The COVID-19 pandemic has been changing people’s all aspects of lives. While life necessities such as working and shopping have almost completed their shifts from offline to online, what is expected to be the next commercial opportunity?
According to statistics from mobile data and analytics provider App Annie, the global consumer spending on book apps under the book and reference category exceeded US $980 million in the first half of 2021, at a year-on-year growth of 65%. It proves that the rapid development of mobile Internet infrastructure accelerates the popularity of online literature among young generations. Online literature, also well known as online fiction or web novel, is literary works available primarily or solely on the Internet.
For instance, Dreame, a reading App launched in September 2018, has soon ranked first in the book category in Apple’s App Store in 22 countries and Google Play Store in 50 countries. This emerging reading app from Singapore has achieved more than tens of millions of readers.
Lucrative business model
App Annie pointed out that the business models of online literature applications can be categorized into two major modes, free and paid. Free mode make profits in a relatively traditional way by advertising, while paid mode develops multiple sources of incomes such as subscription, membership, reward, etc.
Dreame is such a paid reading app featured romance novels with many successful practices to build a local online literature ecosystem by attracting writers and readers. The app rewards writers to upload their original works, keep updating stories and complete the novels with a variety of incentive policies and copyright protection. Meanwhile, Dreame has many local editor teams around the world to seek and cultivate excellent novice writers. Writers can also get helps in terms of subjects, plots and contents through real-time interactions with readers and comprehensive analysis. So far more than 100,000 writers have published their literature works on Dreame.
With success of having attracted a total of more than 300,000 high-quality and exclusive literature resources, Dreame’s paid readership keeps considerably rising. In order to strengthen user stickiness, the app creates a comment area for readers to interact with authors and enrich their online content community experience
Next Literature IP
The lucrative prospects of online literature is not just a series of text works, but also many other possibilities of commercial values. Harry Potter, one of the best known literature IP born two decades ago, is such a priceless business ended up with multiple forms of films, tourism, and entertainments. The online literature app which can generate the next Harry Potter will definitely become a hit among investors.
Beyond creating online text literature works, Dreame’s parent company Stary has also revealed its ambition to seek the best works for next Harry Potter IP. By adapting the text works, the company can create a lucrative business chain for operating an IP ecological closed loop. In addition to online novels, Stary also expanded business lines into audiobook, AVG interactive games, web comics on its business territories. In September 2020, Stary launched the audiobook platform Wehear, the content resources of which are precisely adapted from Dreame‘s popular novels.
Wehear adapts a combination of free and paid modes, with the first few chapters for free and the later ones to be unlocked by paying coins. Users can do tasks on the platform to earn coins. This special commercialization is designed friendly to meet demands for those who tend not to pay and also extend users’ time staying on the app.