Is "Net Comprehensive Sunset" coming?
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Variety shows that never lack topical attention make people feel that this spring is like "the sun is thinning down the west mountain".
The law of industry development is superimposed on external factors, so that the era of "spending money can make a phenomenon-level variety show" is gone forever, the market is cold, and the chill is full.
Industry insiders believe that this is the pain the industry must go through during the transition period, and content innovation and model innovation are the inherent requirements for the healthy development of variety shows.
Before the change, no one would have thought that a variety show that created a topic would attract people's attention with "no topic".
This happened two days ago.
Screenwriter Wang Hailin posted on Weibo that the "boutique variety shows" on the long-video platform have been declining.
He also disclosed that this year's Tencent's top variety show "Half-familiar Lovers" did not receive brand sponsorship until the broadcast.
In the past few days, Wang Hailin's Weibo, together with several variety shows broadcast on "Lonely" this spring, has sparked discussions in the industry.
The market is cold
Why does Wang Hailin's Weibo resonate so widely in the industry?
The answer is the coldness of the variety show market in the first quarter of this year.
According to Yunhe data, only the second season of "Hahahaha", "Hahahaha", "Hahahaha", "The Great Detective" and "Annual Comedy Contest" have 4 effective broadcasts in the first quarter. There were 5 fewer episodes in the same period, and the overall playback volume fell by 33% year-on-year.
As far as a single program is concerned, "Half-familiar Lover" has received more than 1 billion views on the entire network. In comparison, "Sister Riding the Wind and Waves" in 2020 has more than 5.1 billion views that year.
Compared with this data, what makes the industry feel the chill more intuitively is the difficulty in attracting investment and the difficulty in finding "gold masters".
"Half-familiar Lovers", as the head love variety show of Tencent Video, has "own topics" in both the subject matter and production. It is the most discussed and longest-lasting variety show in the first quarter.
However, it is such a variety show that it has been in a "naked broadcast" state and has not received brand sponsorship.
The second season of another hundred-million-dollar variety show "Hahahaha" did not have a title, and only received sporadic sponsorships.
This is in stark contrast to when the market was booming.
The year 2017 is considered to be the year of the "Super Internet Variety" era, and the number of Internet variety shows with over 100 million views began to surpass TV copyright variety shows.
When iQIYI created "The Rap of China", it quickly became a "sweet pastry" for advertisers. In the second season, the investment amount exceeded 1 billion yuan.
Data shows that from 2017 to 2019, the scale of my country's online variety show market has always maintained a growth rate of more than 20%, and more than 90% of the revenue of online variety shows comes from advertising investment.
The turning point began in 2019. According to the data released by the third-party advertising data platform Jangkang Insight, from 2019 to 2021, the number of variety shows implanted in the domestic variety show market has declined year by year, from 635 to 513.
Since the beginning of this year, the number of variety show cooperation projects in various industries has decreased across the board.
"Gone are the days of throwing money at a phenomenon-level network synthesis," Wang Hailin said.
wind direction change
The market chill felt by professionals is an intuitive feeling of "variety shows are getting worse and worse" for ordinary audiences.
"Compared with the past scores of more than 8 points, it is not bad to be able to find a variety show with a passing score." Li Ran, who watched "Taiwan Comprehensive" grow up and experienced the crazy era of Internet variety, said with emotion, "No I know whether the audience is 'informed' or the quality of variety shows has declined."
Compared with the improvement of the audience's aesthetic needs, the low and homogeneous quality of program production has been discussed by everyone for many years.
Factors such as the "wind direction change" of the industry's development law, combined with the impact of the epidemic and policy changes, have attracted more and more attention.
Last year, the "National Variety Show" "Happy Camp" was suspended after 24 years of broadcasting.
This sparked a discussion about the life cycle of variety shows.
The popularity of domestic variety shows will generally be exhausted in four or five years. Even in foreign markets with a highly developed entertainment industry, it is difficult to maintain the freshness of variety shows for more than 10 years.
At the same time, the excessive entertainment and commercialization tendency of variety shows for a long time has not only been criticized by the audience, but also further strengthened the supervision.
In September last year, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television launched the "Qinglang Action", which is a continuation of a series of regulatory measures, requiring no idol development programs to be broadcast, resolutely boycotting the "fan circle" culture, and opposing the only flow theory.
This also made the "draft" variety shows with large traffic disappear this year.
On the one hand, the variety show carrier has naturally changed from TV to the Internet.
On the other hand, the age of the audience is changing from old to young, the aesthetic cycle of the screen is changing round by round, and the program mode of traditional variety shows is being brutally eliminated.
With the development of the Internet, "micro variety shows" backed by short videos seem to be gradually being accepted by more audiences compared to "long variety shows" that often take a few hours: on short video platforms, topics related to micro variety shows can easily gain tens of billions of dollars of clicks.
How to innovate
How can variety shows develop healthily?
Pessimists believe that "confusion is long-term", while optimistic people see that the domestic variety shows are undergoing all kinds of drastic and subtle changes, which may foster a healthier future.
The industry consensus is that variety shows are now using a reasonable allocation of limited resources to try their best to meet the diverse and changing needs of users, and the way to achieve this is innovation.
In the second half of last year, a survey in which the post-80s and post-90s generation accounted for more than 80% of the respondents showed that more than 90% of the respondents expected more high-quality domestic variety shows to appear.
As for the characteristics of a high-quality variety show, 65.5% of the respondents believe that it is continuous innovation, the program quality is high and distinctive, and 64.2% of the respondents believe that it is sticking to the bottom line and promoting positive values.
"Innovation" is not only content innovation, but also model innovation.
Based on the concept of the Internet community, the community model of variety shows has attracted a lot of attention. At station B, where young people gather, variety shows such as "Rap New Generation" and "Dancing Millennium" are considered to be the embodiment of this model.
Some people have also summarized this model as, through the community insight into the user's aesthetic taste, effectively guide content creation, through the platform content fermentation advantages, with the help of stable user habits such as spontaneous dissemination, Erchuang play stalks, etc., to boost the dissemination of works and achieve continuous dissemination.
On platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou and Station B, the development of this model deserves attention.
Wang Hailin believes: "Creating high-quality content, including the hierarchical creation of high-end demand and popular fun, may be the next direction. How to make entertainment and commercialization play a role under the current management mechanism is also a platform in front of the platform. unavoidable question.”
Zhao Hao, a variety show director, believes that the crisis facing the entire variety show industry also means the emergence of opportunities, "The era of mud and sand and mixed content is slowly passing, the audience is verifying the sustainable development of good content, and good money will eventually be driven out. It is an inevitable process to eliminate low-quality variety shows and retain high-quality content." He believes that the current difficulties faced by online variety shows are exactly the pains that the industry must go through during the transition period.
Deng Qifan