Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1264
Around 2018, Yao Jinming, the host of Hangzhou Radio, and Yang Yi, the deputy editor-in-chief of Sports Weekly, who has been an NBA reporter for more than 20 years, and two journalists separated by thousands of miles, are tired of doing linear news work. One of them longed to “tell stories” to their children, and the other wanted to “express their hearts”. But where can people find people who pay for these content?
In order to realize her dream of becoming a stage actress, Su Ting gave up her job as a host of Xinjiang TV station and came to Beijing. Soon, she stood at a crossroads again, to be an audiobook anchor or to continue her dream of being an actress? Tao Yongxiang, born in the 1990s, studied hard for many years, and was admitted to the Department of Computer Science of East China Jiaotong University from a small county town. In order to become an audiobook anchor, he simply gave up graduation.
Four people with very different experiences eventually turned their “voice” into their means of making a living, or a way to realize their dreams – Yao Jinming became a “Lion Dad” with 2.2 million fans; Tao Yongxiang became a “Lion Dad”. Zijin with Audio”, known as the No. 1 anchor of audiobooks; Su Ting has become a big anchor who can transform into all kinds of women by her voice, “Yidao Susu”; Domain-restricted content. And the platform that carries them is the Himalayas.
Founded in 2012, Himalaya has completed 11 rounds of financing so far, and the list of shareholders includes Tencent, China Literature, Xiaomi, Baidu and other companies. The last round of E-round financing was led by Zhixin Capital, Tencent, General Atlantic, etc., with a valuation of over US$4 billion, and the prospectus was updated on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in March this year. This August is the tenth year since the establishment of Himalaya.
The most developed region in the global audio market is the United States, which has an advantage unmatched by other regions-the public broadcasting system in the United States has never been far from the mainstream perspective for decades. They have cultivated a large number of audio content practitioners and audiences, and cultivated content payment. The market has created many professional audio publishing companies.
The domestic audio market lacks such innate conditions. Its user scale, number of practitioners, and payment habits must be promoted little by little by the companies involved in it. As the company with the highest market share, Himalaya is in A lot of resources have been invested in this process to drive the development of the market.
The voice actor behind “The King’s Woman”
In 2018, “Yidao Susu” (hereinafter referred to as Susu) auditioned eight books for the first time. The popular male and female channels on the Himalayas (the female channel on the novel website, mostly ancient and modern romance novels), Science fiction, fantasy, and suspense, she tried them all. Surprisingly, a month later, out of the eight books she auditioned for, six of them passed the preliminary audition, which gave her great confidence.
Susu’s undergraduate major is broadcasting and hosting, and her voice conditions are good; her experience as a stage actor has given her rich acting ability and script understanding ability, and can understand a role more deeply than others.
But going from the stage to the microphone is a completely different experience. Performing on the stage, there is a “fourth wall” – the stage actors cannot see the audience, but they can feel the emotions brought by the audience through actions such as holding their breath and laughing; and in front of the microphone, Su Su needs to to the imaginary audience and bring them into the world of the work and the protagonist.
It turns out that the tension, control, and expressiveness of performing on stage are not applicable to audiobook performances. “Then change it all,” said Susu, who spent a year changing all her performance methods and recording equipment. By 2019, she is only short of a work that suits her and can become popular.
After Himalaya introduces the copyright of audiobooks, the books will be rated, and new anchors need to find the most suitable works among the massive works, in addition to their strength, they also rely on a little luck. Susu and her partner Yidao Kankan (referred to as Kankan) are the lucky ones. After a year of trial and error, Kankan found an urban novel “There’s a Dragon on Me” that others didn’t want, and it became popular immediately; while Susu found a romance novel “Wang Wang” among a bunch of free imported female channel copyrights. The woman who dares to move”.
“Who Dare to Move the King’s Woman” is an ancient time-travel romance novel. The intern heroine travels to ancient times and meets Uncle Wang who is powerful in the world. Like many successful online novels, this book has grand scenes, exciting plots, and fast-paced emotional transitions of the characters.
Susu’s performance experience has been brought into full play in this work, whether it is the low-pitched female voice narration that shows the sense of the picture, the ignorance of the heroine when she first travels through, or the unwillingness of life and death, Susu can do it alone. Decorated with multiple angles, the emotions are fully displayed. The most expressed in user comments is “as if listening to a TV series”. “The King’s Woman Who Dare to Move” finally surpassed 2.5 billion broadcasts on the Himalayas.
One person playing multiple roles is Susu’s core competitiveness in the audiobook field. In the work “Uncle, You Missed Me”, she played all the female roles by herself. She created three characters with completely different personalities, including the silly white sweet heroine, a scholarly friend, and the second generation of justice and wealth. Even the audience can’t tell if it’s the same person.
Since then, Susu has been based on “female frequency”, and 72% of fans are women.
The content on Himalaya is closely related to upstream copyright companies. Users gather here to listen to high-quality audio content, but most of the anchors are amateurs. Therefore, the platform needs to train a large number of UGC creators with different backgrounds to have PGC. The creator of production ability. To achieve this, the editing system plays a key role. In the process of Su Su and Zijin gradually finding their own direction, the producer’s guidance and feedback have played a key role, and Himalaya is willing to push the creator to the front. .
The ecology of the Himalayas, Zijin and “Dad Lion” invariably use the “field” as a metaphor. The Himalayas endow a field, and the anchor will plant, water, cultivate and harvest by himself. For the platform and the anchor, this is a heavy operation, but the anchor has a higher sense of value. The anchor becomes a brand and gains fans, and it is easier for the platform to form a UGC community.
When UGC anchors grow up, Himalaya will also push them to set up professional PGC companies to help them develop in the form of investment or cooperation. Su Su and the two partners “One Kind of Kankan” and “Xidao Gongzi” established the audiobook production company Sanshi Scale, Zijin and Himalaya jointly invested in the audiobook production company Ximiao Xiansheng, and hatched the audio brand “Zi”. Lapel Opera Club”.
The production process of an audio publication is more complicated than expected. A work is adapted into an audio novel. First, the main line of the story and the essence of the characters are refined into an outline by the main part. , auditioning and assigning roles; followed by film production, crew building, and vocal recording.
After the vocal recording is completed, the recording is handed over to the production team to track the vocal and the script, and then add the music and sound effects in the later stage. After the finished product is released, the operation team will also synchronize the public account, Weibo, Douyin and other channels to do related publicity work.
If you only rely on personal use of love to generate electricity, it is impossible to achieve such an industrialized operation, and it is even more difficult to continuously create high-quality products. Su Su said that when she was working alone, she could only record three books a year, but after the company became a company, she, Kankan and Mr. Xi Dao could record more than 20 books a year, and the biggest advantage was to improve the efficiency and stability of the finished product. quality.
Driven by the top anchors and platforms, the domestic audio market has sustained good works. The responsibility of Himalaya is: by editing to accelerate the growth of UGC anchors, and then transforming the head UGC anchors into PGC production companies, the entire industry can cultivate more talents and form large and small production companies. Therefore, heavy operation and refined production are not the most cost-effective options, but must be done.
With the expansion of the number of users, the content ecology of Himalaya has also attracted the attention of more PGC anchors, such as Yang Yi and “Lion Dad” who are eager not to do “news content”.
Yang Yi’s life has always been closely related to basketball. He is the director of the basketball department of “Sports Weekly”, the deputy editor-in-chief of “Basketball Herald”, and the basketball commentary consultant of CCTV. He is also the first person in China to report in depth on the NBA. But when he came to Himalaya to do a podcast, he decided not to talk about NBA games, and even decided not to do an NBA show, but a sports show.
Radio stations need to provide knowledge reserves and core opinions, but the main problem with podcasts is that they are easy to fall into news. One after another chat about NBA games is a typical news content, and the vitality of a program will not exceed 3 days; The content of the players or information is highly homogenized and lacks primary sources. The analysis and comments are based on several foreign websites, without primary sources and on-site observations. Yang Yi feels that this is all “random analysis”.
Expanding the content from the NBA to the entire sports industry, Yang Yi has the resources, accumulation, and life experience. He can talk about it without checking the information. He even began to actively screen users-screened out the huge number of teenagers who used to argue about players, teams and games, and the remaining 25-40-year-old users accounted for 70%, and these users with certain life experience even You can listen to him on the podcast talking about the Russian-Ukrainian war that has nothing to do with sports.
Yang Yi has cooperated with many content platforms. He commented: Among the several projects he is working on at the same time, Himalaya is not the one that gives the most money, but what he values the most.
The reason why “Lion Dad” came to the Himalayas is also the pursuit of content. Tired of doing linear news content, I want to make valuable audio content for children. At the end of 2018, he went back and forth to study children’s content on the Himalayas, and found that many of the content for children aged 8-10 has a lot of room for improvement. And now, the parent-child channel has become one of the most popular channels on the Himalayas, which also confirms his judgment.
At that time, most of the content for teenagers and children on the Himalayas was born out of publications, and the anchor would read it aloud according to the text, but the text language in the book was only read out, not translated into sound language, which was actually painful for children to hear. of. In particular, when parents choose content, they value the authority of authors and publishers, while children actually only pursue the ultimate sense of hearing.
Translating the text language in the book into a voice language that teenagers can understand has become a breakthrough for “Lion Dad”. The “Lion Dad” who has two children knows children very well. He knows that children born after 10 receive a very high density of information every day. It is difficult for traditional storytelling methods to satisfy them, and the amount of information must be increased; he also knows that he is the greatest His opponent is not the audio of other teenagers in the Himalayas, but the cartoon. The audio content he tells must be at least “greater than or equal to” the video of the cartoon to win the attention of the children.
The Himalayan UGC community is expanded by the growth of amateur anchors and institutions such as Zijin and Susu. After reaching a certain size, more diverse and rich users will attract PGC authors such as “Lion Dad” and Yang Yi. Join, they are more professional, and the cost of trial and error is lower.
Yang Yi used to be a storytelling actor before working in the media. After working in the media, he has a deeper understanding of different media – TV requires popular, text requires depth, and audio needs to be somewhere in between, not too much information, but Don’t be too deep and complicated; and the first work “Journey to the West Children’s Radio Drama” recorded by “Lion Dad” with intuition and experience has become a hit, and it has achieved 10 million plays and 100,000 subscriptions within one month of its launch.
The growth of UGC anchors and the addition of PGC anchors have made the ecological construction of Himalayas more complete. On the upstream side, a more professional and larger PGC institution, the publishing house, has also joined as a new variable.
Behind the logic of heavy content: feed back more choices to the market
Himalaya has so far reached cooperation with 160 leading publishing houses and 140 online literature platforms. In addition to licensing the copyright, the publishing house will also produce audiobooks in person.
According to the prospectus, in 2021, Himalaya will share 1.6 billion yuan to content creators and third-party IP copyright owners. Publishers and writers are now using audio platforms as an important channel for publishing new books.
The cost of making an audiobook is not low. According to the feedback from the audio director of Beijing Science and Technology Press, with 100 episodes as a unit, if you just invite people to perform, about 10,000 to 20,000 can be done; but if you want to produce more sophisticated , the cost of producing 100 episodes will increase exponentially; the audio producer of Shanghai Translation Publishing House also said that when producing important copyrights such as Haruki Murakami and Milan Kundera, out of quality control, well-known dubbing will be invited. When actors come to perform, the cost of recording and the cost of supporting production will increase exponentially.
Technology is also changing habits. With the emergence of short, frequent, fast and informative products such as short videos, users’ attention spans are constantly shortening. According to the person in charge of Shanghai Translation Publishing House, there was a 20-minute episode of audio content on the Himalaya a few years ago, but now it is basically about 10 minutes; Beijing Science and Technology Publishing House is aimed at child users, with more attention than adults. Short, the duration of an episode of audio is basically about 5 minutes.
Some famous masterpieces may not be suitable for adaptation as audiobooks. When Shanghai Translation Publishing House first cooperated with Himalaya, it took out the exclusive rights of some overseas best-selling authors, such as Ian McEwan, Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro and Haruki Murakami. However, McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro’s works have a high threshold for understanding, and the response is average, while Haruki Murakami has achieved better results because of his great reputation in China.
And some works naturally have story logic and narrative rhythm adapted to audiobook adaptations. If Mak published “Mr. Toad Goes to a Psychiatrist”, it would be very suitable for an audiobook adaptation. The original book is an introductory book on psychological counseling that has been sold in the UK for more than 20 years. It shows the causes of serious depression and psychological analysis with animal dialogues, which is relaxed and happy. From Mr. Toad’s large number of vivid and colloquial emotional expressions, let readers Understanding depression and self-discovery. The audio album produced by Himalaya changed the original work into a multi-player audio drama, and on the basis of the original work, the psychological counseling content of psychological consultant Hu Shenzhi was added to answer user questions. Once it was launched, it was welcomed by a large number of audiences. .
How to maximize the copyright value of best-selling books and well-known authors; how to find works with the potential for adaptation among works with average sales in the book market, this is the first challenge faced by all publishing houses after entering the audio book market.
Second, is the cost. The publishing house decides to invest in the production of an audiobook, starting from the copyright part. This means that the publishing house has to find the right direction from the beginning, otherwise there will be a lot of waste in copyright and production costs.
Publishing houses that have succeeded in the Himalayas have all found suitable user groups. Guomai has a strong performance in the two tracks of history and psychology. Most of its historical audiences are middle-aged men over 40 years old. They are female office workers and college students in second- and third-tier cities; Shanghai Translation Publishing House’s audience is mainly women in their 30s who prefer literature and art books; Beijing Science and Technology Publishing House, which produces audio-visualized children’s books, is mainly 3-8 years old and likes to listen to stories of children.
Tianxia Book Publishing Company produces Chinese books for junior and senior high schools in China, with annual sales of 400 million yuan. Himalaya suggested that they should start with the language products they are good at. When the “Hilarious Chinese”, which covers primary school students in grades 1-3 based on the language, achieved good results, Himalaya suggested that they could expand to students of other age groups. The editor of Himalaya took a fancy to the joke album among the many selected topics. He believes that this album can make the IP “Qu Xiaoqi” quickly become popular. After becoming famous, whether it is Chinese, Chinese studies, or famous works, it can be successful.
As a result, the album “Laughter Campus” became their first album to exceed 100 million views. After this album became popular, the popularity of “Qu Xiaoqi” was immediately opened, and then there were “Funny Campus 2”, “Journey to the West”, “Romance of the Three Kingdoms”, and “Youth Detective Group”. The “Qu Xiaoqi” series has more than 300 million plays on the Himalayas, and paid albums have brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue. 150,000 sets of cultural and creative products were sold, bringing in more than 1 million yuan in revenue.
The audio editor of Tianxia Books reviewed the cooperation with the editor of Himalaya, saying that he deeply felt that “choice is greater than effort”. At that time, among the search keywords of the Himalaya Parent-Child Channel, the search volume of “joke” was gradually increasing, but there was no explosion, which became the basis for editors to suggest that Tianxia Books seize the opportunity, and these effective suggestions became “Qu Xiaoqi” “A rapidly rising beacon.
In addition to the content investment on UGC and PGC, Himalaya also has a lot of investment in AI technology. The prospectus shows that Himalaya’s R&D investment has increased year by year, and the R&D investment in 2021 has exceeded 1 billion yuan.
According to Lu Heng, the head of Himalaya AI, the technologies invested by Himalaya include text-to-speech technology (TTS) and automatic speech recognition (ASR), which can currently achieve AIGC (AI content creation) capabilities.
The AI team has now transcribed over 10,000 audiobooks on the Himalaya platform. On top of this, Lu Heng also led the team to reproduce the voice of the storytelling master Shan Tianfang, reaching 80% similarity, and used Shan Tianfang’s voice to reproduce some classic works, which have exceeded 50 million plays.
The application of TTS technology can digest a large amount of long-tail text content – such as news content with high timeliness and fast replacement, long-form manuscripts from media organizations, or a large number of mid-tail audiobooks and web documents. The conversion efficiency of TTS can reach thousands of copies in one hour, and the accuracy is almost the same as that of live broadcasters, which brings a qualitative leap in the timeliness of content, the productivity of creators, and the richness of the platform.
ASR technology is more used in intelligent review, AI manuscript (speech-to-text) and work scoring. The investment and development of the two technologies have also greatly enriched the content pool on the Himalayas. In 2021, the AIGC work “High IQ Crime” will reach 150 million views, and another work “White Night” will be listened to more than 29 million times.
In a relatively mature market, these infrastructures can be formed naturally through the process of marketization. However, in the domestic audio market with insufficient congenital conditions, Himalaya chose to accelerate the construction of these infrastructures by itself. This is a work with heavy investment and slow returns, but without doing so, it is difficult to create greater value.
Absence and growth of domestic audio market
The United States is the most prosperous country in the global audio market, and its audiobook industry has lasted for a century. “Continuation” is the key word, and it has never experienced a break, so it has fostered a habit of huge creators, huge audience, and paying for content.
Audible, an audiobook production company owned by Amazon, is one of the representatives. According to the statistics of Similar Web, Audible’s annual revenue has exceeded 1 billion US dollars.
But Audible’s success is more a result of the continuous development of the foreign audiobook industry, content payment habits and the interaction of capital entry. In contrast, the domestic audio market still has multiple factors that take time to develop.
Domestic Internet users and book users still need to cultivate the listening habits of audio content. Due to the gradual marginalization of the domestic broadcasting and audio markets in the past decade, content creators will prefer other creative paths. In foreign countries, some of the most important media, such as The New York Times, The Economist in the UK, and the BBC’s audio and radio programs, have never been absent from the mainstream vision.
The common problem encountered by all content platforms in China is that domestic Internet users lack the habit of paying for content. The mainstream business models of Chinese Internet companies include games, membership, advertising, e-commerce, and live broadcasts, but no company can run through content payment. mode. In the past few years, Himalaya has built a mainstream Internet commercialization system for content payment, membership, advertising, and live broadcast. However, in foreign countries, audio is a payment model that relies on content subscriptions. In China, it still has to wait for the growth of users’ payment habits.
Some secondary factors are also causing the development of audio in the Chinese market to be inferior to that of the United States: For example, scene dependence, the main scenes of audio are divided into car, housework and bedtime. The proportion of car owners in the United States is much higher than that in China; urbanization is another factor. One factor, from the third- and fourth-tier urban groups to the middle class, determines to a certain extent the coverage of long-audio audio content with a high threshold – podcasts.
The domestic industry division and talent pool are also insufficient. American audio content production companies can still have hundreds of millions of financing in the first two, with a clear division of labor between upstream and downstream.
These are all issues of the general environment, and they are not limitations that the audio industry can quickly break through with the promotion of itself or one company. Audio has its uniqueness and scene requirements and cannot be replaced by text or video.
In terms of the efficiency of obtaining information, the efficiency of text is the highest, while the efficiency of audio is slightly lower; but instead, the abundance of audio in emotional expression is unmatched by other media. Although audio is inefficient in acquiring information, it can make people feel the emotion of an author and a work for a long time, including the emotion of the speaker, making audio irreplaceable as a content form.
In the content market, American Story has proven that audio has its place in the content market. According to the editor of Shanghai Translation Publishing House, who has extensive experience in overseas markets, the sales of audio books in the United States even surpassed e-books for a time in the past two years.
This year is the tenth year of Himalaya. It took ten years of time and investment to build an ecosystem that can loop in and continuously produce high-quality content, and also promote the maturity of the audio market.
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