Beijing (PingWest)- Tiktok owner ByteDance has taken a stake in a company that run multiple online reading platforms, further penetrating the sector currently dominated by rival Tencent Holdings.
According to Chinese business data and investigation platform Tianyan Cha, ByteDance has acquired a 10% stake in Beijing Dingtian Culture Entertainment, making it the third-largest shareholder in the company.
Beijing Dingtian Culture Entertainment runs several online reading platforms, including Sweetread, Guazixs and Dmread, and also produce TV series and dramas adapted from novels.
The deal marks another step taken by ByteDance to move into online novel sector dominated by Tencent, which is the largest shareholder of the country’s top e-book publisher China Literature.
In addition to domestic market, China Literature also has established its reputation and presence in overseas markets after signing multiple deals with international publishers to promote Chinese culture.
In 2017, China literature has made its debut on Hong Kong Stock Exchange, its share skyrocketed nearly 90 percent in value on the first trading day, making it the most profitable IPO in the history of China’s online publishing sector.
ByteDance have been increasingly stepping to online novel sector to challenge Tencent through aggressive investment and business revamp.
In December 2019, ByteDance has acquired a majority stake in Mymind Culture, through its investment arm Beijing Quantum Jump Technology.
Mymind Culture operates five reading platforms to help its 4,000 contracted authors publish and distribute their works targeting different age groups, generating revenue from advertisement or commercialization of novels such as games, cartoons and movies adapted from novel.
In addition, ByteDance has also revamped its online novel business by integrating all the novels published on news aggregator Jinri Toutiao app into its online literature publishing app “Tomato Novel”.
ByteDance’s TikTok and its popular news aggregator Jinri Toutiao had more than 1.5 billion monthly active users, which allow ByteDance to leverage its massive user base to distribute content from Tomato Novel.
In April, ByteDance also held an online promotional activity for Tomato Novel, enabling readers to interact with their beloved authors through live-streaming sessions on Douyin.
The promotional campaign for Tomato Novel called “Meet behind-the-scenes storytellers”.
During the live-streaming sessions that lasted roughly two hours, four famous online novel authors were invited to take turns introducing their story ideas, and 20 audiences got in touch to question authors more details about chapters scripts, these random audiences were selected from live-streaming lucky draw that was created by the four authors.
Online novel sector is not currently worth as much as gaming or social media, it still hold an big market potential with an enormous audience in China. it had an estimated 455 million readers – over half of the country’s 900 million netizens – as of June 2020, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.
The coronavirus pandemic has seen a rise in online reading activities, along with other internet services such as mobile games and work conferencing
Chinese users of digital reading platforms consumed 7.2 billion reads which amount to 330 million hours of reading during February-when the confirmed case of Covid-19 pandemic reached its peak, according to report issued by China Audio-video and Digital Publishing Association (CADPA).
Additionally, CADPA’s survey of 91,647 online readers showed that up to 44 percent of the respondents read one to three books during the pandemic, a daily average of 133 million mobile devices logged on to reading apps compared to 120 million during the same period last year