COVER STORY INTERNET
SUPERSTAR
Understanding the obssion with making and breaking
online celebrities
一朝受宠名利双收，不慎陨落骂名滚滚。
究竟是我们消费了“网红”，还是“网红”消费了我们？
IN CHINA, THE WORLD THAT
EXISTS ONLINE CAN SOMETIMES
本子什么意思
SEEM MORE REAL THAN THE WORLD
THAT EXISTS AROUND US. THERE, ONE
CAN BE WHO THEY LIKE AND EXPRESS
WHAT THEY LIKE—FOR A WHILE ANYWAY. AND,
IN THIS ODD COMMUNITY OF CYBER CITIZENS,
A FEW INDIVIDUALS ARE BUILT INTO STATUES OF
INTERNET GODS OF BEAUTY, WIT, AND MORALITY, ONLY
TO BE CRUSHED BY THE JUDGMENTS OF THOSE WHO BUILT
THEM IN THE FIRST PLACE. THIS MODERN PHENOMENON HAS
GIVEN RISE TO HOUSEHOLD NAMES, BOOKS, FILMS, AND EVEN AN
ECONOMY THAT FLOURISHES WHEN THE FAME BURNS BRIGHT AND
LASTS LONG AFTER IT FADES. IN MANY WAYS CHINA’S INTERNET REALM IS
UNIQUELY ISOLATED, WHICH MAKES IT AN INTERESTING PLACE TO SEE KINGS
AND QUEENS RISE, FLOURISH, AND FALL.
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Thin, V-shaped chin, huge eyes, supernaturally long eyelashes—when people e a girl with the features, they automatically reach for the phra 网红脸(w2ngh5ngli2n),
or internet celebrity face. According to the stereotype, internet celebrities share this picturesque visage, with an unpleasant assumption they have had cosmetic surgery. They’re assumed to run online stores and to have fleeting romances with pop stars and the super
rich.
Zhu Chenhui, allegedly the newest
girlfriend of Wang Sicong (王思聪)—
known for being the son of one of服务器连接
China’s richest men, Wang Jianlin (王双线路由器
健林)—is one of the newest online
procute
celebrities. She may just be the latest
in a long line of conquests, but before
the gossip exploded she had already
earned some celebrity and huge profits鱼鸥
online. Reports claim that Zhu is now
making 150 million RMB this year
with her Taobao store, more even than
China’s richest actress, the famous
Fan Bingbing, who earns around 128
million RMB a year.
But, becoming one of the lucky
few isn’t easy, and while many manage
to do it by accident, it is not an area
yet governed by any field of economic
science. In many ways, it’s like starting
any business. Y ou need to find your虫虫虫虫飞
target audience, build up a unique
personal brand, keep up constant
communication with your followers
(customers), and always remember to
update regularly. In reality, it might take
a team of experts to operate an account
to make a Weibo look sufficiently
humble and lf-run.
平实However, if one is creative enough,
they can just harness the imagination
(and vanity) of hopeful web celebs.
Hongshu (轰叔), born in 1992, gained
more than one million followers
on Weibo, and decided to start a
very creative business: lling sweet
potatoes online. But, not just any sweet
potatoes—sweet potatoes sold only
to attractive people. Even Hongshu
himlf admited this was a little
“bitchy”, but it worked. He’s a man
that knows the internet. “Good-looking
大尾巴狼
people feel superior to ugly people; but
the point is everyone tends to think of
themlves as good-looking,” Hongshu
said in a speech.
Of cour, the fastest way to success is
x appeal. Being pretty and fashionable
is probably one of the easiest ways to
become a grass-roots celebrity, giving
the young and impressionable stars
at least one skill: Photoshop. The
prevalence of this ideal has resulted in
the phra, “online beauties only exist
online” becoming cliché.
Others opt directly for plastic surgery,
risking the before-after pictures that
THE ECONOMY OF THE
INTERNET CELEB
JUST LIKE THE REAL WORLD, MONEY
MAKES THE WEB GO ROUND
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Issue 2 /2016
could, in the end, become their downfall.And, as ever, where there is fame, there is money . Any large group of people, no matter how disparate, has commercial value. Whispering a quick, short quote into Weibo shouts at millions. Song Feifei, a
marketing expert, says that marketing agencies pay the internet celebrities differently according to their number of followers, ranging from hundreds to thousands of RMB. “But they won’t necessarily accept your offer. They have to consider whether your product fits their image and whether they can manage to write some interesting content,” says Song.
To some extent, internet celebrities can turn their fame into influence and turn their influence into money .
“Not many people want to entertain the public online as a career,” says Li Shaoyong, 34, a grassroots celebrity agent working at the Beijing Gushan Cultural Company . Li ud to be a joke writer and when his fans exceeded 50,000, people started coming to him, asking to inrt their products into his jokes.
Now that he’s with the company , his major job is sifting through the growing numbers of online stars and employing them while they’re cheap.With a whole team working behind him, online celebrities are more productive and can always generate new content and timely topics that interest the public to sustain their popularity a little bit longer.
There are any number of ways to become popular on the internet if you play your cards right. If you are neither pretty nor smart enough, then go for a pet. If you have a pet which is adorable enough, you need to do nothing but post photos or short films of your cutties, then you can be popular. “Red Little Fatty” (红小
胖), for example, simply raid his pet and posted pictures of his fat little kitten that attracted more than 450,000 followers—which, by the way , is about the population of Malta. It just focus on that particular cat. More cats can equal more followers. The “Mad Cat Lover” (大爱猫咪控), an account p
osting different kinds of cats, has more 1.6 million followers. Followers mean market potential and even rve as a brilliant feedback tool. Often via lling cosmetics and clothes, the minor internet celebs are the lifestyle ideal for their casual fans. All the celebs have to do is post whatever product they’re meant to be marketing and in conds they’ll have enough comments for a PR onslaught. Of cour, with that many viewers, you don’t even need a promotion push—just post a link to your store. Data from online retail platform Taobao shows that more than 1,000 Taobao shops are run by internet celebrities. During Single’s Day on November 11, China’s biggest online shopping day , ven out of the top ten hottest women’s clothing stores were owned by people who only claim to fame was minor online celebrity . Zhang Dayi, a former model and now the owner of an online shop, has more than three million fans on China’s Sina Weibo, which is more than most major film stars. It is said that thousands of this social media “It Girl” items are sold in conds. Even what she wears in photos garners a barrage of comments asking her what brand she is wearing, as if the whole online world is a red carpet reporter. Unlike the realms of film and
music stardom, tho like Zhang are from all walks of life, from models and independent designers to
photographers and stylists. For many , it’s a short walk from internet celebrity
to an entrepreneur with their own brand and investment capital flowing into their coffers. “Since the latter half of last year, we have noticed some of the women’s clothing shops on Taobao are quite different from others. Tho shops have turned into blogs; the clothes are independently designed and money is made this way ,” director of Taobao’s clothing division, Jin Ke, said in an interview with China.
In most contexts, the word “internet celebrity” is associated with Taobao shop owners, and in a broader n, it generally refers to guerilla marketing. Obviously , the realm of internet celebrity isn’t just populated by fashion icons and beautiful schmoozers; in the age of the internet, anything can become famous, and every bit of that fame is valuable.
This strange equation of followers equaling money is perhaps a relatively new addition to the economy , though one shudders to think how someone can be taught to be an internet
celebrity . The fact remains, however, that while people casually peru their social media feeds, they are, perhaps inadvertently , inspiring a generation of would-be entrepreneurs. This odd economy is perhaps made even stranger by the fact that some become famous accidentally and others u the preten of shame to gain notoriety . In the end, it is a transaction: netizens are enter
tained by their interest, hormones, or need to shame others, and tho same celebrities u their followers to make money . That’s China’s online-celebrity economy . It would appear that this is the modern price for
conversation, one that, with time, has experienced rious inflation.- SUN JIAHUI (孙佳慧)
I l l u s t r a t I o n s b y P e n g y u e
WHEN IT COMES TO ONLINE CELEBRITY, SHAME LEADS TO FAME
WHAT A TANGLED WEB
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Probably the most notable—and certainly the most notorious—web celebrity at prent is Wang Sicong, the big-spending, big-mouthed son of the richest man in China, Dalian Wanda Group CEO Wang Jianlin.
As the heir to what is now a 32.7 billion USD fortune, the younger Wang had long been a well-known name, but it wasn’t until 2011 that he made his first big splash in the world of online gossip. In April
of that year he got into a spat on Sina Weibo when he accud Zhang Lan, owner of the high-end South Beauty restaurant chain, of lying about being clo friends with his father and accepting money from the Wanda Group for her son’s wedding. A few days later he called Zhang and her son “zhuangbi ”, a vulgar term for people that exaggerate their worth.
Though it garnered buzz at the time, this wasn’t Wang’s first spat; in January of 2011 alone he fired pointed barbs at venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee for releasing a book with an “ugly” cover and called comedian Zhao Benshan a nongmin , or peasant, for renting out a plane he’d bought. It was, however, big enough to be commented on by local media, an indicator of things to come.
As the years rolled by , Wang’s infamy grew thanks to both outlandish displays of wealth and his knack for hitting the nerves of web urs. On Valentine’s Day last year, he announced that all he needs in a Valentine date is big boobs; the fuss created led to state media organization Xinhua publishing a 1,287-word criticism claiming that Wang: “recklessly disminates vulgar information…from the worship of money to x and violence”. His father
apologized for Wang’s behavior on state television, blaming his son’s Western education for his outspoken nature.
Perhaps they hoped it would shame him into silence. If so, they were wrong: Wang reposted the article on his Weibo account, and one month later he posted a picture of him straddling his pet huskie, with the caption “I am practicing
how to fuck a dog”. Xinhua squealed that he’d, “stained the purity of the Chine” and warned others not to prai or copy him. Regardless, he continued to hit the headlines; in May he showed off two Apple watches he’d bought for his dog, and in June he got into a slanging match with actress Fan Bingbing.
Whether Wang gets off on trolling the uptight and
pompous by playing a character, or whether his Weibo feed is an honest gateway to an id unleashed is up for debate. What’s certain is that his outlandish acts have made him enormously popular. He has a following of 15 million Weibo fans, and is known as “The People’s Husband” (国民老公)—esntially , China’s most eligible bachelor.Not everyone receives such a positive respon from China’s netizens. In November 2009, pictures began to circulate online of a woman handing out flyers in Shanghai, eking a tall, handsome and rich boyfriend with a Master’s in Economics, an international outlook, and who hadn’t fathered any children. The excessive demands, coupled with th
e woman’s less-than-supermodel appearance, led to much mockery online. Choice comments from one news report, translated by the website ChinaSMACK, included: “How about first going to get plastic surgery?” and “Even if I have to spend the rest of my life with just my left and right hands I would not want this kind of garbage.”
The woman, who had claimed to be working at a Fortune 500 company , was revealed to be Luo Y ufeng (罗玉凤) a cashier at supermarket chain Carrefour (since Carrefour was 25th on the Fortune Global 500 list at the time, she was technically right). Web urs quickly dubbed her Sister Feng (凤姐), or “Sister Phoenix”, but it wasn’t until she appeared on popular Jiangsu Province talk show Renjian in January 2010 that she really hit the big time.
Luo was joined on the show by two attractive young men, whom she claimed were her boyfriend and ex-boyfriend, and made a ries of bold—some might say absurd—statements such as “No one in the last 300 years can
compare with my IQ.” The boyfriends were later revealed to be actors, but both Luo and the TV station denied hiring them.
Whatever the truth, netizens were fascinated by the
ongoing car-crash that was Sister Feng’s life. In March 2010 she announced that she would get plastic surgery , leading to a slew of cruelly photoshopped images; that September she relead a near-nude photo ries showing her, for reasons unknown, holding a stepladder. Meanwhile, she continued to make absurd pronouncements on Weibo while earning money with public appearances and TV guest spots, making boastful remarks to the jeers and humiliation of audiences—perhaps the nadir of which was an appearance on China’s Got T alent that saw her being hit with an egg.
