Virtual livestreamers are now accessible to any brand in China
Livestreaming is a topic we regularly cover at the Skinny, and with good reason. In 2018, ¥120 billion ($16 billion) worth of goods and services were sold through the channel in China. Five years later, following a pandemic which saw people homebound and looking to be entertained, the popularity of livestream shopping rocketed 30 times in value, reaching an estimated ¥3.49 trillion ($480 billion) in 2022.
Unlike traditional ecommerce where consumers need to proactively seek out products, livestreaming delivers products to your screen in an engaging and alluring format, with a sense of urgency to buy. This sees conversion rates as high as 30% - ten times that of traditional ecommerce.
By 2020, 1.23 million people were already employed as livestream hosts in China. With youth unemployment climbing north of 20%, many Gen-Zers are seeing it as an aspirational career. A survey of 10,000 young people last month found that 60% would be interested in working as an internet influencer.
Many of those aspiring livestreamers may find it increasingly harder to land a job as AI bots arrive en masse, flaunting themselves across streaming channels. It wasn’t long ago when virtual livestreamers were only the realm of very large brands such as Porsche, Louis Vuitton and L’Oreal. Yet with AI becoming mainstream, the cost of engaging a customized, brand-specific virtual livestreamer has plummeted.
Tencent has introduced a service where brands can pay $1,400 for a custom avatar, or $2,400 for one with a customized voice. Smaller companies are offering virtual cloning for as little as $1,100 with videos costing $1/minute to produce after that. Or for an out-of-the-box generic livestreamer, you can pay as little as $123 a month. We’ve put together a few videos of AI livestreamers to show you what they really look like!
Brand-owned livestream channels have become popular for brands to reduce their exposure to increasingly expensive agency-owned livestreamers who can cost hundreds, to tens of thousands of dollars, plus commission, a session. They can lack authenticity as they flog products from any brand who pays them, and risk getting caught up in scandals. Brand livestream channels also enable greater opportunities for loyalty and help temper daunting costs of acquisition. This has seen 65.8% of fashion brands, 65.2% of food & beverage and 52.9% of beauty brands conduct livestreams through their owned, private domain channels.
The low price of virtual livestreamers has enabled brand-owned livestreaming to become a lot cheaper. Hiring an internal real-life livestreamer costs a minimum of ten times of what a virtual streamer can cost. Real people often take some training, regularly burn out or quit, demand steep wage increases as they get popular, and can only work so many hours.
Brands are taking notice of the benefits of AI bots. Nanjing’s Silicon Intelligence claims to have already produced 1.5 million digital humans for 40,000 livestream operators.
Does this dystopian trajectory where robots replace humans mean the dearth of all hard working real-life livestreamers? Unlikely. Regulations are increasingly giving human livestreamers a bit of a leg up. For example, bots need to clearly label that they are AI hosts on Douyin. Skilled real people-livestreamers don’t stick to the script in the way that robots do and find their own way to talk and drive sales. Story telling requires subtle emotions and nuances, which robots still largely struggle to deliver.
Right now, we don’t think it has to be one or the other – human livestreams and AI ones can both serve a purpose. Like many things in China, we’d recommend brands experiment. Areas AI bots might be helpful are channels where brands run content around the clock such as cooking or makeup application streams, so visitors can be entertained no matter when they come.
Different bots can be created to appeal to different subsegments and audiences. Brand-customized bots can also be integrated into other channels to create a consistent and familiar experience. This could include customer care, brick & mortar stores, other social media touch points, gamification, interactive tutorials and training for consumers and B2B channels, and plenty more. Contact China Skinny to learn how best to balance new opportunities from AI with tried-and-true techniques from the real world.
