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- 1. PROJECT YL BY YANG LIN SRPING 2015 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment Of the requirements for the Masters of Science Media Management Program THE NEW SCHOOL DATE OF SUBMISSION: MAY 1st 2015
- 2. Contents I. About “Project YL” ........................................................................................................................... 3 1. Name and Logo .................................................................................................................... 4 2. Vision and Mission ............................................................................................................. 5 II. Research ............................................................................................................................................. 6 1. General Market .................................................................................................................... 6 2. Weibo and WeChat ............................................................................................................. 8 3. Trending Content? ........................................................................................................... 10 4. Outcomes and Guidance ............................................................................................... 12 III. Operating ...................................................................................................................................... 12 1. SWOT Analysis .................................................................................................................. 12 2. Soft Launch Operational Overview .......................................................................... 13 3. New Insights ...................................................................................................... 14 4. Censorship Factor ............................................................................................ 18 IV. Future Phases .............................................................................................................................. 20 1. From Online to Offline ................................................................................................... 20 2. Advertising ......................................................................................................................... 21 3. Career advantage ............................................................................................................. 22 V. Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................... 22
- 3. 3. New Insights Page view (PV) was the most important measurement for my project. On my Weibo blog, most of the articles got 300 to 500 page views. Considering my previous job as a TV presenter provided many followers on Weibo, this was quite a satisfied result. The top five most viewed articles are: Top 5 Page Views 1 Do You Know the Director of Furious 7 Is Chinese? (23k PV) 2 Game of Throne And Ed Sheeran (6310 PV) 3 2015 Corgi Beach Party (3724 PV) 4 A Marriage Proposal in Boston Marathon (1423 PV) 5 GIFs From the New Avengers 2 Trailer (1210 PV) Exhibit 3. Top 5 Page Views By classified the Top 5, I also confirmed the outcome from research: entertainment and emotional content were more appealing to readers. My WeChat blog was newly established, which means unlike my Weibo blog, it had zero followers at the beginning. I was not sure how this would influence page views, so I did two experiments to explore 1) whether the number of followers would impact PV, and 2) whether the promotion would impact PV. On March 3rd, I posted an article called “13 Pun Names From House of Cards” on my WeChat blog. Then I contributed the same article to another WeChat blog called Digger. The major topic on Digger was related to politics and news; though my article about House of Cards did not fit its topic completely, it was relevant. A few days later on March 12th, Digger posted my article with minor changes.
- 4. Since WeChat provided a measurement tool for blogs, I asked Digger to send me the information of my article, and then compared it with the information I acquired from my blog. The contrast was startling. On my WeChat blog, my article was only successfully pushed to thirteen readers (readers could decide whether to accept the pushed content). In the first seven days, only 26 people read and three people shared. Push to users 13 Page views 26 Reposts 3 Chart 5. My article on my WeChat blog Meanwhile on Digger, my article was successfully pushed to 5,477 people, got 1,809 page views and was shared 141 times. Push to users 5447 Page views 1809 Reposts 141 Chart 6. My article on Digger’s WeChat blog Apparently, my article had more influence on Digger instead of on my blog. Digger’s abundant reader base helped a lot with the page views. However, it is worth noticing that out of 5447 users, only 1809 users clicked the page after saw 20 40 03/03/2015 03/05/2015 03/07/2015 03/09/2015 1000 2000 03/12/2015 03/14/2015 03/16/2015 03/18/2015
- 5. the title. The ratio is about one third. The reason for that is either the title was not appealing, or the topic was not readers’ preferences—in another word, readers on digger are not my targeting audience. Although that ratio on my blog seems better than on Digger, it cannot conclude that I successfully reach my audience, because the sampling numbers were too few to make a judgment. The probability is uncertain, so the ratio is meaningless. A few days later, I did the second experiment. On March 16th, I posted an article called “Meet Your Ancestors (All of Them)1”. It was a science-‐topic article translated and edited from the same title content. I kept the writer’s name, Tim Urban, under the title, and put a link to original website in the end. Not surprisingly, it also had a bad performance on the first day. But on second day, I started to promote it. I sent it directly to people, asked them to repost it if they liked the article. I shared it on my WeChat Moment so all my friends could see it. Then I checked the statistics tool—the result was amazing. 1 Meet Your Ancestors (All of Them), Tim Urban, Wait But Why, Dec. 2013, http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/12/your-‐ancestor-‐is-‐jellyfish.html 2 Travels With My Censors, Peter Hassler, the New Yorker, Mar. 2015,
- 6. Push to users 14 Page views 664 Reposts 50 Chart 7. Another article on my WeChat blog with promotion Like last time, only fourteen users decided to receive my pushed article, which means my followers were few. But when I started promotion, page views increased rapidly. Eventually, 664 people read my article—47.4 times the number of my followers. These two experiments have provided illustrative examples to my presumption. First, the quantity of followers is the basis for spreading the content. More followers a blog has, the more exposure the content will get. Second, the promotion is the catalyst. A good promotion will impact spreading process dramatically, and vice versa. Most importantly, the content is the king. People want to be informed, touched or entertained not by the promotion, but by the content. If operating a blog is like driving a car, followers and promotion may lead to a fast lane, yet the content decides how far the car will get. These insights not only apply to my Weibo blog, but to other social business models as well. 4. Censorship Factor When talking about Chinese media, the censorship factor is inevitable. In fact many my friends’ expectations about my project were my point of view and 250 500 03/16/2015 03/18/2015 03/20/2015 03/22/2015
- 7. solution dealing with censorship, either in clever ways, or in not clever but fearless ways. But my preference and advantages were inclining to produce entertainment content. The research also supported that entertainment topics are more popular on social media. So I knew censorship would probably not be a tricky issue for my project. Unexpectedly, I did encounter a related situation. On March 5th, I saw a post on Weibo recommending Peter Hassler’s new article, Travels With My Censors2. I clicked the link in the post, which lead me to the New Yorker’s website to read the original one. It was quite long, almost seven thousands words, but I didn’t stop reading until finished it. It was a very insightful article. I really liked it. Then I decided to translate it literally to let more Chinese readers read. I spent three days to finish the work. In order to accurately translate the article, I did research and added annotations. In the end, the translated article was more than ten thousands Chinese characters. Because it was much longer than I expected, I was not sure if there were any errors. Instead of putting it on my blogs, I posted it on a translating BBS in order to ask for revisions. To my surprise, a half day later, someone took my translation and posted on his WeChat blog. I didn’t expect it happen, yet I was not angry at all. Peter Hassler was the author and the New Yorker posted it online for free reading, while I only removed the language barrier for those Chinese readers. If Mr. Hassler and the 2 Travels With My Censors, Peter Hassler, the New Yorker, Mar. 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/09/travels-‐with-‐my-‐censor
- 8. New Yorker would not oppose this behavior, what right did I have to be jealous and upset? Besides Peter’s name, the New Yorker, my name and the source links were all completely showing on that blog. In fact, all reposts kept those credits too. Moreover, my purpose was letting more Chinese people be able to read it, and now more people were reading it, so it did help me. The page views increased exponentially. Within one day, it got more than 10,000 page views. Like I said before, it was the content, Peter’s writing, that made it so popular. Before I had a chance to screenshot the PV number, that article was gone. After one day, the BBS where I posted the translation delete related page as well. The page views on BBS stopped at 6,562. An article about China’s censorship, got censored after translated into Chinese—that was not surprising at all. Only Peter’s article was focusing more on book editors and readers, not the system, and the tone of the article was to show misunderstood facts, rather than to criticize. That’s also why I want to translate. I had some revelations after this. First of all, Chinese people are eager for good English content with translation. Comparing with ten thousand PVs on WeChat and six thousand PVs on BBS, the original post on Weibo only has about 50 reposts, roughly equal to five hundreds PVs. Ironically, it didn’t even get censored till this day, so didn’t the New Yorker’s webpage. Moreover, political content is a two-‐edged sword. A political content can be fast spread under certain circumstance. For example, scandals are always
- 9. eye-‐catching, not only in China, but all over the world. For content providers, this would be a good chance to attract more audience. Yet political content is also risky, especially in China. When my translation got censored, I only wasted several days’ working. But if a business, a marketing campaign or publishing a foreign book got influenced by censorship, the loss would be much more severe. Running a business needs to consider the risks and consequences. It is always like a dilemma, and there won’t be a perfect, easy answer. I agree with what Peter Hassler wrote in his article, quoting from his Chinese editor Zhang—“it's not about the things you can't do but concentrating on the things you can.”3 3 Travels With My Censors, Peter Hassler, the New Yorker, Mar. 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/09/travels-‐with-‐my-‐censor