The art of attracting attention: a process model of Chinese toubu vloggers’ strategies to create online identities and self-brands

ABSTRACT

Since 2018, toubu vloggers – a term that refers to the vloggers who earn the majority of traffic and attention through vlogging their daily lives on Chinese social media – remain a limited quantity in the emerging and rapidly growing Chinese vlogging market. This article aims to explore the performative identity strategies developed by Chinese toubu vloggers to attract attention and stand out from the multitude of vloggers on social media platforms. A case study was conducted with a qualitative content analysis of 73 vlog posts published on the user-generated video platform Bilibili from May 2017 to August 2019, by four Chinese toubu vloggers: Nihaozhuzi, Jyhachi, Cbvivi and Mashasha. This study revealed four personae constructing strategies applied by toubu vloggers to grow and retain their online audience, including anti-standardised originality, negative affect authenticity, ungraspable intimacy and frank commodification. Further, the study offers an explanation of how these strategies contributed to their success by defying the highly standardised and institutionalised Chinese wanghong industry that is characterised by perfection of self-presentation and blurred commodification. These strategies illustrate the agentic and subversive potential that vlogging practices can hold in a highly hermetic cultural environment.

KEYWORDS:

• Vlogs
• self-branding
• attention labour
• chinese microcelebrity
• identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In China, ‘toubu’ is initially used to refer to the ‘head’ in the long tail curve of asymmetric distribution about attention and traffic acquired by online content production.

2. This entry is widely popular on Chinese social media and magazines (Luo 2019, Fannymi 2019), though it was criticised by Ouyang Nana herself in an interview with Luo (2019) in ELLE.

3. The Chinese government set up a policy agenda named ‘Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation’ to boost creative industry with grass-rooted users’ creativity and innovation (Lin and de Kloet 2019); and the market is marked with a 20% increase rate of wanghongs on Chinese internet (CBNData 2019). MCNs control an industrial chain to produce content, cultivate wanghongs and monetise them with connected platforms (CBNData 2019).

4. See details on the Bilibili regulation of commercial promotion on the link: https://www.bilibili.com/blackboard/help.html#/?qid=9504ba21c13343df931d8c88201d7f66.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Xiaoxian Wang

Xiaoxian Wang is a PhD student at the Department of Communication Sciences of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). She is researcher of the unit on Journalism, Trust and Participation within the Media and Society research programme of imec-SMIT (Studies on Media, Innovation and Technology). Her research focuses on exploring vlogging culture, self-branding, identity construction, microcelebrity culture and platform economy.

Ike Picone

Dr. Ike Picone is Associate Professor at the Department of Communication Sciences of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and heads the unit on Journalism, Trust and Participation within the Media and Society research programme of imec-SMIT. He is particularly interested in disruptions on the crossroad of journalism, technological innovations and democracy.