Musk did not play his cards according to common sense again.
A few days ago, he said on social media that he is considering quitting his current job and becoming a full-time "influencer". Influencer's translation is an opinion leader. In the current online context, "influencer" is more appropriate.
In response to a comment from a netizen, he wrote: "I do aspire to entertain the people!", that is, "I really want to entertain the people."
Musk is undoubtedly one of today's most successful business leaders. Tesla at the helm of him triggered a revolution in the new energy vehicle industry. Space x rewrote the history of commercial manned spaceflight. Its brain-computer interface company Neuronlink plans to use it on humans next year. .
Recently, he was also successfully elected as the 2021 "Person of the Year" by the American "Time" magazine.
Musk really wants to quit his job to become an internet celebrity? Or is this just a whimsy? The outside world has no way of knowing, but one thing is certain is that the best place in the world today is China to be a full-time internet celebrity.
01Make more choices of internet celebrities in China
Musk wants to be a full-time "influencer", he can choose nothing more than the following: opinion leaders, KOLs, and Internet celebrities.
He is already an opinion leader. He is regarded as the greatest innovator after Jobs, with more than 66 million global fans on Twitter. But from a practical point of view, whether it is KOL or Internet celebrity, in the United States, these two roads are not broad.
KOL is actually a marketing concept, which refers to people who have more and more accurate product information, are accepted or trusted by related groups, and have a greater influence on the group’s purchasing behavior; the Internet celebrity economy is related to e-commerce Merchant channels are deeply integrated, and bringing goods is the best way out.
Simply put, the goal of an Internet celebrity is to become a KOL, and the goal of a KOL is to bring more goods.
In the early days, whether in Europe, America or China, the outlet for Internet celebrities was nothing more than one: to undertake brand advertising. This is also a kind of carrying goods in essence, but it stays more in the link of planting grass.
With the rapid rise of the mobile Internet, the outlets for Internet celebrities are constantly increasing. It is also from the beginning of the mobile Internet that China has begun to catch up with foreign countries in many business areas, and e-commerce is one of them.
The biggest reason is that the domestic social e-commerce started earlier, the ecological maturity is higher, and the combination of content and e-commerce is also at the forefront.
Even in China, the "net celebrity economy" was born out of the integration of social e-commerce:
In 2013, Weibo accelerated its commercialization, and its cooperation with Taobao opened the way for e-commerce and internet celebrity integration. After the two were opened up, internet celebrities became portals and recommendations became channels, which directly promoted the development of internet celebrity e-commerce ; In August 2015, Ali held a seminar on the phenomenon of "Internet celebrity", which was the first time to systematically sort out the "Internet celebrity economy".
By 2016, the Internet celebrity economy became a major outlet. That year, on Double Eleven, Zhang Dayi’s online celebrity shop became the first Taobao women's clothing store to exceed 100 million yuan.
Also in this year, Weibo launched the "Weibo Showcase", established an interest-oriented social e-commerce system, and officially merged Pinduoduo and Pinhaohuo. With the rapid rise of the WeChat ecosystem, WeChat launched small programs, and shows The rapid rise of live broadcasting, ByteDance launched Douyin, and Kuaishou’s monthly activity exceeded 150 million.
In this process, Internet celebrities have gradually enriched their business monetization models. They harvest live broadcasts on live broadcast platforms such as Douyu and Yingke, sell products to fans on platforms such as Taobao, and advertise for brand companies on social media such as Weibo. Short video platforms such as Kuaishou also rely on content to make money.
These monetization models reflect a trend: most of them are integrated with e-commerce, and the degree of integration continues to deepen. E-commerce has therefore become the largest monetization path for domestic Internet celebrities.
However, the main monetization path for U.S. Internet celebrities is still advertising.
Three sets of data prove this:
Zenith research data shows that from 2017 to 2020, the United States and China contributed 47% of the share of new advertising expenditures;
In 2018, U.S. digital advertising spending, search, display, and video together accounted for 73% of the market share, of which search accounted for 39%;
In 2019, in China's Internet advertising distribution, e-commerce, display, search, and video ranked the top four, accounting for 91% of the market share, e-commerce advertising accounted for 29%, and search 17%;
This reflects two points: First, search ads are gradually being eaten away in China, and are still the mainstream in the United States; second, the proportion of e-commerce ads in China is significantly higher.
02 why the United States live with a cargo did not do it?
As we mentioned above, after the arrival of the mobile Internet, China has been at the forefront in the combination of social networking and e-commerce, and content and e-commerce.
This actually boils down to one point-the domestic exploration of e-commerce models is more advanced, more radical, and more innovative.
We have also seen that the purpose of all these explorations of the new model is unified: on the platform side, it is to fight traffic anxiety and find new traffic increments; on the consumer side, it is to shorten the consumption link and improve the matching of front-end goods and people. efficient.
Live e-commerce, which started in 2016 and started in 2018, is another unique innovation in China.
Its core is the further integration of content and e-commerce. The appearance is the e-commerce of content platforms and the content of e-commerce platforms. Live broadcast actually plays a tool role in it.
Early live broadcast e-commerce constituted a win-win situation for multiple parties: content platforms got rid of the single dependence on advertising monetization, e-commerce platforms found new incremental markets, merchants ushered in improved marketing efficiency, and consumers also enjoyed more discounts free.
Because of this, the potential of live e-commerce is quickly released:
From 2017 to the first half of this year, the live broadcast e-commerce market has grown from 36.6 billion to nearly 2 trillion, and the market penetration rate is less than 15%;
As of June this year, the user scale of live broadcast e-commerce has grown rapidly to 384 million, accounting for 60%, 47%, and 43% of the proportion of live broadcast, e-commerce and short video users. There is still room for growth;
In addition to Douyin, Kuaishou, Taobao, Xiaohongshu, Zhihu, Pinduoduo, and B Station, these Internet companies have also accelerated the deployment of live broadcast e-commerce;
But the U.S.'s exploration of the e-commerce state is lagging behind. Take live broadcast e-commerce as an example. The US live broadcast platform is dominated by game live broadcasts, and the user's live broadcast viewing habit has not yet been developed.
According to Stream Elements data, Twitch/YouTube Gaming accounted for 73%/21% of the total viewing market on European and American live broadcast platforms in 2019. A survey by Statista also shows that by 2020, the proportion of users in the United States who have not used a live broadcast platform is still as high as 69%.
This lag has in turn led to the limitations of the U.S. e-commerce ecosystem. According to eMarketer data, in 2019, the sales of e-commerce platforms in China and the United States were US$19,350/896.9 billion, corresponding to 36.6%/10.7% of total retail sales in China and the United States . China’s e-commerce scale and consumption penetration rate were respectively 3.4/ that of the US 3.3 times.
Returning to the perspective of the realization of Internet celebrities, live e-commerce and leading celebrity anchors are actually a process of mutual achievement. Li Jiaqi, Wei Ya, Simba and others have actually completed the hierarchical transition from Internet celebrities to KOLs. In this process , Luo Yonghao has also completed the transformation of his identity from entrepreneur to KOL.
Then this year, brand self-broadcasting has become a new outlet, and a large number of mid-waist and tail anchors have also ushered in greater room for realization. Live streaming has become the most imaginative means of monetizing Internet celebrities.
In contrast, the business logic of live broadcast e-commerce in the United States is different from that in China, and its development is relatively slow.
For example, Amazon launched the live broadcast function "Amazon Live" and the graphic "Amazon Posts" in April and October, 2019, and officially started the contentization process.
A BCG research result also shows that Western shopping platforms focus on precise and efficient shopping. Consumers often choose products on e-commerce platforms after determining their shopping goals. In other words, in the US market, the shopping logic has not yet been realized The transition from "goods" to "goods looking for people" has been realized by domestic e-commerce companies as early as around 2015.
Under this circumstance, it is difficult for foreign internet celebrities to follow the path of live streaming.
03Where is China's e-commerce infrastructure stronger than foreign countries?
According to the path of domestic Internet celebrity economic ecology, e-commerce is the best path to realize. Under subdivision, live broadcast e-commerce can help them achieve maximum economic realization. The success of Li Jiaqi, Wei Ya, and Simba illustrates this. a little.
However, the delivery of goods has integrated multiple factors such as "people, goods, market", and any lack of any link will affect the way out of the Internet celebrity.
Tracing back to the source, the slow development of the U.S. Internet celebrity economy is determined by the lagging development of the e-commerce ecosystem:
First, at the end of the supply chain, the hollowing out of domestic manufacturing in the United States has imposed certain restrictions on the development of e-commerce.
On the one hand, China's supply chain cost and scale advantages are more obvious, creating favorable conditions for the formation of a localized supply chain model.
As the global manufacturing focus shifts to China and Southeast Asia, where labor costs are lower, large-scale factory clusters concentrated in the Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta and other economic belts have formed, with huge manufacturing capacity.
The US consumer goods manufacturing industry has experienced a process of transferring overseas in recent decades. Brands have carried out production overseas and then shipped back to China, and the supply chain has expanded globally. Under the global supply chain model, major consumer product categories in the United States rely more on imports, and the value of their products is relatively higher.
On the other hand, the US manufacturing industry is more concentrated, while the Chinese manufacturing industry is more scattered.
This has led to the fact that there are a large number of small and medium-sized enterprises in China that have demand for merchandise sales, and e-commerce platforms of different models are useful. For example, Taobao has to a large extent realized the online market of Yiwu Commodity City, while most foreign e-commerce platforms are mainly self-operated.
Second, from the perspective of e-commerce infrastructure, the United States has a gap in logistics, payment, and other links compared with domestic ones.
In terms of express logistics services, American goods are cheap and expensive. Traditional e-commerce merchants often choose land express to control costs. One of the biggest pain points of land transportation is its weak timeliness.
According to a data from UPS, the time for goods shipped from New York by land transportation to New York City Group, East Coast Cities, Central Cities, and West Coast Cities are 1, 2, 3, and 4 working days respectively, and even up to 6 in some areas. Working days, including weekends and holidays that may be encountered, may actually take longer.
Let's look at payment again. According to data from Statista, the penetration rate of mobile payments in the total population in the United States in 2019 was less than 10%, and the penetration rate among smartphone users was also less than 30%.
In China, since 2014, WeChat and Alipay have been fighting over the payment portal for a long time. WeChat Pay and Alipay have already achieved coverage of almost all transaction scenarios.
Third, from the perspective of market size, there is insufficient innovation in response to the slowdown in e-commerce growth.
The size of the U.S. e-commerce market was $587 billion in 2019, and it has fallen into a growth bottleneck. During the same period, China's e-commerce market was US$1.9 trillion.
Today, China's overall e-commerce market growth rate is also slowing down, but major platforms have found a new incremental market for live e-commerce.
In contrast, overseas content e-commerce is still in its infancy. Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube have launched internal e-commerce systems, but the current level of integration is low, and it is a big step slower in live e-commerce.
Take Instagram as an example. It builds its own e-commerce function on the platform, but on the one hand, it is more inclined to large brands. On the other hand, only a few media/net celebrities can attach the brand's main product link in the content.
Fourth, from the platform side, the closed-loop ecosystem is not as perfect as domestic ones.
A typical example is the establishment of advertising and marketing platforms.
Domestic platforms such as Alibaba, Douyin, and Kuaishou have all established platforms for the docking of advertisers and ad undertakings, such as Giant Engine and Alimama. They actually lower the threshold for docking between the two parties, and can achieve data precipitation and standardization. Management, and can improve its own platform ecology.
In the United States, such platforms are still dominated by third-party organizations.
04 Conclusion
Going back to online celebrities carrying goods, there are no more than three dimensions to measure the economic ecology of online celebrities: who will bring the goods? Where to bring the goods? Who brings the goods for?
Corresponding to this is the entire online celebrity economic industry chain.
The Internet celebrity economic industry chain can be summarized as the upstream supply chain, midstream platform, and downstream users. It is the differences in each link of the industrial chain that determine the current status of the Chinese and American Internet celebrity economic ecology.
CITIC Securities pointed out in a research report that the supply chain determines the basic lower limit of the economic scale of influencers, while the platform determines the upper limit of the economic scale of influencers, and profoundly affects influencers and even the user ecology.
And behind this line that determines the economic and ecological industrial chain of China and the United States, almost every link is a microcosm of my country's e-commerce ecology catching up with Europe and the United States.
https://mysterydiary.com/2021/12/16/5-modern-website-design-trends-for-engaging-visitors/
references:
[1] "2018 U.S. Internet Ecology Report", DotCUnitedGroup;
[2] "Comparison of the Economic Ecology of Internet Celebrities in China and the United States", CITIC Securities;
[3] "The ultimate experience is invincible: Looking at the development space of JD logistics from Amazon", Industrial Securities;
[4] "Dual ecological drive, high-tech empowerment, 2B electronic payment leader swords for a broader 2C market", Orient Securities;
[5] "Being benchmarking the road of overseas transformation, on where is China's MCN road", Guosheng Securities;
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