How to attract 500 million Chinese people, an increasingly "sinking" online novel

Today, when short videos and mini-series are popular, do Chinese people still love to read?

More and more Chinese people are addicted to reading, but they don’t read physical books. The "2022 China Online Literature Development Research Report" released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences shows that the number of online literature readers will reach nearly 492 million in 2022, and there will be one online literature reader for every three Chinese people. At the same time, the number of online writers has exceeded 22.78 million, and the total market size has reached 38.93 billion yuan.

In the growing market empire of online article reading, a platform with over 100 million monthly users has emerged. In April 2023, the number of monthly active users of the Tomato Novel APP reached 153 million, and that of Qimao Novel APP was 67.98 million.

For quite a few people, Tomato and Qimao have never been heard of. So, what is the most popular online content today? Who is addicted to Internet articles?

Shen Yi was a big fan of online literature when she was a student. She still remembers that at that time, she mostly read online literature on platforms such as Jinjiang and Qidian.

Nowadays, the platform structure of online novels has changed.

According to AppGrowing monitoring data, the monthly active users of Tomato Novels in the first half of 2023 were 175 million, while QQ Reading and Qidian Reading had 20.79 million and 18.3 million respectively. Jinjiang’s monthly active users are only in the millions.

Tomato Novel was established in November 2019. In just four years, it has firmly established itself as the “first brother” of the online literature platform.

In the field of short videos, there is an unspoken creative rule that "3 seconds determines life and death, 7 seconds determines a turning point." That is to say, a short video needs to attract users to watch and make them stay within 3-7 seconds. Therefore, short videos often use visual, auditory and content conflicts, suspense, reversal, etc. to create conflict and contrast at the beginning.

On the Tomato novel platform, summarizing the interesting points of the entire work or the twists and turns of the story through one sentence of the title has become a necessary condition for attracting online articles and attracting more people to read - for example, on the Tomato platform, such as "Being Deceived in Northern Myanmar," Popular novels such as "Real Encounters", "My Ph.D. in Psychology Entered the Palace and Killed Me", "Mr. Tang, Please Respect Yourself After the Divorce", etc. Just looking at the titles, it seems like they could be turned into a hit micro-short drama in a matter of minutes.

Internet articles with this type of title are also more popular in Qidian, which currently ranks in the second echelon of users.

On the older online article platform Jinjiang, the titles of the listed online articles are more of a simple style and do not have the title elements to attract traffic.

After counting the hot words in the titles and introductions of the 3,037 online articles on the three major online article platforms: Tomato, Qidian, and Jinjiang, we found that Tomato, Qidian, and Jinjiang have different themes and content styles in online articles.

On Tomato, "Sweet Pet", "Time Travel" and "Double Cleansing" are most popular among female channels, while male channels prefer "System", "Time Travel" and "Invincible".

Shen Yi, who has been reading online articles since middle school, told us that "sweet pet" represents the male protagonist's exclusive love for the female protagonist, which can be expressed through routines such as exposing the supporting characters' schemes and doing anything for the female protagonist, while the "system" is given to the protagonist. Various special abilities, such as treasure identification, flashing, parkour, etc., enable the protagonist to identify the authenticity of treasures and travel through time and space in real life, thereby gaining honor, victory, etc.

However, this type of sweet pet and system-themed Internet articles are often characterized by routines and serious homogeneity of plots.

"Like a system article, the structure is like upgrading a game to defeat monsters. Just set up the framework and fill in the content. There is serious homogeneity, the direction of the plot can be guessed, and the setting is nothing new." Another person said. Lin Xiaoyu, a senior reader of online articles, said.

In comparison, Qidian and Jinjiang also have similar so-called "routine" themes and plots, but many popular novels will develop more possibilities based on these labels.

On the Qidian platform, labels such as “no cp” and “cultivate immortality” are also quite popular.

Different from Tomato directly labeling itself as "shuangwen", Qidian's online articles are more willing to shape more macro concepts such as "era", "jianghu", "history", etc., such as integrating Cthulhu style and Western magical elements. "The Lord of Mysteries" tells the story of the protagonist's journey of exploring a different world in order to return to the real world. The setting of the article is relatively complex, and the plot is grand and tortuous, and has been well received by readers.

The people who read online articles are also quietly changing.

Being more immersed, younger, and older are the new characteristics of today’s Internet users.

Data from QuestMobile shows that in 2017, the digital reading market was still dominated by the subscription payment model. Those from first-tier cities accounted for 13.2%, and those from third-tier and below cities accounted for 51.2%.

But now 58.6% of Tomato Novel APP users come from third-tier cities and below, while only 7.5% come from first-tier cities.

According to data from Huadaishu, in October 2022, 35.1% of users who read digital novels on Douyin had a monthly income of 3,000 yuan or less, and another 31% of users had a monthly income in the range of 3,001-6,000 yuan. Tomato and Douyin both belong to ByteDance, and their overlapping users account for 72.1% of the total Tomato users. Therefore, the data of digital reading on Douyin can reflect the income level of Tomato users to a certain extent.

Data from QuestMobile shows that in 2019, free reading people were mostly concentrated in the age groups of 25-30 and 31-35, accounting for more than 20% respectively. However, on the free reading app Tomato Novels, users are more concentrated in the two age groups of under 18 and over 51.

On platforms such as Tomato and Qimao, there is also a function of withdrawing cash for reading, that is, after reading or listening for a certain number of minutes, cash can be withdrawn to the wallet. This makes free reading look more "attractive" and caters more to the Internet habits of the elderly.

Routine and cool articles were not popular on the first day, but the online article market has developed into the 2.0 era, and online article content increasingly emphasizes the ultimate sense of pleasure, and even short videos. At the same time, the audience for online article reading has also reached an astonishing scale.

Rookies Tomato and Qimao, as well as established brands Jinjiang and Qidian, actually represent two completely different business models for free and paid reading.

The core of paid reading is content. Through high-quality content, the platform completes deep binding with users and transforms users' loyalty to works into profits. The core of free reading is traffic and advertising.

Both models have pros and cons. Free reading has a shorter path to monetization through advertising revenue. The most successful example is the Tomato novel. Backed by Bytedance, Tomato Novel relies on Douyin’s traffic and algorithm advantages to not only achieve leapfrog growth in user scale in the four years since its establishment. According to a report by LatePost in May this year, Tomato Novel’s revenue has exceeded 10 billion Yuan, basically advertising revenue.

But the pain point of free reading is that it is not easy to incubate top IP.

However, the mini-drama that broke out this year has changed this situation.

On the one hand, nearly half of the short dramas on the market are derived from these online articles that are increasingly focused on refreshing, short and fast. On the other hand, short plays have become a part of attracting traffic to free reading platforms.

"I asked a doctor for help because of my anxiety disorder. I felt uncomfortable all over after not working overtime for a day, and I had difficulty breathing after a day off. What should I do? The next second, I was transported to a slow-paced harem, so I opened the book without saying a word. In As someone who works as a laborer, in my opinion, palace selection is really not a big deal..." AI dubbing like this is paired with video materials such as cutting soap and cakes, and quickly narrates the content of an online article. The assembly-line tweet video has been flooded with TikTok. Yin, Weibo, Xiaohongshu and other platforms.

These AI videos are commissioned by intermediaries at a commission of 6-10 yuan per video, and part-timers are recruited through small programs to produce videos to attract traffic to the reading platform. Free Reading APP can quickly introduce traffic from other places to the platform through the placement of these AI dubbing videos on social media.

Judging from the data, the free reading APP has indeed spent a lot of effort on attracting traffic. Data shows that from January to March 2023, among the reading apps, Tomato was the one with the most promoted purchases, followed closely by Qimao. Looking at the entire promotion rankings, free reading apps occupy 6 of the top ten reading apps.

With a huge consumer market, the platform also needs to produce sufficient and timely online articles.

Judging from the income of Tomato's top contracted writers, from 2021 to 2023, the number of writers earning more than 5,000 yuan and 10,000 yuan has increased to 3,070 and 1,598 respectively, an increase of more than 250%. The number of writers earning more than 30,000 yuan has also increased. Quite a few, rising from 138th to 454th.

The growth in the number of top high-income writers confirms that Tomato’s appeal to online writers is increasing. According to Tomato Novels 2022 data, the number of original authors on the platform increased by 300% year-on-year.

Connected to a huge consumer market on one end and a rich number of content providers on the other, Pinduoduo in the reading world and Yiwu Trade City in the online version are gradually taking shape.

However, the increasingly "sinking" of online articles has ushered in a wider audience and opened up a more prosperous market, but it has also caused problems such as uneven content quality.

In the traffic era, if there is no supervision, the urge of platforms to obtain traffic and make huge profits through low-quality, unoriginal or even marginal content will become stronger.

How to find the balance point is an issue that the industry and regulatory authorities need to think about urgently.