As Hollywood Flops Pile Up, China's Storytelling Giant Yuewen Tries A Different Approach

"A different, more tech-savvy approach to the search for winners is emerging from China. So believes Tencent-backed China Literature Ltd., the country's largest online literature platform and a leading global content company that has built success with a vast community of readers and writers to guide its content development. "We balance the art of storytelling and the science of crowdsourced insight to discover what resonates," CEO Hou Xiaonan told Forbes China in a recent interview."

"By embracing what he calls "a model of mass co-creation," China Literature, also known as Yuewen, has cultivated one of the world's largest digital fiction libraries with a community of 500,000 overseas writers and partnerships with Netflix and Disney+. Through that support, the company aims to build a "global IP universe-an ambitious vision to rewrite the future of global entertainment," Hou said. Already, its intellectual property, or IPs, account for nearly half of China's most successful dramas and animations, he added."

"Hou describes Yuewen as "the YouTube of novels" or "an MCN (multichannel network) for authors." His analogies capture what he describes as the platform's essence: a lively ecosystem where hundreds of millions of writers and readers collectively shape stories, acting as a global editorial board and real-time focus group."

The Ugly Immortals, a dark fantasy, became the first Chinese web novel to enter Universal Studios Singapore park. Tencent-backed China Literature Ltd. (Yuewen) operates a vast online fiction platform that combines a community of readers and 500,000 overseas writers to guide content development. The company uses mass co-creation and crowdsourced insight to identify stories with commercial potential and has forged partnerships with Netflix and Disney+. Yuewen aims to build a global IP universe, with its intellectual properties accounting for nearly half of China's top dramas and animations. The platform functions as a multichannel network for authors and a real-time global editorial board.

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