Text | Mouyu
On the first day of Double 11, Jia Nailiang stood in the Douyin live broadcast room from 9 a.m. to late at night, selling 570 million yuan in a single day, setting a personal record in the past three years, including 150 million yuan for Estee Lauder single products and more than 200 million yuan for Helena black bandages.
But what is really worth looking at is not GMV, but another set of data: the return rate is about 3%, and the industry average is about 20%.
If consumers place orders impulsively because of Jia Nailiang’s face, the return rate will not be so low. Impulsive consumption is naturally accompanied by high returns. This is common sense in live broadcast e-commerce.
The reason why 3% is established is that when users place orders for high-end beauty products, the basis of judgment is no longer the person in front of the camera, but the price and credibility of the brand itself. The role of celebrities in the live broadcast room has changed, from someone who makes people believe to someone who helps people place orders.
570 million records this role change. The era of facial recognition is over, and professionalization has become the ticket.
Jia Nailiang wins with the system, not with face
Jia Nailiang did not come with his own system from the beginning.
In 2020, when he tested the waters as the co-host of Suning Live, the live broadcast room had the typical celebrity guest temperament, relying on curiosity to stay, the selection was light, and the scale of a single session was limited.
The turning point occurred in the category structure. In the Double 11 promotion in 2026, it was not snacks and paper towels that supported 570 million, but Estee Lauder and black bandages. High-priced beauty products raised the decision-making threshold and minimized the room for impulse consumption.
The higher the category goes, the less valuable the anchor’s performance is, and the more valuable the system’s commitment is.
The product selection team behind Jia Nailiang’s live broadcast room has reached 100 people. The products must pass three stages: trial, price comparison, and public opinion. The brand traceability can only be broadcast after the team visits the source.
Specific to the live broadcast execution end, the water spray truck is poured on the body to test the jacket, the cold storage is testing the down jacket, and the suona folk band opens the show. The underlying logic is no longer a talent show, but a compression of product performance into a visible basis for decision-making. In a single live broadcast that lasts more than 12 hours, you can’t stop talking, the rhythm can’t be interrupted, the links can’t be wrong, and there is no NG. People who scan their faces cannot do this, not because their faces are not enough, but because the system does not recognize faces, it only recognizes input.
But the problem is that the 3% return rate appears in high-end beauty specials, relying on the pre-sale of users’ minds that Estee Lauder and Helena have completed. The brand digests the most difficult part of the decision-making chain for the anchor, and the professional system only needs to complete the last step.
What’s even more subtle is that the anchor in front of the camera and the seller on the order are often not the same subject. When the Guerlain special event in 2025 caused controversy, Yaowang’s response was very clear: the products are shipped uniformly from Guerlain’s official flagship store, and the logistics are handled by the brand. The main store operator is a company owned by LVMH, and Yaowang is doing cooperation qualification verification and after-sales coordination.
What Jia Nailiang has proven is the ability to efficiently realize the potential of the brand, not the ability to create trust out of thin air. The difference between the two is precisely the part that is most easily confused in the professional narrative of stars.
The industry is switching channels
570 million, placed at the industry level in any year, is enough to show that the explosive power of celebrities to bring goods is still there.
But the water level has changed in 2026, and the most intuitive change is the direction of money and goods.
In 2023, master live broadcasts still accounted for 70% of Douyin live broadcasts. By 2024, store broadcasts accounted for 41%, surpassing the 38% of master live broadcasts for the first time. In 2025, the proportion of brand self-broadcasting will rise to 55%. In the first quarter of 2026, store broadcasting will exceed 62%, and talent broadcasting will fall below 40%.
At the same time, the proportion of GMV driven by top anchors has plummeted from 26.66% in 2022 to 10.66%, and the proportion of small and medium-sized anchors has increased to 89.34%. Darenbo has not disappeared, but it has retreated from a dominant channel to a supplementary channel, and the traffic is no longer concentrated on one face. It flows to the brand’s own live broadcast room, shelves and search.
What drives this shift is a calculation that the brand took many years to figure out.
Zhou Yan, the founder of Opelai, put it bluntly at a forum in late 2025: “The commission ratio for talent live broadcasts may be 40 points in 2024, and it will basically reach 60 points in 2025.” Brands with self-broadcasting capabilities have profit margins that are 15 to 20 percentage points higher than brands that rely solely on talent.
When commission costs double and the profit margin gap reaches double digits, Talent Broadcasting is no longer a growth lever in the brand’s books, but becomes a cost that needs to be optimized.
Blue Moon’s actions are a footnote. The proportion of Douyin masters bringing goods has dropped from over 70% to 58.67%. At the same time, it has opened about 15 self-broadcast accounts, with an average daily live broadcast of more than 16 hours. Han Shu’s transformation has been more complete. The proportion of transactions by master accounts has dropped from 43.5% in 2024 to 19.5% in early 2025. By July 2026, the contribution of masters is only 7.5%, and 83% of sales come from the brand’s own 1,086 live broadcast accounts.
The differentiation of return rates better illustrates the essential difference between the two systems than the differentiation of shares. The return rate of brand self-broadcasting is about 8%, and that of expert live broadcasting is about 35%. The 27 percentage point gap does not correspond to the level of speaking skills, but to the different scenarios in which decision-making occurs.
Transactions in Daren’s live broadcast rooms rely on emotional stimulation and time-limited mechanisms. Users may not have clear purchase intentions when entering, and the gap between ordering and returns is systematically magnified. Users of store broadcasts have often completed brand recognition and product screening, and enter the live broadcast room to confirm rather than discover.
The reason why Jia Nailiang’s 3% became news is precisely because it is an outlier in the Darenbo system. Its establishment relies on the decision-making process of the high-end beauty category itself, rather than the universal capabilities of Darenbo as a model.
The competition barriers for Daren Bo are face and words, while the barriers for Store Bo are account matrix and content assets. There is no migration channel between the two sets of barriers. When the river changes direction, no matter how fast the fish swims, they will not swim into the new river.
Darenbo is not dead, he was just demoted
Jia Nailiang used heavy asset specialization to get 570 million, but at the same time, brands were collectively crossing out a key cost item from Darenbo’s ledger.
In the first quarter of 2026, 85% of Douyin’s top 20 beauty brands are reducing their talent promotion budgets, and the contraction of leading domestic brands generally exceeds 15 percentage points. The brand’s calculation is very straightforward: Dabo’s traffic belongs to the anchor, and the brand cannot retain people; fans of store broadcasts enter the private domain pool, and repurchases are their own.
The platform has added weight to the other side of the arithmetic problem, with a store broadcast area, search priority, and subsidy tilt. With a combination of tricks, talent broadcast has changed from a must-have option to an option.
Darenbo has not been eliminated, but it is being repositioned. The proportion of talent budgets for most leading brands has dropped to less than 30%, and the transaction function of talent live broadcast rooms has been systematically weakened, and they have taken on more auxiliary roles in new product testing and marginal category distribution.
The core value of Daren has shifted from driving sales to providing content. After secondary editing, the planting videos and evaluation materials have become the raw materials for brand self-broadcasting rooms and the creative library for Qianchuan. Daren has changed from a sales channel to a content supplier. This is a downgrade of the ecological niche, not a downgrade of capabilities.
When Darenbo still accounted for 70% of the market in 2023, the single-game explosion of a top star was an acceleration in the tailwind situation. When Darenbo fell below 40% in 2026, the same 570 million became a concentration in the headwind situation: the cake is getting smaller, and the knives to cut the cake are also getting smaller, so the share of a single knife appears to be higher.
The gross profit margin of Yaowang Technology’s social e-commerce business in 2025 will be only 5.53%, and its core live broadcast e-commerce revenue will decline by 23.81% year-on-year. The net profit attributable to the parent company for the year will be a loss of 649 million yuan. The juxtaposition of Jia Nailiang’s high GMV and the organization’s structurally thin profits points to the same fact: professionalization has made celebrity anchors irreplaceable in the shrinking ecological niche, but that ecological niche itself is no longer a priority for brand budgets and platform traffic.
Jia Nailiang won the knockout round, and those who read the draft were indeed eliminated, while those who focused on asset-building systems got tickets.
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