The printed word changed all that. As ink dried on paper, stories became permanent, unchanging.
Centuries later, the burgeoning Chinese entertainment industry was turning to the printed word for inspiration. There were many golden nuggets to be found, but much digging was needed to unearth them.
The catalyst
for change
It was in this moment that we had a vision of how to mine these riches and remove unpredictability from the content origination process.
Online serialization was emerging from the grassroots, but with little or no revenue, these communities were struggling to survive.
Shanda saw an opportunity to step in and offer this fledgling fraternity a guiding hand.
An opportunity to turn a pastime into an industry.
And so the first chapter was written
Shanda Literature
Shanda Literature nurtured and grew all the popular literary genres, giving them an online home with the functionality and business structure we’d developed building China’s most successful online games platform.
We’d set the story free again, turning readers into writers, making every member of the community a part of the creative process.
User generated content
published chapter by chapter
Community interaction
amongst readers and authors
Generating
Masses of Data
that could be mined
By mining this big data we created valuable entertainment industry insights that we were able to monetize
Subscription
- PC
- Mobile
Content export
- Mobile operators
- Reading apps
- Audio books
IP licensing
- TV drama
- Movies
- Games
Online advertising
- Target verticals
Offline publishing
- Novels
- Comic books
We created revenue, rewards, incentives and income, and the community started to grow, and grow, and grow.
Proven original content with big data
The ability of readers to feed back to writers meant that popular content flourished exponentially. And by analyzing the vast quantities of data created by millions of users reading and reacting to millions of titles, we were able to take the guesswork out of content production.
The golden nuggets simply rose to the top.
For the first time in history
Film, TV drama and game producers were able to invest in intellectual property that would yield proven and predictable fortunes.
This library in the cloud had come of age, so we gave it a new name...
The world's
largest ecosystem
of original Chinese language content
200m+ users
reading
7.6m+ titles
written by
2.5m+ authors
A King indeed.
Cloudary Net Revenues 2008-2014 (RMB million)
As China’s appetite for entertainment continued to grow, the next chapter of success beckoned. Securing the right channel for distribution became vital.
The paradigm shift from PC to mobile was happening
King Maker
It was time for us to take Cloudary to the next level and beyond.
By looking to the future, Shanda merged Cloudary with Tencent’s powerful mobile distribution.
A giant with incredible potential
A force to be reckoned with.
Then, in November 2017, China Literature (772:HK) leapt onto the world stage becoming Hong Kong’s hottest IPO, with a retail subscription of HK$520 billion, the second highest in the market’s history.
Another chapter in "Shanda the King Maker"... but by no means the last.
Stay tuned for the next story.