The days when Chinese refused to pay for anything they downloaded from the internet seem to be over
When the pioneering US file-sharing software Napster was forced off the air 16 years ago amid allegations that its users were essentially stealing music, the internet in China was just beginning to get into full swing.
In the years that have followed, Chinese internet users have become freeloaders par excellence, used to downloading music, films and books free of charge, even as their counterparts in the West have become increasingly accustomed to the idea that in cyberspace someone ultimately has to pay for content.
Now, Chinese are not only waking up to that idea but are also showing themselves willing to fork out large sums for information products that the knowledge economy is now serving up. This means that many of those with the nous to come up with the right kind of internet content can turn them into highly profitable cash cows.
One of these is Li Xiaolai of Beijing, an angel investor who publishes a weekly financial newsletter called The Road to Financial Freedom, for which he charges a 199 yuan ($29) a year through the mobile app Dedao.
By May 3, the business consultant had more than 150,000 subscribers to his service, which he began publishing last July, scooping a revenue of 30 million yuan.
Dedao, which aggregates information services, offers 24 other newsletters on subjects including business, science, books and technology at a similar price.
Luo Yonghao, of Beijing, founder and chief executive of the smartphone company Smartisan, has more than 30,000 subscribers on the app for his articles on how to make a startup company successful, each paying 199 yuan for an annual subscription starting from May.
Zhang Xiaoyu, of Beijing, a former analyst with Goldman Sachs, set up a newsletter with the same price that provides potted histories of big international companies, and within a month he had more than 8,000 paid readers.
Luo Zhenyu, of Beijing, the creator of Dedao — the name is Chinese, meaning “to get it”, implying that those who use the app will get the knowledge they need to keep abreast of the times — used to be a television producer.
In 2012 Luo started an online talk show, Logical Thinking, recommending good books every day, and says it now has more than 10 million followers. It was free of charge.
Last year, drawing on his experience of the previous few years, he published a book titled Information Overload — I Know How You Feel.
“We need to change the way we think if we are to keep up with these ever-changing times,” Luo says in the preface. “Change can be hard; it pushes us to learn continuously, to understand new things, but it is only in change that we can see the future.”
The app is Luo’s way of providing people with the knowledge to cope with change.
It offers written articles, podcasts, e-books, and live talks.
But unlike other educational apps whose
You have to pay for quality content … and this trend is even stronger than it was 20 years ago.” Patrick Brigger, co-founder of GetAbstract
content is mostly free, almost every product carried on Dedao has a price.
GetAbstract, a Swiss company, was a pioneer in the West in cashing in on the knowledge economy and using the internet to promote it.
Founded in 1999, getAbstract provides e-library of about 15,000 condensed business book summaries mainly to big companies such as Boeing, Deutsche Bank and IBM to help their staff keep up abreast of current knowledge.
In April the company formed a partnership with Dedao in which summaries of foreign books are made available in audio form in the app in Mandarin.
“We always believe that good content is worth something,” says the co-founder, Patrick Brigger. “You have to pay for quality content … and this trend is even stronger than it was 20 years ago.”
Brigger says there is so much information on the internet, but a lot of it is mediocre, and his company tries to solve that problem by sifting through, selecting and curating good content.
He compares getAbtract’s product to the papyrus scrolls in the old library of Alexandria in Egypt, where every scroll has a brief summary at the top.
“That’s our vision — anything with good content should have a summary so people can decide if it is the text they want to read,” Brigger says.
“It saves time, and when the price is reasonable, people are willing to pay for it.”
The company has sold more than 12 million licenses for individuals and corporate entities, he says.
It will soon begin publishing Inside China, which will provide English-language summaries of in-depth reports originally published in Mandarin.
Rena Xie, a Chinese American freelance translator and writer, has been working on the project since February.
Xie scours through mountains of Chinese news reports and industry analyses every day, boiling them down into summaries of