With the two powerful tools of Web3 and AI, MEET48 has taken a unique path and become a disruptor in the entertainment industry.
Let's go back to 2007, the first year of virtual idols. A blue-haired girl from Japan emerged in the form of electronic music, and her name was Hatsune Miku. Without a physical presence or a real voice actor, in just a few years, her influence surpassed many real-life stars, becoming the pioneer of virtual idols and laying the foundation for the user-generated content (UGC) model for virtual idols.
In 2012, Hatsune Miku's total commercial revenue from various activities worldwide exceeded 6 million yuan. As her popularity and commercial value continued to rise, more virtual idols emerged globally, especially in the Asian region. Organizations such as Japan's Hololive, Nijisanji, and South Korea's PlayV and PLAVE gained attention. However, unlike Hatsune Miku, these virtual idols relied more on the platform-generated content (PGC) model, created and operated by professional teams, and achieved real-time interaction with the audience through complex technologies such as motion capture and real-time rendering.
Although these PGC virtual idols have achieved varying degrees of success, this company- and platform-led model faces increasing challenges. Firstly, high production costs are a major issue. Content creation for virtual idols often requires a large amount of resources, whether it's character modeling, motion capture, or post-rendering, all of which require substantial financial and technical support. Furthermore, the production speed of the PGC model is slow, making it difficult to meet the growing demands and diverse interests of the audience. Additionally, content produced under this model often overly relies on the company's strategic direction, lacking creativity and flexibility, making it difficult to truly establish deep interaction and emotional connection with fans.
If the virtual idol industry seems to be "trapped" in the room of the PGC model, then technologies such as AI, metaverse, and Web3 are like the "door openers" of the room, gradually bringing UGC virtual idols with more user voice back into the public eye.
The freedom to create and share virtual idol works without relying on resources from large companies makes the virtual idol ecosystem more open, inclusive, and better suited to the participation needs of current internet users. This is the "new fan economy" that new technologies such as AI, metaverse, and Web3 bring to the entertainment industry, and MEET48 is precisely such a metaverse project that integrates multiple new technologies.
MEET48: Subverting Traditional Virtual Idols
Over the past year, I have frequently attended major conferences in the Web3 industry, traveling to several cities and countries with deep Web3 cultural roots, such as Hong Kong, Dubai, Japan, and Singapore. Almost every time, I could see a very impressive project—MEET48. This metaverse virtual community, based on AI and Web3.0, is quietly changing the landscape of virtual idols.
Upon further investigation, I found that MEET48 is a metaverse virtual community based on AI and Web3.0, with a diverse UGC entertainment content ecosystem. Last month, I interviewed MEET48's COO Kai to gain a deeper understanding of this metaverse project that spans virtual idols, AI, and Web3. Read more: "MEET48's AI UGC Ecosystem: Business Insights into the New Fan Economy."
MEET48, perhaps many people are hearing this name for the first time. But when it comes to SNH48, many people are familiar, such as Ju Jingyi, who emerged as a star from this girl group. In the annual general election of SNH48 on August 3 this year, they earned a staggering 110 million yuan, and behind this amazing "money-making" power is the deep connection between fans and idols.
As an AI product, virtual idols face natural challenges in community building and cultivating fan culture. Looking back, most failed virtual idols "fell into this pit." MEET48's solution is to reference and borrow the successful model of the "48 series idols" that has been verified over the past decade: continuous interaction between the platform and fans, and an annual general election vote, allowing fans to deeply participate in the growth of idols and create a more sticky idol culture.
It must be said that this move is quite clever. It directly bypasses the trial and error in the construction of fan culture, which can be said to be a great move.
When people in the Web3 industry mention MEET48, many people's first reaction is "Oh, that metaverse project that rented a whole street in Lan Kwai Fong, Hong Kong." It seems that their activities have indeed been successful, and with such a grand promotion, they have demonstrated their ambition and strength in the field of virtual idols. In a conversation with an investor in MEET48, they also told me that MEET48 is the most star-quality project they have invested in.
MEET48 rented a whole street in Lan Kwai Fong, Hong Kong
In addition to the current on-chain voting platform, MEET48 has made more layouts in the ecological application, including the recent launch of the ecological airdrop project CoinIdols on the TON ecosystem and H5 platform, a game that is highly compatible with MEET48's culture. At the same time, MEET48's Labs has also incubated the Coin Fish project, which aims to attract fans and users of idol culture to MEET48 through multiple channels.
AI+UGC Creating a New Era of Virtual Idol Prosperity
Using AI to create content for virtual characters is the core breakthrough in overcoming the technological and market bottlenecks of virtual characters. Without high-frequency and high-quality content support, virtual characters cannot establish their unique persona and achieve large-scale dissemination. However, the high production costs limit the participation and competition in this race to only a few large capital and large companies. For example, top domestic entertainment companies like Lehuo Entertainment relied on technical support from ByteDance to create the A-SOUL girl group. In order to relaunch A-SOUL, Lehuo even spent 30 million yuan to buy the copyright of these technologies from ByteDance.
MEET48, on the other hand, relies on its self-developed multimodal large model for vertical training of virtual character music and dance performances, and has launched corresponding AI tools and MaaS editors, allowing users to easily create their own virtual characters and their performances, and even virtual group performances. This is also a manifestation of its core competitiveness.
In a previous conversation with MEET48's COO Kai, he revealed to me the astonishing scale of their music and dance large model, with an initial training data of up to 500TB of high-quality music and dance videos, a process that has been ongoing for a year. OpenAI, a leading company in the AI industry, used approximately 570GB of text data during the training of its language model GPT-3. In comparison, MEET48's 500TB of music and dance video data is nearly 1000 times the training data volume of GPT-3. Although GPT-3's dataset mainly consists of text, while MEET48's dataset covers various forms of content such as video and audio, this comparison still intuitively demonstrates the depth and breadth of MEET48's data accumulation.
Currently, there are no similar large models in the market. Based on this large model, MEET48 has developed IdolGPT, which allows users to upload their photos and generate a virtual idol based on their appearance, including male and female versions and the creation of non-human idols. Through simple text input, IdolGPT can also generate virtual idol performance content such as songs and dance moves. It is currently undergoing closed testing, with 2500 users participating.
Using existing AI technology, MEET48 is about to launch a next-generation virtual idol UGC community that will integrate virtual characters and virtual music and dance AIGC technology, combining the LLM music and dance large model and its MaaS service to create a user community that spans the Web2.0 and Web3.0 eras. This community will not only provide rich tools and resources for UGC and PGC content creators but will also open up new areas for UGA and PGA content creation.
This also means that MEET48's virtual idol UGC community will attract a large number of content creators and drive the development of a Web3.0 native virtual character and real idol nurturing system. MEET48's UGC intelligent social metaverse will become the graphical social foundation of the entire community.
Currently, the plan to build the virtual idol UGC community by MEET48 is not just talk. The prosperity of their fan UGC construction has reached a certain level of prosperity, with over 24,000 user-uploaded UGC videos and over 10 million total views of UGC videos, most of which can be attributed to real users.
A friend who has been a fan for many years once told me, "Being a fan of an idol is projecting the ideal self onto them, helping fans expand their own boundaries, and from then on, the idol becomes a part of myself, doing things I can't do." In the past, the threshold for "stepping into the spotlight" was very high, and fans could only project themselves onto idols. But now, MEET48 can use AI tools to not only allow fans to become "idol creators" and "partners" of idols but also help everyone achieve their "idol dream," compete with real idols, and enter the MEET48 metaverse together.
When we look back at the development of virtual idols, it is easy to see that this track is full of ups and downs and challenges. From the emergence of Hatsune Miku to the popularity of Luo Tianyi, and to the recent "hiatus wave" of virtual idols, the virtual idol industry has experienced a major reshuffle. Although the traditional PGC model brought temporary prosperity, it could not sustain the enthusiasm of fans and the continuous growth of the market.
Now, the virtual idol industry has returned to the UGC stage, ushering in new development opportunities. MEET48, using the decentralization of Web3 blockchain and the content generation capabilities of AI, has opened up a completely new development path for the idol industry.
WEB3 + Fan Economy: Mass Adoption New Hope
In fact, it's not just the virtual idol industry that is looking for a breakthrough; the Web3 industry also urgently needs a "killer-level" application for mass adoption.
In the Web3 industry, everyone talks about wanting to achieve Mass Adoption, but all protocols and applications in the industry inherently have a ceiling of 100,000 users. After reaching this level of real users, they face growth bottlenecks or even decline.
MEET48's ecosystem can be seen as a private domain entity, with strategic partner SNH48 Group having a fan base of over 30 million, 15% of which are global users. Assuming MEET48 converts only 1% of these real active users, it would mean occupying "half of the Web3 industry." Currently, MEET48 Dapp has 50,000 daily active users, so achieving true Mass Adoption in the next stage of Web3 is not difficult.
In the past few years, MEET48 has completed its Web3 platform and wallet, and opened up MEET48's on-chain metaverse voting channel. Fans can earn points by creating content, watching videos, and completing daily tasks, which can be exchanged for NFT voting tickets to support their favorite idols. Each NFT voting process is recorded and saved on the chain, ensuring transparency and immutability throughout the process.
From MEET48's on-chain data this year, the growth has been very rapid compared to last year. The Dapp activity page has also become the number one social ranking on DappBay, with over 3 million registered users for the "2024 GIPR2" voting event Dapp.
The traditional voting model has been completely overturned with the introduction of Web3 by MEET48. Through blockchain technology, MEET48 provides a fair and transparent Web3 voting platform. Instead of purchasing physical products, users can earn points by creating content, watching videos, and completing tasks, which can be exchanged for NFT voting tickets. Each voting process is recorded on the chain, ensuring transparency and immutability, eliminating past waste and chaos.
Furthermore, Web3 gives fans more rights and rewards. Through governance tokens and NFT mechanisms, every support action by fans is recorded on the blockchain and has the potential to generate value. While governance tokens and NFTs may be new to outsiders, the "social token economy" model is already very mature in the Web3 industry.
More importantly, MEET48 redefines the relationship between idols and fans through Web3's empowerment. Fans are not just supporters of idols but also partners in the idol's career. Through governance tokens and NFT mechanisms, every support action by fans is recorded on the blockchain, and token and NFT holders can enjoy value appreciation. This two-way interactive relationship gives fans more rights and rewards.
These votes and revenues not only create impressive results for this year's general election but also lay the foundation for future global idol elections. Therefore, in 2025, MEET48 plans to integrate SNH48 idols and hold a global idol election event in Hong Kong, further expanding the international influence of MEET48 and the entire 48 series idols, attracting fans and participants from around the world, and becoming a grand event where virtual idols and real idols compete on the same stage.
With the establishment of an office in Japan this month and the expected opening of the Korean office on October 1, MEET48 will participate in and host multiple events in the coming months to further penetrate overseas markets.
At the official opening party of WebX in Japan, jointly held with Line Next on August 27, MEET48, as the title sponsor of the event, will lead SNH48 and other well-known idols in a performance at WebX. On September 4, also in Japan, MEET48 will sponsor the SNH48 girl group's TOP16 tour in Tokyo, showcasing MEET48's expansion of its influence through these international events and further promoting its global strategy for virtual idols and Web3.
Not only in Japan, but during the Token2049 event in Singapore, MEET48 will also co-host the "Back To The Streets" large-scale AI+Web3 application side event with Hape on the evening of September 18, and will also participate as a platinum sponsor in Token2049, further demonstrating MEET48's strategic layout on a global scale and its important role in the Web3 ecosystem.
No longer just dividing the "cake" or making the "cake" bigger, MEET48 is creating a completely new "cake." With the two powerful tools of Web3 and AI, MEET48 has taken a unique path and become a disruptor in the entertainment industry.
It is believed that in the near future, countless virtual idols created by users themselves will emerge on the MEET48 platform, and the best among them will stand out as top KOL idols in the voting competition. At that time, virtual idols will perform and compete alongside real idols, truly presenting a metaverse platform created and built collaboratively by virtual and real entities.
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