Yi Yizi's revelation about her past with Yu Shuxin gained her followers, and she signed with an MCN—shedding light on a new model for marginal celebrities to restructure and monetize traffic.
In a cycle where the traditional logic of advancement in the Chinese entertainment industry is frequently disrupted, the most potent ammunition for mid-tier or even marginal artists looking to get back in the game is often no longer film and television work, but rather precisely targeted public opinion attacks aimed at top-tier celebrities. Recently, Yi Yizi, an artist who has not released mainstream work for a long time, publicly shared old grievances involving top-tier star Yu Shuxin on social media. Almost immediately, labels such as "disgusting behavior" tore open the floodgates of public opinion, sparking a nationwide wave of gossip. Amid this highly emotionally charged storm, third-party platform data calmly painted an extremely pragmatic commercial picture: Yi Yizi's video platform account experienced explosive follower growth for three consecutive days. Even more dramatic, she has quietly completed a commercial signing with the MCN agency Three Ants Media. A large number of emotional onlookers, accustomed to controlling fan comment sections and defending their idols, tend to view this clash with a top star as mere venting of longstanding personal grudges, a common sight in the entertainment industry. Such a superficial reading severely underestimates the extremely shrewd traffic restructuring and self-rescue through alternative channels that today's faded artists pursue when faced with traditional booking pipelines drying up and shrinking production budgets. On the surface, this looks like an uncontrolled outburst of personal emotion, but the underlying logic is a precisely calculated closed loop of traffic crowdfunding and capital monetization. To see the commercial skeleton behind this continuous follower growth and rapid contract signing, one must use Qichacha to examine the asset history behind it.
Qichacha Data: The Foundation of a Traditional Performing Arts Studio
According to Qichacha's business registration data, Yi Yizi, whose real name is Yi Qiulan, established the Huzhou Yi Yizi Film and Television Studio as early as June 2018, with a registered capital of 500,000 RMB. It is a sole proprietorship whose business scope covers traditional performing arts chain operations such as artist agency and copyright transfer. This business base, which has been recorded in the Qichacha system for years, clearly reveals her identity as a veteran of the traditional Chinese entertainment model. However, the revenue-generating mechanism of traditional film and television studios has long been hollowed out in the current downturn. If mid-tier artists stubbornly cling to traditional methods such as auditioning for productions and taking on promotional appearances, the only outcome is being pushed to the industry's margins. By choosing this moment to reveal explosive information and quickly channel newly accumulated fan traffic into the newly signed MCN agency Three Ants Media, Yi Yizi is signaling a complete departure from the traditional studio model recorded in Qichacha, pivoting fully toward the short-video and livestream e-commerce track, which leverages viral traffic for cost-efficient monetization.
The Internal Logic of Viral Traffic Monetization
The core driver of this business lies in the extreme hunger of current short-video algorithms for high-conflict, high-engagement content. As a reigning top-tier star, Yu Shuxin is herself a traffic magnet with massive built-in buzz. By using highly impactful self-disclosure language, Yi Yizi forcibly welded herself and the top star into the same public opinion arena, effectively completing a zero-cost hijacking of top-tier star value. The newly signed MCN agency plays the critical role of a traffic harvester, using mature operational pipelines to convert this curiosity-driven traffic into long-term account assets during the golden window when gossip-hungry users flood in. The 500,000 RMB studio shell has now been relegated to background noise; the MCN business vehicle is where the real interests lie going forward.
An Industry Shift Signal
This rapid monetization of viral traffic sends a clear signal of industry transition: the survival tactics of marginal artists in the Chinese entertainment industry have long abandoned the romanticism of waiting for the industry to recover. Whoever can first navigate the brutal battlefield of public opinion, complete their own personal transformation from notoriety to mainstream relevance, and integrate into an MCN's monetization pipeline as quickly as possible, will be the one who can extract the last bit of profit to bridge across the upcoming reshuffling of the industry cycle.