Executive Summary
China’s influencer factories
Tik Tok's impact on the Book Industry
College Athletes Cash In as Generations of Rules Fade Under Pressure
How China’s influencer factories mint live streamers to feed China’s billion-dollar e-commerce industry
From the outside, Xinhe United Creation Park in the outskirts of Hangzhou, China's e-commerce capital, appears to be any other business park.
The signs adorning the building facades give an indication as to what is going on within. “Time is money,” “You are unique,” “Nothing can replace you,” “Yesterday is history, good luck,” and “Full of hope” are just a few of the phrases designed to inspire those who come to learn one thing: how to become the next big thing in China's fast-growing live-streaming sector.
Xinhe, one of several similar hubs springing up around China, became a Mecca for live-streaming hopefuls after producing some of the country's top influencers, including Viya, China's live-streaming diva with over 80 million followers on Alibaba's Taobao.
Student athletes' admission into a previously forbidden market is projected to bring in millions of dollars and reshape the economic structure of collegiate athletics. It's also fraught with difficulties, such as ambiguous commercial values, business pitches with caveats and different quality, and potential team mismatches. Above and beyond the individual deals, a larger puzzle is forming: how to integrate athletics with education, young adulthood, and, now, business.
Many of America's college athletes have been planning in locker rooms and group texts, in residences and over meals, about how to seize opportunities that were unthinkable when schools recruited them only a few years ago. Players have already been speculating on trademarks and teasing gear lines.
However, the idea of athletes receiving money still worries many CEOs, who are concerned about colleges losing marketing dollars. They've concerned about shady boosters breaking the rules and introducing new pay-to-play methods, and they've feared that recruiting and, ultimately, competitions could be jeopardized.
BookTok has had a significant impact on the publishing industry, assisting young authors in launching their careers and propelling novels like Silvera's to the top of bestseller lists years after their initial release. Some of the other books that have found popularity on BookTok years after their initial release include Madeline Miller's "The Song of Achilles," E. Lockhart's "We Were Liars," and Taylor Jenkins Reid's "The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo," all of which were published before BookTok began to dominate the industry.
Barnes & Noble, for example, has taken use of BookTok's popularity to sell popular titles on the app to buyers by developing specialist shelves dedicated to viral books. Shannon DeVito, director of books at Barnes & Noble, said, "We're spotting these patterns as major opportunities." “So [Barnes & Noble store managers] say, 'Let's make a table, let's make a shelf, let's make a statement,' because I know I have a lot of consumers coming in saying, 'I saw this trending on TikTok.'
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