In recent years, the content industry has flourished, giving birth to phenomenal companies such as ByteDance, B station and Kuaishou. According to the "Report on the Development of China's Online Copyright Industry (2019)", the market size of China's online copyright industry reached 958.42 billion yuan in 2019, an increase of 29.1% year-on-year. In this huge industry, the children's content industry is a relatively niche, but indispensable subdivision track. Children are the "flowers of the future", which is the source of the "living water" of the Internet, which is considerable in scale and is growing at a high speed.
According to the "White Paper on China's Children's Digital Content Industry 2019" released by Analysys, the core industry of China's children's digital content reached 237.8 billion yuan in 2018, an increase of 21% year-on-year, and it is expected that the annual output value of pan-children's digital content will be close to 400 billion yuan in 2020. If we count the pan-education industry such as children's programming, this number will be much larger. However, this article is going to discuss the children's content industry with strong IP attributes.
In recent years, companies in the field of children's content industry have grown rapidly, and Internet giants have laid out children's content. At the end of 2018, Baby Fish Animation received A+ round financing from Station B; in 2019, Baidu led the investment in children's content education brand Uncle Kai Storytelling C round of financing; in March 2021, Tencent invested in children's animation company Zhongle Tongle to become its second largest shareholder; iQiyi and Youku made their own children's animation content such as "Invincible Deer Team" and "Toot Dangman".
Giants have attached great importance to children's content, and it is not difficult to understand:
1. The scale of children's users is considerable, and the demand for content consumption is strong.
"QuestMobile 2020 Children's Economic Insight Report" shows that benefiting from China's huge population base and the stimulation of the "comprehensive two-child" policy in 2016, the number of newborns remains at about 15 million per year. Although the number of newborns and the birth rate have declined in 2020, the scale of child users is still very impressive, they are the "living water" source of the Internet market, and their content consumption demand is also very strong.
2. Behind the children, there is a huge parent user base, and the consumption power is strong.
Behind the children's users is a huge group of parent users. QuestMobile data shows that the parents of children aged 0-12 are the main group of mobile Internet, the online active scale is about 300 million, mainly after 80 and 90, which is at the time of the strong year, and the proportion of users with high and medium consumption capacity is more than 60%. These parents are very busy, accustomed to even relying on internet services such as online education, e-commerce, and online video platforms to educate and nurture their children. Internet companies seize child users, and they also seize parent users.
3. Parents attach great importance to the early education of children's users, and content becomes the core carrier.
"To win is to win at the starting line", Chinese parents attach great importance to their children's education. With the acceleration of the urbanization process, people's income levels have increased, families have invested more in children's education, and investment in extracurricular education has advanced from K12 to the enlightenment stage, and from test-oriented education to comprehensive quality education. According to the QuestMobile report, more than 54% of households spend more than 30% of household income, and the vast majority of households spend more than 1,000 yuan per month. Unlike the "curriculum" drive of K12 education, low-level early childhood education is more "content" driven, and the user scale of typical content applications such as Uncle Kai's storytelling is growing rapidly.
IP is the soul of content, and content companies are essentially IP business enterprises, who create, incubate and develop IP. A large number of IPs emerge every year, but high-quality children's IP has rarely appeared in recent years. People are familiar with children's IP, either classic domestic IP such as "Big Head Son Small Head Daddy", "Happy Goat and Gray Wolf", "Huluwa", etc., or foreign hit animations such as "Peppa Pig", "Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck", "Transformers", "Ultraman".
It is difficult to create IP, it is especially difficult to create children's IP, and it is difficult to create a well-known children's IP.
The core reason why it is so difficult to create children's content IP is that the user base of children and adults is different.
First of all, low-tech users themselves are difficult to "catch".
The essence of IP is to obtain the cultural and value recognition of users through content, but children's worldview is still under construction, and content can only influence them by telling good stories. To tell a good story, first of all, there must be a good story, and then it must be told in a form that is interesting, understandable and acceptable to children, which is more difficult. There are many good writers, but very few good children's writers.
Second, the difficulty lies in the "duality" of child users.
Children's content must first grab the parents to catch the children, because the parents are the ones who "pay the bill". Children's content is not only to attract children and facilitate their acceptance and understanding, but also to make parents think that this content is "suitable" and "useful", such as increasing knowledge, promoting intellectual development, cultivating positive values, and improving reading ability.
Finally, the difficulty is low viscosity in child users.
Parents who have done it know that if they are not particularly rich, they do not have to buy shoes for their children, because they develop rapidly and shoes are not suitable for long. Content consumption is the same, children grow rapidly, different stages of content needs are completely different, such as the initial play of audio and video content may be more suitable for children, to the back may have to participate in a variety of interest classes, extracurricular classes. As children become more and more exposed to more and more content, loyalty to a content may decrease, and it is not easy for an IP to penetrate deep into the child's heart, accompany its growth for many years and even become its childhood memory.
Dialectically, classic IP is deeply rooted in the hearts of the people often in childhood. The four great books, idioms, Idioms, Disney and other IPs we basically start to contact from childhood, and eventually they will accompany us for a lifetime. On the one hand, the younger the child, the more a blank piece of paper, they are easy to have a lifelong memory of a thing, once good content affects them, it can become IP; on the other hand, children's content consumption is very wide, audio, video, games, books, toys and other content have needs, these are excellent carriers of IP. Therefore, although there will be many difficulties in creating children's IP, children's content has a great opportunity to form IP, and the key depends on how to do it.
Children are different from adult users, which makes it difficult to create children's IP. To create children's IP, it is necessary to refer to the common practice of creating adult IP, and also to do some differentiated exploration in combination with the characteristics of children's content. There have been very few children's IP on the rise in recent years, and Uncle Kai's storytelling is an exception. Recently, Uncle Kai's storytelling has launched the mother and child version of "Uncle Kai's Dream of the Red Chamber", which has gathered four famous IP. This incident made me see another possibility of creating an IP path in China's children's content market.
Uncle Kai Storytelling is one of the earliest children's content entrepreneurs in China. Up to now, the "Uncle Kai Storytelling App" has more than 50 million users, with a total of 30,000+ original children's audio and video content, and the average daily listening time of users is up to 70 minutes. Uncle Kai Told Story received a Series C financing led by Baidu in 2019 and another $66 million in Series C+ financing in February 2020.
Today Uncle Kai's storytelling has two core "stories": one is an IP-based content platform, and the other is children's online education. The creation, operation and development of IP is the main line of its development. How does Uncle Kai's storytelling create children's IP?
1. The verified "single product goose array mode".
Uncle Kai storytelling average annual production of original story content more than 4,000 episodes, these stories and story characters will produce a lot of IP, Uncle Kai storytelling will be around each IP, developed a diversified product form, covering text, sound, cartoons, books, listening, hardware, courses and New Year's show and other different products to meet the different consumption scenarios of different users.
In 2017, Uncle Kai launched the first original popular science story series "Uncle Kai's Magical Library", which has now been updated to the third part. Uncle Kai Storytelling has developed different products around this IP to meet the needs of users of different ages. The picture book version of "Uncle Kai's Magical Library" is suitable for children under 4 years old to read in the company of their parents, the audio version can be understood by children over 4 years old, and the children's literature version is for children aged seven or eight and above. The animated film "Magic Library" co-produced by Uncle Kai Storytelling and Tencent Video will be launched in the second half of 2021.
"Uncle Kai's Pocket Detective" is another original popular science IP of Uncle Kai's storytelling, which is jointly created by the world's authoritative magazine "Global Science" to popularize science knowledge in the form of detectives. Like "Uncle Kai's Magical Library", "Uncle Kai's Pocket Detective" has also been developed into audio stories, books, detective game books, casual listening and other different product forms, and as of now, "Uncle Kai's Pocket Detective" has been listened to nearly 1 billion times in the Uncle Kai Storytelling APP.
Similar to the original IP such as "Uncle Kai's Magical Library" and "Uncle Kai's Pocket Detective", the Uncle Kai family continues to develop and accumulate, covering different directions, such as the girl's story "100 Troubles of Mai Xiaomi", the national style business cultivation class "Two Two Little Cute Demons", the science and technology education class "Super Cell Team", the AI science fiction class "Uncle Kai's Mecha Guard", the safety education class "Uncle Kai's Security Handsome Squad", etc., these original IPs have either been developed into different products, or have the conditions to be developed different products, Uncle Kai's storytelling "single product goose array model" IP development method was verified.
Why can these IPs become IP?
On the one hand, it's because they're good content that's validated. Large-scale content consumption is the premise of IP formation, "Uncle Kai's Magical Library" has been online for three seasons, accumulated nearly 1 billion times, for "Uncle Kai's Magical Library" adapted into a series of animation to lay a solid user base; the same original "Uncle Kai's Pocket Detective" story has also accumulated 506 stories on the shelves, of which Ai Xiaopo, Chicken Feifei and other IP images have also become good friends of many children.
On the other hand, many of Uncle Kai's original IPs are actually "IP collections", and "Uncle Kai's Magical Library" itself contains a large number of classic IP elements, such as Historical IP such as Dunhuang, forbidden City, Sui and Tang Dynasties, and then such as Uncle Kai's four famous book series, which is itself a traditional classic IP that has been "childlike" secondary development by Uncle Kai. Uncle Kai's storytelling original IP and classic IP have a lot of room for development.
Good content is consumed by a large number of people, innate IP attributes, so that Uncle Kai storytelling becomes an "IP" workshop, "single product goose array mode" can also work, such a model to meet the needs of users of different ages in different scenarios, directly enhance user stickiness and expand user scale, but also increase the commercialization space.
2, do IP must be content is king.
IP and content are mutually supportive. IP is the source of content, and content is the foundation of high-quality IP.
Children's content applications on the Internet are not scarce, but quality content is scarce. Many children's content applications "do not produce content, only do porters", for example, in the application market search can see a large number of Tang poems, stories, children's song applications, many are "matryoshka mode", the content is handled, the experience is very poor, they can not become IP.
To do IP is to do a good job of content, to create children's IP has and only one trick, is a good story. There is a saying in the entertainment industry: "The core of the entertainment industry is IP, the essence of IP is a good story, and behind a good story is value recognition." The content of Uncle Kai's storytelling, whether it is the original IP or the re-creation of the classic IP such as the four masterpieces, is based on the story as the core, and is created around the creative principle of "happiness, growth and crossing".
With the landing of IP strategy and content platform strategy, many of the content of Uncle Kai's storytelling is not personally created by Uncle Kai, but invited third-party professionals to co-create, such as the general planner of "Uncle Kai's Dream of the Red Chamber" is zeng Xiang, the former host of CCTV-4 "China News" and a teacher at communication university of China, and the general counsel is Zhang Yinan, ph.D. and associate professor of the Department of Chinese of Peking University, and director of the Chinese Poetry Teaching Association. In the platform model, the key to Ensuring a stable and consistent content level in Uncle Kai's storytelling is "quality control".
Doing original is very "slow", the boutique original polishing cycle is longer, "Uncle Kai" once said that each project of the team today, from the establishment of the project to the launch of at least half a year, during which to go through the internal "quality control meeting" layer by layer, preparation for more than half a year but can not pass the project a lot. "Uncle Kai's Pocket Detective" has been used in the quality control process for a year and a half, and now it has become the most popular product.
Slow work out of the fine work, through the craftsman-style content polishing, Uncle Kai's storytelling can continuously output good content, becoming a "story workshop", and Uncle Kai is called "story king" by the media.
3, children's IP should be "two-wheel drive" or even "suitable for all ages".
Classic children's IP such as "Big Head Son Small Head Daddy", "Pleasant Goat and Gray Wolf", "Huluwa" and so on are all "two-wheel drive", parents are willing to pay, children are willing to follow, and top children's IP can even attract people of different ages. Today, there are many "big kids" who consume children's content that they have been exposed to since childhood, such as Transformers, which does not lack adult fans. Children's IP for all ages is not afraid of children growing up, which can capture children of different ages, and can also accompany a user to grow up for life, with strong vitality, such as "Huluwa".
The mother and child version of "Uncle Kai's Dream of the Red Chamber" is behind this logic. Uncle Kai clearly thought out that children's IP should be "two-wheel drive", and the "mother and child version" has both a explained version for children and a sound drama version for mothers (fathers), while taking into account the needs of children and parents, so that the vitality of IP content products is longer.
4. User operation is the key to the landing of children's IP.
Output content is only the starting point of creating IP, in the era of Internet community, user operation is a key part of the implementation of IP strategy, interacting with users, listening to users' voices, creating content around user needs, and even inviting users to co-create, in order to better meet user needs, improve stickiness, and gain people's hearts.
In recent years, the online education industry has been frequently named by the media due to excessive marketing, in fact, education should be a slow industry, and excessive marketing is difficult to sustain. As a member of the online early education track, Uncle Kai has always been very "moderate" in user operation, not hype, not kitsch, not over-marketing, but content-driven, relying on word-of-mouth to gain growth, and sticking users with emotions. Uncle Kai's storytelling relies on user reputation to obtain growth, and user reputation is an important support for Uncle Kai's IP strategy.
On various content platforms, parents and children have always supported uncle Kai's content and good reputation. Some time ago, when "Uncle Kai's Dream of the Red Chamber" was launched, Uncle Kai did an official "user recall" campaign, in the "Seven years, are you still here?" Under the official tweet, many users have replied "still". Some mothers have changed a few mobile phones, but Uncle Kai's storytelling App has always been in the mobile phone; there are many mothers who have given birth to a second child and listen to Uncle Kai from "the boss to the second"; some children read Uncle Kai's content from kindergarten and see the sixth grade of primary school. For example, a parent left a message:
"For seven years, from the age of four to eleven, Uncle Kai's voice accompanied the child every day and had become a part of his life. When the child grows up, he recalls the joy of childhood, Uncle Kai's voice, and the characters in the story will become his good memories. ”
The users around Uncle Kai's storytelling series IP are a community, and they all have similar value culture identities, which is like the phenomenon of classic IP such as Marvel and Jin Yong, and such high-sticky users are the "mass foundation" for the success of Uncle Kai's storytelling IP strategy.
5. "Combination of virtual and real" can also create classic IP.
Some people divide children's IP into two categories, one is the animation virtual class, the other is the real human beings such as Uncle Kai, from the exploration of Uncle Kai, the "combination of virtual and real" is not impossible. Uncle Kai's storytelling is not only an original large number of audio virtual IPs, but also re-creation and dissemination of classic IPs such as the four famous works, Dunhuang, the Forbidden City, and the Sui and Tang Dynasties. On the basis of virtual IP, it may be loaded with a real character image such as Uncle Kai, and some virtual IP also has a real character image when it goes offline. The TV series versions of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms in different eras use real people to reshape the classic IP, and eventually form a new IP, and the Three Kingdoms IP itself continues to evolve and become more and more abundant. Uncle Kai's storytelling of the re-creation of classic cultural IP such as the Three Kingdoms makes the traditional IP new, makes the virtual IP more real, makes children of different ages fall in love with the traditional classic culture, and makes the classic IP endless.
Uncle Kai's storytelling has a unique IP creation path, which has a certain relationship with Uncle Kai's personal experience, resources, and capabilities, and it is difficult for the industry to directly copy it, but there are also some versatilitys worth learning from the industry.
In the past seven years since his establishment, Uncle Kai's storytelling has started from knowledge payment, taking personal IP as the starting point, and gradually forming a content platform around children's needs, and users and content have achieved orders of magnitude improvement. What is valuable is that Uncle Kai's storytelling is based on the unique children's IP creation model of "single product goose array", forming its own unique children's content IP manufacturing capabilities, and mass output of high-quality children's content IP, such a model is the same as the IP manufacturing workshop of the content industry such as Disney and Netflix, and once it runs through, it will only get smoother and smoother.