"Then you've been able to increase your followers by 10,000 every month lately, right?", after hearing this sentence, Lili on the other end of the phone rang out with a giggling, crisp laugh. Lili is a budding vlogger who started shooting vlogs in February this year, and after shooting nearly 200 short videos, the vlogging account named @Lili de Little Happiness has amassed 66,000 followers in watermelon videos.
If put in half a year ago, Lili would not have dreamed that her life would usher in such a "bright moment".
With people's impression of those bright and shiny, life is full of all kinds of novel experiences vlogger is very different, pasted on the body of Lili's labels are roughly new baby moms, the northern drift family, not outstanding appearance, but it is these seemingly insulated from the netroots traits but did not hinder her in the watermelon video has a fairly good popularity.
When vlog can break through the subculture circle and go to the public, many players realize that vlog really began to fire.
The latest players to enter the game are Aqiyi and Sohu, Aqiyi launched its own vlog platform just this past week, and Zhang Chaoyang announced almost simultaneously that Sohu Video will promote the development of vlog-type short videos for self-media. If you count the relatively mature B station, microblogging, shaking sound and watermelon video, plus the vertical field of App players a flash, VUE, etc., this piece of short video field spawned by the new wind mouth has been counted on the wind and water.
"We are all authors today. We are all directors. We are all filmmakers. At the same time, we are all theorists, because we create our own theories", writes American author Nicholas Rombes in his book Cinema in the Digital Age.
Right now, every ordinary person possesses the opportunity to become a vlogger. Even, some people are changing their lives through the new identity of vlogger.
The 10,000 lives behind vlogging
Ouyang Nana, a new generation actress and cellist, is also a famous vlogger, and her "Nabi's Study Abroad" series of vlogs with Today's Headlines and Watermelon Video has received 77 million views and appeared on the Weibo hot search list 11 times.
People's enthusiasm for Nabi's study abroad story lies in the fact that it allows people to see a different, and perhaps more real, side of the star - in the vlog, Ouyang Nana records her experience of traveling to Berklee College of Music, from flying with six suitcases to bunking in her room, from eating pizza in the restroom to plopping down all night in front of the From flying with six suitcases to bunking down in her room, from eating pizza in the restroom to lying in front of the computer all night doing PPTs, these trivial experiences have brought the psychological distance between celebrities and ordinary people closer.
The New York Times once said that "the mundane and the ordinary" is the key to victory for vloggers, and the vlogging whirlwind that began with Ouyang Nana has quickly broken the sub-dimensional wall, attracting more ordinary people to record their daily lives through short videos.
Yi Chan (watermelon video account @横店龙套影视演员) is an active dragon set actor in Hengdian. He doesn't have much education and was a failed businessman before coming to Hengdian. As a child, he dreamed of making movies one day, so he came from Hunan province to Hengdian, more than 800 kilometers away, after losing money in his business, and mingled with the complicated ecology of local group actors.
According to the normal development of the plot, it is impossible for him to have movie and television resources like Nana Ouyang in his life, and the day of his emergence is far away. But as a vlogger, Yi Chan is now in the same league of big V as Ouyang Nana: since April 2017, when he started shooting short videos, Yi Chan has 790,000 followers as of now.
"Life in Hengdian is too boring. If you run a group, you have to go to the theater at 4 or 5 a.m. every day, and work for 12 or 13 hours", between the high-intensity work, shooting short videos has become one of the few pastimes for Yi Chan. It just so happens that people are also curious about the size of things that happen in Hengdian Jianghu, Yi Chan's cell phone has become their eyes to spy on Hengdian, and vlog makes him also become a record of the real life of Hengdian group actors "anthropologist".
Here you can see the Guangxi boy who can't afford to rent a room, living on the street, the boy helplessly lamented "Hengdian is completely different from what he imagined", and finally relied on Yi Chan's financial support for the train ticket to start a working career in Guangdong; you can also see a group actor who wants to fall in love with a boy, by the Internet love object cheated out of the month's rent of 200 yuan still! He is not determined to die, giving himself encouragement that the other party is not a liar, he still has a chance. Of course, there are also inspirational stories, such as an actress who earns 8,000 yuan a day, many fans in the comments section think she is lying, Yi Chan went to the streets to find her to shoot a new vlog to confirm.
In Hengdian, the optimistic vision of dreams and the barren reality collide to produce many dramatic stories, and the variety of passers-by here also provides Yi Chan with rich enough material for filming.
Hengdian is like a miniature version of the Jianghu of righteousness, with different stories unfolding every day. As an "anthropologist of Hengdian", Yi Chan says what he is doing is to "simply record people's lives". Yi Chan is not the only one who wants to record life, but Jie (watermelon video account @ShenzhenJie) also wants to do so, only he aims the camera at himself.
Xiao Jie is an ordinary graphic designer in an Internet company with 560,000 followers, and he shoots vlogs to record his and his wife's daily life. As a matter of fact, there are a lot of CP combinations active in the vlog channel of watermelon video, and Xiao Jie and his wife walk in the plain and cozy style. For example, when he took his wife to eat desserts on weekends, his wife disliked that the desserts she ordered were small in size and not cold enough, and Xiao Jie exchanged the food in front of him with his wife without saying a word, and the comment section was full of comments such as "a good man who cares for his wife...". The comment section is full of comments like "a good man who loves his wife".
There are many similar things, Jie vlog spindle is almost always his wife want to eat what to buy, what requirements are trying to meet. "My wife loves to laugh and looks friendly, many fans are concerned about me because of my wife", said Jie. But when he first started shooting vlogs, his wife was the least supportive one, thinking that there was no value in recording such trivial things. But as time went by, hundreds of vlogs became valuable testimonies of their lives, and his wife's attitude took a 180-degree turn.
As a viewer, it's getting easier and easier for you to find ordinary couples like Jie on Watermelon Video, which has become a place for people to peek into how different couples get along and reflect on their own married life. For example, Lili and her husband often dislike each other over trivial matters, while a vlogger named Zou Shidong (watermelon video account @ I am all holes) takes the route of pampering his wife, who doesn't even want her to enter the kitchen, and when asked for the reason, just smiles nervously and perfunctorily and says, "I like to cook".
Behind 10,000 vloggers, there are 10,000 lifestyles. The further we go, the more we find that vlogging is not only a glamorous and prosperous appearance, but it starts to have more colors. From the firewood, rice, oil and salt to the sweet, sour and spicy, the real sense of life manifests more and more become the vlog back to the essence of the way back to the road.
Change, from a new house to a high-speed rail ticket
Before becoming a vlogger, Zousteen did some actuarial calculations.
As a graduate student from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications last year, Zou Shidong is particularly sensitive to numbers, which may also be related to his own background. He was born in a rural family, his father has only one hand, from a young age in the environment of his parents careful budgeting. As a senior, Zou Shidong began the business of selling cell phones, and at that time made a small fortune, became the man of the hour in the school.
Such an environment allows him to do things with a particularly clear sense of purpose, such as in order to settle down in Beijing, gave up the Internet company's high salary, turn to run for the account chose to work in the state-owned enterprises from nine to five; at the same time, soon after graduation also immediately in Beijing Tiantongyuan also north of the north of the seven homes to buy a house: the price of 34,000 yuan per square meter, the down payment cost more than 2.3 million, and the loan will need to pay 2.2 million, the pressure on the mortgage about 13.5 million per month, and so on. The pressure of the mortgage is about 13.5 thousand per month.
13,500, for the monthly salary of only 10,000 Zou Shidong is undoubtedly a lot of money, but also from January this year to buy a house, he began to have the idea of becoming a vlogger.
"Because the state-owned enterprises to and from work especially regular, so the idle time always have to do something, thought about their own specialties, the self media may be the only way out", Zou Shidong said. He attracted fans in two months time about 150,000 to 600,000, the recent fan growth has also entered the fast track, every week there can be about 10,000 new increments.
For Zou Shidong, this means not a small level of income. According to his platform video share rules, every 10,000 playback is about a dozen dollars, playback from the fans of the share is even higher. For Zou Shidong, racking his brains to find subjects to shoot video has become his spare time all.
The most played short video in his vlog list is the video of his daughter-in-law cooking. As a vlogger who doesn't let his daughter-in-law into the kitchen, the novelty this video brought to his fans eventually brought about 1.75 million plays, which represents a video that brings in at least a four-digit level of income. Zou Shidong now gets off work at six o'clock every day, and when he gets home, in addition to cooking, his time is basically spent shooting videos and editing and publishing them, but he and his wife are enjoying themselves. "Shooting vlogs to bring the platform share to share the mortgage pressure, we can even pay back part of the previous down payment loan," said Zou Shidong.
In addition to Zou Shidong, Lili also just bought a new house. In the first two years of Jinan's soaring prices, Lili and her husband had no choice but to quickly purchase a new house in Jinan. Although and Zou Shidong the same north, but Lili's situation is more complicated, her daughter was placed in the hometown, which makes her in addition to the mortgage also need to bear the pressure of commuting costs.
Before becoming a vlogger, Lili and her husband could only go back home to Zaozhuang to see their daughter on holidays in order to save money, and they could only take the ordinary hard seat on the green train with a ticket price of 90 yuan, and sometimes they needed to transfer from Tianjin, and the one-way trip had to be hard for an all-nighter. "My husband and I are particularly sticky parents, so more than a month can only see the baby once on both of us are quite difficult", she said.
After becoming a vlogger, the green train ticket in Lili's hand turned into a blue high-speed train ticket. With the increase in airplay and fans, the share Lili received from the platform also began to become more: "Now we can buy high-speed train tickets, and we can get home in three hours, so we can spend more time with our daughter. Although the ticket price of more than 520 is not low, but bite the bullet and pay it."
Now, many platforms are scrambling to imitate the model of YouTube, which has a clear goal from the very beginning of its development: to gather users' attention through content producers, and then resell their attention to advertisers, who will eventually receive a share of advertising revenue based on the volume of playback.
When Chinese content platforms like Watermelon Video start to build a similar ecosystem, more ordinary people like Lili or Yi Chan will benefit from it. At the same time, these tangible benefits will also attract more people to get involved, making vlogging not just a windfall in China, but also a sustainable soil.
The meaning of the shot?
What is the point of shooting a vlog? This is a question that many budding vloggers often need to explain to their friends and family after shooting a short video
