This article comes from the WeChat public account: New List (ID: newrankcn) , of: heart, from FIG title: IC photo
Zibo, an ordinary third-tier city in central Shandong province. The chemical industry used to be the economic engine here. When industry gradually declined and the Internet tide hit this small town, some people seized the opportunity and turned into the most “fashionable” self-media practitioners in the town.
A mobile phone, a stand, and a ten-minute video can get up to 200,000 views.
As a result, some people have won wealth beyond their original social status, and more people have seen new opportunities to make money. Regardless of whether you are in a rural or urban area, As long as you can shoot, someone will watch it.
Everyone wants to enter the market to chase wealth and form a unique self-media river and lake in the small town. In the rivers and lakes, the platform is the owner of the flow and the rule maker; the flow of revenue still follows the “28th Law”, and the head KOL and MCN are the largest vested interests.
For novice Li Tie, entering this river and lake is like starting a hunger game, he is still in the middle and lower end of the food chain. The contention is the traffic, the audience ’s attention, and the only weapon is the content.
Changing platforms and trying different content, from graphics to short videos, from team shooting to real standing, Li Tie spent two years in the self-media rivers and lakes in the sinking market, and the “great dream” gradually broke.
Weft knitting craftsman shot by Li Tie team
(The following is Li Tie ’s dictation)
I.
My hometown is Zibo, Shandong, an already lonely industrial prefecture-level city, and is also known as the sinking market in the Internet age.
When the night falls, the night market covered with dust and stains is always full of people, and the young people in the town are crowded under the neon lights of the bar, squandering less than 3,000 yuan per month.
Until the early hours, the roadside of Pub Street was still full of taxis for life. The driver opened the window, smoked cigarettes, and rallied to wait for the business to come.
At this time, they are most willing to pass the time on the App. Some like fast hands and vibrato to watch live broadcasts and short videos, and some like to watch news on today’s headlines.
The free time of young people in small towns is in the eyes of interested people, it is a business.
After graduating from university, the family relationship helped me find a job in a state-owned enterprise in Jinan. I used to study fine arts, do modeling, and finally somehow went to this new energy company doing waste-to-energy.
Although the work is stable, state-owned enterprises have some unbearable things. Life machinery repeats, after about five years, I resigned.
The family members do not understand this choice. In their eyes, or in the eyes of everyone in this city, there are only jobs such as civil servants, teachers, bank employees, and employees of state-owned enterprises. It is shameful for those who entered the “siege” and chose to resign.
An Wen has become the label of the small city, which means more or less meaningless. I was suffocating in my heart at that time, not like a man in his 30s.
In mid-2018, after spending three months at home, my high school classmate Ying Wei found me. He heard that many people in Binzhou, Shandong made money from the media. A product that does content in a sinking market is called Toutiao, which is popular with people in the county. Ying Wei posted some articles translated from foreign websites on the test water, some of which were funny and some talked about health. Inadvertently planting willows, he also earned more than 1,000 yuan a month.
He thinks this is an opportunity.
We have heard many stories about becoming rich from the media overnight in the sinking market, but at that time, we did not know that this idea was just the beginning of a “nightmare”.
In 2017, since the media was hot, BAT sent money to everyone, and today’s headline also sent money to everyone. Each platform focuses on subsidies, some say 1 billion, and some say 10 billion. But in fact, if you go to a real research, you will know that, to put it in perspective, revenue is nothing more than including traffic sharing and original subsidies.
At that time, the sinking market became a self-media, and everyone’s routines were based on traffic sharing. Engaging in headline party and traffic news, general team operations, like a content processing plant, are essentially labor-intensive industries. For example, an employee earns 4,000 yuan a month, the boss produces two numbers, and the subsidy flow of each number platform increasesHe can have 10,000 yuan, then he can earn 6,000 by himself, and he can earn 60,000 by hiring ten people.
So at that time we heard too many such fairy tales of “doing a monthly income of 100,000 from the media in the countryside”.
I did n’t know that at the time, I arrived in the middle of 2018 and got a belated ticket-the tide has already returned.
Second,
The Caotai team in the sinking market wanted to counterattack Beishangguang. That was a daydream. Especially in the second half of 2018, the competition from the media has been fierce.
Shandong Binzhou is a self-media concentrated area. We heard that many people have started companies by doing self-media, with annual income of millions or even tens of millions. But after careful inquiries, I realized that they rely on carrying and washing manuscripts.
In September 2018, we started to make pictures. At that time Baijiahao had high subsidies and high traffic, and everyone was doing Baijiahao. But by the end of the year, when not making a few dollars, Baijia began to limit the flow in large quantities.
We changed the platform again and started to be the Penguin. At the beginning, the flow was relatively stable, but soon, the Penguin also came out with a new policy. The platform no longer allowed to be a matrix, plus the tax on the personal number was too high, it was 20%, and no money was made.
The rules of the platform are also getting stricter. For example, as long as Penguin finds that there is any account for manuscript handling under your matrix, then the income of the entire matrix will only give you 10%. A friend in Binzhou earns 2 million a year, but only 200,000 in the end. A year has gone dry.
At that time, Toutiao happened to be an emerging platform, and the traffic was very large. Today, Toutiao gradually became the largest position of self-media; we finally decided to focus on two headlines.
In addition to the battlefield conversion, we realized that manuscript washing is a gray area that ignores intellectual copyright and industry norms. With the rapid increase in platform content and authors, many authors like me have poured in in large numbers without media practice Experience, without a clear understanding of copyright, the days will not last long.
We can see that each platform is using different incentives to encourage originality. For example, Toutiao and Toutiao, the platform will use their criteria to select good content and then distribute it again, so that very good authors can be easily selected. In addition, for the authors who repeatedly move, the flow will not gradually tilt towards them, and the threshold for the platform to enter is also getting higher and higher.