Who Decides How Long a Traffic Star Lasts?

Individual traffic stars may be short-lived, but the traffic-star phenomenon endures.

2018 saw the first changing of the guard among China's traffic stars.

Around 2014, Lu Han, Wu Yifan, Yang Yang and Li Yifeng were crowned the mainland's four great traffic idols. But over the past year, the film and TV projects they appeared in — dramas and movies alike — did poorly on reviews and on box office or ratings, and at the very least showed nothing like the commercial value their traffic promised.

Meanwhile, traffic stars keep rolling off the line. Zhu Yilong and Bai Yu shot to fame through the web series Guardian; Deng Lun, Luo Yunxi and Yang Zi reached a wider audience through Ashes of Love; and Cai Xukun, who debuted in the center position on Idol Producer, has become the hottest traffic star of the moment. On Weibo's Star Power List he has held the top spot for 10 straight months since May 2018 — and the person who held it before him was, of all people, Lu Han.

If fan enthusiasm is the yardstick, perhaps one conclusion follows: over the past four years, China's entertainment industry has watched its first generation of traffic stars rise fast and fall just as fast. Their careers look drastically shorter. Compared with the actresses dubbed the "Four Dan and Two Bing" twenty years ago — Zhao Wei, Zhou Xun, Zhang Ziyi, Xu Jinglei, Li Bingbing and Fan Bingbing — traffic stars are unlikely to get a career that long. They look more like the fast-moving consumer goods of an entertainment age.

In our earlier piece, Who Exactly Manufactures Traffic Stars?, we argued that the old "star — media — public" model of transmission has been replaced, in the internet era, by a "star — fans — public and media" model. The internet's advantage in sheer numbers has been transplanted into the value system of stardom: by whatever means, as long as fans generate enough noise (and usually keep it going long enough), a person can become a "star."

Around the year 2000, fans were nothing more than passive recipients, waiting for a star's film or TV work to come out, while the star simply followed a career plan, meeting directors and producers to find the right parts. The bond between fans and stars was not especially tight. Today the two are close to bound together. Fans raise the star; the star draws value out of the fans.

Fans of Produce 101 have all accepted this logic by now. They treat the traffic they generate as an investment. Li Yanfei spent several thousand yuan on the first EP by Rocket Girls. She believed the sales figure itself would prove one particular member's value to Tencent, Wajijiwa and the other companies running Rocket Girls, and would tilt more resources toward that member later on. "I recognize how important she is, so I threw money at it."

What Li Yanfei said points to a fact: fans understand that the point of generating traffic is not to prove to bystanders how great their idol is. Very few fans think that way. At most, they'd count it as quite an achievement if the effort happened to win over some casual onlookers along the way.

Fans generate traffic to prove their idol's value to the people paying the bills, and so help the idol land better opportunities and resources. Here, those payers are the talent agencies and the brands. As shows like Produce 101 and Idol Producer demonstrate, fans have to prove their own value to those payers first, before they can get their idol better resources.

A closed loop has already formed among fans, idols, brands and agencies. Fans use traffic to prove an idol's commercial value; brands and agencies, going by that traffic, put advertising budgets and film and TV resources into the idol. In return, fans buy the products the idol endorses and supply the ratings for the idol's shows, and that spending ends up back in the hands of the brands and the agencies.

This traffic-centered business model is almost nothing like the traditional entertainment star's. A traditional star's career turns on the industry circle. A traffic star's turns on that circle and on everything outside it — and in some ways the outside matters more. Without noise, nothing else exists. Their lifespan depends on whether they can keep fan enthusiasm burning for the long haul.

One way to keep the heat up is to pull in a steady supply of new fans. Unfortunately that is genuinely hard, because one of the traps a traffic star falls into is that they "peak the day they debut."

Fans generate traffic on the internet, and what defines that mechanism is that it can carry one person's noise across the entire online sphere in very little time, manufacturing viral-hit-grade traffic stars. Cai Xukun through Idol Producer, and Zhu Yilong and Bai Yu through Guardian, all became top-tier traffic stars in a little over a month — all products of the same mechanism.

The flip side of harvesting fans that quickly is a phenomenon easy to overlook: the people who have not become fans fall roughly into two groups. One group is indifferent to entertainment and was never going to sign up. The other has heard of the star, or knows something about them, and still hasn't been won over — which means they were essentially never going to be that star's audience either.

By the time Idol Producer and Guardian became hits, they had brought almost everyone within reach of their influence. Whoever was going to be pulled in was pulled in, and whoever wasn't is unlikely ever to be. Under those conditions, a traffic star's ceiling shows itself, unmistakably, the instant they become a traffic star.

There is, of course, a second method: get the existing fans to manufacture fresh traffic for you, over and over.

Li Yanfei once ran vote-boosting campaigns for her idol for a while. For a month, she spent three or four hours a day farming votes for her fan group. The mechanical work wore her down and made her question the point of it. Yuan Ting, who once did anti-smear work for Fan Chengcheng, found her own efforts dull and pointless after a little over a month. She has since become a hands-off, take-it-as-it-comes kind of fan — she'll tap "like" if she happens across something relevant, but she no longer farms traffic.

Fan circles have a name for this: "fan abuse." The trigger might be bad news about the star, or the agency rolling out products fans consider unreasonable in order to squeeze more value out of the star, leaving fans feeling their idol has been treated unfairly. After the abuse, some fans, out of something like Stockholm syndrome or the self-satisfaction of sacrificing for an idol, become more diehard than ever. But far more of them simply walk away.

At the very least, you have to stop fans from walking away. That attrition looks unavoidable. Preferring the new to the old is human nature, and the entertainment industry runs on a lag besides: once one formula works, more people set out to copy it, so the same aesthetic floods the market and audiences tire of it fast.

In 2014, the pairing of Li Yifeng and Chen Weiting became widely known through the TV drama Swords of Legends. Playing to the country's growing fujoshi culture, Li Yifeng and Chen Weiting became first-tier traffic idols of their day. Two years later, the web series Addicted, adapted from the danmei novel 《你丫上瘾了》 (Are You Addicted?), set off another frenzy when it aired, and its two leads, Huang Jingyu and Xu Weizhou, secured a place for themselves in the industry as a result. Then in 2018, Guardian skirted the censorship line with "socialist brotherly love" and made Zhu Yilong and Bai Yu overnight stars.

Fans quit one star's fandom and fall down another star's rabbit hole, and in this drift from star to star they manufacture one traffic star's peak and trough after another.

Everyone, in fact, knows these methods for keeping a traffic star alive, but the knowledge is just talk. Given how fast traffic stars are replaced, the methods that sustain them and the methods that make money off them form a perfect paradox. The upshot: everyone knows a traffic star won't last long, so the aim becomes extracting the maximum commercial value in whatever time there is.

While being won over, a fan is to a large extent a consumer. Whether it's a variety show like Idol Producer or a web series like Guardian, all they have to do is lie back and watch to get their happiness.

Once a traffic star becomes a traffic star, though, the fans become the thing to be squeezed. Brands that hire the star as a spokesperson want fans to buy the endorsed products; agencies that pay to put out albums and throw birthday parties want fans to buy in and show support; and the production companies that cast the traffic star as a lead want fans to convert into ratings and view counts. The fans, for their part, busy themselves with chart-boosting campaigns of every kind so their idol can climb higher.

From this moment on, fans and traffic stars are in an exchange relationship. Just as fans see their traffic-farming as an investment, they are no longer merely consumers: they have to contribute value of their own, including the time and energy poured into farming traffic and the money spent on albums and endorsed products. In return, the idol has to give back affection and things like film and TV work.

An exchange relationship usually rests on roughly equal give and take, the way every shopper wants their money's worth. If an idol takes too much from fans, the odds of fans quitting rise sharply. And the problem facing every traffic star is that in a business model built on traffic, the taking always outweighs the giving back.

After an overnight breakthrough, the resources a traffic star gets most of are brand partnerships and endorsements. Fans, wanting to support their idol, are willing to spend. But even though the star's ads end up plastered across every street and alley as a result, for most fans that amounts to nothing they can actually hold.

Film and TV work pays fans back better than commercial deals do. But the production cycle is longer (even if it has been sped up by various means), and release comes with plenty of uncertainty. After Guardian, Bai Yu went a long stretch with no new film or TV work, and his popularity fell far more steeply than Zhu Yilong's.

Even when a project does come out, it may not meet fans' expectations. For fans who started following these actors because of Guardian, part of the emotional investment came from the show's rendering of socialist brotherly love — and with state controls tightening and the actors weighing their own prospects, the chance of seeing them in that genre again is slim.

As fans see it, everything they do is investment in the idol and love for the idol, plus various kinds of self-projection. Commercializing too fast, and a star persona fixed too rigidly, make it hard to hold off the moment when fans tire of the whole thing. Fans grow and change; the stars they love often don't change with them.

2018 saw the decline of the first generation of traffic stars precisely because all these problems came due at once. Lu Han appeared in three films in 2015 and three more in 2016, then had nothing to show for the two years after that. The web series he starred in, Fighter of the Destiny, already drew a flat response in 2017, and Sweet Combat was just the continuation of that trend. Likewise, Wu Yifan, Li Yifeng and Yang Yang appeared in only a limited number of projects over the past two years. As fan enthusiasm cooled, the commercial value built on their traffic fell far below what it had been at the peak.

Traffic stars won't disappear over this, though. They fit the internet and they fit commerce.

The biggest difference between the internet era and the television era is that the internet breaks linear time and, with it, any single voice's monopoly. The outfits that manufacture traffic stars are still professional operations, but they are no longer bound by "prime time," and they don't have to please everyone at once. Even the traffic stars themselves stand a chance of being noticed, as long as they find the right position. The internet is a shelf without edges, and entertainment products are bound to keep being stacked on it — traffic stars are simply a by-product of this fast-food entertainment.

New products keep coming, but the core of an entertainment product is always much the same. Whether it's TV drama, film or books, Hollywood or mainland China, a product with mass entertainment appeal works because it plays to mass emotion. Youth campus dramas stayed hot all the way from 2014's Fleet of Time to 2017's A Love So Beautiful (do you still remember 《十八岁的天空》, or even the earlier 《十六岁的花季》? They're really the same thing) for the same reason a new crop of 16-year-old boys and girls arrives every year: youth is an eternal subject.

The most classic core of all is, of course, the Mary Sue. In 2015's The Journey of Flower, Huo Jianhua's "devoted old cadre" persona lodged itself in the public mind, and in 2018's Ashes of Love the character Deng Lun played likewise never wavered in his love for the female lead. The Mary Sue is an old story frame with staying power. Traffic stars did not make the Mary Sue; the (successful) Mary Sue made the traffic stars.

The core doesn't change, but the internet has sped everything up. Over a few years, the types of star in favor may rise and fall, and individual traffic stars may be short-lived, but the traffic-star phenomenon endures.

Traffic stars were never the protagonist. The internet, and people's desires, were.

Cover image / Produce 101

Graphics / Zheng Shuya