'I tried to become a livestreaming star in two weeks. I failed'

Over the past two years, China's livestreaming curiosity has exploded into a multi-billion-dollar industry – and it's still just a digital infant. Keen to explore one of the most dynamic online trends in recent memory, we gave Frank Sweet two weeks to become a livestreaming star.

He failed.

‘I love your beautiful temperament,’ offers a level-two user named ‘I Will Disturb Your Home’, as I unsheathe my selfie stick on this, my first day as a Chinese livestreaming sensation. I Will Disturb Your Home is correct – my temperament is beautiful.

I’m luxuriating in the scattershot praise of over 50 viewers, all of whom are voluntarily watching me do very little at my desk. I’ve had a digital chin tuck and chisel and my irises drastically enlarged. I wear a Victorian-era virtual bonnet. My temperament is downright arresting.

I’m using Huajiao (Pepper), one of China’s more popular livestreaming platforms for both its ease of use and competitive gift exchange rate. But after roughly two hours staring down the barrel of the selfie lens, I’m realising livestreaming is perhaps not the quick-money cakewalk I’d budgeted for. It’s a grind, and performing to an invisible audience is exhausting – filling the silence is a full-time occupation.

At 5pm on my second day at the desk, I at last receive my first cash-redeemable gift. It’s a virtual doughnut, and it flashes across my screen for all of my viewers to see, before darting off to my wallet to be stored as a ‘Pepper Coin’. It’s the best social encounter a boy could ever have, and all without the antiquity and stench of being near a fleshy human. Jubilation for one. But the peaky highs of my first earnings are followed shortly after by an inversely proportional comedown, and so would begin my fiendish pursuit of the Pepper Coin dragon.

Days passed with no more Pepper Coins. Sitting in my office doing nothing, I realise I was very lucky to receive even the one Pepper Coin. With thousands of livestreamers broadcasting at any one time, the competition for Pepper Coins, it seems, is decidedly fierce, so I turn to popular app Yingkee to watch the pros turn tricks for theirs.

Scrolling hard, I pause on a young woman cut of an Elven beauty, bopping her head as she rips through a few stanzas of traditional Crosstalk verse. This forms one segment of a kind of one-woman variety show – a common livestreaming format. Building speed, her recital is backed by the type of saccharine happy hardcore you might hear in an arcade; 170, maybe 180bpm territory. It’s frenetic, terrifying and cute at the same time. It’s top-shelf content.

According to a study conducted by Talking Data, 55 percent of Chinese users, or roughly the population of the Middle East, reside in third-tier cities, and so on Saturday night I treat my provincial fans to a turn down that semi-autonomous strip of foreign indiscretion, Fangjia Hutong, to watch laowai drink beers. I net a record audience of over 250 viewers in an hour, not to mention three precious Pepper Coins. An improvement, but my celebrity deadline is approaching – it’s time to seek the counsel of a professional.

As far as Zhang Lun, CEO of ‘fame incubator’ and livestreamer agency Magic Circle (Moliquan) is concerned, flaunting the foreigner card is paramount to my blowing up. ‘Chinese people are still very interested in foreigners, you should work your foreign difference into your content’. I had a hunch we might be heading down that path, but it was a suggestion from one of Zhang’s recent signees, Guangzhou model Suki Luo that stuck. ‘If you have talent, you can gain more attention’. Translation: props.

This time, I’m armed with a pumpkin costume, a puppet, a melodica and a swan-shaped staff that lights up and plays dancing ayi fave ‘Xiao Pingguo’. I receive four Pepper Coins just ten minutes in from a user named ‘White Water Life’. Staggered, I push on for roughly an hour, squeezing every millilitre of laowai puss out of myself and onto my audience.

The puppet and I are two verses into ‘Rolling in The Deep’ when, lo and behold, my screen blows up with the prophesied bounty for which I’d laboured. There’s virtual cucumbers everywhere. It’s a buxom hoard indeed – 42 Pepper Coins full, from ‘White Water Life’ again. This time, however, he’s paired his present with a comment: ‘I’ve never seen someone with as few viewers as you’, and I rinse my hands of this new-fangled techno-sorcery, making off down the infobahn with my 52 Pepper Coins (3.64RMB) like 2017’s baddest cyberbandit.