The dark side of the bright celebrity stage: where does the fan money go?
A 10-meter-long advertising screen with nine smiling teenagers in blue uniforms is prominently positioned, facing every passenger entering the Beijing Guomao subway station.
Who are these nine young faces on the billboard? Why were they able to gain such exposure in this golden zone, with the daily flow of nearly 350,000 passengers?
Wang Zihan, a veteran fan based in Beijing with eight years of star-chasing experience, gave us the answer, “They are top nine trainees in this year’s hottest talent show Youth With You Season 3.”
She also mentioned that their fans have spent lots of money to make them in the top nine and pointed at the boy appearing in the center of the billboard, saying, “His fans are so cray that they have spent more than 2 million yuan to send him to the first.”
Youth With You Season 3 is a man’s group talent show launched by iQIYI, one of the most popular online video platforms. This program invites 119 trainees from different companies, and fans will finally select the top nine to debut in the group. Other talent shows in the same genre as this are Tencent's CHUANG series, Youku's We are Young.
Ms Wang participated in the whole process of voting in We are Young held by Youku last year. She said that she voted for nearly 800 lists during the contest and spent 1,500 yuan on sending idols to debut.
To vote more for her idol, she has to buy products from the show's brand sponsors and buy Youku video membership cards.
​
“It is too complicated behind this show and fan fundraising.
I have spent lots of money in vain,”
Wang Zihan
a veteran fan based in Beijing with eight years of star-chasing experience
However, it is just the beginning of star casters’ investment in idols. Apart from spending money on voting to send idols to debut, fans also need to pay for the star’s albums, concerts, magazines, etc. The market size of the fan economy will reach 100 billion yuan in China in 2020, according to the evaluation of the "2019 Idol Industry and Fan Economy White Paper" released by Owhat, a comprehensive e-commerce trading platform for fans.
Behind this vast market size and profit space, a related gray industry chain hovering at the edge of the law has also emerged. From the video platform artificial manipulating rules to induce fans to vote, fan managers blurred fund-raising account statistics, secretly peddling photobooks to earn extra money, to scalpers falsely claiming to have a source of tickets cheat fans of money, this vast market is full of money traps.
Tips: Some of the interviewees appearing in the report are not in the full name, for the protection of their personal safety, since they may be subject to cyber violence if their real names are disclosed.