Youth culture to grow, with many willing to pay for content in 2D environment
Domestic video-sharing site acfun.tv on Thursday secured $60 million in A+ round financing from SB China Venture Capital (SBCVC), a leading venture capital firm in China.
Acfun.tv enjoys great popularity among the young generation of Internet users in China, and SBCVC might increase its investment in the platform, Liu Tianmin, managing partner at SBCVC, said in a press release acfun.tv sent to the Global Times on Thursday.
China's pan-youth culture and entertainment industry will see rapid growth in the coming years, according to Liu.
Founded in 2007, acfun.tv focuses on anime, comics, games and novels (ACGN) and attracts the largest number of users of the two-dimensional (2D) world, according to the press release.
One of the platform's main features is that it provides live comment displays for shared online videos.
The 2D world focuses on ACGN content, and its fans are likely to be involved in cosplay (a role-playing performance art in which participants wear costumes of particular characters) and browse acfun.tv-like websites.
ACGN culture has begun to influence many sectors of our lives such as entertainment and shopping and will further affect the future of the Internet, Zhang Yi, CEO of iiMedia Research Institute, a mobile internet consulting agency, told the Global Times on Thursday.
In August 2015, acfun.tv received a $50 million investment from Youku Tudou Inc, popularly known as "China's YouTube." After this infusion of cash, the platform's daily active users increased 400 percent year-on-year within less than six months, the press release said.
In the press release, Mo Ran, CEO of afcun.tv, attributed the popularity of the 2D world of ACGN content to the fact that the nation's entertainment sector is experiencing a "demographic dividend" of young consumers.
The year of 2015 marked an important year for the 2D world of ACGN content and the estimated number of its total fans reached 219 million in that year, according to a report released Thursday by Beijing-based market research firm iResearch.
The market has great development potential and has drawn strong attention from investors, experts noted Thursday.
About 200 million people in China were born in the 1980s. Those born in the 1990s and the early years of the 21st century total 330 million. These groups constitute the major users of the Internet, according to Mo.
As ACGN culture has become a key part of their lives at a time when their consumption power is increasing, acfun.tv and the ACGN sector should take advantage of this opportunity, Mo said in the press release.
Users of content in the 2D world are accustomed to paying for the products, a trait that is well-regarded by investors, Li Yiyang, an industry analyst with iResearch, told the Global Times on Thursday.
Li said that "65 percent of [these users] are willing to pay, and their average consumption level reaches 1,700 yuan ($258.09) in 2015."
Li also noted that since many of them are still students, the user base will expand as they get older.
The sector will continue to be favored by investors, he forecast.
With large quantities of popular ACGN content, bilibili.com is another big base of ACGN culture in China.
Competition between the two sites is intense as the founder of bilibili.com was a senior user of acfun.tv who then created bilibili.com in 2009, media reports said.
Bilibili.com reportedly obtained 200 million yuan in investment from the domestic Internet titan Tencent Holdings in November 2015. The market value of the website is 1.5 billion yuan, the report from iResearch said.
