China’s traditional media face massive shift to digital

Global Business

China’s traditional media face massive shift to digital

Like much of the world, China is undergoing a rapid transformation of its media industry, with traditional platforms shifting to digital.

Major organizations such as Caixin, one of China’s most renowned media groups, are feeling the pressure to diversify to mobile platforms. Caixin’s Associate Managing Editor Huang Shan said that packaging your content the right way is paramount to survival – as readers’ attention spans become shorter and internet habits change.

“Provide very incisive and compact information packages. Make your content more readable; don’t use a lot of jargon, complex words,” Huang explained of their strategy.

More than ever before, social media has handed control back to the public, who can not only choose what media they want to consume, but can play a role in producing it themselves.

China’s major social platform Wechat now has hundreds of millions of followers, with ever more people playing a leading role in media production. That’s a change media groups are hoping to take advantage of.

Shen Qiang, Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft Ventures, said that understanding what customers need is the most important thing. And helping users to find content that’s interesting for them is something a popular news site Today’s Headlines (Jinri Toutiao) has been achieving.

Launched by Bytedance, the company has 300 million users, and more than 30 million of them receive personalized headline pages each day. The company is leveraging user preference data to serve their needs.

“For example, if our system knows you like Yunnan, we can give you a flash deal under the travel story about Yunnan. Information gives us a lot of room for imagination, lots of room,” said Tina Zhao, VP of Bytedance.

Technology and consumers’ changing needs are redefining China’s media industry. Serving up audiences and users with personalized content will certainly create unique competition within the media industry.