CATDOLL: Zou Zhengyu: Tencent Animation is ready to open up and co-create the two-dimensional economy

"The foundation of the ACG economy is IP. With the development of the entertainment and cultural industries, animation IP is gradually becoming an important source of the entire Chinese content industry, and the Internet has brought new opportunities for the rise of China's animation industry." Zou Zhengyu, general manager of Tencent Interactive Entertainment's animation business department, said at the Tencent Animation Industry Cooperation Conference on November 19, "Tencent Animation is ready and willing to work with everyone present to open up and co-create the ACG economy."

This cooperation conference is the first strategic conference for the entire industry since the establishment of Tencent Animation, and it is also the largest industry conference in China's animation industry. After Cheng Wu, Vice President of Tencent Group and CEO of Tencent Pictures, gave a keynote speech entitled "Flying with the Two-Dimensional Economy" and first proposed the concept of the two-dimensional economy, Zou Zhengyu explained in detail the business strategy of Tencent Animation's open co-creation as the largest online animation platform in China.

Zou Zhengyu pointed out that good content and good creators are the key to incubating high-quality IPs, taking Tencent Animation's representative works in recent years, author big data statistics, and animation themes as examples. In recent years, Tencent Animation has been continuously improving its product line layout, and its penetration rate on both PC and mobile terminals has remained the first in the industry. "Based on the user insight and data of the largest online animation platform in China, Tencent Animation has become the most professional animation IP producer and copyright operator in China, and can efficiently connect authors and users to "content co-creation." This year, Tencent Animation has also focused on building a screenwriter system to inject strong support into content creation." Zou Zhengyu said.

At the conference, Zou Zhengyu shared Tencent Animation's integrated business operation model. "During the IP creation period, in addition to original creation and introduction of native animation IP, Tencent Animation can also customize native IP in other fields according to demand. When the animation IP matures to a certain stage, it can start various forms of commercial derivative operations such as image implantation, joint promotion, advertising cooperation, and authorization." Zou Zhengyu was full of confidence and emphasized that Tencent Animation must "go global!" and establish cooperation with first-line original artists, studios and editing teams in the United States, Japan, and South Korea in terms of content; in terms of distribution, help more Chinese animation works go global and cultivate star IPs with a broader user base.

"Tencent Animation not only has rich IP reserves and operating experience, but also has a unique and hard-to-replicate pan-entertainment platform advantage. These advantages will not be exclusive to Tencent Animation. I hope that every industry colleague can benefit from participating in the cooperation, and every user may get a better and more diverse interactive experience." Zou Zhengyu emphasized that Tencent Animation will adhere to the cooperation principle of "open co-creation". It can operate on its own, and is also willing to operate and share profits with partners; Tencent also actively welcomes cooperation with external IPs, contributes its own platform, users, and media resources, and promotes with partners; at the same time, Tencent Animation can also customize IP according to external needs. Tencent's different business platforms have experts in their respective fields, who can provide professional and systematic help to partners.

Focusing on Tencent Interactive Entertainment's pan-entertainment strategy with celebrity IP as the core, Zou Zhengyu explained that Tencent Interactive Entertainment has launched four major businesses, namely animation, literature, and film and television, based on its game business. At present, except for the film and television business which has just started, the first three businesses, including animation, have already achieved the first position in the industry in their respective vertical fields, which has accumulated a solid platform foundation for the interconnection, integration and symbiosis of the same IP in multiple content fields.

Zou Zhengyu finally emphasized that in the future, "open co-creation" is not just an attitude, but also an action. The revitalization of China's animation industry is by no means the work of one company, and the development of China's animation industry should not be a one-sided win. Let us remember love, remember light, and enter a brand new two-dimensional world together!

The following is the full text of Zou Zhengyu's speech:

Hello everyone, I am Zou Zhengyu. First of all, on behalf of Tencent Animation, I would like to welcome all guests and media to this event.

Before today's event started, I believe everyone has seen the IP display of Tencent Animation outside the main venue, as well as cosplay, home dance, mobile games and other hot ACG cultural forms derived from IP. The potential of the ACG economy behind them makes everyone in the ACG era feel excited.

The foundation of the two-dimensional economy is IP. With the development of the entertainment and cultural industries, animation IP is gradually becoming an important source of the entire Chinese content industry, and the Internet has brought new opportunities for the rise of China's animation industry. For this purpose, Tencent Animation has been preparing for three years. First of all, in terms of content layout, Tencent Animation has created a number of high-quality IPs with mature worldviews and mature fans. Among the top ten works of Baidu Fengyun List of Chinese animation, 6 are works of Tencent Animation. In addition, more than 40 comic works have a click rate of over 100 million. In terms of animation works, except for the new series in 2015, the playback volume of all Tencent Animation's animation works has exceeded 100 million. Among them, I have to mention "My Name is Bai Xiaofei", which is the familiar "Corpse Brother". The total number of clicks on the animation and comic network of this work has exceeded 8.3 billion times, which is a representative work of Chinese youth animation.

Good content and good creators are the key to incubating high-quality IP. Here, I would like to share two sets of data with you. The first set is the data of works: there are more than 20,000 works on the Tencent Comics platform, more than 6,000 signed works, and the output of original Chinese comics accounts for more than half of the Chinese online animation market. It can be said that it is the largest original online animation platform in China; the second set is the data of authors: the total number of contributing authors on the Tencent Comics platform has exceeded 50,000, the number of certified authors has exceeded 9,000, and the number of contracted authors has exceeded 500. More than 100 of the outstanding authors are here today, welcome to you!

In addition to original works, Tencent Animation has also introduced more than 1,000 genuine comics and light novels from Japan, South Korea, the United States, Hong Kong and other regions. Now, Tencent Animation platform has achieved full coverage of work types, especially the most popular themes among young users such as passion, comedy, science fiction, suspense, etc. They have built the industry's richest star IP reserves for Tencent Animation platform, and also laid the most solid content foundation for the two-dimensional economy. Good content output requires a good ecology, and Tencent Animation has also been committed to building a healthy platform ecology.

First of all, Tencent Animation continues to improve its product line layout, and its penetration rates on both PC and mobile terminals are firmly ranked first in the industry. Users can watch their favorite works anytime and anywhere on PC stations, Android clients, Apple clients, H5 pages, QQ Animation, and Tencent News clients, communicate with friends, and get the latest animation information. These platforms are not only a tool for information transmission, but also a platform for fans to interact and communicate. They are not only a place to read and listen to content, but will also become a platform for IP promotion. Every month, 48 million users are active on our platform, which is not only completely open, but also has a business mechanism that strictly protects copyright. Whether it is an individual, a studio or a company, you can upload original works; users can choose their favorite works, and good works can stand out if they are loved by readers.

Based on the user insight and data of the largest online animation platform in China, Tencent Animation has become the most professional animation IP producer and copyright operator in China. During the creative process, editors will gain insight into the needs, interests, and behavioral habits of a large number of users and provide timely feedback to the author. This "co-creation" method of connecting readers and users breaks the closed state of the "black box" in the traditional creation stage, helps authors to carry out subsequent creation of works, and makes the works loved by more users. Big data can provide reference for the creation of works, but the birth of a work is essentially a subjective creative process. Tencent Animation has a content team of hundreds of people, who are close friends of the author.

Our editorial team has many senior editors, some of whom have been in the industry for more than 10 years; the animation production team brings together outstanding talents in the industry, and the number of views of the animation works supervised by them has exceeded 100 million; this year, we have also focused on building a screenwriter system to inject strong support into content creation. Not only that, Tencent Animation will also "go global" and establish cooperation with first-line original artists, studios and editing teams in the United States, Japan and South Korea in terms of content; in terms of distribution, it will help more Chinese comics go international and cultivate star IPs with a wider user base. Based on the above platform advantages, Tencent Animation has established a set of business operation models that run through the life cycle of IP. During the IP creation period, in addition to original creation and introduction of native IP, Tencent Animation can also customize IP according to needs. For example, the animation of the same name was customized for the game "Brave Adventure", and the current number of views has exceeded 250 million. It is the only animation work customized for a game among the top ten Chinese comics on Baidu Fengyun List.

When the animation IP enters the mature stage, it can start various forms of commercial operations such as image implantation and authorization. In the vertical field, making the IP well and refined is only the first step. We have long been convinced that the value of IP is far more than that. Four years ago, Mr. Cheng Wu proposed a pan-entertainment strategy with celebrity IP as the core. Based on this strategy, Tencent Interactive Entertainment has launched four major businesses, namely animation, literature, and film and television, on the basis of its game business. Therefore, we can say that Tencent Animation not only has rich IP reserves and operation experience, but also has a unique and difficult-to-copy pan-entertainment full-platform advantage.

What I want to emphasize here is that these advantages will not be exclusive to Tencent Animation. I hope that every colleague in the industry can benefit from the cooperation, and every user can get a more diverse interactive experience from it. This is exactly the original intention of holding this cooperation conference. Facing the two-dimensional economy, Tencent Animation has done a good job in content layout and platform ecosystem construction. However, this is not enough, and we still face many challenges. The first challenge is that although the methods of cultivating works are constantly upgraded, the output still cannot keep up with the speed of consumption, and good works are gradually overdrawn. Authors, as powerful creators of content, need to get more attention.

This year, Tencent Animation invested 60 million yuan in animation funds and 30 million yuan in comics funds to support domestic cartoonists, build a welfare system, and protect their lives. This investment has achieved good results. The output of excellent works on the platform has increased significantly. The number of works with more than one million hits per day has tripled or quadrupled, and the number of high-quality works updated steadily every week has exceeded 300. Therefore, we decided to increase our support. Today, Tencent Animation officially announced that it will invest 300 million yuan to establish the Juxing Fund! The fund is fully open to authors and studios, encouraging them to create boldly, produce more excellent original works, and become true superstars in the Chinese animation industry! We sincerely welcome more creators to join the Tencent Animation family, turn dreams into reality, and reach the peak of life! For more content, please pay attention to the author's writing meeting in the afternoon.

Another challenge comes from the business model. The current mainstream business model is to realize the value through the derivative authorization of the work. When an original work has a certain degree of popularity, it is licensed in different fields to consume the popularity of the original work to obtain income. The licensing fee is an important indicator to measure the commercial value of the work. Under the current situation of the development of China's animation industry, a work needs a very long period of accumulation to reach a certain IP popularity, and then it will take a long time to cover all the derivative fields. Therefore, the commercial value of the work cannot be maximized in a short period of time, and the linkage of different fields is isolated from each other. At the same time, as can be seen in the picture on the left of the big screen, for the downstream fields that have obtained authorization, the market size and profitability of most fields are far less than those of popular fields such as games and film and television, and the overall development of the industry is extremely unbalanced.

So, how to maximize the commercial value of the work and the profitability of downstream? Our strategy is to build an IP symbiosis system, as shown in the picture on the right side of the screen. The starting point of this system is no longer just to produce a work, but to integrate all links in the industrial chain to jointly create an IP. Therefore, in the early stage of the work, in addition to the creators of the work themselves, partners in more fields can join in the form of resources or cash investment in the early stage, jointly plan and produce IP in advance, and through the derivation of IP in different fields, reversely promote the overall growth of IP, and ultimately benefit all parties.

Based on the integration of these different fields, fan behavior can be continuously precipitated. Animation fans may be converted into game players, and game players may buy peripherals and go to the cinema to watch movies. With the accumulation of multiple levels of users, the value of IP will snowball and eventually become a star IP with a mass consumption base. This is IP "symbiosis". The IP symbiosis system cannot be achieved by one person alone. We are willing to open up more profit space to partners, gather the strength of the entire industry, and jointly create more national comic star IPs.

Based on the IP symbiosis system, Tencent Animation began to explore a new business model and launched the "joint production" model, that is, all parties invest capital, jointly create IP, and share the benefits. Different links in the industry chain work together and everyone plays together. Authors, animation studios, coser studios, game manufacturers, toy manufacturers and sellers, film and television parties, producers, and media parties can all be members of the joint production.

This year, Tencent Animation has begun many attempts at the "co-production" model, such as cooperating with Japan's DEEN Studio and Li Haoling Studio to jointly create the heavyweight work "Once Upon a Time There Was a Spirit Sword Mountain"; co-producing the animation "Ma Shen" with Tencent Video, and co-producing the animation "Monster List" with iQiyi, etc. These cases include both internal cooperation within Tencent and cooperation with multiple external parties. For more details about business cooperation, please attend the business authorization meeting in the afternoon, and we will explain them to you one by one. In short, Tencent Animation will adhere to the cooperation principle of "open co-creation".

Tencent Animation has its own IP, which can be operated by itself, and is also willing to operate and share profits with partners. We also actively welcome cooperation with external IPs, contribute our own platform, users, and media resources, and promote together with partners. At the same time, Tencent Animation can also customize IP according to external needs. Tencent's different business platforms have experts in their respective fields, who can provide professional and systematic help to partners. In the future, we believe that "open co-creation" is not only an attitude, but also an action.

As early as 20 years ago, China's modern animation had already started, and China has never lacked creators and fans who love animation. The revitalization of China's animation industry is by no means the work of one company, and the development of China's animation industry should not be a one-sided win. Tencent Animation is ready and willing to work with everyone present to break free from the constraints of gravity and explore more possibilities of the two-dimensional economy. Let us remember love, remember light, and enter a brand new two-dimensional world together!