Source: Economic Daily
"I think Wessi is innocent because she doesn't know he has a girlfriend."
"I think Hu Wen is too emotional about her ex. This is actually not good. Once you break up, don't get it back. ”
"This comic is so funny!! Can't wait to see Xiao He and Shen Xin meet!! ”
At first glance, these messages are very common, isn't it the little thought of young boys and girls? But if I tell you that this is a group of Readers from Europe, America, Japan and South Korea, on their country's comic platform, after reading Chinese comics, and then commenting in English, Japanese, Korean, etc., is it a bit interesting?
These comics that overseas readers chase are from the comic platform Quick Look. Kuaikan is not a comic creation company, it is like the comic book industry's Douyin, Toutiao, bringing together comic studios and creators all over China, distributing 109 works overseas in the first quarter of 2021 alone.
Chen Annie, the founder of Kuaikan, revealed that this year Kuaikan will take the overseas market as one of the priorities, and send Chinese comics to the sea by means of overseas platforms and self-operated platforms.
In addition to the quick look platform, some comic creation companies are also making efforts overseas. Min Xuyang, founder of Chengdu Open Source Interactive Entertainment Culture Communication Co., Ltd., told reporters that in the second half of this year, they have five or six works to be launched in Japan.
For many years, Chinese comics have been trying to break into the base camps of comics in Europe, the United States, Japan and South Korea, and the results have not been ideal. Now that I am going to sea again, can Guoman do it?
Forced to go to sea: national comics have just emerged, and there are pirated copies abroad
With the box office sales of domestic animation movies such as "The Return of the Great Sage", "The Demon Boy of Nezha", and "Jiang Ziya", many people began to exclaim "the rise of national comics". In fact, in the field of animation, national comics only refer to domestic comics. It is different from animation and more different from children's picture books. Compared with animation, manga is the source of anime IP. Marvel in the United States and elementary schools in Japan have built their own Avengers and Robot Cat mini-universes with comics as the core.
The situation is different in China. People are familiar with happy sheep and bald heads, mainly from young animation. As the main audience of comics, the youth group can only watch Japanese and Korean comics for a long time, because domestic readers have no payment habits, comic piracy is serious, and it is difficult for comic book authors to support themselves.
It was not until the post-90s and post-00s grew up and developed the habit of paying for content under the education of the Internet, that content platforms such as video, music, and comics had soil. After the emergence of content platforms, The group of comic book authors in China has also slowly formed.
Li Runchao, co-founder and CTO of Kuaikan Comics, revealed that when Kuaikan was established in 2014, there were no more than 100 Chinese comic book authors. After several years of cultivation, the number of Chinese comic creators cooperating with the platform has risen by about 100 times. Chinese authors created "Sweet Bite Marks", "Female Giants Also Talk about Love" and other head works, the former has a popularity of 236.817 billion, 11.37 million comments, which means that readers have read 236.8 billion pages, and the latter has a popularity value of 108.5 billion.
According to a report released by Analysys, as of January 2020, the monthly active users of China's Internet comic market were 96 million. Among them, the monthly active users of the kuaikan platform exceeded 40 million, which is the largest comic platform with the largest number of users in China. I really didn't expect that now Guoman has been so angry that it has basically regained the attention of teenagers.
However, Li Runchao also pointed out that there is no gap between China's top authors and their global counterparts, but the base is particularly small, and there is still a gap in the overall quality of the works.
Since the domestic market is still under development, why rush to go out?
"When we go to sea, we are first forced by pirates." Li Runchao told reporters that There was no intention of entering the international market, but there has been piracy of works in overseas markets. For example, on a foreign website, there are multiple accounts staring at the high-quality comics on the Kuaikan platform, and as soon as the Chinese author is updated, it will soon be recorded and uploaded. "Instead of being pirated by others, we should go out and earn this money ourselves." Li Runchao said.
"There is also a strong interest in Chinese comics overseas." Min Xuyang said that due to the population base and other reasons, there are not many overseas comic creators, and the works cannot meet the market demand, so the overseas side will also follow the list of mainstream Chinese comics and take the initiative to come to the door, hoping to introduce comics from China as a supplement.
Wen Yumei, the head of overseas copyright business, was originally responsible for negotiating the introduction business with overseas, and she found that the quality of Chinese comics is gradually catching up with Japan and South Korea, and the introduction of Chinese comics that have been tested by readers overseas is much lower in cost and has a much greater probability of success than cultivating a work from scratch. Wen Yumei remembered, "There was a small overseas studio that just started to import 5 works from Kuaikan, saying that they didn't want it for the time being, they didn't have enough manpower, they couldn't get busy, but it wasn't long before they came to ask for works again." When I asked, I learned that they had made money and recruited many new people. Overseas partners can make money from Chinese comics, and they are interested. ”
Going out, I found that Guoman can play from quality to technology
"I love your work, and there are thousands of people in our country who like you as much as I do." Recently, Wu Chenyi, founder of Hangzhou Goose Unstained Culture and Creative Co., Ltd., received a message from overseas readers praising her "Universal Love Grocery Store". Unbeknownst to Wu Chenyi, her work was not distributed to the country, and that thousands of readers had access to her work through piracy and contacted her.
Piracy is certainly not a good thing, but the existence of piracy shows from the side that the appeal of Chinese works is rising. According to Wen Yumei, comics have different preferences in each country and region because of the age structure of the audience in the world. However, the top works can be "all-you-can-eat", such as "Sweet Bite Marks", and global readers like the theme of "hegemony" and "beauty".
Min Xuyang also said that he originally thought that foreigners could not understand "The Overbearing President Fell in Love with Me", and he did not expect that it was actually very popular in the English circle.
The greater opportunities for Guoman come from technological change, alternating between old and new. Manga powers, Japan and the United States, are dominated by black-and-white pages, and there is still a large market for print manga publications. But with the popularity of mobile Internet and smartphones, South Korea took the lead in creating color strips that are convenient for sliding on mobile phones. Relying on this new technology, Korean comics have led the world, and more than half of the world's mainstream comic platforms are Koreans behind them.
Chinese comics have now also entered the era of color strip comics. In order to help authors, Kuaikan has also developed a set of technology to assist creation, which can see what types of readers are reading works in the background, which chapters they stay for a long time, and which chapters lose more readers.
"On comic book platforms around the world, only Quick Look has such technology." Chen Annie told reporters that Kuaikan also equipped each author with an editorial team and agent team, using big data to provide professional advice for authors in terms of plot, character settings, outlines and other aspects.
At present, the kuaikan platform has more than 5,000 creators and has precipitated more than 8,000 works. They hope to pick out the most effective works to test abroad. Li Runchao revealed that they will choose several overseas markets this year to launch their own apps.
Chinese engineers and product managers are leading the world in developing app technology. Wen Yumei chased the latest comic chapter on the Korean platform, "They don't have a bullet screen, even less comments, cold and clear, I'm back waiting for the update." She feels that this is also the advantage of Chinese apps going overseas.
In the eyes of this wave of entrepreneurs who have come out of the Chinese Internet, the overseas market is less mysterious. "Cold launch in overseas markets is less complicated, just put it on the platform and then calculate the ROI." Li Runchao said, "After several rounds of financing, it is quick to see that there is enough capital to go to overseas markets to try and make mistakes." We believe that with the best comic works in China and the technology of quick viewing, we will not be wrong. Now that Guoman is going to sea, it is actually fighting ecology, technology, and capital, and we need to consider how to win-win with the overseas platforms that have now been authorized. ”
Gaps and Hopes: Chinese comics have the greatest potential to be tapped
Open source interactive entertainment was only established in 2017, and has now precipitated more than 100 works and dozens of cooperation platforms at home and abroad. In the past two years, Min Xuyang has found that Chinese readers' tastes are becoming more and more picky, the theme and quality of the works are upgraded very quickly, but they are relatively lagging overseas, and the works in 2017 are also in the market, and the value of the works has been developed twice. However, he felt that it was too difficult to go to sea, so he handed over this part of the business to the platform and focused on content production himself.
Wu Chenyi also told reporters that Goose is not stained but signed an overseas copyright sharing agreement with Kuaikan, and the specific business does not matter. In fact, the girl who concentrated on creating did not even know the proportion of overseas shares, and it was all the agent who took care of it.
Like open source mutual entertainment and goose unstained, more and more comic creation companies tend to go to sea through the platform. In 2020, the quick look platform has signed overseas copyright agreements with more than 1,000 works, translated into 11 languages such as English, Japanese, German and French, and can be distributed to dozens of foreign comic platforms. The works of many Chinese cartoonists have also cooperated with Shanghai Disneyland and Happy Valley to enter offline stores and enter real life from the second dimension.
Quick to see the popular comics "Chengye Xiaohe" and "Guwei Nanting" reached a cooperation with Shanghai Disney and entered the Disney offline store. It's cosers punching in the field. Last Christmas, "Cheng Ye Xiao River" also drew a Disney exclusive fan.
Because of the existence of comic platforms, Chinese authors sit at home, and the fees naturally come. Since its inception, the remuneration paid by Kuaikan to authors has accumulated more than 1 billion yuan. In particular, overseas markets have brought unexpected incremental revenues.
"Overseas markets are paid reading, Japanese and Korean readers pay about 3 yuan for a word of work, if you update a word every week, only one work a year will cost about 150 yuan." Wen Yumei said that quickly see the distribution of Chinese works into the overseas market, only a small amount of secondary investment, you can get a good overseas income, the author is sitting at home waiting for the second penny, and some works in the Chinese market is not selling well, the overseas market is very popular, the value of the work can be more fully reflected, the motivation for continuous creation is stronger, and the platform can also harvest a steady stream of good works.
This constitutes a virtuous circle and changes the ecology of the country going to sea. "China only had paper comic publications around 2000, and only online platforms after 2010, which is a generation slower than the current leading South Korea as a whole." However, Chinese relatively large, after the atmosphere of the comic becomes more and more, the creators will be more and more. In this regard, other countries cannot compare. Li Runchao said that the national comic goes to sea, on the surface is the competition of works, in fact, it is the competition of technology and capital, the essence is the competition of people, and China's huge population base and the comic population that gradually develops the habit of payment mean that the potential of national comics to be tapped is the greatest. (Economic Daily reporter She Ying)