• Interviewee #1, Wang, 21 years old, Male, 300k followers

Wang has been earning his own money since he graduated from high school and is currently on a break from university. He has worked as a salesman for Shiseido and as a front desk consultant for a plastic surgery hospital. Two years ago, in his spare time at work, he started posting videos about the cosmetic surgery industry, which became an accidental hit. He continued to keep up with the updates for the rest of his life, and slowly his account was seen by cosmetics brand owners who approached him to promote their products. He blended the expertise he had learnt at work into his videos, recommending cosmetics and skincare products to people.

But balancing advertising content with daily content has been a problem that wang has been overcoming. The platform’s algorithm recommends video content with a high number of interactions and a high completion rate to more users. And Wang’s highly-played content trolls the plastic surgery industry and expresses LGBT views mainly. There are two problems with this. First, the traffic generated by content trolling the beauty industry does not directly translate into traffic interested in beauty products. This is because people watch his videos in the hope that they can hear more sharp reviews. Yet promoting a product requires expressing one’s love for it. When viewers see a series of words from someone who is supposed to criticise a product, they will think that the blogger is not real enough, which will result in a lower number of views and interactions than other videos, which is not good for the overall advertising revenue of the account.

The second point is that LGBT topics are extremely heavily censored on Chinese social media. If such topics are discussed in a straightforward manner, the censors will limit the traffic of the content. As a result, Wang sometimes creates great content that cannot be widely distributed.

But Wang has never given up on making content in the LGBT space. Today his content takes the form of combining LGBT-related topics and make-up together. Using some of his own invented words and phrases to circumvent the censorship from the platform. This also means that Wang is under a lot more pressure than regular creators. The platform’s audits, the demands of merchants, the expectations of data and the responsibility to his fans often make him feel anxious. Recommending products to fans means making them trust him, and this trust often makes him feel psychologically burdened about his income.

Wang says his anxiety and procrastination make him often put off posting videos. But at the end of the day, he pushes himself and gets it done. But sometimes, he pays the price for his procrastination. Because advertisers and he would book slots, the creator’s video content all had to be reviewed in advance before it was released. If the review is delayed, sometimes this can be resolved by changing the release date. However, sometimes the merchant will not accept a change of date. This is because there is a time frame for the promotion of each product. When a merchant runs out of budget, or doesn’t have enough product revenue, don’t stop promoting. And when the launch slot is missed and no revenue is generated, Wang has no other way to vent his anger than to troll on social media.

• Interviewee #2, Li, 23 years old, Female, 280K followers

Li is a girl who graduated last year. Her original plan was to study at home after university to prepare for her postgraduate entrance exams. But her job in self-publishing has slowly made her give up on this decision. After all, there are now 4.51 million students taking the graduate exams in China, but only 1.1 million actually get accepted. Preparing for postgraduate exams is a risky business that does not pay off in time to see the benefits.

Conversely, however, Li’s income from self-publishing jobs can be quite substantial. In China, before 2012 was the era of text-based social media, dominated by various forums such as Tianya Forum and Baidu Post. With the spread of 4G networks, the era of pictures and videos has gradually evolved. Li has been sharing her make-up tips and product swatches on social media since she was a freshman. Since 2020, Li has been experimenting with videos to record her make-up sharing. Thanks to her skilful make-up techniques, high-definition picture quality and logical and clear explanation style, she has gained many fans who trust her. She spends her spare time after school to shoot make-up videos. Her make-up style is not all about fashionable make-up, but rather blends her views on feminism and her own interpretation of current social hotspots into the video content. This is why her account is very popular with highly educated women with high spending power. Her single ad service offer is also much higher than that of bloggers with the same amount of followers.

However, as a quality content creator whose views are good at outputting opinions, Li still gets bothered by her productivity. She used to think she was a very self-disciplined person who felt she could organise her time between studying for graduate exams and working on her self-publishing. In reality, she slowly found that her self-publishing work took up most of her life time. Double-checking and revising scripted content with businesses consumes a lot of communication costs. As she is the one serving the content, she needs to meet the brand’s requirements as much as possible. Sometimes a shot has to be shot three or four times.

Filming not only takes up Li’s time, but also her energy. After a long day at work, it was difficult for her to devote herself to her studies.

In the summer of 2020, she gave up her exams and decided to devote herself to content creation. However, her life did not become as easy as she thought it would. Losing the one study goal of graduate school, she bet her life on working in self-publishing. She cares more than ever about the number of views and likes a video gets. Her sense of crisis has also never been higher. At first she worked all day and night like an office worker, but gradually she began to stay up late working and living the opposite life of an ordinary person. The traffic assigned to her by the platform dominated her life, and everything she did revolved around whether she could bring more attention to herself. Many people may not understand why we-media creators care so much about traffic, but the reality is that the income of we-media creators is strongly correlated with traffic. Traffic determines the kind of life a we-creators can lead.

• Interviewee #3, Zhang, 22 years old, Male, 450K followers

zhang talks a lot about his self-publishing work. He is a very action-oriented person. He is currently producing an interview show. In each episode he goes to chat with other bloggers and discusses some interesting things he has come across while doing self-publishing. He says he enjoys the pace of his life now, although his traffic may not be as good as before he did the interview. But he feels that he is trying to think outside the box of traffic, to do what he wants to do, to do what he feels is meaningful, and that makes him feel happier in life.

But Zhang admits that his life is very different from the one in the video. In the video he is a happy and sunny boy, but in reality he is addicted to games and he smokes and drinks. He says he plays games with his workmates all day and then delays work until the early hours of the morning.

He feels he has passed the period when he would feel anxious because of bad video numbers. He has been working in self-publishing for almost four years. He’s done daily content shared by couples, he’s done funny episodes, he’s done interview shows, he says his traffic is one half less than it was in previous years, but he feels that being in self-publishing is about accepting these changes. You can’t let the job dictate your emotions, he says.

Zhang has also done live entertainment broadcasts in addition to his ad services. Live entertainment broadcasters make money through viewers’ rewards. When an anchor’s live stream is engaging enough, the average retention time of viewers is high, and the platform uses an algorithm to recommend live streams with high viewer retention time to more users. zhang’s live stream was once the number one most popular in sichuan province. He says that doing live streaming is more exhausting than shooting videos. Sometimes it’s 12 hours of work at once, and at the end of the live broadcast not only do you not want to do any other work, but you even want to say a word. The popularity of live streaming sometimes has nothing to do with effort, looks, personality and talent can all be factors that attract people, and many of these factors can’t be learned through later in life. zhang has many friends who are also fellow live streamers, and he says that sometimes your previously unpopular friends can explode overnight, and you can’t predict these. You can’t predict these things. It’s better to be jealous of other people’s success than to accept the reality.