Discussion Opinions on Qidian Mega-merge thread 2.0 - All future Qidian Opinion Threads Will Go Here

Wuxiaworld has 3 million unique monthly visitors.

Anime/manga is way bigger of course. That's why I used 3% user base of Crunchyroll and not something like 10% or 20%.
Even 3% would generate $3 million a year in revenue.

 

there are 50 million chinese oversee (same as population of England), most of them can not read/write Chinese, but can reach English
this market alone is large enough for Qidian intl

And, basically, you are saying the Audience of Avenger (the movie) is the Audience of Avenger (the comic book)
NU does not represent the target audience of Qidian, people willing to pay are adult who has a job

 

Hope so to. Both as a writer and a reader. Too many good novels are abandoned because they don't get paid or is too time consuming with jobs or college to do as a hobby.

 

Ok, now how do you reach that market? How did this translations develop? hint, its in the post.
How did people reach wuxiaworld in the first place? Through community channels. Wuxiaworld started on spctv.net (Coiling dragon first translations).

There is a reason why i chose NU...Do you see Qidan interacting with another community elsewhere? or are they going to buy ad space on WW?

Also edit. Seattle are you arguing that their isn't a market to make money when I established that there is a large market?

Also tencent what is your argument? I've already established that there's a market, but Qidans is making it difficult on themselves with their actions.

 

Same as how Hollywood movie is market in Indian and China, all you need is money and time

Tencent is a top 10 company in the world, Qidian is only one of the plan for the intl market
at this moment, they are
- buying/coopt with japan anime studio
- buying foreign video game studio
- invest on TV program and Movie

And there is whole industry called Marketing, all you need to do is pay them

 

Tencent_hater what marketing got you here? Yep, a whole lot of investing is going to be needed. You completely missed my argument. 'difficult expanding internationally' versus impossible or they will fail.

 

going internationally is difficult, no one is denying this. like any investment, success is not guaranteed

Tencent think they can succeed, so they make the move. Tencent is not run by fools, They know more than you and me

Yes, Investment is needed. And there are rich people called investors, and it is their money and their worries. stop pretending to be one of them

 

You<>I , no need to get personal first. And i guarantee you have far less business experience.

What is your argument, mine is simple. Qidan had easy entry into the market and messed it up. And by investments, i mean there needs to be a actual market exposure outside of NU and the current communities that built the interest.
Why i compared it to Japan, Japanese anime and supporting industries are known world wide. Someone likes and anime, they might buy the light novel. Japan has active seekers. CN very few seekers.

CN dont have this luxury=High marketing costs to educate potential customers before even thinking of converting them. I mean look at their current engagement. And sure, thy can/will hire vendors to do their marketing but again, the cost will be high, higher because of their decisions.

 

Yes, I don't have any business experience, my job is sys programming, but I manage a few people, and a lot of things can be understand with common sense.

As I said, there are 50 Million Chinese oversee (most speak English), qidian can succeed by just attract reader from this group alone

If you happen to be not the one of that 50 million, and you don't care of product from qidian. it is OK. qidian can succeed without you

 

Should also factor in Author royalties. CKTalon posted that Cocooned Cow would be earning 10-20% revenue AFTER QI was profitable. Not sure if this is the case for all authors or not.

I imagine a paywall could work similiar to munpia where you buy Gold Coins for WON (Dollars in QI's case) and then pay a certain amount for the chapter. On Munpia chapters typically run ~300 won ($0.26). Gold Coins are sold in various increments 1000,5000,10000,30000, etc. Not sure how Qidian handles it in China.

 

I think its pay by word count after paywall begins for that novel. The going price is usually between 5-10 cents if converted into US currency, so its cheaper per chapter.

 

More than likely would be something similar to this, wouldn't be like a card payment for every chapter. Buy Qidan currency upfront and later use that currency to buy chapters.

 

So uh, read the raws off an aggregate site?

Thanks.

 

Saw someone bringing up staff cost, I think there might be a tiny misconception there, Qidian isn't a single company that's online, it's owner is Tencent which already has large amounts of different interests online.

It's true that they want Qidian International to generate it's own income over time but I don't believe they would need to allocate that many people for site maintenance or developing features (additionally, from what i've seen of the website, 80-90% of the the code is probably a direct copy pasta of what they've done for the original chinese novel platform already meaning even less innovation and hence programmers needed for this.) Taking that into considering, I'd argue that their costs for staff directly related to Qidian international is significantly lower than expected.

I don't really want to talk about what I think about Qidian, I think my other post in the megathread already explained my thoughts well enough on it.

I will add that I'm personally okay if Qidian raises a pay wall assuming both original author and translator gets a share, it might be slightly more expensive, but I'm a lot happier paying a token sum to Qidian primarily because I want the original author of the story to get a share as well. Not to say that paying through patreon/paypal/whatnot means they don't pay the original author but any one translation group cannot and will not represent every single translation group and even less of those directly mention what they do with the money. Again that's my personal opinion. Nothing more, nothing less.

Minor addendum: I do by the way purchase Qdmm currency and pay the original authors as I read chapters, although I don't do so for translations as of yet so far. I'm not sure where I stand on that spectrum as of yet personally despite technically being in the same boat of "consuming material for free that should be paid".

 

Qidian needs to fix their quality control first and foremost. Qidian started out the gates just accepting any translation group that bothered to fill out the application on a first come first serve basis without actually doing some form of research on the translation group. There are good and legit translators then you have translation groups novelsaga with TTNH. Loads of people dropped TTNH because of the massive quality drop.
Unless Qidian does something about their quality, its going to be neverending losing battle.

 

Probably because no one would read it then?

Well, I guess it's maybe because it's not talking about the issue with WW... But I don't know how those things are being handled... >.>

 

My opinion is that paywalls and micro-transactions are ruining the world.
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I'll buy a book for 15$, a completed story. If they do what I've seen being discussed which is a monthly subscription for access to the site plus another fee per chapter. You can forget it. I've actually got about 185 audiobooks each of those are 20-30$ and actually have voice actors reading out the material for me. Hell check out Graphic Audio, they will get an entire cast for all the characters of a story. It's still under 30$ for a COMPLETED story.
graphicaudio.net/night-angel-trilogy-1-the-way-of-shadows-1-of-2.html 19$
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My point is I'll never pay. You shouldn't ether. If an author wants to sell his completed work then that's the time to buy. This pay by the chapter microtransations is just bs if they go that route. I hate that people who are impatient actually buy into it fueling and making it a working business model.

It just wont be worth it. I'm not so addicted to my story that I lose common sense. They dictate they want more money, cool, that's their prerogative. They dished out a lot of money for these translators to outright buy them. They say free... That's now and not later. When later comes; I'm sure you'll had have your free samples, and that's when it's time to ante up as they strap on a price to finsh reading series X.

Some where I read that 1000chapters might be 100$? These 1,000 chapters have better come with Morgan Freeman reading it to me as well.

 

as long its free idc, im free player btw,, but i dont like for being meddlesome person soooo be carefull sir/madam, someone will summon lich for u because so much resentful from other people,, actually why dont u make your own forum? have desaigner and programer right? here u guys 70% critizm/ 20% like us care/ 10% support u guys, oh im on like us care as long its free

 

I just want to say that I'm getting sick of all Qidian stuff by now .. Like seriously? We're still talking about this .. *sigh*