How is Chinese online literature selling overseas?

Recently, iResearch Consulting produced the “2020 Research report on China’s Internet Literature going abroad” (hereinafter referred to as “the report”), which discussed China’s successfully commercialized online literature industry.

Network literature has seen a large scale at the beginning of the 21st century in China, and its main readers are the post-80s and post-90s generations. Today, the enthusiasm of young people born in the new century for network literature is gradually fading, but fortunately, on the one hand, network literature has begun to break through the form of characters and output comics, animation, games, movies, TV dramas and other contents. On the other hand, the audience of Chinese online literature is also gradually expanding overseas. This brings new business opportunities for the slightly aging network literature.

According to the report, after nearly 20 years of development, Chinese online literature has changed from simple copyright sales to multi-channel and multi-form sales similar to domestic ecology, and some adapted TV dramas have also achieved some success overseas, such as “Qing Yu Nian”, “The King’s Avatar”, “Ni He Wo De Qing Cheng Shi Guang”, “Ashes of Love” and so on.

According to the report, 87.9% of overseas readers said they would try Chinese online literature when western fantasy literature could not meet their reading needs. With regard to the freshness of Chinese online literature, 53.4% of readers said that “the content is more imaginative”, 38% of readers expressed that “the creation mode is different”, and 30.9% of readers said that “serial mode is updated online”. Some readers were more concerned about new themes and longer space, and so on.

According to the report, the market size of China’s domestic online literature has grown from 3.42 billion yuan in 2013 to 20.17 billion yuan in 2019. In 2019, the market size of overseas online literature was only 460 million yuan, which was still less important than that at home. Optimistically, by 2019, more than 10000 online literary works had been translated and sold, and 3452 works had been translated and put out to sea in 2019 alone.

According to the report, the number of overseas readers of Chinese online literature has exceeded 30 million, and more than half of them have access to Chinese online literature through social networks. They preferred Chinese online literature because of novel plots or cultural differences, and paid most attention to the updating speed of online literature. 31.2% of overseas readers have paid in the process of reading.

However, Chinese online literature still encounters some problems when going abroad. For example, without understanding the policy, it is difficult to set up a localization team, the quality of translation is uneven, and cultural differences lead to incomplete content or offend readers. From a good point of view, the cultural friction encountered by network literature also brings more opportunities for cultural blending.