc.

The model of live streaming sales revolves around the live broadcast room, where the anchor promotes the current products to consumers one by one. In two hours, there are only dozens of products available for display. This seems to bring the infinite shelves of e-commerce back to limited space.

At that time, people inside and outside the industry were questioning whether it could succeed, and there were many pessimistic voices.

The emergence of Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya dispelled a lot of doubts. They gathered a large amount of traffic, and countless users crowded into their live broadcast rooms to buy goods, which attracted public attention, and then promoted the popularity of the entire platform, which fed back to the platform's e-commerce ecology.It can be said that in the early stages of the development of the live streaming business on several major platforms, big anchors played a crucial role.

Li Meng, the founder of Tianxiaxiu, once pointed out that Taobao’s heavy investment in creating Wei Ya and Li Jiaqi was actually an investment promotion behavior to attract more merchants to start live broadcasts on Taobao.

Taobao Live has also achieved this goal. In 2019, Taobao Live had accumulated 400 million users, 40 million items entered the live broadcast room, and the number of merchants increased by 268% year-on-year; in 2020, the transaction volume of new brands in the live broadcast room increased by as much as 329%; by the "Double Eleven" in 2021, there were more than 100,000 brands that opened their own live broadcast rooms.

The GMV of Taobao Live has also been rising year by year. In 2020, its GMV (total transaction volume) exceeded 400 billion yuan. By 2023, according to the data of "Dianshubao", the annual GMV of Taobao Live will be about 980 billion yuan. In three years, its scale has doubled.

In the early stages of live streaming e-commerce, everyone on the platform hoped to produce a super anchor.

In September 2017, Kuaishou launched "Kuaishou Shop" to help brands connect with anchors and promote live streaming sales. Simba, a popular online celebrity with a "rustic" label, started live streaming on Kuaishou, established his own trading company, and created his own brand, quickly becoming the top live streamer on Kuaishou. In 2019, the total annual merchandise transaction volume of Kuaishou's e-commerce was 59.6 billion yuan, of which Simba contributed a quarter.

Douyin launched its live streaming e-commerce business in December 2018. In the early days, Douyin was not optimistic about its live streaming business because it did not have top anchors such as Li Jiaqi, Wei Ya, and Simba. It was not until 2020 that Luo Yonghao, who owed 600 million yuan, entered Douyin's live streaming business under the name of "making friends". His first show set a record of selling over 110 million yuan in 3 hours.

At that time, Douyin provided a lot of traffic support to support anchors. According to Tech Planet, the amount of cooperation between Luo Yonghao and Douyin reached 60 million yuan, and the platform also provided Luo Yonghao with resources including opening screen advertising and live broadcast room push for all users on the site.

With the support of the platform, super anchors have used the traffic effect to gain the right to speak, and to a certain extent have replaced the middlemen and agents of traditional brands. They have the bargaining chips to talk directly with brands and ask them to give low prices.

In the years when super anchors had the most say, they would often sign a minimum price contract when cooperating with brands to ensure that the price offered by the brand was competitive than that of other platforms and live broadcast rooms.

A typical case is that on Double Eleven in 2021, because L'Oreal did not give the "lowest price on the entire network", Li Jiaqi announced that all cooperation between the two parties would be suspended until L'Oreal came up with a solution.

The live broadcast room is essentially a sales channel, and the channel "coerces" the brand to reduce prices and demand pricing power, which is very rare in the entire retail industry. This is enough to show the strength of the super anchors in the entire retail chain at that time.

Brands that enter the live broadcast room of top anchors not only have to promise the lowest price, but also have to pay the "pit fee" (i.e. the entrance fee to the live broadcast room) and commission. For big brands, the commission of the live broadcast room can reach 15%-30%, and the commission of some new products is even higher than this range. This is undoubtedly a huge cost expenditure for brands.

However, the traffic advantage of super anchors and their high ability to bring goods still attract many brands. Many new consumer brands and domestic brands value the traffic exposure ability of super anchors. A formula has been circulated in the industry: 5,000 Xiaohongshu posts + 2,000 Zhihu Q&A + super anchor live broadcast room = a new brand.

In the past few years, many new consumer brands have invested heavily in live broadcasting and tried to tie up with super anchors. Take the beauty industry as an example. From Perfect Diary to Huaxizi, Herborist, Zhuben, Proya and Winona, they have all invested a considerable amount of money in live broadcasting. The live broadcasting rooms of top anchors have also brought huge traffic and exposure to these brands, which ultimately translated into sales growth.

This has also changed the landscape of China's beauty market to a certain extent. In the top 20 Douyin skincare list in 2023, domestic brands accounted for 11 seats, surpassing foreign brands.

During the most powerful period of super anchors, the personal charm of anchors was often talked about. However, returning to the essence of live streaming, its internal logic is still the traffic model of the Internet era, except that the traffic has shifted from the shelves to one anchor and live broadcast room after another.

In the past few years, especially during the epidemic, it is not uncommon for celebrities to sell goods through live broadcasts. Dong Jie, Jia Nailiang, Huang Shengyi, Qi Wei, Zhang Xiaohui, Yi Nengjing and other anchors have attracted the attention of many people. It has also become a new trend for entrepreneurs to enter Taobao live broadcast rooms. Yu Minhong, Dong Mingzhu, Li Guoqing, Zhang Chaoyang, Li Yanhong and others have tried live broadcasts to sell goods. The fame and appeal of these people are certainly important, but the platform's support for their traffic is also indispensable. In that era, the platform and the anchor needed each other, so they could achieve each other.

However, as competition in the industry intensifies, it is becoming increasingly difficult for big anchors to do business. In the early days, live streaming e-commerce had an advantage of low traffic prices, but as competition intensified, this advantage gradually faded.High commissions, slot fees, and low discounts have gradually reduced its cost-effectiveness. Especially after the craze of "new consumption" has cooled down, companies and consumers have returned to rationality, and more and more brands are unwilling to spend money on live broadcasts.

In the past, "low price" was the most critical ability of live broadcast rooms to retain consumers and the best means for merchants to promote sales. However, the "absolutely low price" of live broadcast rooms has caused many brands' price systems to become disordered, with different prices online and offline. Even if they are both online, the prices in live broadcast rooms and other channels are different. This chaos has been passed on step by step from online to offline. From the perspective of industrial development, the low price is behind the further exploitation of the supply chain.

For the platform, the main risk brought by super anchors is "customers bullying the store". The influence of the top anchors is so great that it can affect the operation of the platform. Once these anchors "turn over" or have conflicts with the platform, it is easy to bring shocks to the platform and even the entire industry.

In the past few years, Simba was exposed for selling fake bird's nests, which led to doubts about the credibility of the entire live streaming industry. According to a report released by the State Administration for Market Regulation, the number of complaints and reports about live streaming reached 337,000 in 2023, a year-on-year increase of 52.5%, a growth rate far exceeding the market size.

In 2023, when Li Jiaqi was live streaming Huaxizi's products, a consumer questioned its high price. Li Jiaqi failed to control his emotions and asked "whether the salary has increased or not", which triggered negative public opinion. Until now, this incident has cast a shadow over Li Jiaqi.

Other super anchors are also constantly controversial: Brother Xiao Yang's live broadcast room is often blocked due to "vulgarity"; in the two years since Dong Yuhui became popular, there have been countless controversies surrounding him and Yu Minhong, Sun Dongxu and others; recently, Oriental Selection anchor Tian Quan "demanded" Jiang Xiaobai during a live broadcast, believing that it is not a liquor, which caused dissatisfaction on the brand side and plunged Oriental Selection into a whirlpool of public opinion.

In addition, many top anchors such as Viya, Shirley, and Lin Shanshan were blocked for tax evasion, once again highlighting the chaos of live streaming e-commerce during its wild growth period.

Not only that, at this stage, the existence of super anchors seems to have become an obstacle for the platform to balance the traffic ecology and promote the diversification of content and models.

An Alibaba insider once complained to the media about the problem of super anchors: "They take the group's best traffic support and strategic resources, but all the money they earn goes into their own pockets, destroying the group's original industrial chain and constantly challenging the bottom line of the group's customers. Even after the top anchors have eaten up most of the resources in the market, spending money on advertising may not necessarily get good publicity and sales. Even if they do, the audience will only thank the anchor for getting a good discount, rather than thanking the brand for making concessions."

For Taobao, developing live streaming is a strategy to increase the content of its platform. As a traditional e-commerce company, Taobao has always played the role of an online shelf. This model was first challenged by Pinduoduo, which competed with low prices for "factory goods", and then was further divided by content e-commerce and interest e-commerce to divert users and traffic.

The emergence of Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya was once a benchmark for Taobao's success in increasing content. However, live streaming itself has a "Matthew effect", and super anchors monopolize a large amount of traffic, resulting in serious internal competition among small and medium anchors, making it impossible to enrich the content ecology of the entire platform.

The fixed traffic on the site has also led Taobao to frequently launch "talent wars" in recent years, "poaching" many mid-level and top talents from other platforms, such as Zhang Xiaohui, who became popular on Xiaohongshu, Internet celebrity Zhu Yici, Luo Yonghao's "Make Friends", Liu Genghong ViVi, Dongfang Zhenxuan, "Big Mouth Girl", etc. However, after these anchors came to Taobao Live, many of them had problems with acclimatization.

Douyin is the hardest hit area for poaching. In mid-2023, "Dongfang Zhenxuan", which became popular on Douyin, started Taobao live broadcast.

A former employee of Oriental Selection's operations said that after Oriental Selection started Taobao live streaming, Douyin's support for it has weakened. One direct manifestation of this is the decline in daily traffic in the live streaming room.

In comparison, the "deterioration" of the relationship between Simba and Kuaishou is more prominent.

In April 2024, Simba gradually lost control of his emotions due to some negative comments from netizens in the live broadcast room, and angrily called Kuaishou a "rubbish platform". Simba's account was then blocked for a month. Simba once again expressed his dissatisfaction through multiple accounts, and these accounts were also blocked one after another. On May 25, Simba was unblocked and returned to the live broadcast room. At the same time, he announced that he would reduce live broadcasts in the future and think about the entrepreneurial transformation of the AI ​​track.

Unlike the early reliance of Kuaishou e-commerce on the Simba family, in 2023, the total GMV of Kuaishou e-commerce broke through the trillion mark for the first time, reaching 1.18 trillion yuan. Simba revealed at an event that Xinxuan's GMV in 2023 will exceed 50 billion yuan. Based on this estimate, Xinxuan's contribution to Kuaishou e-commerce GMV has dropped from one-third of its peak to less than one-twentieth.

No longer looking for the next Li Jiaqi?

People have found that the influence of super anchors seems to be gradually fading.

One manifestation is the ability to sell goods.During the "6.18" in 2024, the sales performance of the top anchors was not so impressive.

According to data from "Qingyan Intelligence", on the first day of pre-sale, the GMV (total merchandise transaction volume) of the beauty category in Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room exceeded 2.675 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 46%.

According to Chanmama and Feigua data, the top three of the "6.18" Douyin influencer sales list (May 24-June 18) were Guangdong Couple, Jia Nailiang and Yuhui Xingxing, while Dongfang Zhenxuan and Xiao Yangge fell out of the top ten, and Jiao Ge Pengyou ranked only tenth. The sales of the first live broadcast of Douyin's top anchors Guangdong Couple, Qi'er, Pan Yurun, Xiao Bingbing and Luo Wangyu during the promotion period decreased by more than 70% year-on-year.

In this industry where updates and changes are particularly rapid, Dong Yuhui's ability to bring goods remains strong, but without Dong Yuhui, Oriental Selection has become powerless, and Xiao Yangge and Jiao Ge Pengyou no longer have the dominance of super anchors.

Another manifestation is the gradual cancellation of pit fees.

As a "latecomer" in the industry, Dongfang Zhenxuan chose not to charge slot fees from the beginning of the broadcast, which to some extent lowered the threshold for products to enter the live broadcast room. Another toy manufacturer said that many big anchors no longer charge slot fees, but instead sign a cooperation framework with merchants and then share the profits in proportion to GMV.

The reason for this is that many businesses are unwilling to invest more in live broadcast rooms, and big anchors are willing to give up their rights and interests in order to retain brands with good sales. Canceling slot fees is not a common phenomenon at present, but when the competition in the industry becomes more and more fierce and excellent brands tighten their spending, a considerable number of big anchors will change for this reason.

At present, what is even more troubling for super anchors is that they are gradually losing control of "absolute low prices", which is also because many brands have started store broadcasts.

More and more brands have come to realize that it is better to do store broadcasting themselves, rather than investing heavily in the live broadcast rooms of super anchors and letting their low-priced products become a gimmick for super anchors to attract traffic. This is also in line with the interests of major platforms in seeking ecological diversification.

It can be seen that all major platforms are currently vigorously supporting store broadcasts.

At the 2024 Taobao Content E-commerce Festival, Taotian Group announced the support direction for Taobao Live in fiscal year 2025, and will add 10 billion yuan in cash to promote content e-commerce operations, of which more than 4 billion yuan will be used to support the growth of influencers and 3 billion yuan will be used for the construction of the store broadcast ecosystem, while paying attention to the growth of the live broadcast ecosystem in the industry belt.

The direction of talents is mainly to support small and medium-sized anchors. In 2024, Taobao established Taobao Live E-commerce Co., Ltd. Cheng Daofang, the then head of Taobao Live, said: "The platform is more willing to support unknown anchors to become famous anchors, which is more valuable. How to make an ordinary person become the next Li Jiaqi may be our goal."

In 2023, Kuaishou CEO Cheng Yixiao said that he would invest at least 60 billion traffic to upgrade the "Chuanliu Plan". The plan is mainly used to build a dual-circulation traffic model that combines brand self-broadcasting and distribution to solve the brand's public domain traffic bottleneck.

Recently, some media reported that Douyin is reducing the proportion of traffic allocated to live broadcasts by influencers and tilting the traffic to high-quality short videos and brand store broadcasts. People close to Douyin believe that this is related to Douyin's desire to improve its e-commerce structure and continue to expand the proportion of shelf e-commerce.

The relevant person in charge of Douyin e-commerce denied the above news.

Store broadcast is growing rapidly. In 2023, the GMV generated by store broadcast accounted for 64% of the GMV of Taobao Live. On June 18, 2024, among the 81 Taobao Live broadcast rooms that achieved a transaction volume of over 100 million yuan, 47 were "store broadcast live rooms". In the previous year's Double Eleven, there were only 38 store broadcast live rooms with a transaction volume of over 100 million yuan.

From the perspective of the industry as a whole, according to the "2023 China Live Streaming E-commerce Industry Research Report", the scale of China's live streaming e-commerce market will reach 4.9 trillion yuan in 2023, of which store broadcasts account for 51.8%, and Dabo (live streaming by experts with goods) accounts for 48.2%. Store broadcasts have exceeded Dabo.

According to FeiGua data, sales through self-operated live streaming rooms of domestic brands such as PROYA and WINONA account for about 50%, and some brands even exceed 60%.

After brands start live streaming in stores, they are more willing to keep the "absolutely low prices" in their own live streaming rooms. More and more consumers find that the discounts for the same products in super anchors' live streaming rooms are not as good as those in brand stores. Top anchors are gradually losing the advantage of "the lowest price on the entire network."

The personal charm of the anchor is a major factor in attracting traffic in the short term, but in the long run, the key to retaining consumers and improving sales conversion rates lies in the bargaining power of "absolutely low prices" from big brands. Losing low prices means losing traffic, and super anchors have begun to seek change.

Jiaogepengyou started to build a diversified live broadcast team early on to spread risks and expand into platforms other than Douyin. Meiwan, the live broadcast company where Li Jiaqi works, launched a self-selected platform called "Meiwan Optimized" and began to try self-operated and co-branded products.

With the explosion of short dramas, short drama + sales began to rise. There are already successful cases in the industry. Since March last year, Hansu has cooperated with influencers to update a number of short dramas. According to statistics from Chan Mama, the cumulative number of views of its short dramas exceeded 7 billion in 2023. According to Magic Mirror Insight data, after March 2023, Hansu's sales have soared. In the first half of 2024, Hansu topped the Douyin beauty TOP1 every month.

Wei Ya, Xiao Yang Ge, and Simba have all started to test the waters of short dramas. On the eve of the 2024 "6.18", the Douyin account of Qianxun, Wei Ya's company, released the series of short dramas "Rich Daughter Comes" and "True and Fake Boss", and embedded the "6.18" and "100 million subsidies" notices in them. Simba chose the "short drama + brand" model, and launched the brand-customized short drama "She is as Bright as Pearls" in cooperation with OSM in March 2024. Xiao Yang Ge also launched a number of paid short dramas.

The live streaming industry still needs top anchors, and top anchors are constantly emerging, but perhaps no one wants to have a super anchor who can monopolize traffic and influence the platform.