After finishing all his instructions, Pei Qian asked, “Do you remember everything?”
Ma Yang nodded, “Don’t worry, Brother Qian, I remember it all!”
Pei Qian was very satisfied, thinking to himself that Old Ma was indeed reliable, as he hadn’t raised any objections to these requirements.
The requirements Pei Qian had outlined were clearly detrimental to Rabbit Tail Streaming’s ability to compete with other streaming platforms.
Allowing streamers to come and go freely with no streaming hour restrictions would objectively turn Rabbit Tail Streaming into an excellent springboard for talent.
In the streaming industry, streamer job-hopping is the norm. This is partly because streamers’ income inflates too quickly and their legal awareness is weak; on the other hand, major streaming platforms spare no effort in poaching each other’s talent.
Currently, most streaming platforms lock down big streamers with huge contracts. While they have astronomical breach-of-contract penalties, their fixed salaries are also astronomical.
Rabbit Tail Streaming is a new platform that doesn’t offer fixed salaries. With fewer viewers and less gift money, even if small streamers became popular on Rabbit Tail Streaming, they would quickly be poached away by bigger platforms with high salaries.
As long as Rabbit Tail Streaming consistently lacks influential major streamers, its appeal to viewers would be very limited, making it difficult for the platform to become popular.
Data manipulation at streaming platforms has become an open secret.
Actually, it’s not just streaming – data manipulation exists widely throughout the internet industry, creating a situation where bad money drives out good.
Between two similar types of APPs, one with 1,000 real users and another with 10,000 fake users, investors would definitely choose the latter.
They figure that out of those 10,000 fake users, there must be at least one or two thousand real ones, right? As for the former’s 1,000 users, who can prove they’re all real?
Therefore, when data manipulation becomes an unwritten rule, even companies that don’t fake their numbers are assumed to be faking them, and real data becomes meaningless.
Many platforms claim to have hundreds of millions or even billions in viewership. Although everyone knows these numbers are fake, compared to live streams with just a few hundred or thousand actual viewers, these numbers still appear much more popular.
Meanwhile, guilds, contract gifts, ranking competitions, bot comments, and so on are all means of faking popularity. When these streaming platforms decide to do this, they go all in.
Pei Qian was taking the opposite approach, deliberately choosing to be the good money driven out by bad money.
When people see that Rabbit Tail Streaming’s homepage streams only have a few thousand or tens of thousands of viewers, they’ll think this platform is so dead there’s no point watching it.
Strictly and heavily penalizing borderline and inappropriate content is another way to reduce popularity – though there’s also some sense of social responsibility involved.
Most current streaming platforms are very cautious about behaviors explicitly prohibited by law, but tend to turn a blind eye to many borderline behaviors and hype-seeking activities.
For example, some rich second-generation driving luxury cars to pick up girls on the street, with the girls deliberately wearing low-cut outfits and going for a drive, tightening their seatbelts a bit deeper during acceleration, and screaming as the car speeds up… quickly attracts huge viewership and attention.
Strictly speaking, this isn’t illegal, but it creates very poor values.
Pei Qian couldn’t control what other streaming platforms did, but his own platform would definitely prohibit such content.
In other words, Rabbit Tail Streaming would have much stricter content guidelines than other streaming platforms.
With these principles in place, Rabbit Tail Streaming would certainly be buried among the numerous streaming platforms.
Pei Qian’s goal was to keep Rabbit Tail Streaming existing in this half-dead state while continuously paying high bandwidth costs to burn money.
At major streaming platforms currently, the expense structure is roughly: bandwidth costs 30%, streamer revenue sharing/signing fees 30%, and other operational costs (such as regular office operations, marketing costs, copyright costs, etc.) 40%.
By cutting out most streamer signing costs, marketing costs, and copyright costs, Pei Qian was reducing expenses but also killing any possibility of the platform exploding in popularity.
This way, by simply paying bandwidth costs steadily, he could achieve pure money-burning.
Bandwidth costs typically operate on a peak monthly billing model. If concurrent online users exceed 2 million in a month, with data transmission requirements approaching 300GB per second, monthly expenses could reach 40 million yuan.
Of course, Rabbit Tail Streaming couldn’t possibly have such high concurrent users initially, but regardless, even with smaller bandwidth purchases, it would still burn through large amounts of money monthly, significantly lightening Pei Qian’s current burden.
Pei Qian had already done extensive research on these matters.
Anyone with streaming industry experience would definitely question Pei Qian’s ideas, or at least ask about them.
Yet Old Ma accepted everything without question, indicating he either knew nothing about the streaming industry or trusted Pei Qian completely without any other thoughts.
Either way, Old Ma was very reliable!
Pei Qian was extremely satisfied with Old Ma’s response: “Good, remember everything I’ve told you and go prepare well. When setting up the company, get Heo Deuksung and Chen Yu Feng to help. You can also poach a mid-level manager from other streaming platforms. I’ll handle the money, so feel free to act boldly!”
Ma Yang immediately stood up enthusiastically: “No problem, Brother Qian, leave it to me!”
…
Right after Ma Yang left, someone knocked on the office door again.
Pei Qian looked up to see it was Assistant Xin.
“Mr. Pei, Meng Chang has arrived.”
Pei Qian frowned slightly: “Perfect timing, let him in. I actually wanted to speak with him.”
After a while, Meng Chang gently knocked, then pushed the door open.
However, upon seeing Mr. Pei, Meng Chang’s heart skipped a beat, feeling somewhat anxious.
Because Mr. Pei’s expression didn’t look good – he seemed rather unhappy!
Seeing Mr. Pei always gave Meng Chang an indescribable sense of awe, as if his every move couldn’t escape Mr. Pei’s eyes, wanting to be clever but not daring to try.
But Meng Chang reconsidered – this is my first day of work. Even if Mr. Pei is angry, it should be at someone else, not me, right?
However, before Meng Chang could speak, Pei Qian had already handed him a report: “Read this yourself.”
Meng Chang somewhat confused took it over, and his expression changed upon seeing just the first page.
“This… this is the transmission effectiveness analysis of the promotional plan I did before?”
“How is this possible?”
“The promotional effect is actually this good?!”
Meng Chang was completely stunned. The usually eloquent him was rendered silent for five minutes, unable to say a word.
This report was the transmission effectiveness analysis of the promotional campaign for Tenda’s physical industries during the Spring Festival!
Earlier, Pei Qian had intended for Meng Chang to start work officially after the Spring Festival, but coincidentally needed to spend money urgently, specifically to advertise physical businesses like Slackin’ Delivery, Slackin’ Internet Café, Upwind Logistics, and Sloth Apartments.
Pei Qian thought, since he’d already decided to put Meng Chang in charge of advertising and marketing, why not use this opportunity for practice?
So Pei Qian gave Meng Chang the task of creating promotional posters for these physical businesses.
After receiving this promotional assignment, Meng Chang immediately began designing.
The worse the promotional effect, the more commission he’d get. How simple!
Meng Chang produced a design set very carelessly. All promotional posters used the exact same minimalist style – a solid background color plus just a logo or store image, omitting all other information. Even people unfamiliar with these businesses couldn’t tell what was being advertised from the posters alone.
After submitting them, Meng Chang stopped paying attention to the matter.
In his view, these ads would definitely have terrible promotional effects. With no key information, how effective could they be?
However, carefully reading this transmission effectiveness analysis report, Meng Chang realized he’d been wrong.
This promotional campaign had unexpectedly good results!
Being well-versed in marketing, Meng Chang immediately reflected on his strategy upon seeing the report and understood what happened.
“Oh no, I overlooked a crucial detail!”
“Mr. Pei only asked me to create promotional posters for Tenda’s physical businesses but didn’t specify the scale of this promotion!”
“I assumed it would just be small-scale promotion in Jingzhou or a few other cities, which is why I settled on this approach.”
“For limited promotion, these ultra-minimalist posters would be easily lost among colorful billboards. Those familiar with Tenda’s businesses wouldn’t need these ads anyway; those unfamiliar would find them confusing.”
“But I never expected Mr. Pei to deploy such large-scale promotion!”
“Not just Jingzhou and Han Dong Province, but even major cities like Imperial Capital and Magic City were saturated with these ads. In some busy districts, these advertisements clustered together created a collective effect!”
“A single minimalist ad would quickly get buried among various colorful advertisements; but when an entire street is filled with these minimalist ads, it immediately creates strong visual impact for passersby, leaves deep impressions, and showcases powerful brand confidence…”
“But… as far as I know, many cities don’t even have these physical businesses? They’re forcing advertisements in places without even storefronts?”
“This…”
Meng Chang was confused.
One small misjudgment led to completely different promotional effects.
Earlier, Meng Chang was confident this promotional plan would perform terribly, but it turned out to be completely different!
According to his agreement with Mr. Pei, commissions were paid monthly based on the comprehensive effectiveness of all recent marketing campaigns.
Now that this Tenda physical business promotion was so successful, it would significantly lower the overall evaluation. This month’s commission was likely to be severely affected!
Greatly discouraged, Meng Chang didn’t know what to say.
He looked up at Mr. Pei, then down at the analysis report in his hands.
Strange, why does Mr. Pei seem even angrier than me?
Logically, with such successful promotional results, Mr. Pei’s advertising budget paid off, and he doesn’t need to pay me extra commission. Shouldn’t he be overjoyed and smug?