There is no doubt that the new top-tier star Guo Youcai is another great victory for the TikTok algorithm – he is like a bullet, easily penetrating the circle barriers built by TikTok and spreading indiscriminately into the recommendation lists of hundreds of millions of netizens.
According to the new Douyin data, the number of viewers of Guo Youcai's live broadcast room was no more than 100,000 before; but after May 3, the number of viewers for each live broadcast remained above one million. On May 16, the number of viewers for a single live broadcast exceeded 27.74 million, and the number of likes exceeded 100 million.
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Correspondingly, the number of Guo Youcai's Douyin fans also rose sharply – on May 10, Guo Youcai's account had only 190,000 fans, but after being selected by the algorithm, the number of fans increased by 3.14 million from May 9 to May 12, and on May 15, the number of fans increased by 1.13 million in one day; as of May 26, Guo Youcai's Douyin fans had exceeded 13 million.
“I saw the same question in several groups: ‘Is it too late to copy Guo Youcai now?’ The people asking included MCN partners and bosses of tens of millions of Douyin accounts, but they all felt that the life cycle of top-tier IPs has been compressed again,” a Douyin anchor told Huxiu.
He believes that from Zhang Tongxue, Xiucai, Yu Wenliang to Wen Huijun, Wang Po, and Guo Youcai, the “legend” of amateurs becoming top stars has been staged repeatedly, but the time window for their popularity is getting shorter and shorter, more like a “deification” movement that is born and dies quickly.
Guo Youcai “breaks through” TikTok
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In fact, from Zhang Tongxue, Xiucai, Yu Wenliang to Wen Huijun, Wang Po, and Guo Youcai, the popularity of these ordinary people can be clearly deconstructed. For example, the many analyses of Guo Youcai's popularity can be roughly divided into two aspects:
On the one hand, Guo Youcai came from humble beginnings, but he never lost the spirit of fighting against fate.
This young man, who was born in a rural area (Heze, Shandong) in 1999, is only 25 years old now. However, despite the hardships of losing his mother at the age of 10 and dropping out of school to work at the age of 13, he still lives a passionate and hard life – he is a passionate singer during the day and a barbecue chef at night. After seven years in the live broadcast industry, he finally hit the TikTok algorithm and became an overnight sensation.
The grand occasion after Guo Youcai became famous
Born in a poor rural area + dropped out of school to become self-reliant + loved deeply even when he was in a humble situation + brought honor to his hometown upon becoming famous – as a small person who struggled to rise from the bottom of society, Guo Youcai's growth trajectory is simply a natural chicken soup script.
On the other hand, the nostalgic filter + miserable emotions + unique appearance make Guo Youcai highly recognizable.
When you come across Guo Youcai on Douyin, his nostalgic filter and old-fashioned appearance will be eye-catching. Coupled with his desolate voice when singing “Promise”, it is easy to empathize with the difficulties he faces in facing the trials of life. Through his tearful singing voice and nostalgic filter, Guo Youcai quickly brings the image of a struggling rural youth to life, which is three-dimensional and real.
After watching Guo Youcai's video, a short video creator firmly believes that old train stations, retro filters, and nostalgic makeup should be guided and packaged by a professional team.
“He has a slicked-back haircut, silver-rimmed glasses, a wide suit with a floral shirt, a red and white striped tie, and black leather gloves. These details are very vintage and recognizable. Most ordinary people cannot create such a systematic IP. The performance environment and camera language are obviously carefully conceived.”
The above-mentioned person further added, “After his (Guo Youcai) lens is coated with a layer of nostalgic filter, it is easy to evoke the collective resonance of a generation, and the song “Promise” hits the memories of the audience who have experienced great changes in the times” – according to third-party data, people aged 31 to 40 account for the largest proportion in Guo Youcai's fan portrait, with males accounting for 67% and females accounting for 33%.
In this regard, Chen Huizhong, associate professor of sociology at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, believes that the Chinese people have a nostalgic mentality, which shows that our society is undergoing rapid change and development, and many things have not been fully digested by people before they have been replaced by new things – “nostalgia is a summary of the past.”
As a result, voices of reflection began to emerge in the market: Is such precise operation and promotion, is it really “nostalgia” behind it, or is it the marketing that has fully understood the public’s aesthetic taste?
In fact, as soon as the spotlight of deification came into contact with Guo Youcai, it was destined that doubts would follow.
Sure enough, during the period when Guo Youcai became popular, internet celebrities from all over the country rushed to Heze South Station, fearing that they would miss the opportunity to share in the huge traffic. As the crowds poured in from all directions, the three operators, China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom, all drove signal vehicles to the scene and added network base stations overnight to escort the assembled live broadcast army. A live broadcast of Ukiyo-e, a “dancing of demons”, was staged in this grand manner.
Screenshot of the live broadcast of the melee at Heze South Station
Soon, the traffic volume swallowed up this station which used to have few passengers like a flood, which eventually led to the authorities to stop all entertainment activities in Heze South Station Square, and Guo Youcai's recommendation data on Douyin also slowly began to cool down.
At this point, the situation has reversed, and Internet critics who have come here to smell the fuss have begun to criticize: Why do we have to push Internet celebrities to become the top stars of the nation in this era? They even further elevated the Guo Youcai effect to a reflection on the local government:
“The mass live broadcast incident created by Guo Youcai and his backstage promoters can be named Heze Dream because of its efficiency in making money quickly and its quick attack and withdrawal on the local government. In Heze Dream, the contribution of traffic to the local government is zero. If we refer to the hasty flattery, the social reputation is probably negative. Heze Dream is comparable to a yellow millet dream.”
In their view, even if Guo Youcai completes a wealth leap overnight (according to third-party statistics, the amount of gift rewards for a single live broadcast of Guo Youcai exceeded 1 million after he became popular, and it is rumored that he was signed by an MCN for 50 million yuan), this is still far from a class leap, so he is still not in the limelight – critics firmly believe that Internet celebrities are nothing more than an ugly symbol driven by the interests of all parties.
It is true that the elite group's fathers built barriers with their bodies to allow them to climb to the top of the education system and enjoy the preferential treatment of educational resources. However, the efforts of ordinary people to move upwards during half their lives were easily wiped out by online commentators with a sentence like “just an internet celebrity”, which is somewhat arrogance of the intellectual elite.
It is undeniable that this live show that traveled thousands of miles to Heze South Station was not without speculators, sensationalists, and traffic manipulators, but there was also a considerable proportion of ordinary people who were eager to climb up and seized this rare opportunity, doing everything they could to climb up.
For example, Bao Ran commented that “a large number of grassroots people are eager to find a way out, from a well-off life to class transition. When the mainstream channel is blocked, the barrier lake will always find a breakthrough point in the pressure by itself. The motives are understandable, the actions are logical, but the results are unknown.”
After all, this is already an extremely complex and rapidly expanding ecosystem in China – according to the latest data on the live broadcast industry disclosed in the “China Online Performance (Live Broadcast and Short Video) Industry Development Report (2022-2023)”: There are currently more than 150 million online live broadcast accounts and more than 1 billion content creator accounts, which have created nearly 200 billion yuan in market revenue and driven more than 100 million jobs.
Douyin finally becomes a “totem” for Internet celebrities to rise
In fact, from Zhang Tongxue, Xiucai, Yu Wenliang to Wen Huijun, “Wa Ya Wa” Teacher Huang, and Guo Youcai, the vast majority of contributors to those data with millions of likes and tens of millions of views are people from the sinking market.
This is exactly in line with the “cave theory” proposed by the philosopher Plato. Plato believed that everyone lives in a cave dug by themselves when they are born. He thought that what we see is the real world, but we didn't know that it might just be an image thrown onto the cave wall by the sunlight.
From left to right: Wen Huijun, Mr. Huang from “Wa Ya Wa”, and Yu Wenliang
Before this, rural themes have always been the enduring “traffic code” in the short video field of various platforms – but vulgarity, magic, and absurdity once became labels attached to short videos with rural themes.
Moreover, in the public's perception, Douyin and Kuaishou have different tones and ecological characteristics. An MCN agency manager told Huxiu that if you want to build a personal image, it is recommended to go to Kuaishou, and if you are good at creativity, Douyin is more suitable.
“Even the smallest Douyin account has the chance to become popular, and there are many who become famous overnight, but the problem is that even those with tens of millions of fans have a short life cycle, and their out-of-date data will be very bleak. If a small Kuaishou account wants to become popular, it needs to invest a lot of resources in the early stage. It can connect with the microphone to compete in the charts and give gifts to big anchors. It takes time to become popular, but as long as you establish your personality, your loyal fans will wait for you every day, unlike Douyin, which says that it will be out-of-date once it becomes popular.”
In other words, gaming the algorithm is a survival skill for every Douyin creator to grab traffic. Douyin has absolute control over the iteration of top anchors. Any slight change in the official content format will lead to a wave of people rising and falling. But this is not the case with Kuaishou. There is only one reason why the Kuaishou anchor family has remained prosperous. They do not rely on content creation, but have created an IP on the platform through live broadcasts and jokes.
Following this logic, Guo Youcai's character seems to be more in line with Kuaishou's “temperament” – after all, the visual recording of rural landscapes originated from Kuaishou, which encourages the use of a nearly plain approach to record real life, and it is more likely that a “Guo Youcai” will emerge from its base of loyal followers.
The mental state of early Kuaishou anchors
However, when Guo Youcai swept the entire Douyin at lightning speed, not only did he make brands and businesses notice the down-to-earth atmosphere of Douyin, but he also made Douyin's rural + nostalgia vertical category have a soft landing.
“Guo Youcai's popularity may be due to Douyin's accelerated efforts to grab traffic from the lower-tier markets.” An observer of short videos believes that compared to the previous MCNs' deification of Douyin, the platform is now embracing young people in small towns and people in the lower-tier markets by cultivating more Guo Youcai.
In other words, from Zhang Tongxue, Xiucai, Yu Wenliang to Wen Huijun and Guo Youcai, it is nothing more than an algorithm sinking led by Douyin – it's just that the internet celebrities selected by Douyin's algorithm to change their fate are no longer the survival of the fittest under the mainstream aesthetics of high-tier cities.
In other words, it is an inevitable trend for traffic to flow to “lower places” – Douyin and Kuaishou are expanding their advantages by penetrating into various vertical categories and plundering each other's advantageous vertical time.
In particular, when the growth of the entire short video industry is approaching its peak and the scale of monthly active users has begun to enter a fluctuating phase, Douyin and Kuaishou must seek growth against a high base and must do so through the mutual competition among various vertical categories.
The head of operations of an MCN admitted to Huxiu that it was not surprising that Guo Youcai became popular on Douyin rather than Kuaishou: “The underlying logic of the explosion is that Douyin has a larger and more generalized audience base. From Daigula K, Maomao Jie, Qiu Yong to Zhang Tongxue, Xiucai, Yu Wenliang, Wen Huijun, Wang Po, and Guo Youcai, the top stars come and go, but Douyin is unshakable.”
Therefore, when Guo Youcai conquered one Douyin hot list and Weibo hot search after another, simply studying the account could not find the answer, and everyone has focused their attention on the platform's will. “Traffic is almost equal to platform currency. It is impossible for the popularity to last so long just by snowballing with algorithms. This may be the direction of the platform's trend in the future” – so there is no shortage of creators who reproduce pixel-level works, and Li Youcai, Wu Youcai, and Liu Youcai have all appeared on the platform one after another.
However, extreme ROI, pursuit of hot products, and industrialization of DOU+ delivery are the underlying logic of the Douyin ecosystem. The vertical super IPs that have sprung up are nothing more than its “tools” for conquering the city.
After all, in this “turning stone into gold” game, Douyin has the final right of interpretation.