Selling products through live streaming has become big business in China, with celebrities, tech founders and news anchors all trying their hand at it. And now live streamers are enlisting the help of anime idols to talk and sing beside them as they try to hawk their wares.
On May 1, Alibaba ecommerce platform Tmall introduced two of China’s most popular virtual idols to a live-streaming event and reportedly attracted 2.7 million viewers. During the session that lasted roughly an hour, idols Luo Tianyi and Yuezheng Ling were displayed next to a human live streamer, helping describe the features of products like colored contact lenses, electric cookers and body wash.
(Abacus is a unit of the South China Morning Post, which is owned by Alibaba.)
While the viewer numbers were decent, it’s not clear how many products were sold. It also pales in comparison to audience numbers influencers can attract. In a live stream last month, indebted tech personality Luo Yonghao drew in 48 million viewers and made US$15 million sales. But since the Tmall stream didn’t have a high profile influencer, it might have helped that Luo Tianyi is popular among anime fans, albeit not a household name.