What's fishy about fan fundraising ?
By Sunny SUN
The words "orange building" and "go to feed" are everywhere in the discussion group titled "Youth with you 3" on Weibo, with links to jump to third-party platforms for payment.
“These are the code words for fundraising in the fan circle to avoid the platform-sensitive word screening. ‘Orange’ means fundraising, as they have the same pinyin abbreviation in Chinese,” Amy said.
She has ten years of experience as a groupie and has been in charge of celebrity fan support groups, including organizing fan fundraising, voting, and publicity. She said that fund-raising is a prevalent thing in the fan circle, “Voting for idols, buying products endorsed by celebrities, and supporting them offline all need money,” she added.
To help idols raise this financial support, stars’ fan groups usually act as the initiators of the fan fundraising on Weibo. Stars’ fans groups are generally made up of fans who are more experienced in supporting stars, and they may keep in touch with the star's studio or company. So they are somehow equivalent to a sounding board for stars and ordinary fans.
“We also have a lot of strategies when organizing fan fundraising to stimulate regular fans to invest more money,” Wang Zihan said, who once organized a fan fund-raising event.
She said that there are many types of fund-raising activities in the general fan circle, including daily fund-raising links with a long timeline, short-term fund-raising sprints, or limited-time battles with other fans.
“Generally, the limited-time fund-raising activities will also be carried out to ‘plant the flag’ and ‘pull the flag’ activities,” she added.
“We will hold different types of flag-planting activities at different times of the fund-raising period so that every money can be used to its maximum effect,” Ms Wang said.
According to her experience, in the first half of fundraising, a flag-planting activity that counts participation rate will be organized. It will generally be lured by adding a large number of chips to stimulate ordinary fans to participate. But when the fundraising is about to end, a small amount of flag-planting activities will be organized to drain the last bit of money from the fans.
In addition to holding such events, some people will publish small essays full of passion or sympathy in the discussion group so that fans can empathize and invest more money for idols.
“When I saw phrases like ‘you can exchange your idol’s ten years of less bloodshed with a cup of milk tea,’ I will be touched and put my money into the support group,” Liu Susu said.
However, the money collected from fans in the name of supporting idols by fan associations is not regulated and transparent, and there has been a gray area.
Amy encountered cases of being scammed during the early period of supporting idols. In 2016, she purchased albums that allowed her to vote for Mayu in AKB48's general election from Mayu's fan post-bar, “Because the album was only sold in Japan, all Chinese fans have to raise money to her fan post-bar to let it help buy albums.”
But after the AKB48 general election results were announced, Mayu’s fans found the owner of the post-bar had embezzled 1.7 million yuan and did not buy the album to vote for Mayu following the fans' wishes. It also made Mayu miss out on first place that year.
“Our fans’ money has not been recovered because the post-bar owner is in Taiwan. So our fans were joking that he use that money to buy a ‘Seaview room,’” she said.
And later, "sea view house" was also used by other fans to satirize the fan support groups or individual embezzlement of fan fundraising behavior. Last year, Jin Zihan's fan support group was questioned by her fans for buying a “sea view house” and under-voted by 650,000 votes.
“When the fan support group discloses its accounts to the fans, it sometimes misrepresents the price of buying voting accounts,” Amy said. “For example, the fan support group buy the voting accounts for 5 yuan, but they will write 10 yuan for expenses in the financial statement so that they can make 5 yuan profit. This is how Jin Zihan's fan support group does.”
She also said that this kind of blurring of money spending in financial disclosure statements is pervasive in many fan support clubs.
Source: LIU Yuxin fan support club; @惠子_silent from Weibo
Liu Yuxin Fan Support Association launched a fan fundraising campaign on Owhat platform to
organize offline music festival support and received 7882 yuan.
“Flag-planting” activity
“Flag-planting” activities are generally initiated by fans with relatively strong financial capabilities. This activity means that when the amount of funds raised or the number of participants reaches a particular target, some wealthy fans will continue to add additional funds to the fund-raising link.
“Flag-drawing” activity
The “flag-drawing” event means that other fans complete the indicators set by the event initiator within the specified time and successfully allow the event initiator to add additional money.
Liu Xiening Fan Support Association was questioned by fans to modify the numbers on the screenshot of the transfer using PS since the number "2" and the "1" next to it are clearly inconsistent in clarity.
source: Douban; Liu Xiening Fan support club
Source: Zhao Yue fan support club
“Because the price of many voting accounts for talent contests fluctuates over time, but the average fans don't know the exact price of these accounts when the fan support clubs purchase them. Fan support clubs can easily falsify,” she added.
In September 2020, Zhao Yue's fan support group issued an apology letter to fans for not helping Zhao Yue successfully move from the Weibo Rising Star list to the Mainland list. But it drew abuse and accusations from more casual fans since they had raised 3 million yuan in this campaign, while Zhao Yue’s competitors, who did not have so many funds raised by their fans at the same time, were successful.
As part of Zhao Yue's fan support group, Wendy Wei explained that the final defeat was due to a temporary change in the rules of the Weibo platforms and that other competitors received additional financial support from their agencies compared to Zhao Yue.
“Her competitors have the financial support of the company behind them, while we only have the financial help of our fans. So it looks like Zhao Yue's competitors spent less money from their fans to achieve success,” she said.
Ms Wei pointed out that another reason is that some expenses cannot be shown to fans, so fans feel that the accounts in the financial statements do not reconcile with the amount of money raised by them.
( These two charts show the expenditure summary of Zhao Yue's fan club during the competition. Source: Zhao Yue's fan club financial report)
“Because some of the expenses are used to buy retweets, comments, and likes of the idol's Weibo posts. But these actions were producing false traffic, which was illegal, so this part of the expenditure cannot be disclosed to ordinary fans,” she added.
However, she also admitted that the financial statistics of the fan support group are very loose and only need screenshots of electronic transfer record for checking.
“The financial staff of the fan support club will not check whether the screenshots of electronic transfers provided by everyone are fraudulent,” Ms Wei said. “And they also have a certain degree of operation space when calculating the expenditure.”
Therefore, she said she would not participate in fund-raising activities by other idol’s fan support groups even if she also liked the idols.