I’ve been on the BIGO Live platform since 2019 and I’ve seen a lot of changes in the four years, but one of the biggest changes I’ve seen has also been one of the most detrimental to the growth of the platform. When I first joined in July of 2019, there were only a limited number of agencies in the US region. I don’t know how many agency partners there were for sure, but I suspect there were well under 50 agencies at the time. In fact, back then, not everybody could become a host. People who didn’t have “the look” or couldn’t perform some kind of talent were turned away from becoming official broadcasters. It wasn’t even widely discussed that being an official host was even an option for most people. It just simply wasn’t talked about openly.
Fast forward to today and there are over 300 agencies on the BIGO Live platform in the US and Canadian regions. This data comes from a breach of privacy when BIGO sent out a mass email to its agency partners, exposing the email addresses of all of the other agency partners in the community. We also know that there were over 34,000 active hosts in the US/CA region, as of July 2021. This increased number of broadcasters is a direct relationship to the number of agencies combined with the minimum number of hosts each agency is required to bring into the ecosystem.
Where do these new hosts come from?
Often times the agency leaders have a fleet of recruiters who seek out non-hosts on the platform and turn them into hosts in exchange for a commission of the revenue. This creates a vulture system where anybody who comes to the platform who is not already a host, gets bombarded with requests to become a host. It also turns people who came to the app to meet new people or support their favorite broadcasters, and takes those gifting beans out of the pool.
This hurts our economy and creates a dilemma where there are too many hosts and not enough supporters. This has created an environment where organic beans are largely scarce, and many of the hosts will rely on trading beans for profit in order to reach their monthly targets. This can be an effective strategy to making money, but without organic gifters it makes things very much more difficult.
How Can We Solve The Problem?
The first thing we can do, is to lower the PK reward percentage to make it mathematically impractical to trade beans. This will cause talentless and non engaging broadcasters to no longer be official hosts because they no longer will benefit from the current beans trading system. With less broadcasters in the market, the viewers will have fewer broadcasts to go to, and are likely to find the broadcasts where high quality content is being delivered.
The next thing we can do is offer incentives to the agencies who bring new users to the platform who DO NOT become official hosts. For example, if an agency recruits a user to the app using the OneLink, and they do not become official hosts for 60 days, then the agency could be entitled to some kind of compensation for brining non-host users to our community.
Another option is to use the OneLink to lock new users to certain agencies so that new users on the platform can not audition for any agency besides the one who’s OneLink they signed up through. This will cause the in-app recruiting to die off, and hopefully keep some of the gifters in the market as supporters instead of hosts. It also means that agencies will have to find creative ways to bring new users from outside of BIGO Live.
If you are interested in becoming a non-host gifter on the BIGO Live platform, visit cody80.com/download and try the app out today. Then when one of the vultures invites you to become a host, you can tell them that you already signed up with Cody80’s OneLink and that you can’t join their agency.
