Editor's note: This article is from WeChat public number "Guyu Lab" (ID: guyulab), author Xu Ting, editor Jin He.
In front of the camera, they are young, beautiful, and get rich overnight. They splurge and show off their wealth, spending 200,000 yuan on Hermes bags. But in Jiubao, east of Hangzhou city, many of their live broadcasting rooms are located in factories or office buildings in the urban-rural area. Every night at 7 p.m. and continuing into the early hours of the morning, some of them are like robots, constantly trying on clothes priced at 99.9, 69.9 or 39.9. But only a very few of them make any money. They are in a whirlpool, held hostage and misunderstood, "in the urban and rural areas, with their hearts in Paris Fashion Week". This is the story of a group of young people trying to get rich.
1
If you're constantly trying on clothes on the air, you need to overcome a lot of obstacles. Tatsu began to think that the whole thing was "extremely disgusting," but she put up with it. "If you don't believe me, try standing in front of a mirror for five or six hours, constantly taking off and putting on, putting on and taking off." Tatsu padded over to the live-streaming area, stepping through the gaps in the pile of unpacked clothes. It was set up as a corner of a living room, with a pale yellow couch, a small circular catwalk, a foam backdrop with a painted plumeria deer, and dried reeds in a vase. "This is the most expensive, over 700." Tatsu pointed to a pale green recliner that she had bought when she first started.
The live room reveals a rough-and-tumble vibe: it's simultaneously a warehouse, half of it open as a live room, the other half piled high with thousands of samples of clothes, shoes, bags, and assorted face masks, and the air smells of freshly unpacked clothing dye. The table held takeout orders from the assistant, from a nearby street store.
Next to the studio is a banner manufacturing company, the office is filled with bright red samples, written with "wonderful hands", "loyal", "patience and love", a middle-aged woman is counting the accounts; the opposite room has been converted into a residence by a family, a small boy is sitting on a dark red old sofa watching TV with a bowl of rice. A middle-aged woman was counting the accounts; the room opposite had been converted into a residence by a family, and a little boy was carrying a bowl of rice and sitting on a dark red, outdated sofa to watch TV. But all this is not presented in the camera.
She has more than 400,000 fans, spread out in the north or the fourth and fifth tier counties in Henan and Hebei. They can all see her on their cell phone screens. The camera will only show the part of the catwalk, and the picture shows an INS style. Under the effect of filters and soft lights, Xiao Chen's skin is white and delicate, and not a single pore or sweat hair can be seen.
She spends most nights of the year in this studio: clothes are the most popular, the largest category on the e-commerce platform. She would stand on a small catwalk, smiling, and keep trying on clothes, speaking briskly to explain the fabrics and fits and guide her fans to buy. Of course, she prefers to recommend beauty or accessories.
Several times, she felt nauseous halfway through the broadcast and ran to the toilet to vomit violently. When she left work in the middle of the night, the lights were off in the whole building.
She is an e-commerce anchor, and among the tens of thousands of netizens in Hangzhou, she is in the echelon of the well-paid. After a few months as an anchor, Xiaochen moved into an apartment in the city center with a monthly rent of 8,500, lives alone and has a white Pomeranian dog. The live broadcasts would start at 7 p.m. and last until 11. Sometimes it would be later, until the wee hours of the morning. It's prime time, when white-collar city workers finish their day's work and begin to slump on the couch and swipe their cell phones.
More netizens gathered in Jiubao. Xiao Chen signed up with a webcam company there - he chose to rent a house near his apartment as a studio because he couldn't stand the late-night commute.
If you come to Jiubao, you will feel that stronger sense of roughness. If you go from Jiubao MRT station to Ruhan, the feeling may be more intuitive. You'll pass through a mix of semi-old residential areas, factories, urban villages awaiting demolition and office buildings. Then, from the main road, Hanghai Road, you turn into Wanjia Road, where an advertisement for the property stands on the side of the road - "Interactive gardens, aesthetically pleasing to come home to".
Down the road was a transit center, next was a white fence, but splattered with mud stains and painted across with advertisements for cranes and excavators. Then there was a cornfield and a vegetable patch where an old woman set up a stall to sell vegetables every day on the dusty roadside. Beyond her hunched back, a lavish temple with golden walls could be seen, and in the distance again were the orange lifting cranes of two construction sites.
But around Jiubao, a huge netroots base has formed. A kilometer in a circle of factories, office buildings, gathered hundreds of large and small netroots companies, including Zhang Dayi's Ru Han and Sydney's Tisu. They are the "faith" of the netroots in Jiubao.
Chaoyang Industrial Park is but five or six houses, but highly condensed the whole Netflix industry chain: clothing factories, staff dormitories, e-commerce companies, Netflix live broadcasting rooms, and logistics points are all available. Most of the storefronts along the street have opened restaurants, such as Shaxian snacks, Quzhou stir-fry, Shandong dumplings, etc., but none of them last long, and they change a batch of them every once in a while.
In a documentary about netizens, after a day of live broadcasting, choosing models and looking at goods, late at night, Zhang Dayi walks down the road, flashing her signature smile at the camera, "in the city and countryside, with her heart in Paris Fashion Week." She is a super netizen.
A day in Nine Castles begins at dusk. At 5 or 6 p.m., young anchors apply their makeup and pour into the brick-red factory. In order to be photogenic, their faces are painted white and their lips are red. The room is small, with a few overly bright LED lights surrounding a two-square-meter live broadcast area. The racks around the room are filled with clothes, often priced at 99.9, 69.9 or 39.9, from nearby garment factories.
"They all want to be Zhang Dayi." Chen Yong, a cashier at the small supermarket at the entrance, had a smile on his lips. He is in his early 20s and has a lanky figure, and in order to make more money, most of the takeout orders in the neighborhood will be delivered in person. Almost all of the fourth and fifth floors are engaged in live broadcasting. "They chirp and quack until late at night." He often went to bring them water at night.
2
"Health, happiness, and joy are the most important things. Material things are also important, but just as long as I can maintain my basics. I've calculated that I spend around 50,000 a month, so if I can maintain earning 150,000 to 200,000 a month, I'll be happier with my life."
In the apartment where she lived, Tatsu was sitting at her dresser in a jeweled green silk nightgown, puffing on her powder as she blandly spoke. As if realizing something, she then adds, "Of course, everyone has different standards." She always tries to be her "real self" - in the live broadcast room, she will tell her fans, "Here, I just bought a bracelet, 80,000 yuan."
A light rain drifted outside the floor-to-ceiling windows on the eighth floor, and the street lights came on as darkness descended. Xiao Tatsu real person is a whole circle smaller than what you see on the cell phone screen, and speaks in a soft voice, completely lacking the bright, stern temperament in the hard photos.
The log-colored dressing table was piled with bottles and jars of Lamer's cream, SK2's Divine Water and Armani's foundation, among others. An oval beauty mirror shines a very bright light on her face, a small melon face, eyes large and round, chin pointed, nose high and straight, cherry-colored lips are very full, and Shu Qi has a slight resemblance. Fans often shouted in the live broadcast room, "I want to see Shu Qi." Her screen name contains the word Shu Qi.
All the controversy about Netflix almost always centers around wealth. Is Netflix really making money that you could never make at that age?
For a very small number of people in the Nine Castles, yes. For example, Via, Zhang Dayi or Sydney, Xiao Chen is also considered one of them. From her first live broadcast to earning 100,000 dollars a month, it took her less than 6 months.
In the spring of 2017, Xiaochen found a girl who also worked as an anchor and shared a loft apartment. They lived upstairs and broadcast live downstairs. The brokerage company told her that small anchors should not steal time from big anchors, "it makes no sense." She then set the live broadcast time at 1:00 am to 4:00 am.
In this game of wealth about beauty, consumption and traffic, the platform is the banker behind the scenes. According to the rules of the platform, a new anchor wants to be seen, must last long enough, even if it is to speak to the air. At first, Xiaochen did not dare to drink water, did not dare to go to the toilet, came to the menstrual period pain rolling on the ground, vomiting, gasping for breath and climbed downstairs to continue to live.
Tatsu told her friends that she would not see them until she had earned a million dollars. During that time, she was nicknamed "Li million". But the reality is very bone, the first month, she only earned less than 5000 yuan. "They teased me, how far are you from 1 million? I said 1.02 million to go."
Almost from the third month, her number of fans began to soar, up to ten thousand a day. "In one live broadcast, a pair of pants could sell more than a thousand pieces, and in three minutes, a thousand bottles of shampoo were sold." She raised her right hand to gesture, this was the peak moment of her anchoring career, and with it, her monthly income reached six figures.
This 26 year old's life changed. She immediately moved into this new apartment in the city center and started buying luxury items.
"I have always loved Hermes. When I was very young, I was determined to buy a Hermes bag by the time I was 30, on my own. Luckily, when I was 26, I was able to buy myself a birkin, entry level, for around 100,000 dollars." Tatsu walked out of the bedroom and said to the museum rack full of bags in the living room, "Of course it's just the entry level, it also comes in crocodile leather and so on."
Sometimes shopping is even just a way to vent the stress of having nowhere to go.During the 2017 Double 11, from the 1st to the 11th, Xiaochen was live-streaming twice a day for 8 hours. The next double 12 words, she was back-to-back for another 12 days. "I don't think I can do it, I have to buy something." In addition to Hermes, Xiao Chen incidentally bought all the several bags she had always wanted before, "anyway, I spent 200,000 that month."
But for other girls, beyond money, "fame" is equally attractive. "Some people say I look like Takuya Kimura's daughter, others say I look like Yuki Arakaki, and in general I look like a Japanese person," Jia Jia says coyly, holding her chin in a Hangzhou Mansion cafe. She wears a duck-tongued cap, a blue striped shirt and skinny jeans.
She is a bit resistant to the label of Netflix. On Weibo, she is labeled as a "famous fashion blogger" and prefers to be called a KOL; she owns a Garfield cat. When we first set up an interview, she suggested a bar by the West Lake where a band was playing.
Jiajia started modeling even before the term "Netflix" was coined. It was 2011, she graduated from high school, a set of photos were posted online, clicks are considerable, she began to appreciate the value of beauty. Before that, she had never clearly felt beautiful, "In high school, I still wore braces, and my classmates called me a girl with steel teeth."
After that, modeling about shooting the invitation to continue, "This is the same as saying, get on the car". In the winter of her junior year, Jia Jia received a call from the editor-in-chief of a fashion magazine that a famous Japanese car company was selecting a female lead for an advertisement, and she was listed as a candidate. After passing the audition, Jia Jia and a production team flew to Hokkaido, Japan.
After a few years, she has always remembered that trip, "We drove a car together and sped through the wilderness of Hokkaido. The snow was so thick that I slid on my back on the snow. Every day was fun." She fell in love with "this life," a life in front of the camera.
An advertisement didn't bring her into show business. Like the vast majority of netizens based in Hangzhou, she chose to copy Zhang Dayi's path. Jia Jia runs her own online store and also works as a model for some online stores and brands. The store's warehouse is located in Jianggan District, where Jiubao is located.
3
When we told him that the emerging career that more than 50 percent of post-95s dream of is Netflix, Yang Han didn't hold back and burst out laughing. He's in his mid-thirties, talks with a sense of humor, and works as a supervisor for an e-commerce company that provides supply chain services for netizens in the Jianggan district in the east of the city, just a few subway stops from Jiubao.
"[The job of an e-commerce anchor] is the stall girl at the former Four Seasons Green, being online." He has mixed and ambiguous feelings about netizens: he doesn't think it's a noble profession, but he has to admit that they can make money in a short time.
The lure of money is obvious. According to a local media report, there are more than 300 netroots unions or brokers, large and small, from Jiubao to the university towns in Jianggan District.
Brokerage firms play a special role between platforms and web stars. Brokerage companies that are deeply tied to the platform will participate in the distribution of traffic, such as specific recommended positions. "Suppose you start broadcasting today on the first day, there may be 5,000 anchors at the same time, I don't know the monkey years when I see you." Ma Hao said he works as an agent at a netroots incubator not far from Jiubao.
"Netflix growth is an industrial assembly line." After signing the contract, they will set up a persona based on the girl's looks and personality, guide makeup and dress code, and speaking skills. After each live broadcast, Ma Hao will work with the girls, reviewing the data situation and correcting some flaws in the live broadcast of the webcam, the speed of speech, expression or other. "I recently recommended them to watch Me and My Agent, bringing them and bringing artists are the same thing."
No matter how much beauty standards change, youth is always the cornerstone. In the brutal competition, agencies will always prefer girls of a more juvenile age: some companies sign (Netflix) and don't want those who are 98 years old. Little Acme told us. She had interviewed for a broker position with a head netroots company in Hangzhou. Xiao aca, who is in her 30s and already a mother of two, finally decided to give up.
"It's cruel." She said.
No one is always young, but there are always people who are young, and there is no shortage of young people in the university town of Jiubao, where "Can", born in 1998, is still in her third year of college. "Can" is the brand name she chose for her future brand, and she would like us to call her by this. She has a thin figure, fair skin, and a round face, which makes her look childish. 5 months ago, she signed with a brokerage company. Yang Han provides supply chain services for her online store.
"Can" is a native of Dongyang, Zhejiang Province, with a favorable family background. "When I was in high school, I wanted to buy a bag for 20,000 dollars, and my dad would buy it for me." After going to college, she bought clothes almost every week. The inexpensive spending raised the scale of her measurement of money. After selling clothes superficially in the circle of friends and getting a taste of it, she decided to sign up and open an online store.
"It's all about the (store) deal." New to the industry a few months ago, she has a clear goal and no mental baggage.
April and May, "can" one of the most important work content, is to put on their own store clothes, in the lakeshore Yintai, Kerry Center and other places to shoot jitterbugs: content in accordance with the then "pop" standard concoction. One hot afternoon, you can walk back and forth in front of the golden windows of GUCCI and LV in Hubin Yintai nearly 10 times, making faces at the camera, or pretending not to know that they were photographed. Then, she also played a couple with a boy with a height difference of nearly 20 centimeters, playing around for nearly an hour on a road by the West Lake, spraying off a whole bottle of mineral water. This is a new sight in Hangzhou city after the rise of jitterbugs in recent years, and is a far cry from the playfulness that previously characterized the Jiubao gridiron.
In this cruel circle, only the freshest blood is relaxed and ambitious for the future. "Can is aware of the big waves in the netizen industry, but she doesn't think she will be eliminated from the sand. Although her online store is still far from being a "big store", she has yet to experience the cruelty of business. She registered her company this summer and hired a Chinese graduate.
But the logic of the story remains the same: success is a small probability event. "70%" - that's the "death rate" of Netflix we heard from a head brokerage. "Less than 10% people make 90% of the money in this industry." The cruelty of the law of two or eight is amplified in this industry, where "most people are probably struggling to make $10,000."
For Netflix stars, this cruelty doesn't even need to be warned by the agency. In Xiao Chen's living room, there was a dusty treadmill. It was left behind by the roommate she used to share a room with. She and Xiao Chen belonged to the same brokerage company, signed with the same group, and were quite pretty.
After suffering for six months and still getting nowhere, she left the industry. "She cheated me out of tens of thousands of dollars, and WeChat even pulled the plug on me." Xiao Chen said. The story ends with the girl disappearing from the shared room, leaving behind the treadmill. In Jiubao, this is unusual story.
4
"Almost no anchors ever go back to a regular white-collar life. That's human nature." Maho said with certainty. For many webcasters in Jiubao, making fast money is as addictive as cigarettes and alcohol, and once you start, you can't leave. But at the same time, like any other gift of fate, it comes with a price tag in secret. The price is experienced little by little, and the physical level of exertion is just the beginning.
At the beginning of 2018, Xiao Chen realized that she began to fall into a state that she could not get out of, with boredom, tedium, and a sense of exhaustion following her. According to the rules of the platform, in order to maintain the heat, netizens must never stop. Four to six hours a day is the number we heard over and over again in our interviews. Hosts only broadcast this length of time, the platform will give traffic tilt, such as recommended to enter the home page. In their jargon, it is "floating out".
Algorithms and data that dominate the lives of the little taters. "Endless, week after week, the same life every day, just like a robot." Says Tatsu, "We are billing by the minute, traveling, getting sick and falling in love are luxuries for us."
The joy that came from buying the bag disappeared after receiving it. Every day at dusk, she inexplicably wanted to shed tears as soon as she started applying makeup. After turning off the live streaming software, the bright smile that was on her lips a second before immediately disappeared. "The brain will lack of oxygen", sometimes the mouth into the cold air will dry vomit, open speech once also became her burden.
Xiao Chen interrupted her work and went to the Seventh People's Hospital to hang up a psychiatry department. The doctor told her that it was the result of people's inability to secrete dopamine under prolonged stress, which, in simple terms, is mild depression. This is a highly prevalent disease in the Netflix industry.
She tried to escape and went to a new media company owned by a friend, and her monthly salary dropped from 100,000 to 10,000 dollars. But within a few days, she was "scared away", because "can not accept the gap". Once a person has made quick money and enjoyed the happiness of a short burst, he can no longer tolerate a down-to-earth life. Xiao Chen reopened the camera and returned to the live broadcast. "But I no longer work as hard as I did before." Xiao Chen wanted to adjust the pace, "I'm more tired today, even if you give me thirty-six thousand dollars for this live broadcast, I'm not going. I'm going on a date tomorrow, so I'll inform everyone that I'm taking a vacation."
But that doesn't mean there's no cost. Her following hasn't grown in a year. "See, the ones that aren't as good as you, they're surfacing." A friend told her. "Why stop when you can make money at a young age that others won't make in a lifetime." The friend felt sorry for her.
In mid-June, Xiaochen had a fever for several days, once reaching 39.6 degrees Celsius. A few days later, she forwarded an article to her friends circle: "20-year-old beautiful model died suddenly on the high-speed train: to destroy a person, one illness is enough".
She didn't know where to go. Those big anchors have particularly stable lives, many of them have gotten married and have children, "I'm not like them, they came to be anchors after they've seen the world, I haven't seen the world yet." In between silences, she would pick up the e-cigarette on the table and take a couple puffs, tooting her lips and exhaling a circle of white mist. The habit of smoking was picked up when she was studying in the UK in 2012, "At first, I didn't speak the language, I didn't have many friends, and I had to deal with everything on my own. Especially lonely when learned."
Tatsu is in anxiety. A happy family life and an anchor who gets off work at 12 o'clock are mutually exclusive. But she has a clear ruler in her psyche: money, the reason she can't leave the anchor industry. Even now, the decline in traffic and stagnant growth of fans has made her dissatisfied.
"The first two days are still insomnia, just insomnia until the morning, I don't know what to do." She sits up in bed and speeds up her speech, "What if later in life when I can't make this kind of money? Now I have a bottle of cream three or four thousand dollars, I know in my heart, this is a month's salary for some people now, I use it now can not afford to use it later what should I do?"
One day in May, we witnessed a live broadcast of Xiao Chen in an office building by the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal. It coincided with her physiological period, and 20 minutes before the start of the broadcast, Xiaochen was still lying on the floor, her face as colorful as earth, abdominal pain to the point that she couldn't stand up straight. A few hours ago, she just rushed back to Hangzhou from Anhui, that trip was invited by a jewelry store, his store needs to Xiao Chen and her peers in front of the camera shouting - nine Fort netroots brokerage seems to be a nest, it is a constant flow of blood, the energetic and young girls to Anhui, Nantong, Wenzhou and so on. Various online stores that need to sell goods live room.
Tatsu simply took a few bites and pushed it aside. Her assistant went on air first while she kept rolling on the floor. Fans called out to Kotatsu on the air, and she braced herself to go up and say hello, then plopped down on her assistant's suitcase. During this time, Xiao Chen called for a doctor, hoping to ease the pain and then finish the broadcast. The situation didn't get better, so she only had to end this live broadcast early. The merchants' faces did not look good, and the bandwagon was very unsatisfactory.
"No commission on this one." Between waiting for her car downstairs, she hugged her arms and lowered her voice to tell her assistant.
*Siu Chen, Jia Jia, Ma Hao and Yang Han are pseudonyms in this article.
THE END
