On January 13th, it was confirmed by Interface News to multiple sources that Douyu issued an email on January 12th announcing internal organizational structure and personnel adjustments.
The email content shows that Douyu will establish a new Content Ecology Department internally, responsible for producing anchor content, collaborating with manufacturers, and building the competition ecosystem. It will be led by Ren Simin, a member of the Temporary Management Committee and Vice President of the company. At the same time, there are three secondary departments, namely the Anchor Operations Department, the Manufacturer Project Department, and the Event Content Department.
The original author service department has been adjusted to the content product department, responsible for content side events, manufacturer and anchor related needs, as well as creator operation services, creative tools, value evaluation, etc., with Lv Lifeng in charge and reporting to Chen Zhe. There are four secondary departments under it, namely the Competition Product Department, Manufacturer Product Department, Anchor Product Department, and Algorithm Research Department.
The platform product department is led by Zhang Chao, which is mainly responsible for external advertising and on-site contracting, iteration of basic products, community products, group products, and traffic distribution strategies, virtual resource review and configuration, etc.
The revenue business unit responsible for platform revenue products, activities, major customer service, guild management, entertainment content, and other businesses is under the responsibility of Jia Xiaobin, with two secondary departments: the union management department and the entertainment content department. The original brand department, public relations department, and content review department have all been transferred to the public affairs department of the service center.
Interface News has sought confirmation from Douyu regarding the above news, and as of the time of publication, there has been no response.
It is worth noting that this Douyu has made adjustments to the organizational structure of core businesses such as anchor operations and internal events, no longer following the logic of zoning and sub projects, but integrating resources uniformly.
Some internal employees believe that the integration will be beneficial for the company to conduct an overall evaluation and maintain strategic consistency. "Previously, it was split into different departments, and everyone had their own KPIs, which inevitably led to problems during the process. Now, this overall work will be easier to do." said the employee.
At the same time, starting to integrate internal resources can also be seen as a signal of Douyu's transformation. A person close to Douyu told Interface News that from this organizational restructuring, in addition to integrating resources, the establishment of anchor product departments and manufacturer product departments within the product department has also conveyed a signal of the product department shifting towards a service-oriented approach.
"Previously, there may have been an emphasis on creating an esports gaming community, but later on, it could be a live streaming platform serving game developers and a large MCN organization," said the aforementioned person.
In the strategic transformation formulated by its old rival Huya, a major direction is to shift towards providing more game related services, promoting commercialization through game distribution, game prop sales, and game advertising. Similar to Huya, Douyu also faces the dual bottleneck of active users and revenue growth, and choosing to switch to game related services is also reasonable.
The total net income of Douyu in the third quarter of 2023 was RMB 1.3592 billion, compared to RMB 1.7983 billion in the same period of 2022, a year-on-year decrease of 24.42%; The average monthly active mobile users decreased from 57.1 million in the same period of 2022 to 51.7 million, which is much lower than Huya's 86 million in the same period; The quarterly average number of paying users decreased from 5.6 million in the same period of 2022 to 3.9 million.
Previously, Interface News had published an article detailing Douyu's efforts to promote the "live streaming+video+community" three in one strategy, but now it seems that the results have been unsatisfactory.
Controlling costs has been the main tone of Douyu's financial reports over the past year. The sharing expenses and content costs have maintained a significant year-on-year decline trend for multiple quarters, which has also affected Douyu's net profit in the third quarter of the year, which was RMB 76.4 million, compared to a net loss of RMB 6.6 million in the same period last year.
But achieving profitability does not necessarily mean the crisis is resolved.
Tiktok and Kwai have already begun to layout their own live game business. After Chen Shaojie was arrested on suspicion of opening a casino, Doukuai's live broadcast team soon threw olive branches to many head fighting anchors with the words of "cherishing feathers".
In terms of specific business competition, Tencent Mobile Game "Glory of the King" announced that it will be fully opened in Tiktok Live from January 21. This means that the conflict between Tencent and ByteDance in live game broadcasting has begun to ease. After the upstream Tencent game copyright is loosened on the Tiktok platform, the survival space of Douyu will be further compressed.
In the current era where game live streaming is no longer a high traffic hub, shifting the focus from communities to games and taking a step back may be a way for Douyu to maintain market competitiveness.