Silver-haired online celebrity Ecology： A large number of accounts have stopped and lost powder, linking the transformation direction of middle-aged and elderly fans
On July 28th, Grandma Wang, who only wore high heels, took off her makeup for the first time and appeared in a plain state, responding to all kinds of questions and ridicule from netizens.
In the video, she still begins with the familiar "Hello everyone, my name is Wang Biyun, and I am 80 years old". The difference is that this time she emphasizes "I want to introduce myself again".
Compared with the exquisite "Wang Beauty" in the past videos, she used her truest appearance to face the camera and told fans why she likes makeup and why she only wears high heels.
At the end of the video, she asked everyone, "Can we get to know each other again?"
As a silver-haired online celebrity, Grandma Wang, who only wears high heels, has been regarded as the weather vane of silver-haired online celebrity since she became popular.
From the early 80-year-old exquisite and beautiful grandmother Wang to the present, she took off her makeup and responded to questions with her truest state. Grandma Wang is changing from the shallow content output that focused on age in the past to the deep value output that returned to real and active life.
In her short video content, the content of the label "80 years old" is decreasing, and more is to present her daily life and output the values of active life.
It’s not just Grandma Wang who has changed. AgeClub has comprehensively studied 50 online celebrity with silver hair at the head, middle and waist in Tik Tok. We found that after several years’ development, the whole ecology of online celebrity with silver hair is welcoming a turning point.
On the one hand, the types of silver-haired online celebrity are more diversified, and the content pays more attention to depth and truth. It is no longer just a marketing gimmick with age, but also has more new explorations in the level of realization and platform layout;
On the other hand, with the evolution of the whole short video ecology, a large number of early silver-haired online celebrity accounts stopped changing/losing their powder, which further highlighted the difficulties faced by silver-haired online celebrity in creation and realization.
We believe that the coming of the ecological reshuffle period of silver-haired online celebrity will link middle-aged and elderly fans with the elderly industry, which is the direction of future transformation.
(Note: The data comes from flying melon, as of September 13th. The statistics are all within the past month, and 41+ fans account for the proportion of account video viewers)
01
Silver-haired online celebrity is more diverse
Return to the truth, the content is deeper
Compared with online celebrity in the popular sense, silver-haired online celebrity is a new group, and they are really concerned by the mainstream people, largely due to the rise of short videos.
Since 2018, Tik Tok has ushered in a bonus period of 1-2 years’ traffic growth, which has spawned many head accounts with tens of millions of fans, and many early silver-haired online celebrity were also born during this period.
Now, after three or four years, combing the status quo of 50 silver-haired online celebrity, we find these remarkable changes:
one
Diversification trend is more obvious.
The trend of diversification is mainly reflected in three dimensions:
First, the types of silver-haired online celebrity are diversified.
Taking 2020 as the boundary, combing the time when 50 silver-haired online celebrity settled in Tik Tok, there are two peaks:
The first wave is concentrated in the second half of 2018 to the first half of 2019, which is also the newly emerging bonus period in Tik Tok. There are some head online celebrity with tens of millions of fans, and the overall content is mainly pan-life, fashion and so on, focusing on funny and shaping the sense of age contrast. On behalf of online celebrity, for example, @ I’m Grandma Tian, @ Grandma Wang who only wears high heels, @ Fashion Grandma Group, @ Grandpa Little urchin, etc.
At this stage, the silver-haired online celebrity has shown a preliminary trend of diversification. In "Ma Baoguo Phenomenon: Selling Tickets Earns 820,000 at a time", how far is the middle-aged and elderly online celebrity from "realizing personal IP"? In the article "AgeClub", the mainstream silver-haired online celebrity was roughly classified into emotional category, fashion category, life category and specialty category.
The second wave is concentrated in the second half of 2020 to this year, and there are many silver-haired online celebrity IPs that are grounded, more realistic or more distinctive. Most of them are concentrated in the order of one or two million fans. Although their account names still use "grandma" and "grandpa" as suffixes, they no longer focus on age labels at the content level, but pay more attention to realistic and positive energy content output, which can be roughly divided into three categories: agriculture, rural areas and information viewpoint output, for example:
@ Six Grandfathers: Take the daily work of six grandfathers in Jingzhou, Hubei Province as the main content, with appropriate background music to show the hard work of rural life and the optimism and strength of the grandfathers;
@ Sentimental Grandma: 75-year-old laid-off old lady outputs positive energy statements and teaches fans how to operate Tik Tok, etc. as the main content to output information and opinions.
It is worth mentioning that in this new wave of silver-haired online celebrity, there are also some silver-haired online celebrity with distinctive personal characteristics.
For example, Grandpa @ Mina, Mina is a three-or four-year-old mixed-race girl. With Mina as the account and content subject, @ Mixed-race Mina is a well-known mother and baby from the media, and there are more than 10 million fans in Tik Tok. Around this account, a parent-child account matrix including Grandpa @ Mina, Mom @ Mina, Aunt @ Mina and other accounts is formed.
Among these accounts, Grandpa @ Mina is the only account outside of @ Half-Blood Mina that has more than 3 million fans. This is due to the multiple eye-catching factors in Grandpa Mina: 64-year-old foreigner grandpa China life+’s food tutorial+life short play, which is mainly about his daily and shared food tutorial, and his personal IP is very distinct and not easy to imitate.
Second, the platform layout is diversified.
Outside Tik Tok and Aauto Quicker, the video number regarded as the short video "roof of the world" is growing rapidly, and naturally it has 1.1 billion users’ traffic on WeChat.
Many silver-haired online celebrity are concerned about the rising trend of this new platform. More than half of the 50 silver-haired online celebrity have entered the video number, and some account data have performed quite well.
For example, the @ Fashion Grandma Group, which released a number of videos, praised and forwarded them at tens of thousands of levels, and the live data was also remarkable. On January 27th this year, the @ Fashion Grandma Group was launched for the first time, with nearly 20,000 viewers in three hours and about 200,000 likes.
The data performance of Aunt Honglong, a well-known dance network, is also quite good. She only entered the video number in June this year. In just three months, several videos have been forwarded tens of thousands, and the average number of likes has basically broken thousands.
However, on the whole, online celebrity with silver hair is still in the groping stage on the video number. Many Tik Tok online celebrity with silver hair from Tik Tok to the video number, mostly carry the original account names and contents directly, and do not plan different contents according to different platform characteristics. Even Tik Tok head accounts such as @ I’m Grandma Tian and @ Laofangu have not explored the appropriate content form on the video number, and the data performance is also average. Many accounts are even in a broken or stopped state.
From the video number itself, at present, there is no online celebrity and talent who have hatched their own platforms like Tik Tok and Aauto Quicker, and the content ecology of the whole platform is still in the exploratory stage.
In addition to the layout on multiple platforms, many silver-haired online celebrity started to build matrix accounts in addition to their own IP.
For example, Grandma Wang, who only wears high heels, recently began to support Grandma Wang’s daughter. She is also a silver-haired online celebrity, born in 1968, and her fans are around 100,000. However, the account content is still dominated by the interaction between Grandma Wang and her daughter, and her personal characteristics are not clear enough compared with Grandma Wang.
@ Fashion Grandma Group is also building a silver-haired online celebrity matrix, and gradually incubating more vertical numbers outside the group account, such as grandma who focuses on girls’ hearts, grandma who specializes in health preservation, grandma who specializes in fitness and so on.
AgeClub also noticed that in addition to fashionable and exquisite silver-haired online celebrity such as Fashion Grandma Group, there are also some MCN organizations that specialize in arranging funny and lifestyle silver-haired online celebrity.
For example, Baguatian and Feigua data show that Baguatian has signed 15 accounts in Tik Tok, including @ Grandpa Ah Chang, about half of which are silver-haired online celebrity, and the total number of fans is 26.103 million.
Compared with the exquisite silver-haired online celebrity such as @ Fashion Granny Group and @ Grandma Wang who only wears high heels, the silver-haired online celebrity signed by Baguatian is more rural and sinking, and it mainly outputs funny and life-like plots.
The third is the diversification of the realization scene.
In addition to the traditional commodity window, advertising placement and live delivery, the realization scenes of silver-haired online celebrity are becoming more and more diverse.
For example, @ Naughty Granny Chen tried to film while filming short videos, @ Granny Wang wearing high heels and @ Aunt Long were invited to participate in various variety shows, @ Crazy Granny diverted Tik Tok fans to WeChat to realize private domain transformation. @ Fashion Grandma Group has expanded more business endorsements, recruited more grandma members, and conducted offline studies.
The content of silver-haired goods brought by online celebrity also extends from daily necessities, snacks, beauty cosmetics and other products of all ages in the past to products for the elderly.
For example, @ Fashion Grandma Group implanted adult incontinence care brand Tianning and endorsed Jingxin oral liquid in the video, and Letui and Qingtian Yege also appeared in the video the popular science and experience content of nursing homes.
2
Return to the truth, the content is deeper
From the content point of view, although the content quality of silver-haired online celebrity is still far behind that of online celebrity in other age groups, some silver-haired online celebrity have been exploring the innovation of content level, trying to get rid of the past way of relying solely on age to attract traffic and eyeballs and return to the truth and connotation.
Grandma Wang, who only wears high heels, used to focus on "80-year-old grandma is more fashionable and exquisite than young people", creating contrast through comparison, thus attracting fans.
However, from the depth of value, after reading it, users have no more gains except feeling that "this grandmother is great".
Today, although Grandma Wang still appears in a fashionable and exquisite appearance, she no longer emphasizes the label of 80 years old, nor does she deliberately present her "frozen age" status in the camera. Instead, she presents her daily life with her daughter, granddaughter and even young people, and outputs her positive attitude towards life and her life experience as an elder.
Compared with grandma Wang, who used to be exquisite without a flaw, today she looks more in line with the calmness and peace of the elderly and adds more realism.
@ Fashion Grandma Group has also experienced a change in content from visual impact to ideological impact. From the second half of 2020, the fashion grandma group abandoned the theme of "strong visual impact" and began to plan the plot content, focusing on exporting grandma’s thoughts and values, and went further in content depth.
In 2020, @ Grumpy Grandma, who moved to Tik Tok, also broke the way of traffic growth with age and contrast as gimmicks. Instead, she created an image of a maverick but full of justice in the form of a short play, which was consistent with the cognition of middle-aged and elderly people in the public, and accumulated more than 4 million fans in just one year.
According to Huang Ziting, the person in charge of Baguatian’s operation, the content of its signed silver-haired online celebrity account has also experienced a change from "pure funny" plot content to funny plot with output views and positive energy content as the main content, paying more attention to the content value.
It can be seen that silver-haired online celebrity doesn’t have to attract attention through the content "different from ordinary silver-haired people", and real silver-haired people can also get out of the circle with good content.
The exploration and innovation of some silver-haired online celebrity at the content level means that operators are gradually abandoning impetuousness, further precipitating the content, and excavating more connotations behind the silver-haired online celebrity.
02
A large number of accounts stopped changing/dropping powder.
The dilemma of silver-haired online celebrity is highlighted
In addition to the good changes, a phenomenon that can’t be ignored is that a large number of silver-haired online celebrity accounts are in a state of stopping or losing powder.
Early silver-haired online celebrity mostly used the contrast between age and image to attract users and realize the rapid growth of fans. However, after three or four years’ development, we found that more than half of the 50 silver-haired online celebrity accounts in online celebrity stopped changing or lost their powder one after another, and the dilemma of content and realization faced by silver-haired online celebrity was further highlighted.
The first is the risk of health.
On February 16th, 2021, Tik Tok’s head account @ Yaoyang, with millions of fans, published an obituary announcing the death of his grandfather Fuxiang Wang at the age of 83.
After that, the account name was changed to @ Grandpa’s Yaoyang, which was intended to continue to be updated to miss the daily life of Grandpa and Yaoyang’s family, but it stopped on June 30, because many netizens questioned their grandfather who died.
The phenomenon that @ Grandpa’s Yao Yang had to stop working because of the death of the old man means that the health risk of silver-haired online celebrity has become a problem that cannot be ignored in the account operation.
Most of the 50 silver-haired online celebrity are over 70 years old, and many of them are "centenarians". According to the data released by National Health Commission, in 2019, the average life expectancy in China will be 77.3 years.
No matter illness or normal birth, illness and death, it has brought uncontrollable factors to the continuous operation of Yinfa online celebrity account.
Secondly, online celebrity, with silver hair, is even worse in content creation and expression.
Silver-haired online celebrity can quickly attract a group of fans in the early stage by the contrast of age and image, but to ensure the continuous growth of accounts and fan loyalty in the follow-up, it is not only the age, but also the content, which tests the content creation ability and performance ability of short video operators.
However, online celebrity, with silver hair, is far behind young people in both content creation ability and performance ability. If the content creation level can be solved by the team, then the expressive ability can only rely on online celebrity himself.
Among the 50 silver-haired online celebrity we studied, many silver-haired online celebrity lacked expressiveness in front of the camera, as if they were dominated by tool people without independent thoughts and consciousness.
"It is a rare thing to be able to find an old man with strong performance ability and desire to perform."
For example, @ Centennial Grandma, whose daughter runs the account, mainly records her daily life. Because she is old and has no perception of the camera, every video needs to be initiated by her daughter or people around her, and it is difficult for the elderly to support the account content independently. During the live broadcast, grandma is also like a tool. My daughter sits on the side of the live broadcast with goods, while grandma lowers her head, neither looking at the camera nor talking.
There are many silver-haired online celebrity like @ Centennial Grandma. Even some silver-haired online celebrity with excellent performance ability still face more difficulties than young people.
Grandma @ Naughty Chen has often participated in the recording of TV programs, and also performed in group performances. After signing the MCN organization, she quickly became popular by imitation shows and funny short plays, but it is also difficult for her to complete some actions that young people can easily do during the recording process.
Behind this, there are factors of the background and concept of the times. The cultural level, concept and cognition of short videos of middle-aged and elderly people are different from those of young people. There are also physiological factors. With the increase of age, the physical function declines, and the understanding ability, memory and physical coordination ability of middle-aged and elderly people are far behind those of young people.
Finally, the commercial value is over-consumed, and there is no sustainable and benign way to realize it.
On September 11th, @ Gunner Uncle Zhang released a farewell video, telling fans that this may be his last video. Prior to this, his account lost 37,000 yuan in the past month.
In the comment area of this video, the comments with a lot of praise are not expressing regret or missing, but expressing their dissatisfaction with Uncle Zhang’s over-commercialization: "I said goodbye last year, and I will continue this year", "The main reason is that I can’t bring the goods", "I’m very nice, and I’m like this" …
The grandfather who became popular in 2018 by hard work, simplicity and positive energy has experienced a short video career for several years. There are fewer and fewer simple and positive aspects in the content, and more and more empty and hard.
In the few contents of the account at present, click on a video at will, and the comments with a lot of praise are all expressions of dissatisfaction: "Don’t sell things every day?" Changed the routine? " "I am the first fan, and I am by no means a black powder, but it is getting more and more boring, really."
There are many silver-haired online celebrity like Uncle Zhang who excessively consume their own commercial value, including improper planning of the team, short-sightedness or excessive consumption of IP value, and online celebrity’s own mentality change, which gradually loses his initial heart in the face of the impact of huge interests.
In addition to excessive consumption of commercial value, many silver-haired online celebrity who take the funny and life-oriented route are also facing the dilemma of realizing cash.
According to industry sources, the commercial quotation of Yinfa online celebrity in advertising placement is generally lower than the market price by 20%, and many Yinfa online celebrity accounts are in a loss state.
The main reasons behind this are as follows: First, many grounded silver-haired online celebrity are realized in a single way, mainly by short video implantation and live broadcast.
Short video implantation tests the team’s content creation ability and online celebrity’s performance ability, which has been mentioned before. Live delivery tests online celebrity’s own cognitive ability and expressive ability of brands and products, and even his ability to control accounts.
"The live broadcast of silver hair in online celebrity is actually a very difficult thing. On the one hand, it is difficult for many elderly people to establish a comprehensive understanding of brands and products. On the other hand, most of them speak dialects and need a strong helper. Even many silver-haired online celebrity don’t know what they are doing, just follow the instructions of the team. "
Second, silver-haired online celebrity faces many limitations when promoting its brand. "Although many beauty products can be presented to the audience through plot implantation, it is always difficult to show the intuitive effect of the products like young online celebrity."
03
Future direction:
Return to the content and focus on middle-aged and elderly people.
Combined with our research on the current situation of silver-haired online celebrity, we believe that the core of the transformation of silver-haired online celebrity must be to return to the content and dig deep into the IP value of online celebrity, instead of just using age as a tool to gain eyeballs.
Online celebrity is essentially a product of fast economy, and it has become popular in a short time by relying on the Internet. The middle-aged and elderly people are slow people. When "fast" and "slow" are mixed together, the freshness and fun of silver-haired online celebrity can really attract public attention in a short time.
But the novelty can only be temporary. When the novelty and impetuousness in the early days fade away, only the content is the core of linking fans.
This content can be online celebrity’s life experience, story or active attitude towards life as an elder, and it can also be knowledge output in professional fields, such as health care, fitness, beauty, storage and so on.
When people mention silver-haired online celebrity in the future, they will remove the "silver hair" and win with online celebrity’s own personality or specialty, which is the time when the ecology of silver-haired online celebrity will return to a rational state.
"The future silver-haired online celebrity must be able to export content and opinions on his own behalf, not as a puppet."
As for how to build a silver-haired online celebrity, we think there are two key points:
1. When designing IP, consider the subsequent liquidation problem.
Many silver-haired online celebrity’s early popularity stems from accidents or accidents. After accumulating the next batch of fans, they started to bring goods stiffly, and realized commercial realization with the help of online celebrity’s popularity and traffic.
But the result of this is: firstly, it is difficult for fans to pay the bill willingly, because fans lack a clear understanding of online celebrity except their age, can’t convince them of the products they choose, and even hate this over-commercialization behavior; Secondly, the realization is not sustainable. Even if some fans are willing to place an order, they are likely to buy the product impulsively and are unwilling to buy it again later.
Therefore, the commercial value of many silver-haired online celebrity comes and goes quickly. To ensure the sustainability of the account, we must design a general path from the content to the subsequent realization, and continuously strengthen this attribute through the content and realization around the IP core determined at the beginning.
For example, @ Fashion Grandma Group, whose IP core is fashion, what is fashion?
The understanding of @ Fashion Grandma Group is that fashion has nothing to do with age. It can lead people in its own unique way and arouse people’s desire for beauty, life, career and love.
Around this IP core, when planning the content, @ Fashion Grandma Group not only shows the fashionable appearance of grandmothers, but also pays more attention to showing the connotation of their active life through their life stories, thus playing a leading role in thought invisibly.
In the process of realization, most of the products they bring online focus on some middle-aged and high-end products, such as clothing, beauty, books or courses, etc. Offline recruitment and study tour also focus on improving the temperament and connotation of grandmothers. Both products and services are closely connected with the IP attribute of fashion.
2. Link the middle-aged and elderly population and the elderly industry.
Silver-haired online celebrity mostly connects with young fans, which is not necessarily the wrong direction, but there is always a problem: it is difficult to realize cash or ensure the sustainable output of content.
It’s a cliche that it’s difficult to cash in. It’s hard for silver-haired online celebrity to convince young people of the products they recommend.
Take Grandma Wang, who only wears high heels, as an example. She has more than 15 million fans and opened her merchandise window. The sales volume in the past 30 days was 12,000, which seems to be not low. However, compared with another young beauty blogger with 13 million fans, the sales volume of the product window in the past 30 days was 23,000, almost twice that of Grandma Wang.
It is difficult to guarantee the sustainable output of content, which means that some silver-haired online celebrity, such as @ Kangkang and Grandpa, can attract young fans through fashion trends and realize it by selling their own clothes.
However, if every content is just sharing clothes, it will easily make young fans feel aesthetic fatigue, because apart from the label of age, there are many clothes bloggers in the market, and online celebrity with silver hair does not have much advantage compared with them.
In addition, young fans often don’t have much loyalty, and it’s easy to abandon the bloggers they once paid attention to.
From these two points of view, linking middle-aged and elderly fans is the direction of more sustainable and long-term operation of silver-haired online celebrity.
On the one hand, the same age makes it easier to have a sense of identity, on the other hand, middle-aged and elderly fans are much more sticky than young fans.
In fact, some silver-haired online celebrity and MCN organizations are already transforming to link middle-aged and elderly fans.
@ Fashion Grandma Group began to focus on adjusting the fan structure last year. Through the content end, it changed from visual impact to ideological impact, and the number of middle-aged and elderly fans increased significantly. At present, the proportion of 41+ people exceeds 30%.
Not only the fashion grandma group, AgeClub compared the fan data of many silver-haired online celebrity last year and this year, and found that the proportion of 41+ people has improved to varying degrees.
Baguatian began to lay out a more diversified form of online celebrity, no longer taking silver-haired online celebrity as the only direction to link silver-haired people, and at the same time, it did not just gather old silver-haired online celebrity, but explored more middle-aged and even young online celebrity images, and laid out silver-haired people by specialty and content.
Besides linking middle-aged and elderly fans, it is also a great opportunity for silver-haired online celebrity to base itself on the elderly industry.
At present, the elderly industry is in the initial stage of development, and some elderly products have begun to appear in all walks of life, such as beauty cosmetics, elderly shoes, elderly clothing, household appliances, assistive devices and nursing products, etc., but market education is far from enough.
In these fields, silver-haired online celebrity will have great space and potential, for example, it can subdivide the professional knowledge of the fields from the elderly users, and it can also give children or elderly users experience in purchasing products through product trials and experiences.
-END-
Author/Shi Wei