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| Cyber literature, the next battle field? |
November 6, it is reported that Cloudary has been purchased by Tencent, which means another giant in the area of cyber literature has been merged into the Tencent’s business empire. So far, Tencent has had chuangshi.qq mainly for male users, and yunqi.qq mainly for female users, and now vast amount of high-quality content resources form Cloudary can also be accessed within any cyber literature platform of Tencent.
Some believe that
Tencent will soon dominate the cyber literature market. But really? Probably
not.
On November 27,
the inaugural meeting of Baidu literature was held in Beijing, claiming that
three sub-brands including zongheng.com, shucheng.com and panda reader will be integrated
into Baidu literature. Though failed in the purchase competition of Cloudary,
Baidu fought into the battle field of cyber literature anyway.
Some people claim
that, considering the relatively small consumer base of Baidu literature (more
than 40% of active users were occupied by Tencent and Cloudary, while only 8.4%
were occupied by Baidu’s Zongheng.com) (enfodesk, 2013), and the low brand awareness
(as for the brand first reference rate, qidian.com of Cloudary and
readnoval.com of Tencent ranked 1st and 3rd with 32.8%
and 8.3% respectively, while zongheng.com of Baidu came in only after 6th
with the first reference rate of less than 5%) (enfordesk, 2013), the future of
Baidu literature is pessimistic, because Baidu is lack of core competitiveness
in this field.
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| The market share of cyber literature in mainland China, Q3 of 2014. |
However, in my
view, that’s not the truth, and the 3C’s triangle model may help us better understand the
situation of Baidu.
According to the
report of enfordesk (2013), as the growth of the user amount, it is becoming
more and more difficult to enlarge the user base depending on the advantage of
channels. Instead, high quality content is becoming the most important resource
to attract users. Therefore, in the cyber literature market, the one who gets
the best and most popular authors with the largest quantity will win.
Table 1:
Evaluation of the core content resources of main cyber literature websites.
Core Resources
|
Number of active authors
|
Number of editors
|
Number of novals
|
Total
|
Weight
|
30%
|
25%
|
45%
|
|
Cloudary
|
8
|
7
|
9
|
8.2
|
Tencent literature
|
5
|
4
|
4
|
4.3
|
zongheng.com
|
5
|
4
|
6
|
5.2
|
(All data comes from the report of enfordesk (2013).
As shown in table
1, though performs not as well as Cloudary, zongheng.com of Baidu is much
better in terms of core content resources and Tencent literature. What’s more
important, the fees paid by zongheng.com for authors are always at a higher
level than the average of the industry. As for profit sharing, zongheng.com was
used to reserve only 30% of the profits while render 70% to the authors. And
Baidu goes even further in this aspect, insisting to render 80% of the profits
to the authors. Considering all these “author friendly” policies, Baidu
literature is quite potential to attract more high-quality authors to further
develop its advantages on core content resources.
Moreover, in terms
of discovering and cultivating new authors, Baidu also has advantages. Baidu
Post (百度贴吧) has always been one of the
most popular gathering place for millions of active authors of fan fictions.
With the data collected about these existing users, Baidu can easily find out
vast amount of potential authors.
Now we have seen
Baidu’s great potential to gather core resources and move further to become a
market leader. But the question is: with only 20% of profits reserved, how can
Baidu make enough money to survive and thrive?
The simple answer
is: fans economy.
Actually, Baidu
has long been a master of running the fans economy. Everyday, Baidu gains large
amount of traffic from Baidu post. Similarly, the accumulated fans will be new
resources of profits for Baidu. On one hand, with the help of the big data,
Baidu may earn more by providing precision marketing services; on the other
hand, since Baidu has the ambition to further integrate Baidu literature with
other products under its brand, such as Baidu game, Baidu music and Baidu
video, and it has already signed with several partners in the area of game
development and film and television production, the fans will also be a strong
support for its strategy to create a complete industrial chain.
Reference:
易观分析：2014年第3季度中国网络文学市场竞争格局盛大文学一家独大 腾讯文学步步紧逼 http://www.enfodesk.com/SMinisite/newinfo/articledetail-id-418537.html
