Ep. 39: Podcasting in China — the Myth and the Reality
Transcript
(Y: Ying-Ying Lu; R: Rui Ma;)
[00:00] R: OK, Techbuzzers, if you have been paying attention, you can probably guess the two recent pieces of news — one about an acquisition, and the other, about a funding event, both here in the US, by the way — that we here at Techbuzz and also the whole Sinica Podcast Network got way, way, waaaay excited about this month.
Y: Rui’s talking about the acquisition of Gimlet Media, a podcasting network, by the newly IPO’ed music-streaming service Spotify, for $200mm, and the $100mm raised by podcasting platform Himalaya, which was just announced last week.
R: What does this have to do with China tech, you ask? Yeah, it’s actually a bit of a departure from our usual subject matter because this made barely a splash in Chinese media. And in the past, we have always focused on Chinese headline news.
Y: But we just couldn’t help ourselves, because a podcast episode on podcasts is first of all, so meta, and second of all, it was a big deal in English-language news, and surprisingly, quite a few articles did mention China as a leader in this space.
[1:06] R: Specifically, the phrase “the podcasting industry in China is 23x larger” than in the US was cited by al large media outlets, and since I’ve never seen anything like that cited in Chinese, I had to find the source. Turns out pretty much everyone is referencing an article from Marketplace.org called “FOMO in China is a $7Bn industry”. This article says that the Chinese government estimated the “pay-for-knowledge” economy, or 知识付费, to be about $7.3Bn in 2017, with the bulk of it coming from paid podcasts.
Y: In the same article, the reporter notes that the 2017 US podcasting market had advertising revenues of only $314mm, and since most podcasts monetize through advertising here, well, we can safely assume that’s the market size, in terms of monetization, anyway. So if you take out your calculator, that’s a difference of — wait for it — 23 times!
R: But could it be that simple? Do Chinese people just love paying for podcasts? Like, a lot a lot more than Americans? Ying-ying, why are we doing an English podcast and not a Chinese one? We could start one today! We just can’t use the name Techbuzz because 科技嗡嗡 will be really really weird.
Y: Well, the answer is that it’s obviously not that simple. Chinese people are notoriously frugal. And Techbuzzers already know that aside from gaming and livestreaming, it’s just not that easy to get netizens to pay for content, as evidenced by our recent Episode 33 on Tencent Music. So why are they paying, and what exactly are they paying for?
[3:06] R: All questions I’m dying to talk about. But before we go into the show today, we just want to say that we really loved doing this episode because it really allowed us to understand where the podcasting industry came from, and also formulate some of our own opinions about where it’s going. A side note here, we are actually completely accidental podcasters, so we knew absolutely nothing coming in.
Y: In fact, the only reason we decided to even do a podcast was because we wanted to provide accurate, well-researched and in-depth stories precisely like the one you are about to hear, stories that go beyond the easiest, most digestible headline, stories that are as accurate and as complete as we can make them, while being, we hope, somewhat entertaining to listen to.
R: In our naivete, we thought that a 20-30 minute podcast would be easier than writing 4 to 6000 words. And boy have we since been proven to be totally wrong, I think this has been worth it. And I know we do it all the time, but we just want to thank you guys again for listening! Thanks guys!
[4:39] R: Hi everyone! We are TechBuzz China by Pandaily, powered by the Sinica Podcast Network!
Y: We are a weekly podcast focused on giving you a peek into what’s buzzing within the tech community in China.
R: We uncover and contextualize unique insights, perspectives and takeaways on headline tech news that don’t always make it into English language coverage. So you can be smarter about the world of China tech. TechBuzz China is a part of Pandaily.com, an English language site that tells you “everything about China’s innovation.” I’m one of your two co-hosts, Rui Ma.
Y: And I’m your other co-host, Ying-Ying Lu. We’d like to acknowledge our partners DealStreetAsia and SupChina, creator of the Sinica Podcast Network! In addition to TechBuzz, you can also find Sinica which covers current affairs, NuVoices on women, the business-oriented ChinaEconTalk, and the Caixin-Sinica Business Brief from China’s leading business magazine. Check these out, guys!
R: As always, if you enjoyed listening to our podcast, please leave us a review on iTunes or whatever other platform you use, and because our last episode was so delayed, our hongbao offer still stands! Send us a screenshot of your review, and we’ll be happy to send you a small holiday red packet in WeChat! Just e-mail us at rui at pandaily dot com, rui@pandaily.com, for further instructions.
[6:06] R: Unless you were an early adopter, you probably started listening to podcasts just a few years ago, or even more recently than that, and not way back in 2004 when the term was officially coined by a journalist. I’ll be honest and say that I myself started consuming podcasts in earnest maybe just three years ago.
Y: Same here! Today it’s almost hard to believe that podcasts were not always a mainstay channel of content consumption. Anyways, one of the first clues that the China podcasting market is not the same as that in the US is the fact that if you searched for 播客, which is the official Chinese translation for “podcast,” you’ll get articles like this one, titled “Chinese podcasters have to wait another ten years for a viable business model,” this was published in December 2018.
R: Not quite the $7Bn blue ocean that we were looking for, right? In fact, if you read this long and extensive article in detail, the description of the industry is quite dreary. And it’s echoed by a talk given also in 2018 by podcaster 程衍樑 Cheng Yanliang as part of cross-border VC GGV Capital’s GGVoices. Cheng references the story of Alex Blumberg’s founding of Gimlet, yes the one that was just bought by Spotify, as his inspiration, and what every podcaster in China should pay attention to and what inspired him to start on the podcasting path in 2017.
Y: Before hearing Alex’s Start Up podcast, Cheng said that, he, like many other intellectuals in China, had deemed podcasts to be “low cost, of low value, and only fit for killing time.” Not the words you would expect to hear describing an industry that reached $7Bn that same year, right? Or, I guess it’s possible, if Cheng is an outlier, and not representative of the average Chinese listener. That’s entirely possible, given that he was listening to English podcasts.
[8:23] R: But even if that was Cheng’s personal opinion, that doesn’t explain why the article we cited earlier was so bearish on Chinese podcasts. So who’s wrong here? The Chinese podcaster bears, or Western media bulls?
Y: The answer lies in how you define the $7Bn revenue market that keeps on getting thrown around. You see, even in the original Marketplace article, the writer does call it what it is actually referred to in Chinese, which is “pay-for-knowledge,” or 知识付费.
R: If you think that means it sounds more like an education program than a podcast at least in the sense that we are a podcast, then you are right. Let us quote you from a Chinese article on People’s Daily that talks about how the $7Bn — yes, that number again! — pay-for-knowledge market is poised to burst.
Y: It’s the state-owned newspaper, so it can be critical of non state-owned businesses, but check out the example they gave of a woman who wasn’t sure that her pay-for-knowledge product wasn’t a scam. “I paid for a weight loss package last month,” she said, “the teacher seems very good, but I’m not sure about the efficacy.”
[9:33] R: That’s right! That’s the kind of product that is being included in this pay-for-knowledge market, which by the way, the article notes has reached 188mm users at end of 2017, with triple the revenues of the year before. So it’s experiencing explosive growth.
Y: Are these really podcasts, or are these, and we are going back to the Marketplace article again, best described as something else? Let’s see, the article says that the main podcast consumer they interviewed, a guy named Chen Jun, of the dozen or so podcasts he paid for, they were “mostly educational lectures on Chinese history, health, the economy, finance and learning methods.”
R: Sure, these were audio products, often delivered through what’s called a podcasting platform, like Ximalaya, the main investor in Himalaya — by the way we know it’s a bit confusing for those of you who do speak Chinese because Ximalaya is literally the Chinese pronunciation of Himalaya — but the point is, what he’s paying for are actually, ding ding ding, educational lectures, not the entertainment content that I associate with podcasts, and not what I’m going to bet what most of you have on your phones either.
Y: Yes, educational lectures, emphasis on lectures. Not just content that’s educational in nature, which we’d like to think Techbuzz is, but structured formally in a way so as actually, be well, instructive. You don’t get what we mean? Well here’s an example of what Chen Jun paid for — “How to Get Healthy Returns from the Stock Market.”
[11:23] R: Does that sound like Netflix or Spotify for audio content to you? Well, maybe you only watch documentaries and Planet Earth on your Netflix, but for me, Chen Jun’s source of selections sound more like what you’d find on a Coursera, EdX, or other continuing education platform.
Y: And guess how big that market is? In 2016, self-paced e-learning content revenue in the US was $12Bn. In China, consumers only purchased about $1Bn of self-paced e-learning that same year. Even if we include all revenues, including what government and corporations spend on training, that is just $5Bn total, still less than half of what the US spent.
R: And please don’t think we are exaggerating the educational lecture aspect of the market in China. The same Marketplace article notes that Ximalaya signed with a professor by the name of Timothy Taylor who blogs on economics and agreed to develop a 90-episode podcast on the subject based on, you guessed it, one of his books.
Y: First of all, kudos for really respecting IP, since Ximalaya could have probably ripped off his content and gotten away with it but obviously chose not to, although again, in this case, they probably wanted his official endorsement because they branded it “Stanford Classical Economics,” since the guy had taught at Stanford before. Stanford, I’m guessing, was not informed nor shares in the revenues.
[12:57] R: But lest you think this is a one-off thing, it’s not. It’s huge. We want to actually take some time here and really highlight in detail why this phenomenon exists, because I haven’t seen it mentioned in the same breath as the China podcast market, which by now I think you guys know, is really more like the China educational lecture market.
Y: Once again, the original Marketplace article actually does a great job of getting a little into why this exists. Again, a reminder that the article is titled “FOMO in China is a $7Bn Industry.” This isn’t just any fear of missing out though, it’s a specific type of FOMO related to knowledge, or 知识焦虑，AKA knowledge anxiety.
R: Umm yeah, this is a real thing that people in China talk about all the time. So much so that it’s listed as a mental disorder in Baidu’s wiki. For the record, I’ve studied psychology extensively, and no there is no such equivalent in the US, although maybe I think you can just use the general term anxiety disorder to refer to it.
Y: The wiki entry says that the disorder is a result of the huge influx of information in modern society, and the inability of certain individuals to well, basically, keep up with this type of exponential growth, leading to anxiety and nervousness. If serious, the description goes on to say, sufferers may experience physical symptoms like nausea and vomiting, and females may even have early menopause. Wow! That’s serious stuff.
[14:34] R: Funnily enough, under the treatment section, the entry recommends understanding the source of one’s stress and to not seek perfectionism, and especially not to inundate oneself with too much information / knowledge. But that’s exactly the opposite route of what most people are choosing to take, because most of them are trying to cram in ever more information, not less.
Y: A state-owned newspaper surveyed 2000 people who were mostly 40 years and younger in 2018 and found that 73% felt that they suffered from “knowledge anxiety.” 61% of them felt that it was because their job required a lot of knowledge that they were unprepared for. 86% said that they studied in their spare time. But the solution seems clear — study more, study smarter, but definitely don’t stop studying. Or that’s what the folks surveyed said they planned to do.
R: The government seems undecided on whether or not that’s a good idea. Certainly there is no wholesale endorsement. A critical opinion piece re-published by People’s Daily said that all these pay-for-knowledge schemes were effectively selling intellectual fast food.
Y: According to the writer, the audience only receives fragmented information instead of systematic thinking. It even creates the illusion that by subscribing to a few such products, one is actually reading a book, when one is in fact not doing much self-improvement at all, and maybe doesn’t even lower their anxiety. The real value of paying for this knowledge, he claims, is “seriously out of proportion to its popularity.”
[16:20] R: But why is it so popular? Well, there are a few reasons. The first is the expert-celebrity worship mentality, and the concept that information is money. The best example of this is the app 得到, or iget, which is often categorized in the same breath as Ximalaya because of its focus on audio content, but as you’ll see, really isn’t the same.
Y: I personally listen to this app almost everyday. Both 得到 and 喜马拉雅, by the way, are categorized under “Books” in iTunes. Unlike Ximalaya, which covers a broad range of content, Dedao is solely focused on professional knowledge. Founded by 罗振宇, a famous Chinese internet personality known for his witticisms and wisdom, Dedao is basically his attempt at monetizing his fan base, and he has been very successful.
R: He began his Luogic Talkshow, 罗辑思维, and launched it online in 2012, where it first began as a weekly nearly hour-long video show but eventually became a much shorter, audio only weekday format. You can catch a lot of the episodes on YouTube, where he has over a quarter of a million subscribers.
Y: What does he talk about? Some evergreen topics like how to learn, how to read, how to manage your time or socialize effectively, and sometimes in response to topics of the day like IP protection, the Argentinian economy, 3D printing, etc. Basically, business, economics and self-improvement.
[17:59] R: After being wildly successful with this format, he launched the 得到 app in 2016, and yes, it literally means, “to get” or I guess maybe “to receive.” It’s categorized into “academies,” these are thematic groups like business, science, family, society, etc. He’s invited hundreds of industry experts to give classes in the form of audio lectures. Each course ranges in cost from $5 to $30.
Y: This is where you get the story of the wildly popular Peking University Economics professor 薛兆丰 Xue Zhaofeng who left his teaching post last year after grossing almost $8mm on the Dedao platform for his courses, of which it is estimated he receives half.
R: This guy is at nearly 380K students now, and each is paying about $30, so yeah, that’s a lot of revenue. But again, this is not as much a podcast as it is like designed to be an actual course. So I really don’t think this should be counted as Chinese podcasting revenue. However, it is most definitely “pay-for-knowledge” revenue.
Y: I’m not sure you can get the same amount of traction with a university professor’s content here in the West, where formalized learning is not as culturally significant, and knowledge anxiety does not seem to be as widespread as in China.
[19:39] R: Although I do think some investors have some version of it. But aside from educational lectures, a huge use case for audio content is the audiobook category. And guess what, you know what Ximalaya’s tagline is when you download it in the AppStore? 喜马拉雅FM(听书社区). That’s right, they brand themselves as a social community for listening to books. A radio station for 有声小说, which literally translates to “audible novels.” They’re even categorized in the appstore under the category “Books.”
Y: So I think to really compare apples to apples, we need to tack onto the $12Bn e-learning market the revenue for audiobooks, which by the way, was a very respectable $2Bn in the US in 2016. For China, that number was $300mm. And guess who had 70% market share and saw it as a great revenue opportunity early on? Ximalaya. They started going into the business in 2016.
R: And what a good thing that is, because audiobooks made up over a quarter of all audio content in China in 2016. We are taking that figure from an article from Sixth Tone, subsidiary of a state-owned paper, it is provocatively titled: “China’s Struggling Podcast Industry.” See, told you we are not the only ones who thought that was the case.
Y: Let’s take a look at a top ten content creator on Ximalaya, this guy called 有声的紫襟, who has almost 6.5mm fans. His content is, you guessed it, audiobooks. A few are free, but most are behind a paywall. Ximalaya allows for transactions through Apple Pay, by the way, so you’re free to test this out yourself, but the current rate is 6 Ximalaya points for $0.99, and it costs just 0.15 points or 2.5 cents per 10 minute episode of his books.
[21:42] R: One of his newest horror books is 835 episodes, which would cost you about $20 all in. But then he also has books that run over 2,500 episodes, which yeah, would be about $60 to finish the whole thing. The horror one has 332mm plays in total, so even at 2.5 cents per play, that’s $8.3MM USD in gross revenues!
Y: And after Apple’s cut, and Ximalaya’s 50:50 split. That still comes out to a few million per book, right? That’s not bad! That’s actually really fantastic!
R: But wait a moment here, do you really think that Chinese people are paying $60 USD for an audiobook? Does that make any sense whatsoever?
Y: No, of course not. Most likely they did what I did, which is sign up for the $3 monthly VIP membership, which allows me unlimited access to, as far as I can tell, all the content on the platform. Now the math is not looking so great, is it?
[22:50] R: But what about tipping, which is this thing that’s been super hyped up as an amazing revenue stream? Again, we see that in his entire career, this guy has had about 25,000 patrons who gave him something, that’s only 0.4% of his total followers.
Y: There is a leaderboard and we can see that the top lifetime donor gave him about $3,000, and the top donor for this week is about $50. The dropoff is quick though, and as of today, which is Thursday, only 10 people gave him more than $2. Again, that’s gross, before any splits. I am just not seeing that many dollar signs here from tipping.
R: With this guy, he actually has said on the record that he is netting, after all fees, about $150K per month, which does make him on track for nearly $2MM a year. That’s really really really good, but he’s a Top 10 talent on the platform, hardly representative of the population. Most creators, just like in the US, just like us! … are probably just barely eking out a living.
Y: And, we have data to support that. According to Ximalaya’s founders, the platform brought in revenues of just about $100mm in 2017, and expected that to roughly triple in 2018. For a company that has a rake of 50% … I don’t know about you, but I was not super impressed.
[24:23] R: Nonetheless, they are rumored to be going for an IPO soon and based on their daily active users of 23mm and monthly of 75mm, have a very good shot. Although it’s important to know that I did not find any news on their profitability.
Y: OK, so what gets mixed up as podcasts in China is actually a ton of audio book content, which by the way, makes a lot of sense, because as scripted content that’s already been scrutinized for risk, it’s way more resistant to censorship versus some off-the-cuff interview format.
R: But wait, it’s actually even more broad than educational lectures and audio books. Let us take a deeper look. We are going to quote you an industry analytics report from the second half of 2018. And the first thing we want to point out is the title. It’s actually called the 有声音频数据报告，which translates literally to “audible … audio data report.” It actually sounds more normal in Chinese.
Y: This market, by the way, which is composed of the same companies we keep on referring to, led by Ximalaya, but also less popular companies like 蜻蜓 or Dragonfly, 得到, which we’ve talked about, and 荔枝 or Lychee, grew over 70% last year in terms of users to 170mm, and is fairly evenly distributed between the genders, at 52% female. However, over 80% are under the age of 35, and about half are in first or second tier cities.
[26:03] R: There are lots of these platforms but we are only going to focus on Ximalaya, the clear leader. We’ve already talked about it a lot already, but let’s make it official. Ximalaya, which has nearly half a billion registered users, was founded in 2012 and officially went live in March 2013. Just over one year later, it had already amassed 50mm registered users, much faster than the founders expected, and initial investors SIG, KPCB, and Sierra Ventures here in the Valley.
Y: So what happens when you log onto Ximalaya for the first time? Well, in the app, you are asked to select your content preferences, and then the app begins recommending you content. To experiment, we selected every option, so from music to comedy to sleep stories to business to history.
R: If you look at the rankings on Ximalaya, and this is more obvious on their website, which shows the top 10 free and paid shows, you can see that the free ones are dominated by scripted comedy routines, or 相声, and the paid ones are indeed history, poetry, or lifestyle related.
Y: The top one currently is a 160 episode show on ancient Chinese poets and their poems, designed for the person who’s interested in enhancing their cultural appreciation, or perhaps for an ambitious child who wants to delve real deep into this required curriculum. Available for 199 RMB or $30, and you, too, can sound startlingly intelligent at your future dinner parties.
[27:43] R: It’s true, in China, to this day, being able to spout ancient poems is a sign of learned-ness and immediately elevates your social status. This seems to be important enough at least to 35mm users, who have paid for products on Ximalaya. That’s about 7% of their total registered users, but closer to half of their monthly actives.
Y: But not all the content is paid, obviously. Most of it is free. And it’s different from what you would expect. First of all, there is a whole music category, that is effectively independent DJs playing their favorite songs, overlaid with relaxing words, and also a lot of people uploading original songs. In this respect, it’s kind of a mix of easy listening radio, Spotify and Soundcloud.
R: There’s also plenty of sleep-inducing music, kinda like Calm, for those of you who use that app, although I see some of these on Apple Podcasts as well. I guess insomnia is just a worldwide crisis.
Y: And then there are categories that can only simply be called, audio content with Chinese characteristics. Of course there is Communist Party study material, including one just for the Youth League, as well as Chinese opera, but there’s also a fair amount of English learning content as well.
[29:12] R: And very creepily, one of the first pieces of content that we got recommended on my phone was this one, you’ll have to click through on our transcript to hear it for yourself, because I don’t want to get into any IP violations here, but if I have to say, it’s an 18 second clip of the very incredibly handsome British actor Tom Hiddleston saying something very incredibly creepy.
Y: It’s probably ripped off of one of his movies, but this is Clip 59 of a channel called 跟斗森学诗歌朗诵, or learn how to recite poetry with Tom Hiddleston!
R: There are 180K plays on this particular clip, which again, I’ll have to emphasize, is only 18 seconds long, and I doubt is authorized by Tom. It sounds like just ripped off of one of his movies. This entire channel, which is an English learning channel, has accumulated 4mm plays across dozens of clips and has 170K fans. Do you guys think this count as a podcast? Because I certainly don’t.
Y: But it does count as audio content, which is the categorization that is used in China, and as we explained, it’s actually considered educational content. Imagine lots of Chinese listeners playing this clip and repeating after Tom in order to get that impeccable British accent.
[30:34] R: You really have to hear the clip to believe it. The main point though, is now you see just how difficult it is to compare across the two markets and just slap on a headline that says, oh, China’s market size is 23 times bigger, when the content that’s being created and listened to is so incredibly different.
Y: OK, I think we’ve beat this horse to death already. So let’s give it a proper send-off. What have we learned today, Rui?
R: Very simply, we learned that what is sometimes referred to as the “podcasting” industry in China is really the amalgamation of educational lectures, audiobooks, music, and even short unauthorized Tom Hiddleston audio clips. So it’s not accurate to compare the $300-ish million podcasting revenues in the US, which are more for shows just like this one, with the $7Bn pay-for-knowledge audio category, that category by the way, includes even more uniquely Chinese businesses that we simply don’t have time to go into today.
Y: We also learned that the popularity of educational lectures is spurred on by knowledge anxiety, which is basically when people feel overwhelmed by information and unable to get at or make sense of the knowledge they need to do their jobs, so they will pay for an expert to teach them. They’ll also pay for audiobooks. Together, these two categories make up a huge portion of the “audible audio” content in China.
[32:04] R: It’s not super clear that this trend will go on indefinitely, by the way. Yes a big problem is that some unscrupulous merchants oversell the value of their content and leave disappointed users who feel like they were conned, but increasingly, there seems to be the consensus that it’s not easy to retain all this new knowledge that you are paying for. And so there is anxiety generated by this effort to treat your knowledge anxiety and people are just not happy.
Y: Rui, you know what this whole episode is? It’s a really roundabout way of answering the question: why aren’t you two doing a Chinese podcast? Isn’t the market blowing up over there? As you can see, we aren’t an audiobook nor some pre-packaged course, so maybe we’ll get some fans, but it’s will be difficult to convince Ximalaya to pay us an advance, or Chinese listeners to pay us $30. Maybe if we did a English learning channel instead.
R: That being said, we do think the educational and knowledge based nature of podcasts globally will become more salient in the future, and maybe the content in the West will start having a mix that looks more like what’s in China right now. Anecdotally, we were lucky enough to meet several Techbuzz superfans in person, from fund managers to executives at Fortune 500 companies, and we were told that our content was affecting the way you guys are thinking about your investment or operational strategy with regards to China. So, I think we can kind of qualify as educational content? What do you think guys?
Y: As a final note, you’re extremely welcome to click on the link in our transcript to become our first tipper on the Ximalaya platform! Yes our lovely team updates the feed every week. Or if you are one of the few dozen who do listen to us on Ximalaya, give us some 零钱喜钻!
[34:12] Y: OK, that’s all for this week folks! Thanks for listening. As a reminder, episodes will now be available every Friday instead of Wednesdays. We really enjoyed putting this together, and we are always open to any comments or suggestions. You can find us on twitter at thepandaily, at techbuzzchina, and my personal Twitter account is GINYGINY.R: And my Twitter is spelled RUIMA. TechBuzz China by Pandaily is powered by the Sinica Podcast Network. Pandaily.com is an English language site that tells you “everything about China’s innovation.” Our producers are Shaw Wan and Kaiser Kuo. Our intern is Wang Menglu!