Behind the 60,000 monthly salary, how long can the "edge-straddling" traffic business in scenic spots last?

A few days ago, Laojun Mountain released a recruitment notice offering a monthly salary of 60,000 yuan for a "Sea of Clouds Observer", which quickly went viral across the internet. Keywords like "dream job", "60,000 yuan monthly salary", and "hiring decision based on like counts" dominated trending searches, making the scenic area's "high-paying recruitment" a hot topic of public discussion once again.

This is not the first time the cultural tourism industry has gained popularity through unconventional positions. From NPCs and experience officers to observers, more and more scenic spots are using a single job opening to spark widespread public attention. However, after the hype fades away, where do those who took on these roles end up? As "dream jobs" appear more frequently in scenic area recruitment postings, a thought-provoking question arises: are scenic spots truly hiring employees, or are they simply leveraging gimmicks to chase viral trends?

Scenic Area Recruitment Is Becoming a Standardized Traffic-Grabbing Template

Looking back at the "high-paying recruitment" incidents in scenic areas over recent years, an interesting pattern emerges: salary figures have been skyrocketing, while the recruitment has grown increasingly marketing-focused, with its traditional employment attributes diminishing rapidly.

In the spring of 2023, the Taihang Wuzishan Scenic Area in Handan, Hebei Province, announced a recruitment for a "Sun Wukong Performer" with a monthly salary of 6,000 yuan, promoting the role as "primarily responsible for eating". It was quickly dubbed a "dream job" by internet users.

However, the scenic area's management later admitted that the role actually required far more: not only portraying Sun Wukong and interacting with visitors, but also participating in performances and live streams, and that "no suitable candidate had been found for over a year". Shortly after, Taihang Wuzishan launched another recruitment offering 5,000 yuan a month for a "Savage", with requirements including "accepting food from visitors" and "only making grunting sounds to communicate", attracting over 4,000 applicants in just four days.

Following this, this type of recruitment began to continuously "upgrade".

The Chongdugou Scenic Area in Luoyang offered 30,000 yuan a month to hire a "Modern Pan An", Shennongjia in Hubei recruited a "Savage NPC", the Xiangwang Hometown Scenic Area in Suqian, Jiangsu tied the daily pay of its "Xiang Yu NPC" directly to height, and the Fireworks Alley of Zhouzhi Water Street in Xi'an, Shaanxi even invested heavily to recruit 180 NPCs... Roles have become increasingly bizarre, salaries have grown higher, and "dream jobs" have gradually become a standard tactic for scenic spots to grab public attention.

Until recently, when Laojun Mountain announced its "60,000-yuan monthly salary for a Sea of Clouds Observer", pushing this "recruitment arms race" to a new level.

From 6,000 yuan to 60,000 yuan, the salary has surged nearly tenfold over three years. But a careful comparison of these roles reveals that the real change is not in the pay, but in the very nature of the recruitment itself.

If the Taihang Wuzishan recruitment was still a relatively traditional job, requiring formal contracts and monthly salaries, then by the time of Laojun Mountain's announcement, the "recruitment" had evolved into a full-fledged social media-focused communication campaign.

A detailed breakdown of the "Sea of Clouds Observer" rules shows that almost every step is designed around driving online traffic.

During the application phase, candidates are required to post original short videos with the scenic area's designated hashtag, turning every applicant into a content creator for Laojun Mountain. In the selection stage, video like counts are used as a key evaluation metric, pushing participants to actively share their works across multiple platforms to gain more exposure. The final selected candidate is then required to stay on the mountain for 30 consecutive days, posting at least one short video of the sea of clouds every day, continuously generating summer-themed content for the scenic area.

In other words, what the scenic area gains is not just an individual's labor, but a full month of continuous content dissemination.

"Earning 60,000 yuan a month to watch the sea of clouds" is a naturally viral topic in itself. From the release of the recruitment to media coverage and social media discussions, the scenic area completed a nationwide communication cycle with almost no additional advertising investment.

The timing of the announcement is also particularly deliberate. Every July and August, Laojun Mountain sees the highest frequency of sea of clouds formations and the best viewing conditions, coinciding with the peak summer tourism season. Launching the "Sea of Clouds Observer" role at this time not only aligns with the optimal viewing window, but also capitalizes on the summer traffic peak. It is less of a recruitment for an observer, and more of a carefully planned summer-long content marketing campaign.

However, once the hype dies down, the vast majority of these "dream jobs" never develop into long-term careers.

Last year, a former scenic area NPC shared on social media that they had signed a short-term contract, primarily responsible for interacting with visitors during holidays, filming short videos, and supporting live streams, with the position being eliminated entirely once the campaign ended.

They noted, "Many internet users think this is a dream job, but in reality, it is more like a phased marketing activity. When the hype fades, we all return to our original jobs." Some staff members even admitted directly that the "nine-grid WeChat Moments effect" of good-looking NPCs is more effective than billboards: "When visitors post their photos on social media, it brings millions of free impressions."

This statement explains the situation better than any job posting. When the core value of a role shifts to creating viral topics, a question emerges: what do scenic spots truly need, a "Sea of Clouds Observer", or a sustained viral event?

Why High-Paying Recruitment Has Become Scenic Areas' New Advertising Tactic

This type of "high-paying recruitment" is no accident. It reflects a fundamental shift in the operational logic of scenic areas.

Looking at Laojun Mountain's "Sea of Clouds Observer" recruitment in isolation, it is easy to dismiss it as a creative marketing gimmick. But when viewed across the entire scenic area industry over a longer period, it is clear that this is a choice forced by market pressures.

The Qingming Riverside Landscape Garden in Kaifeng is a typical example. Last year, the scenic area received a record 9.6 million visitors, yet its net profit declined for the third consecutive year, dropping from 285 million yuan to 212 million yuan, with its gross profit margin falling from 67.6% to 51.8%. More visitors, but shrinking profits — this is not an isolated case, but a reality many traditional scenic spots are facing.

In the past, scenic areas relied primarily on ticket sales, generating stable revenue directly from entry fees. A mountain or a unique landscape could draw a steady stream of visitors as long as it had sufficient popularity. But in recent years, this business model has been changing.

On one hand, the "ticket economy" has been steadily weakening. Scenic areas across the country have rolled out policies like free entry and half-price discounts. Before this summer vacation, over 100 scenic spots including Huangshan, Lushan, and Putuoshan launched free entry promotions for high school and middle school graduates, hoping to drive visitor numbers through price incentives. Ticket prices have dropped — for example, Huangshan's off-season ticket price fell from 190 yuan to 150 yuan — while operational, labor, and maintenance costs for scenic areas have not decreased proportionally, forcing them to look for revenue streams beyond ticket sales.

On the other hand, how visitors discover travel information has been completely transformed. Previously, travelers mostly relied on travel agencies, OTA platforms, or travel guides to decide their destinations. Today, more people make spontaneous travel plans after seeing a short video, a performance, or an interesting story on platforms like Douyin and Xiaohongshu. For scenic spots, appearing in users' social media feeds has become more important than printing beautifully designed promotional posters.

The reality is that ordinary landscapes are increasingly struggling to stand out. Glass skywalks, viral swing rides, and antique-style streets — most scenic area offerings have become highly homogeneous, making ordinary landscape videos easily lost in recommendation feeds. Furthermore, producing a full promotional video rarely sparks public discussion, and celebrity endorsement costs continue to rise.

In contrast, attention-grabbing, counterintuitive topics like "60,000-yuan monthly salary recruitment", "daily pay determined by height", and "savage NPC recruitment" are naturally viral: users are eager to share and discuss them, and platforms are more likely to push them to broader audiences.

It is in this context that "recruitment" has taken on a new function. It is no longer just a talent acquisition process, but a full-fledged content marketing campaign.

Public data shows this model delivers strong returns: between 2019 and 2023, Laojun Mountain accumulated over 14 billion video views on Douyin, with visitor numbers surging from 760,000 to 4.5 million, and total revenue last year exceeding 1.226 billion yuan, an 8-fold increase over 7 years.

From its "1-yuan lunch" campaign to the current "Sea of Clouds Observer" recruitment, event marketing is not the only factor behind Laojun Mountain's success, but it has undoubtedly helped the scenic area achieve far higher communication efficiency than traditional advertising.

There is no denying that these "dream roles" can quickly attract public attention. The value of a "high-paying recruitment" lies not just in hiring one person, but in sparking widespread discussion, gaining massive exposure, and reaching a far larger pool of potential visitors.

Can "Dream Roles" Stay Popular Forever?

In reality, more and more scenic spots have been copying this tactic in recent years: creating a highly eye-catching topic to trigger public discussion, then leveraging platform algorithms to amplify the dissemination effect. Compared to traditional advertising, this method spreads faster, costs less, and more effectively reaches younger consumer groups.

The problem is that as more scenic spots adopt the same strategy, gaining traffic becomes increasingly difficult. When the public first saw the "6,000-yuan Sun Wukong role", it felt novel. Then came the 30,000-yuan "Pan An" recruitment, followed by the 60,000-yuan Sea of Clouds Observer. The continuous rise in salaries and increasingly bizarre roles essentially reflects the growing threshold for scenic areas to grab public attention.

Today it is 60,000 yuan — will it be 100,000 yuan tomorrow? If all scenic spots keep creating "dream jobs", how long can the novelty last?

But trending on search lists is only a means, not an end — and this "traffic arms race" has already begun to distort the roles themselves.

One applicant who tried out for the "Modern Pan An" role at Chongdugou applied hoping to "monetize their good looks", but was ultimately rejected. They revealed that while the scenic area claimed requirements were only being sunny, handsome, and good at photography, the highest-weighted criteria in the actual selection process were short video traffic and topic dissemination ability. Even with a suitable appearance, they failed to make the cut because their application video did not get enough likes. The few "Pan An" candidates who were ultimately selected only worked for one month, with the role being eliminated immediately after the campaign ended.

To internet users, these are "dream jobs", but for the participants, they are more like phased marketing projects. This phenomenon highlights the inherent limitations of event marketing.

Traffic can draw visitors to a scenic area, but it cannot replace the core quality of the attraction itself. Official media has pointed out that the decline in visitor numbers at some traditional scenic areas essentially stems from the mismatch between upgraded tourism consumption demands and outdated scenic area offerings. Aged facilities, poor service quality, lack of unique core attractions, plus the contrast between high ticket prices and low-quality experiences, continuously erode visitor trust, eventually leading to market rejection.

In other words, visitors might come to the scenic area because of the "dream job" hype, but if all they find are identical landscapes, generic experiences, and forgettable content, the attention from a single trending topic will rarely translate into sustained long-term visitor numbers.

The "Xiang Yu NPC" at Suqian's Xiangwang Hometown is one of the rare cases that successfully retained the generated traffic. Instead of treating the recruitment as a one-off event, the scenic area formed a fixed performance troupe with the 5 selected actors, who conduct regular street patrols, interact with visitors, and perform storylines during holidays, turning the "Xiang Yu NPC" into a permanent highlight. Even so, the topic hype around the recruitment itself only lasted for a little over ten days, and daily visitor numbers never managed to maintain the peak levels seen during the trending period.

This means event marketing can be an entry point, but it can never be the final destination.

In contrast, the Songshan Wulingshan Wuxia City in Kaifeng took a different path. It barely relied on high-paying recruitment to create viral topics, instead investing continuously in immersive performances and wuxia IP operations. Hit content like "Matchmaker Wang Arranges Dates" and "Jianghu Parade" were not one-off marketing events, but naturally emerged from long-term operations. Its core strategy was to turn the entire scenic area into a "full-time real-life film set": with roaming performers everywhere across the site, wuxia storylines unfolding at any moment, visitors entering the scenic area can easily capture engaging content on camera, and will voluntarily share their works on short video platforms, forming sustained organic dissemination.

To put it simply, one approach is to keep manufacturing new viral topics, while the other is to continuously produce high-quality content. Both strategies can generate traffic, but the latter is more likely to build stable content output and foster lasting brand recognition.

Back to Laojun Mountain: in recent years, from the "1-yuan lunch" and "Taoist priests distributing free meals" to the current "Sea of Clouds Observer", the scenic area has proven its ability to create viral topics, and confirmed that event marketing remains effective today. But if in the future, scenic areas start competing over "who has the weirdest role, who offers the highest salary, and who creates the most bizarre topic", the traffic threshold will only keep rising, and marketing costs will continue to surge.

As more and more "dream roles" appear across the industry, the real competition is no longer about who is better at creating viral topics, but who can turn temporary hype into long-term competitive advantages.

After Laojun Mountain, there might still be "80,000-yuan observers" or "100,000-yuan experience officers" emerging. But once these salary numbers lose their novelty, what else can scenic areas use to attract visitors?

The answer never lies in job postings — it lies in every single experience the scenic area offers.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Space Explorer", written by Li Jiaru, and published with authorization from 36Kr.