With the widespread membership system of video and audio platforms including WeChat Official Accounts, Chinese users are gradually developing the habit of paying for good content on the internet. Online video market generated 21.79 billion yuan (US$3.4 billion) from the paid users in 2017. It will keep the fast-growth of over 60%.
Tons of entrepreneurs and companies are trying to seize the opportunity this trend brings. Suddenly, huge amount of original quality content is created on China’s internet, which is something new.
Some become very successful such as Uncle Kai’s Storytime, founded by an ex-CCTV host. Its WeChat official accounts articles generate over 10 million views per month with over 2,000 stories and a total play of 1.5 billion.
The monthly unique devices and monthly effective duration of the paid content market reached 143 million units and 410 hours respectively in December 2017, up by 73.7% and 100.3% from the beginning of 2017 respectively. In the future, learning from paid content might become a mainstream lifestyle of Chinese netizen.