Is "wangzong sunset" coming? The variety show, which never lacks topic attention, makes people feel that it is like "sunset" in this spring. The law of industry development superimposes external factors, so that the era of "throwing money can throw a phenomenal variety" is gone, and the market is cold and cold. Industry insiders believe that this is a necessary pain for the industry in the transition period, and content innovation and model innovation are the internal requirements for the healthy development of variety arts.
In the past, no one would have thought that the variety show making topics would attract people's attention with "no topic".
This happened two days ago. Screenwriter Wang Hailin tweeted that the "high-quality variety" of the long video platform has been declining. He also disclosed that Tencent's head variety "semi familiar lovers" didn't get brand sponsorship until it finished broadcasting this year.
These days, Wang Hailin's microblog, together with several variety shows broadcast by "lonely" this spring, has triggered discussions in the industry.
Cold market
Why can Wang Hailin's microblog resonate so widely in the industry? The answer is the coldness of the variety market in the first quarter of this year.
According to Yunhe data, in the first quarter, only the second quarter of ha ha ha ha ha, the semi familiar lover, the great detective and the annual Comedy Competition had an effective broadcast volume of more than 100 million, five less than the same period in 2021, and the overall broadcast volume decreased by 33% year-on-year.
As far as a single program is concerned, "semi familiar lover" has received more than 1 billion broadcasts on the whole network. As a comparison, in 2020, "sister riding the wind and waves" had more than 5.1 billion broadcasts in that year.
Compared with this data, what makes the industry feel the chill more intuitively is the difficulty of attracting investment and the difficulty of finding "gold owners". As the head love variety of Tencent video, the theme and production of "semi familiar lovers" have "their own topics". It is the variety with the highest discussion and the longest lasting popularity in the first quarter. However, such a variety show has been in the state of "naked broadcasting" and has not received brand sponsorship. The second season of "ha ha ha ha ha ha", another variety that broke 100 million yuan, did not have a title, but only received sporadic sponsorship.
This is in sharp contrast to the booming market. 2017 is considered to be a year in the era of "super network integration", and the number of network integration programs with more than 100 million hits began to catch up with and surpass the TV copyright variety show. At that time, iqiyi created "hip hop in China", which quickly became the "sweet pastry" of advertisers. In the second quarter, the investment amount exceeded 1 billion yuan. According to the data, from 2017 to 2019, the scale of China's online entertainment market has always maintained a growth rate of more than 20%, while more than 90% of the revenue of Netcom comes from advertising and investment promotion.
The turning point began in 2019. According to the data released by the third-party advertising data platform, from 2019 to 2021, the number of variety shows implanted in the domestic variety market fell year after year, from 635 to 513. Since this year, the number of variety cooperation projects in various industries has decreased across the board.
"The era of throwing money into a phenomenal network integration is gone forever." Wang Hailin said.
Wind direction change
The market chill felt by professionals is an intuitive feeling of "variety shows are becoming more and more ugly" for ordinary audiences. "Compared with the score of more than 8 in the past, it's good to find a variety show with a passing score." Watching "Taizong" grow up, Li Ran, who has experienced the crazy era of online comprehensive, sighed, "I don't know whether the audience is' knowledgeable 'or the quality of variety content has declined."
Compared with the improvement of the audience's aesthetic needs, the low and homogeneous quality of program production has been discussed for many years. Factors such as the "change of wind direction" of the development law of the industry superimposed on the impact of the epidemic and policy changes have attracted more and more attention.
Last year, "national variety" happy camp "stopped broadcasting after 24 years. This triggered a discussion on the life cycle of variety shows. Domestic variety shows generally run out of heat in four or five years. Even in foreign markets with 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. Last September, the "Qinglang action" launched by the State Administration of radio, film and television was a continuation of a series of regulatory measures, requiring that idol cultivation programs should not be broadcast, resolutely resist the "rice circle" culture and oppose the flow only theory. This also makes the "talent show" variety show with large traffic disappear this year.
On the one hand, the variety carrier changes naturally from TV to network. On the other hand, the audience ages from old to young, the screen aesthetic cycle changes in turn, and the program mode of traditional variety shows is being cruelly eliminated. With the development of the network, compared with the "long variety" that often takes several hours, the "micro variety" backed by short video seems to be gradually accepted by more viewers: on the short video platform, topics related to micro variety can easily harvest 10 billion hits.
How to innovate
How can variety show develop healthily? Pessimists believe that "confusion is long-term", while optimists see that all kinds of fierce and subtle changes have taken place in domestic variety shows, which may cultivate a healthier future.
The industry consensus is that the variety show is now to meet the diversified and changeable needs of users with the rational allocation of limited resources, and the way to achieve this is innovation.
In the second half of last year, a post-80s and post-90s survey showed that more than 90% of respondents expected more high-quality domestic variety shows. For the characteristics of a high-quality variety show, 65.5% of the respondents believe that it is continuous innovation, high program quality and characteristics, and 64.2% of the respondents believe that it is to stick to the bottom line and promote positive values.
"Innovation" is not only content innovation, but also model innovation. Based on the concept of Internet community, at present, the community model of variety shows has attracted a lot of attention. In station B where young people gather, variety shows such as Rap new generation and dance millennium are considered to be the embodiment of this model. Some people also summarized this model as that the community can gain insight into users' aesthetic taste, effectively guide content creation, boost the dissemination of works and realize continuous dissemination through the advantages of platform content fermentation and with the help of stable user habits such as spontaneous dissemination and second creation. The development of this mode deserves attention on the platforms such as Tiktok, Kwai and station B.
Wang Hailin said: "creating high-quality content, including layered creation of high-end demand and popular interest, may be the next direction. How to play a role in entertainment and commercialization under the current management mechanism is also an unavoidable problem in front of the platform."
Variety director Zhao Hao believes that the crisis faced by the whole variety industry also means the emergence of opportunities. "The era of both good and bad content is slowly passing. The audience is verifying the sustainable development of good content. Good money will eventually expel bad money, eliminate bad variety shows and retain high-quality content. This is an inevitable process." He believes that the current dilemma faced by online variety is the pain that the industry must go through in the transition period.