This is the best time and the worst time to be in media. Online media now makes up a bigger piece of China’s trillion yuan media pie than traditional media. So they either shut up shop, or change tack, like Caixin, one of China’s most respected business media groups.
“Right now Caixin still gets about two thirds of its revenues from advertising on its Caixin weekly magazine, but the group is fast feeling the urgency to diversify, into TV, and especially mobile platforms.” Cheng Lei, Beijing
Caixin is still old-school enough to send reporters on year long assignments to chase important stories, and is doing more – to stop traditional media talent jumping ship to new media startups.
“Maintain quality, your name is well recognized at home and abroad, give incentives to new recruits, provide incentives to retain talent. Second, provide market rate compensation, quite important to generate and find new revenues. ” Huang Shan, Associate Managing Editor, Caixin Group
Huang adds that packaging your content the right way is paramount–as our attention spans become shorter.
“Provide very incisive and compact info package. Make your content more readable, don’t use a lot of jargon, complex words” Huang Shan, Associate Managing Editor, Caixin Group
Thanks to social media, just about everyone can be a media channel, there are now over 10 million official Wechat accounts and hundreds of millions of Weibo accounts. The problem is sifting through the ocean of information for what we need.
“Aggregators, help audience find best relevant content, but anyway, they still need best content, behind content, user still need more services. Most important thing is to understand what customers need.” Shen Qiang, CTO, Microsoft Ventures
That is something Jinri Toutiao, or Today’s Headlines, hopes to achieve. The 3 year old content distributor was set up by Bytedance. Toutiao has 30 million users serving up to them 30 million personalised headlines pages, it hopes to leverage user preference data to serve their other needs.
“You read a movie review, within three or five seconds, you can buy tickets directly, the time gap between reading information and getting service is now very short, you can buy immediately, order an airfare, go on a holiday, when service is simplified.” Tina Zhao, Vice President, Bytedance
CCTV is also changing with news being packaged for mobile devices, apps allow live viewing, major televised events focus on more viewer interaction. In the internet plus age, not re-moulding to the on-demand economy may do ourselves out of a job.
