Chinese beauty bloggers: amateurs, entrepreneurs, and platform labour

ABSTRACT

Internet celebrities refer to people ‘that attain prominence and popularity native to the internet’. Internet celebrities rise not only on global social media platforms like Twitter and YouTube but also on their Chinese counterparts. In China, internet celebrities are known as wanghongs. While wanghong refers to a general group of people who achieve fame online, diverse subtypes of wanghongs exist, like meizhuang bozhu (beauty blogger). Chinese beauty bloggers create content about skincare and makeup with their personal accounts and attract a great number of followers. After the group started budding in the mid-2000s, the role of beauty blogger continues to bloom in the fast-growing internet industries of China. This paper examines the roles beauty bloggers play and how these roles take shape in China’s technological and economic context.

KEYWORDS:

• Beauty bloggers
• China
• internet celebrities
• platforms
• wanghong

To date, scarce attention in the field of celebrity studies has been paid to internet celebrities in the Chinese context. This article explores the ways Chinese beauty bloggers can enrich our understanding of internet celebrity studies. The data in this article is based on secondary literature and my own fieldwork from 2016 to 2018, comprising interviews with nineteen beauty bloggers and ten people in the social media and e-commerce industries.

Chinese beauty bloggers on the rise

Social media technologies afford the chance for ordinary people to brand themselves, leading to online fame which they cannot attain in the offline world (Khamis et al. 2017). Those who obtain enormous attention online become ‘internet celebrities’, of which Chinese beauty bloggers are one subgroup. Since the 1980s, there has been a cultural shift from a gender-neutral image to gender essentialism in China, together with a structural shift from a centrally-planned economy to one underpinned by free market ideology. This has led to increasing consumption of beauty products (Xu and Feiner 2007, Yang 2011, Wen 2013). Socio-economic change was accelerated by the development of web 2.0 at the beginning of the 21^st century. As a result, Chinese beauty bloggers came into being around the mid-2000s when blogs, such as NetEase Blog, Sina Blog, and OnlyLady Blog, enabled internet users to create and exchange information online. Large numbers of users joined these online communities and shared beauty knowledge and skills. Those who generated a considerable number of views were called meizhuangbozhus (beauty bloggers). Blog sites declined in the mid-2010s with the growth of other forms of social media (such as microblogging, video-sharing, and picture-sharing sites), but the term, beauty blogger, has survived. In the mid-2000s, beauty bloggers had no expectation of fame or celebrity status. In fact, they were just ordinary social media users who liked to share life experiences in their leisure time and posting new content was nothing but a hobby. A beauty blogger, Jing, who started blogging from 2007 as a public-relations manager in an advertising agency, told me that she began to blog because she had a love of makeup products (personal interview, January 2018). Posting articles through her blog was simple fun and connected her to many people who shared her hobby. Similar stories were repeated when I asked another eighteen beauty bloggers: most of them started blogging as makeup or skincare amateurs except one professional makeup artist. Their primary intention was to share beauty skills with ‘sisters’ on the internet, but their online reputations grew unexpectedly. Although the majority of blog users remained unknown, these outstanding amateurs became popular on social media.

When these beauty hobbyists became famous, their content made visible effects: it was circulated widely online and the cosmetic products they recommended sold better than before. For instance, after a popular beauty blogger, Xiaoman, recommended eyeliner pencils of a Taiwanese brand on her blog in 2010, they soon went viral on Taobao, the largest retailing website in China. Being aware of Xiaoman’s influence, many stores on Taobao used screenshots of Xiaoman’s blog to demonstrate the effects of these eyeliner pencils, which were labelled “Xiaoman tongkuan’ (same choice as Xiaoman) in the product description. Thereafter, several products recommended by Xiaoman became bestsellers and many cosmetic stores on Taobao added a new collection, Xiaoman tongkuan, to their inventories. Gradually, the reputations of beauty bloggers spread widely on social media and e-commerce platforms in China.

This influence is not limited to the online world. It stretches to the traditional media industries, including television, books, and magazines. For instance, Xiaonini, who started blogging in 2007 when she was an English teacher, quickly achieved an immense reputation on Sina Blog. She was invited to publish an autobiography in 2010 and became a guest host of several Chinese television shows from 2011 to 2013. Such opportunities were usually reserved for traditional celebrities like writers or actors, but the 2010s saw many beauty bloggers enter the realms of mainstream celebrity. Some of them, such as Xiaoman, now have more followers than traditional celebrities on social media.

Entrepreneurs in internet celebrity economy

The celebrity status of beauty bloggers boomed in China’s market economy and some beauty bloggers are now able to make a living and pursue full-time careers with their influential social media accounts.

There are two major ways of commercialising their celebrity. First, by posting advertisements for brands. Xiaoman, for example, quit her job in an internet company in 2017 and started to make a living from posting ads on her social media accounts. Second, by operating retailing stores on Taobao, an e-commerce platform owned by Alibaba. While the former is common for global internet celebrities, the latter is a way of making profits with Chinese characteristics (Marwick 2013, Abidin 2015).

The rise of beauty bloggers has coincided with the rapid growth of e-commerce platforms in China, especially Taobao, which launched in 2003 and grew quickly. In order to beat its competitor eBay, Taobao offered free services to small sellers, which largely lowered the bar of running e-commerce business (Zhang 2017). For Chinese beauty bloggers, selling beauty products on Taobao is an accessible way to cash in their influence and reach numerable consumers. The high-profile beauty blogger, Zhang Mofan, is a notable example. Being creative and productive on social media has brought her a considerable fan base. However, this does not bring her income directly. In order to monetise her online fame, she recommends certain products in her micro-blog and sells these products to followers via her e-commerce stores on Taobao and Tmall (another retailing site owned by Alibaba), converting followers into customers. In 2017 alone, the sales of her e-commerce stores (selling cosmetics and skincare products) reached 150 million RMB (Xiong 2018). She claimed that 65 percent of the traffic to her e-stores was from Weibo, where she establishes her reputation as a beauty guru. The press reported many similar stories in the mid-2010s: different types of internet celebrities making huge profits by combining online fame and e-commerce business (Ye and You 2016, Jinrongjie 2017, Peng 2017). A new Chinese term was coined to describe the economic boom in this context: wanghong jingji (internet celebrity economy) (Ye and You 2016). In this atmosphere, beauty bloggers, as well as other internet celebrities, turn into entrepreneurs in the wave of internet celebrity economy.

However, beauty bloggers are not the only ones to leverage these possibilities. Their content-to-retailing business, de facto, brings Alibaba considerable users and huge benefits. After witnessing the influence of internet celebrities on social media, Alibaba invested in Weibo, one of the most popular social media in China, in 2013, and strategically integrated e-commerce and social media through internet celebrities. Following Alibaba, other major internet companies, like NetEase and Tencent, developed channels to combine social media and e-commerce.

Chinese beauty bloggers are not completely different from their Western counterparts: both gain reputations on user-generated content (UGC) platforms, rely on consumer culture, monetise their reputations, and mainly target women (García-Rapp 2016, Bishop 2018, Hou 2018, Bishop 2019). However, there can be different actors driving in the backgrounds. In China, the e-commerce industry is a major driving force behind beauty bloggers, which may be caused by the enormous impact and prominent role of e-commerce giants, especially Alibaba. In 2019 China had 854 million internet users (CNNIC 2019), of which 755 million were active on Alibaba’s retailing platforms (Ma 2019). Because of Alibaba’s dominance, many beauty bloggers choose to monetise their reputations through these platforms: a mutually beneficial relationship. After investing in social media in the early 2010s, Alibaba has recently started to run livestreaming directly within its own platform Taobao. In 2018, beauty blogger Li Jiaqi had generated GMV 3.53 million RMB on Taobao Liverstream in 5.5 hours (GlobalTimes 2018). It illustrates that the e-commerce platforms in China proactively participate in and promote the rise of beauty bloggers, which is rarely seen in the studies of western beauty gurus. In this sense, the entrepreneurship of Chinese beauty bloggers does not only come from individual aspirations but also comes from the intentional boost of e-commerce platforms.

Beauty bloggers as platform labour

Crystal Abidin notes that Chinese internet celebrities arise from specific cultural and platformed contexts: ‘Unlike the connotations of being a ‘content creator’ in the Anglocentric parts of the world, a wanghong is premised on the acute ability to covert internet viewer traffic to money, relying less on content production than the ability to hold an audience’s attention visually’ (Abidin 2018, p. 3). While this interpretation might work for certain examples of wanghongs, it is less applicable to Chinese beauty bloggers for whom content production and attention attraction are always inseparable. Their primary task is content production on social media: they create makeup tutorials and cosmetic product reviews in the forms of videos, articles, pictures, and livestreaming, giving their audiences information and emotional experiences. As Abidin points out, wanghongs win their celebrity status ‘within the vast ecology of Chinese users’ (Abidin 2018, p. 3). The vast ecology of Chinese users brings both opportunities and challenges: it provides a mass base of audience; at the same time, it also provides fierce competition between internet celebrities. Xiaojia, a beauty blogger with 180,000 followers on Weibo by December 2018, worried that her content might not attract audiences as many as before in the increasingly competitive environment (personal interview, December 2018).

Algorithms provide another great challenge for beauty bloggers. For example, my interviews revealed that beauty bloggers found that the number of views of their posts on Weibo dropped dramatically after 2014. They claimed that this was caused by Weibo’s surveillance algorithm, which blocked their posts and made their posts less visible. If they wanted to reach their followers on Weibo, they needed to pay Weibo for its algorithmic preference. In this way, Weibo can reap revenues from internet celebrities. An informant who had worked for Weibo said: ‘People who make money on Weibo need to share their profits with Weibo … … Weibo doesn’t watch every user. Mainly, we care about head users.’ (personal interview, August 2018) ‘Head users’ are accounts generating over 100,000 views monthly on Weibo and many beauty bloggers are head users (Nie 2018). The algorithms and rules set by Weibo bring a precarious environment for beauty bloggers to attract attention and pursue careers. In general, Weibo deploys a simple and crude approach: when Weibo cannot share beauty bloggers’ revenues from e-commerce stores or posting advertisements, it still can harvest revenues from internet celebrities with its technological advantages. Unlike YouTube, where content producers can get paid for their content based on views, there is no similar mechanism on Weibo. As such, it is difficult for Chinese beauty bloggers to be self-sufficient, and they are compelled to turn to e-commerce platforms for profits. The difference in the social media environment also distinguishes Chinese beauty bloggers from their western counterparts.

Like Alibaba, UGC platforms like Weibo encourage the development of internet celebrities as well. In June 2017, Weibo held a ‘super internet celebrity festival’ in Shanghai and gave awards to influential internet celebrities within its platform (Chaojihongrenjie 2017). Zhang Mofan, the aforementioned beauty blogger, was awarded ‘the most commercially valuable influencer’ on the basis of the number of views, the commercial revenues, and follower activity. As this example illustrates, Weibo therefore pays attention to both the user activities they stimulate and the revenues they make, because Weibo benefits from both. Hence, such festivals and awards aimed at boosting the activities of internet celebrities serve Weibo’s interests. In August 2017, Cao Zenghui, Weibo’s vice president, stated that the company’s rise came mainly from wanghongs, especially wanghongs ‘in the fields of clothing and beauty’ (Hundundaxue 2017). As such, the centrality of wanghongs to its business model is clear. More importantly, Weibo does not hire beauty bloggers, so it does not pay for their work. Rather, as we have seen, beauty bloggers need to pay Weibo. Beauty bloggers are therefore not only internet celebrities but also non-employed workers.

In this sense, beauty bloggers are comparable with drivers on Uber and Didi (Rosenblat and Stark 2016, Chen 2018a). They are platform workers who contribute service and profits to platforms without being hired like traditional employees. All of them are managed through algorithms and rules set by platform owners. However, there are also notable differences between beauty bloggers and drivers of Uber or Didi. For instance, when beauty bloggers could commercialise the attention they attract and make huge profits, drivers have no attention to commercialise.

Conclusion

In 2017, over three million Chinese people, including bloggers, vloggers, and livestreamers, had established careers on social media, leading to the increasing impact of internet celebrities in China (Chen 2018b). The examination of Chinese beauty bloggers provides us snapshots of the expanding internet celebrity economy in China and adds a de-westernised perspective to the global studies of internet celebrity. As the present article has shown, the roles of entrepreneur and platform labour seem contradictory but are actually closely connected to each other, in that it is the underpaid status on social media that increases the entrepreneurship of beauty bloggers on e-commerce platforms and sustains their careers of being beauty bloggers. Behind the e-commerce platforms and social media, there can be the same interest group, like Alibaba, shaping the roles of beauty bloggers and making profits out of them.

While the existing literature on western influencers pays attention to individual endeavours, like ‘aspirational labour’ or ‘visibility labour’, this article shifts attention to the media eco-system where beauty influencers operate by locating them in a technological and economic context of China (Abidin 2016, Duffy 2016). Individual efforts also play an important role in the growth of Chinese internet celebrities, but are not the only driving force. The rapid expansion of Chinese internet celebrities like beauty bloggers would be understood better if we put it in a broader context of China’s fast-growing internet industries. The population of the Chinese internet celebrity industry is likely to surpass three million in the near future, but the complex relationships between technology, entrepreneurship, and labour in the Chinese internet celebrity economy remain underexplored. Further research would be advised to explore the subjectivity of internet celebrities and the changing dynamics among various stakeholders in digital capitalism.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zexu Guan

Zexu Guan is a PhD candidate at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on how the internet celebrity economy is intertwined with gender norms, platform mechanisms, and non-Internet industries in contemporary China.