Virtual Boyfriend Services Going Viral in China
Last summer, virtual boyfriend or girlfriend services were a hot topic on Chinese social media channels, particularly on Bilibili, a video platform very popular among China’s Gen Z consumers. Many upzhu (a slang term for Bilibili’s content creators) shared their experience buying a virtual boyfriend or girlfriend, recording their conversations with them, and editing it as a vlog.
These videos are garnering a ton of interest among young people. One upzhu’s virtual boyfriend video got 5.35 million views. Prior to publishing this video, the highest views any of her videos had gotten was 895k.
What exactly is a virtual boyfriend or girlfriend?
The virtual boyfriend or girlfriend is not AI, they are real people. The service is mostly available on Taobao, when you type in “小哥哥” (good-looking boys) or “小姐姐” (good-looking girls).
Virtual boyfriends or girlfriends are classified into different categories based on their voices and proficiency. After you find a Taobao store that provides this service, you contact the customer service and tell him/her what specific service you would like and s/he would send you a price list with different timing and levels of virtual boyfriends/girlfriends. Once you confirm the specific service, you either give your QQ number or WeChat number to the customer service, and you will be added by your virtual boyfriend/girlfriend.
There are two main formats, text or voice call. The service can last for half an hour, a whole day, a week or a month.
Women are the main consumer group
You may have thought that virtual girlfriends would be the most popular. I mean the success of entertainment live streaming in China relies on lonely boys who want to watch and interact with pretty live streamers. But actually when it comes to virtual boyfriends, the majority of consumers are females (80%).
The reason why this business is growing so quickly is that nowadays many people are under lots of pressure and want someone to talk to, but they don’t want to invest a lot in socializing to try and find the right person.
Many of them are feeling broken from a bad relationship and are seeking comfort or they want to use this virtual person to play around with someone else, or they just want someone to talk to.
Many of them are not confident that they can get into a good relationship and they are afraid of being hurt. These people just want sweetness and happiness, and they don’t want anything else that might cause them to be heart-broken, so they feel like it’s easier to just pay for someone to pretend to like them.
Other Virtual Services
The services are evolving and are no longer confined to virtual boyfriend or girlfriend. You can now hire someone to call to wake you up in the morning, help tell stories and help you fall asleep at night, supervise your school work, assist you to write essays, or help you to play tricks on other people.
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