Stop for 3 months, call the police first! Why did Li Ziqi go to court with this company？
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On October 25th, Sichuan Ziqi Culture Communication Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Ziqi Culture) and Liu Tongming and MCN organization Hangzhou Weinian Brand Management Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Weinian) added new filing information. The plaintiff in the first instance was Ziqi Culture, and the defendants were Hangzhou Weinian and Liu Tongming.
The update date of Li Zikai’s video still stays on July 14th this year, a content about "Well Salt". Then there was a suspension period of more than three months. During these three months, except for updating her daily routine on the Oasis App, Li Zikai’s accounts on the whole platform were all inactive. On the oasis, Li Ziqi’s behavior of going to the police and so on was directed at the only MCN institution he cooperated with-Hangzhou Weinian.
This time, the prosecution, as well as the micro-reading application for the trademark of Li Ziqi, were all rejected, and a series of related hot searches made the looming contradiction between the two directly surface.
Once, Wei Nian insisted on signing Li Ziqi and went to Sichuan from Hangzhou to promote cooperation with Li Ziqi. This story is still circulating on the Internet. So what is the reason that Li Ziqi and Wei Nian completely parted ways and even went to court?
Stop for 3 months, call the police first.
Although Li Ziqi’s video update frequency is not high, she stopped for so long, only twice in her short video production career. Last time, netizens questioned her "having a team", so she stopped for a while.
On October 22nd this year, Li Ziqi appeared in the CCTV program Interview with Lu Jian. In the interview, she mentioned her understanding of the spread of traditional culture, but she didn’t give too many answers to the capital dispute behind the stop, and only used a sentence "unwilling to be over-commercialized".
In fact, Li Ziqi himself rarely receives media interviews, mainly through his private account and short communication with netizens. Therefore, there are different opinions on the reasons for stopping. Some netizens speculate that Li Zikai’s team has left the company collectively, and some voices say that the ownership of her account does not belong to her personally. It is more likely that the account was taken away by the company.
Although Li Ziqi’s assistant denied the story that the team had run away in Weibo, Li Ziqi’s behavior of shouting and calling the police on the oasis at intervals in recent months not only did not conform to her people who were far away from the city in the video and lived quietly in the countryside, but also showed her current situation from the side.
On September 16th, a blogger wrote in Weibo that "Li Ziqi’s present situation is far worse than everyone imagined", aiming to show that Li Ziqi is not profitable in the equity structure, not only has no advantage in sharing accounts, but may even get nothing.
According to the enterprise survey data, Micro-Nian is an MCN organization, which was established on February 28th, 2013 with a registered capital of about 7.761 million yuan. The legal representative and actual controller is Liu Tongming, holding 20.44% of the shares of Micro-Nian. Although there are many online celebrity under it, it is still the traffic and popularity of the old online celebrity Liziqi who holds up most of the micro-thoughts.
From Bole Maxima to Court.
Before meeting Wei Nian, Li Ziqi’s account and all the contents were solely responsible by her personal team.
The most popular saying on the Internet is that after Li Ziqi stopped working for the first time, Liu Tongming, the boss of Wei Nian, contacted Li Ziqi. Frequent private messages made Li Ziqi think he had met a liar. Later, they talked about the business model and the trend of the big era. Liu Tongming hit the nail on the head and pointed out the current development dilemma of Li Ziqi, which deeply touched Li Ziqi. After that, Liu Tongming personally went from Hangzhou to Sichuan, where they made an appointment for a hot pot and finally reached a cooperation.
At the beginning of the cooperation, Li Ziqi was not the "top stream" on the Internet video platform, and Micro-Reading was also submerged in a number of MCN companies, and its subsidiaries did not sign a high-profile contract in online celebrity. Judging from the results, the two have achieved mutual success. Since September 2016, the two sides reached a decision that Li Ziqi focused on the production of content, while Wei Nian was responsible for marketing and promotion, the first explosion occurred in November, and the video of Lanzhou Beef Noodles was broadcast more than 50 million on the whole network, with more than 600,000 praises.
Different from the traditional ways of realizing traffic, such as advertisement implantation and goods delivery, Wei Nian and Li Ziqi successfully created a personal IP of "Li Ziqi", and jointly established Sichuan Ziqi Culture Communication Co., Ltd., relying on Li Ziqi’s IP to open a shop on Tmall, and have a good sales performance. According to the data released by Dolphin Think Tank, the sales of Liziqi brand will reach 1.6 billion yuan in 2020.
However, Li Zikai himself is not entirely the owner of this IP. According to the relevant qualification information of Tmall online store operators, the main body of the official flagship store of Liziqi Tmall is micro-reading, which has nothing to do with Liziqi himself. Some netizens also said on social media that Li Zikai’s food has nothing to do with the pastoral feeling shown in her video, so I suggest that you don’t confuse the two.
Although Li Zikai himself has never responded to questions about shares, it can be seen from Li Zikai’s content team’s long-term filming in Sichuan and Wei Nian’s behavior in a series of supply chains responsible for e-commerce in Hangzhou that the division between the two is very clear. The personnel who run the brand of Liziqi basically belong to Hangzhou Micro-reading, and this kind of full delivery has also laid the groundwork for the court proceedings between the two parties today.
The good days when Bole and Maxima enjoyed each other gradually passed. Before the dust settled in the case, the phrase "good means of capital" deleted by Li Ziqi in a second can’t help but make people feel that how to balance the content creators and the logic of commercial realization in order to achieve a win-win situation?
Online celebrity fled one after another, and the account was hidden in the snow.
Li Ziqi is just one of many cases in the interest dispute between online celebrity and MCN.
Lynne, a student who became popular in bilibili because of filming the Wuhan epidemic Vlog, signed a contract with an MCN company, which claimed that he would be given more shooting resources, but after signing the contract, he asked Lynne to take up business promotion immediately.
Lynne sent a video in bilibili, accusing the company of blood-sucking, and after the dispute, the company claimed 3 million yuan. The company immediately responded that it was a distortion of the facts. Subsequently, this video was deleted.
In July, 2020, Lynne’s bilibili account was completely broken, and the battlefield of interest disputes between him and MCN also moved to Weibo, but the tug-of-war has not yet reached a clear result.
Coincidentally, the UP owner "Xiangxiang Battle", who has tens of millions of fans in bilibili, released a video, claiming that the company had unreasonable contracts. In his description, Party A’s obligations are only six, and the company has not made any substantive actions in providing online marketing, planning assistance, etc. The so-called news received by the team WeChat group is only unhelpful daily hotspots, and it is not as professional as itself in content operation.
Shortly after "Xiangxiang Battle" asked the company for consultation, the company frozen his platform-wide account. He can only start a new stove by himself and start from scratch.
In addition, anchors who cancel or break the contract often face sky-high compensation. According to the news of Judgment Document Network, in the second trial of contract dispute between Zhang Chi and Hangzhou Zhanqi Network Technology Co., Ltd. tried by Hangzhou Intermediate People’s Court, Zhang Chi, the game anchor, conducted live broadcast activities on other third-party live broadcast platforms without the written consent of Zhanqi Company, and no longer fulfilled his contractual obligations. The court of second instance finally upheld the original judgment and ordered Zhang Chi to pay 13 million yuan as liquidated damages to Zhanqi Company.
For sky-high liquidated damages, online celebrity and MCN often hold their own words. Online celebrity thinks that MCN chose to leave because it didn’t perform the relevant business in the contract, while MCN thinks that the company invested a lot of costs in online celebrity himself in the early stage, and behind the sky-high liquidated damages, it is to prevent online celebrity from trying to stand on his own feet after obtaining traffic.
How to standardize the behavior of MCN company and how to achieve a win-win situation between online celebrity and the company is still a proposition that needs to be discussed. The reporter will continue to pay attention to the story between online celebrity and MCN.
(The original title is "Stop for 3 months, call the police first! Li Ziqi went to court with this company in Hangzhou because … "Editor Zhang Hui)
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