按：直播有多火？《经济学人》2月刊的一篇文章告诉我们中国的直播狂热已经深入三线城市和偏远农村地区。读完本文，你将了解到直播在中国的发展历史、日趋流行的现状以及面临的挑战和机遇。值得思考的是：和直播的未来一样，很多行业都将在大数据时代发生变革，留给普通草根的机会将越来越少了，你所在行业的未来在哪里？（文末有福利）

图片来自网络

Life is but a stream

生活仅仅是视频流

A new way of bringing colour to dreary lives
给沉闷的生活带来色彩的新方法

1. LAST YEAR ZHAO XINLONG, aged 25, and his wife and baby boy moved from his parents’ farm into a mid-rise apartment in town. It has been a tough adjustment. Luan County is a rustbelt community on the polluted outskirts of the steel city of Tangshan in northeast China. Mr Zhao’s monthly income from driving a taxi has plummeted by more than half in the past couple of years, and he has not found it easy to make friends in his new abode.

plummet: to suddenly and quickly decrease in value or amount = plunge
e.g. Profits plummeted from £49 million to £11 million.
e.g. House prices have plummeted down.

1）去年25岁的赵新龙带着他的妻子和出生不久的儿子从父母的农场搬到城里的中层公寓。这是一个艰难的转变。栾县是中国东北唐山钢铁城被污染的郊区中一个工业没落的社区。赵先生每月开出租车收入在过去几年里已经暴跌了一半以上，他还发现在他的新居所结交朋友很难。

2. But when he gets online in the evening, he becomes a different person: Zhao Long’er, an entertainer. Using Kuaishou, a Chinese video-sharing and live-streaming app, he broadcasts to a live audience of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of fellow Chinese every night. Taken together, they add up to more than 100,000. Many of them are diaosi, people who mockingly identify themselves as losers in dead-end jobs. Online he can relate to them, telling them stories, dirty jokes, whatever is on his mind.
   2）但是当他晚上上网时，他变成了另一个人：赵龙儿，一个艺人。使用一个中国的视频分享和现场直播应用程序快手，他每天晚上向数百，甚至数千的中国人的现场直播。全部加起来，观看人数超过100,000人。他们中的许多人都是屌丝，这些人嘲弄自己为做着没前途工作的失败者。他可以与他们在线上联系，给他们讲故事、黄色笑话。或者他想到的任何事。

3. Occasionally advertisers pay him small sums to put commercials out over his stream, including things like weight-loss products and “gold” jewellery from Vietnam. Most of his followers are also from north-east China. They chat with him online and sometimes give him digital stickers representing things like a beer that fans buy online and can be converted into cash. The individual amounts are usually small, but they add up. Live-streaming his life earns Mr Zhao about 850 dollars a month, twice as much as his day job.
   3）偶尔，广告商花费小笔钱将广告投放在他的直播中，其中包括减肥产品和来自越南的“黄金”珠宝。他的大多数粉丝也来自中国东北。他们和他在网上聊天，有时送他数字贴纸，代表着粉丝在线买的啤酒等物品，可以转换成现金。个人给的数量通常很少，但它们积少成多。直播他的生活让他每月能赚850美元，这是他白天工作收入的两倍。

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Twinkle, twinkle, little stars

4. The internet has amplified people’s interest in the world’s biggest stars, helping their fans feel a little closer to them, thanks to social media. But it has also made it possible for anybody to become a little star in their own corner of the universe, connecting intimately with subsets of fans. In much of the rest of the world the most popular of these are teen idols on YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat. Most people over 25 would struggle to name a YouTube star other than possibly PewDiePie, a Swedish gamer with a global following of more than 50m.
   4）感谢社交媒体，互联网增强了人们对世界上顶级明星的兴趣，帮助他们的粉丝感觉更接近他们。但它也使任何人都可能成为大千世界他们自己角落里的一个小明星，与一小组粉丝密切联系。在世界上其他地方，最受欢迎的是在YouTube，Instagram和Snapchat的青少年偶像。大多数25岁以上的人很难叫出一个YouTube明星的名字，可能除了PewDiePie，一个瑞典游戏玩家，全球粉丝超过5千万。

5. China’s craze for personal live-streaming runs far deeper, into third-tier cities and remote rural areas where the internet is the one and only fun and cheap place to hang out. These personal broadcasts are not simply videos that fans watch, but more interactive experiences. The fans make requests, chat with their idols and give them virtual gifts. Many of those watching are small-time live-streamers themselves. They are turning each other into mass entertainment.

small-time: If you refer to workers or businesses as small-time, you think they are not very important because their work is limited in extent or not very successful. ≠ big-time
e.g. a small-time actor.

5）中国个人直播的狂热进一步深入，进入三线城市和偏远的农村地区，在那里互联网是唯一好玩且便宜的去处。这些个人直播不仅仅是粉丝观看的视频，更多的是互动体验。粉丝提出请求，与他们的偶像聊天，给他们虚拟礼物。许多观看的人自己也是无足轻重的直播者。他们正在把对方变成大众娱乐。

6. It is a big and growing business. China’s live-streaming industry more than doubled in size last year, with revenues of around $3bn, according to Credit Suisse, a bank. More than 100 companies now offer the service, providing the platform for performers in exchange for a hefty cut of their earnings (one, YY, is publicly listed on NASDAQ, with 269m dollars in gross revenues from live-streaming in the third quarter of last year, a year-on-year rise of more than 50%). That compares with box-office receipts for the Chinese film business, the world’s second-largest, of $7bn last year. Of the 710m people with internet connections in China, nearly half have used live-streaming apps.

hefty: means large in size, weight, or amount. (INFORMAL)
e.g. She was quite a hefty woman...
e.g. If he is found guilty he faces a hefty fine.

6）这是一个巨大且不断增长的生意。根据瑞士信贷银行的数据，去年中国的直播产业增长了一倍多，收入约为30亿美元。超过100家公司现在提供直播服务，为表演者提供了一个平台，以换取从他们的收入中大笔抽成（YY是其中一家在纳斯达克上市的公司，在第三季度的直播收入总计2.69亿美元，比去年同期增长超过50％）。相比之下，去年全球第二大的中国电影业票房收入为70亿美元。在中国7.1亿的互联网用户中，近一半人用过直播app。

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7. Many in the audience are diaosi looking for free entertainment and sometimes a substitute for romance. Women outnumber men as live-streamers, but most of the audiences are male. The government has imposed guidelines aimed mostly at the seamier side of the business, like the erotic eating of bananas (now banned). The most successful live-streamers tend to be attractive young singers of either sex, who can sometimes muster millions of fans. The most popular of them earn more than 1m dollars a year, almost all of it from virtual gifts, but most of them are lucky to see a few hundred dollars a month, broadcasting anything from eating meals to visual pranks to warbling tunes requested by fans. Mr Zhao laments that to boost his earnings, he has to tell more dirty jokes.

seamy: involving unpleasant things such as crime, violence, or immorality
e..g the seamy side of the World Wide Web
muster: gather or bring together = assemble, summon (up)
e.g. muster (up) the courage/confidence/energy etc to do sth
e.g. Finally I mustered up the courage to ask her out.
e.g. Senator Newbolt has been trying to muster support for his proposals.

7）许多观众是寻找免费娱乐，有时寻找浪漫爱情替代品的屌丝。主播中女性人数超过男性，但大多数观众是男性。政府已经制定了主要针对禁止直播平台丑恶一面的政策，比如色情地吃香蕉（现在被禁止）。最成功的主播往往是有吸引力的年轻歌手，无论男女，有时可以聚集数百万粉丝。其中最受欢迎的人可以每年赚超过100万美元，几乎所有的收入都是来自虚拟礼物，但他们中大多数能够每月收入几百美元就算幸运了，他们应粉丝要求直播任何事情，从吃饭到闹剧短片到浅吟低唱。赵先生担心，为了提高他的收入，他必须讲更多的黄色笑话。

8. Live-streaming emerged in China after the financial crisis of 2007-08, as internet companies with questionable business models looked for a way to survive. Six Rooms, or 6.cn, may have been the first to offer live-streaming as a service for a mass audience. It was one of numerous YouTube-like video-sharing businesses (YouTube itself is blocked in China) burning money in 2008 and failed to secure a new round of funding. In desperation its CEO and co-founder, Liu Yan, turned to live-streaming.
   8）直播是在2007-08年的金融危机之后在中国出现的，因为商业模式有问题的互联网公司试图寻求一种生存方式。 六间房（6.cn）可能是第一家为大众观众提供直播服务的公司。它是众多类似YouTube的视频分享网站之一（YouTube本身在中国被封锁），2008年烧完钱后无法获得新一轮融资。在绝望中，其首席执行官和联合创始人刘岩转向直播。

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9. In 2007 Mercedes-Benz, a carmaker, had paid 300,000 yuan (39,000 dollars) to his site to live-stream an event, and his company had developed an inexpensive way to provide such a service on a wider scale to allow people to chat with each other and exchange virtual gifts. That helped make personal broadcasting a social game which could be monetised in a way not replicated on major social platforms of the West. In China, as well as in South Korea and Japan, where live-streaming has also caught on, virtual items have long had an underlying monetary value.

catch on: If something catches on, it becomes popular.
e.g. The idea has been around for ages without catching on.

9）2007年，一家汽车制造商梅赛德斯-奔驰（Mercedes-Benz）向他的网站支付了30万元人民币（39000美元）来现场直播一个活动，他的公司开发了一种廉价的方式来提供这种服务，允许人们聊天并互相交换虚拟礼物。这有助于使个人广播成为一种社交游戏，可以以一种西方国家主要社交平台上无法复制的方式货币化。在中国，以及在直播已经变得流行的韩国和日本，虚拟物品长期以来具有潜在的货币价值。

10. Now that the business model has been proven, all the Chinese internet giants have entered the live-streaming business. Pioneers like YY and Six Rooms must compete with bigger social platforms like Tencent. Six Rooms was acquired by a Chinese entertainment conglomerate for close to $400m in 2015, but Mr Liu, 44, remains the CEO. He has been using machine learning to work out what kinds of live-streamers inspire the most devotion from fans and get the most virtual gifts, down to preferences for facial features, tone of voice and regional provenance. He plans to unveil an even more ambitious effort soon: hired performers whose traits are determined, and perhaps enhanced, by machine learning. At this rate, life on the long tail of entertainment may start getting more difficult for rustbelt dreamers.

now that: because of something or as a result of something
e.g. Now that we know each other a little better, we get along fine.
e.g. I'm going to relax now the school year is over.
e.g. Now you're settled, why don't you take up some serious study?
down to: including everything or everyone, even the smallest thing or the least important person
e.g. Everyone uses the cafeteria, from the managing director down to the office boy.
e.g. The plans were all complete down to the last detail.

10）既然业务模式已经被证明（有效），所有的中国互联网巨头都进入了直播领域。像YY和六间房这样的先行者必须与像腾讯这样的更大的社交平台竞争。六个房间在2015年以接近4亿美元被一家中国娱乐集团收购，但44岁的刘先生仍然是首席执行官。他一直在使用机器学习来找出什么样的主播能够激发粉丝最多的热爱以及获得最多的虚拟礼物，（无所不包）细微到对面部特征，语调和区域出处的偏好。他计划很快进行一个更加雄心勃勃的尝试：雇用那些其特征是由机器学习决定、甚至加强的表演者。以这个速度，在娱乐长尾上的生活对于那些工业没落地区的梦想家们来说会变得更加艰难。

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读完后请思考如何用英语表达：
暴跌
直播
屌丝
积少成多
无足轻重的
大笔抽成
去年同期
丑恶的一面
鼓起勇气
变得流行
小到……无所不包

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有奖问答：能够找到答案的小伙伴请留言，我将从中挑出一位获奖小伙伴，送出一本我的个人藏书——中信出版社出版的《异类》（非新书，但基本跟全新的一样）。这是一本世界级的畅销书，著名的“一万小时定律”就是因为此书为世人所知。这本书的中英文版我都反复读过很多遍，推荐给爱学习的你。

赠书——异类

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原文出处：经济学人杂志

译者：七呵夫

本译文仅供个人研习、欣赏语言之用，谢绝任何转载及用于任何商业用途。本译文所涉法律后果均由本人承担。本人同意简书平台在接获有关著作权人的通知后，删除文章。