Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

China Literature is undoubtedly the number one player on the Internet.

At present, China Literature Group, through many years of continuous capital injection and acquisition, has established a complex empire in the online world, and well-known online writing platforms such as the starting point Chinese network, Chuangshi Chinese network, Xiaoxiang Academy, tea Tianxiang and so on are under its command.

The reason why the city-states can come together, in addition to the power of capital, comes more from China Literature's realization logic and his IP incubation ability.

However, with the continuous development of the online race track, the challenger of the empire began to emerge, and under the agitation of the challenger, the online environment is also changing. In the new competitive context, although China Literature has built barriers by relying on many high-quality IP, with the film and television, games and other industries stepping into the cold winter one after another, China Literature's city wall is shaking.

The struggling online article empire in the early days of the Chinese Internet, the realization of online articles is a major logic of the rise of China Literature.

On the one hand, at that time, the domestic online article industry did not get through, and most of the authors only "generated electricity with love" and did not regard it as a career-even the authors with absolute heads at present were not immune from the problem of food and clothing in their early years.

For this reason, in that barren era, the VIP paid reading system became the author's savior as soon as it was launched, while the later fan reward function made the author bid farewell to the struggle on the line of subsistence.

However, in terms of willingness to pay, the Chinese Internet at that time was not yet "civilized". Whether it is film and television, music, or games, reading, users seem to be free, superimposing the rampant piracy problem, even if the cash path is found, the road ahead of the online text platform is still difficult. Today, there are still small platform authors who break because of piracy, and scattered pirated works or PDF collections are scattered in various communities and online discs from time to time.

Therefore, even though the online text platform can find a way out through a simple copy of the cash path, if there is a lack of anti-piracy ability, the so-called way out will soon be blocked. In other words, the online writing platforms under China Literature are actually close to the "Big Brother" and regard the more powerful China Literature as a "protective umbrella".

And China Literature also lived up to the expectations of his "little brothers". In the face of the evolving "book pirates", from uniting resources from various parties to downloading pirated websites and links, to setting up an "authentic alliance" and to building an anti-theft system, China Literature's anti-piracy measures are also constantly upgrading. Although this smoke-free war is far from coming to an end, the Internet is much cleaner than when pirated resources were flying in the past.

However, even if China Literature can slow down the pace of "book thieves", it can not stop users' demand for "free" itself. When China Literature finally incorporated the various platforms and was preparing to enjoy the fruits of victory, another group of people had secretly deployed troops.

This is precisely the free online article represented by rice reading, tomato novel, and seven cat novel. Unlike China Literature's profit logic of free trial + paying for unlocking, the profit point of free online article lies in advertising, that is, users can read the complete novel for free. Of course, you must also finish reading the advertisements brought during the period.

Compared with the paid reading, which emphasizes the stickiness of users and the economy of fans, free reading is undoubtedly more able to catch light online readers. In other words, even if the individual value of users is low under the free logic, they can quickly accumulate the advantage of scale and "trade quantity for price".

Looking through the list of monthly active users of each reading App, free reading products firmly occupy the forefront, while China Literature's platform not only ranks low, but also gradually loses users. According to China Literature's 2022 semi-annual report, it lost more than 1 million paying users in one year, with the online reading business down nearly 10% from the same period last year.

In other words, China Literature has been focusing on the payment path that can unite the empire and the field of anti-piracy, while neglecting to read the elephants in this room for free.

Perhaps aware of the potential crisis and in line with the logic of joining if you can't beat it, China Literature has gradually tried out the free reading model on his platform since 2021, focusing on user growth. And players who are talking about free reading, in the face of the pressure of the advertising business, have also introduced paid VIP one after another, and at one point, the declining rice reading even spread the news that it would be transferred to China Literature-- the two kinds of logic of payment and free, inevitably moving towards integration.

The content of ecological evolution of online articles has always been the core of the field of online articles.

For paying players, high-quality content can increase users' willingness to pay, and a small amount of high-quality IP has a lot of room for cash; and free players also need a steady stream of content to increase the scale of traffic. The aforementioned rice reading, which carries the banner of free reading, is the decline of the author after a series of rectification and reform.

In the succession of online articles, the author, as a content producer, also bid farewell to the so-called golden age.

As we all know, online articles are different from serious literature, and one of its logic is to provide "refreshing food" to please readers. Therefore, online writing generally does not have high requirements for writing, and it is not necessary to follow strict literary dogmas, as long as the works can attract readers and keep reading them, it can be called success.

In addition, as an open industry, the threshold for authors is relatively low. It is understood that a considerable number of online writers only regard it as a part-time job, relying on a cavity of blood and novel settings in the brain. Of course, the vast majority of part-time writers are only "cannon fodder". The platform's requirements for daily word changes and meagre income will quickly wake them up.

And this, to some extent, determines the production mode of online articles. Yuan Hao, a former online article gunman, told Photon Planet that the current online article industry chain is full of all kinds of studios, and some studios even set up so-called online article writer training courses, and take the students' homework to contribute, making money on both sides.

"now there are online text studios all over the street, and there is a clear division of labor in these studios. Some are responsible for copying the plot, some are responsible for financing, and some are responsible for writing the beginning. On average, a studio can produce more than 10 million words a month."

On the other hand, Yuan Hao, who was previously responsible for the "opening article", was at its peak, although he earned more than 10,000 yuan a month as a part-time job. According to Yuan Hao, for online articles mixed in the traffic field, a good beginning is no less important than a good story-limited by the sunk cost, even if the quality of the subsequent content is unstable, readers attracted by the beginning will not rashly abandon the article. Based on this, "the beginning of the article" has always been popular in the online article industry.

Of course, these batch copy, routine production of "formulaic Shuang Wen" and "Xiaobai Wen", it is difficult to enter the eyes of senior readers, and the studio did not cater to the senior players as well. Instead, they put the market to light readers-more people just want to get mental pleasure by relying on brainless articles after work than senior readers who often speak on the Internet and have high content quality.

And this will undoubtedly push the already fragile online writing ecology into a desperate situation.

For a long time, online writers have been eating meat at the head and soup at the tail. The head writer can not only get high subscription and copyright profits, but also get a share of the IP adaptation, while the tail writer can only eat the "minimum security" by mechanical code words. As everyone knows, the current online article studio has infiltrated various platforms through countless vests, and the tail author can not even drink soup.

In this context, the ecology of online writing is inevitably changing. Authors who are burdened with more pressure are either assimilated into their works or defected to platforms that do not pursue daily shifts.

And this is particularly striking to the head player China Literature-the platforms that mainly push the free model pay more attention to traffic and do not exclude studios that can eat accurate users; while China Literature's logic is to pay for the pull of high-quality content, once the content quality is dragged down, the only cards that can be played are the remaining treasures of those platforms.

IP is not a panacea to incubate IP with online articles, and then realize the logic of IP. It has always been China Literature's "combined fist".

The logic behind it is that online articles are, after all, one of the modern entertainment media, and even if a large number of light readers can be pulled out through free logic, the number of users still has a theoretical ceiling-just as not everyone can listen to music. Not everyone can read online articles.

Based on this, in order to seek a larger cash space, China Literature never stopped the pace of IP realization. Compared with other players, China Literature, who relies on Tencent's interactive entertainment empire, can more easily realize IP into comic books, animation, movies, TV dramas, games and other derivative fields.

China Literature's semi-annual report of 2022 shows that once "fighting the Skies" is broadcast every year, it has become the most popular work in Tencent Video's animation category. At the financial report meeting, Hou Xiaonan, president of China Literature Group, revealed that the game adapted from "Doluo mainland" has already exceeded 10 billion yuan. In addition, hot search regulars such as "Qingyu year" and "superfluous son-in-law" are also written by China Literature.

However, IP is not a panacea, especially in the context of film and television, game track pressure, China Literature's "combination boxing" has not failed, but the strength inevitably attenuates.

Take the film and television industry as an example, under the cold winter, losses have become the norm. According to the Cat's Eye Professional Edition, there were 142 online dramas in China in the first half of 2022, of which 88 were online dramas, a decrease of 22 percent compared with the same period in 2021, while the national box office, cinema attendance and cinema operation rate also decreased compared with the same period last year.

Even though it has also launched so-called "popular styles" such as "the world" and "the killer is not very calm", for China Literature, who gathers a large number of IP, how to realize the IP on a large scale is a top priority, and the deserted track will inevitably show a chill.

This dilemma is even worse on the game track. The flow share of the game adapted by IP has always been an important part of China Literature's income, but the game product always has a life cycle, and the number and activity of players will gradually decline over time. In other words, in order to weaken the negative impact of game aging, China Literature must maintain the rhythm of IP authorization.

At present, although the winter of the long version number is over, the game version number is still tense. Although China Literature still has surplus grain, there is no harvest in the field. For this reason, even though its revenue from TV dramas, online dramas, movies and animations grew steadily in the first half of the year, the above-mentioned growth was offset by a decline in revenue from proprietary online games, resulting in a 1.2% decrease in copyright operation and other revenue compared with the same period last year.

In any case, China Literature's moat is still there and has not come to the point where he needs to save himself. However, on the one hand, the ecology of the Internet has gradually deteriorated, and on the other, the strength of the "combination boxing" that once was proud of has been sharply reduced, and cracks inevitably appear on China Literature's city wall. In addition, although the paid-free factions appear to be merging, the differences in business logic and user groups determine that there must be a battle between the two. China Literature is obviously not fully prepared for this battle.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: photon Planet (ID:TMTweb), written by Dihao Wen, edited by Wu Xianzhi

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