Qu Jing, former vice president of Baidu, has come to an end to his turbulent remarks, but self media “Senge” has become one of the players involved.
A few days after the chaos and fermentation, there were rumors that Qu Jing took a self media operation course by “Shen Ge” a few months ago. According to the collection and dissemination of chat records, Qu Jing instructed some of the employees to further study the “Golden Sentences of Brother”. But Cange later denied it, stating that it was completely a fabrication of rumors, and whoever believed it was intellectually disabled.
However, the two did exchange their resumes as self media in person a few months ago, and Cange himself proved the authenticity of the photos. On May 10th, Shen Ge released a video response stating that Qu Jing “did indeed visit my place and did not join the community, but we had a pleasant conversation.”. According to the upstream news, Brother Shen confirmed that about three months ago, Qu Jing went to Yantai to pay 5980 yuan and attended Brother Shen’s “Tiktok Trading Foot Course” for three days.
Regardless of whether the video released by Qu Jing can be traced back to this “learning request”, the hard work she has invested in self media has been confirmed. According to Tianyancha Information, on April 24, 2024, Shenzhen Wakawaka Civilization Co., Ltd. was registered and established, with Qu Jing as the legal representative. According to the filing information, Waka Waka is an enterprise mainly dealing with Internet and related affairs.
As for Cange’s departure, this 80s generation collector’s real name is Shen Wenjun. He graduated as a fitter and sold sea cucumber on e-commerce platforms in the early days. In 2018, he entered the short video industry and incubated many internet celebrity IP accounts. After entering Tiktok in 2020, Seng became popular through shooting a series of EQ and financial quotient “learning” courses, and the “Seng cognitive circle” accelerated its realization, which also led to the so-called “Tiktok trading class”.
His label for himself is “empowering excellent companies to stop traffic”, and the videos he creates are also model entrepreneur interviews, emphasizing the importance of quickly conveying conclusions to observers. For example, in 2023, Cange interviewed Jiang Quanyuan, the founder of Jiang Xiaodian’s power bank, and the video center focused on how he achieved his goal of achieving an annual achievement of 5000 million yuan, despite not being highly regarded.
According to the data of Xindou, if it stops on May 11, 2024, the number of Tiktok fans in the cognitive circle of Senge will be 2.94 million higher.
Nowadays, “Senge Cognitive Circle” has become a large and systematic trading company.
One of Cange’s daily accounts, “Cange (Daily Account. Record Growth)”, is bound to the MCN of Yisheng Civilization. According to Tianyancha, Hangzhou Yisheng Civilization Communication Co., Ltd. was established in March 2022 with a registered resource of 500000 yuan. The legal representatives of this company, Jiang Defang and Shen Wenjun, are controlling shareholders of multiple media companies.
According to the business registration information of Tianyancha, Shen Wenjun is currently responsible for the legal representatives of 9 companies and the shareholders of 30 companies, covering areas such as sea cucumber sales and civilized dissemination. However, starting from 2022, the company will retire without shareholders, leaving only one of the aforementioned nine companies in a state of extinction.
Image source: Tianyancha
In terms of the form of trade, the realization form of Senge’s cognitive circle is the same as that of a few Tiktok Internet celebrity IP accounts – online through flow and authorization slice, offline construction training, private boards and communities, and derivative support. And this type of self media also assists or instructs those who “seek advice” to incubate short videos with personal colors, which is quite a symbol of agency management.
This is also why Qu Jing’s videos have a similar style to many controversial IP videos, with obvious template traces: the personal title and cover concept are eye-catching, and the reporting style is firm and strong. In essence, this type of video often takes the form of a real person without a mirror and being quickly spoken.
However, Seng Ge, who was dragged to the front of the stage due to Qu’s static turmoil, is just a microcosm of Tiktok’s few and more students. One of the assisting roles is that in the early years, common sense payment was popular, but after its peak declined, some KOLs turned to IP incubation under the influence of short videos. A MCN person who did not go to the academic guidance agency informed the interface that in 2021, they began to shift their business focus from incubating renowned teachers to incubating entrepreneurial IPs.
One criticism is that these incubation courses are free and expensive, but the results are difficult to quantify. A consumer who has participated in the offline training course for Senge expressed that the entire course lasted for 10 days and cost 50000 yuan. In addition, individual “financial intelligence private domain promotion courses” and “emotional intelligence courses” are priced at around 10000 yuan.
Another common sense paying celebrity of Tiktok, “Qunxiang Liu Siyi”, has recently leaked in his big house. From 2020 to now, it has spent 2 million to 2.5 million yuan to operate Douyin. At the same time, he is also monetizing through traffic communities.
But this kind of “blurred boundary” form of monetization has not achieved much, and the platform is already wary.
At the beginning of the year, Li Yichuan’s WeChat mini method of “one ship, one lesson” for selling AI courses was suspended due to compliance with the “Interim Regulations on the Management of Information Service Growth due to the Large Number of Instant Communication Objects”. In March this year, when users searched for common sense payment accounts such as “Senge”, “Li Yichuan” and “dada” in Tiktok, the platform did not show the main account. At present, when Tiktok searches for the keyword “Brother Shen”, the interface message has no choice but to directly search for the “Brother Shen cognitive circle”, but the relevant video and matrix account can both show it.
On March 25 this year, Tiktok released the Notice on the Special Management of the Development of “Thick Black Science” and “Pseudo Success Science”. Tiktok shows that some self media use ordinary people to read the physiology of rapid success, plan the essence and set up a matrix number, which will simplify, stereotype, or even “thick black” the form of success, and realize it by setting up private boards, training classes, and other forms. It reflects social anxiety and sells “antidotes”, using a large number of matrix accounts to attract users to third parties for monetization through selling courses, joining groups, and other forms. After the announcement of the regulations, some payments for common sense payment accounts were unfrozen, and there was no choice but to suspend course chain payments on the platform.
As for Qu Jing’s turmoil, in the latest video, Shen Ge claimed that he had nothing to do with him and did not believe that Qu Jingdao’s words were “successful”. However, from the perspective of platform management and user feedback, such “learner growth” accounts have bid farewell to the era of worry free growth.