As Hollywood Flops Pile Up, China’s Storytelling Giant Yuewen Tries A Different Approach

Hollywood entertainment giants pour millions of dollars every year into the hunt for the next Harry Potter. Studios traditionally rely on a small circle of producers, critics and executives making judgment calls—a process as risky as it is expensive. A recent crop of Hollywood flops this year includes “Christy,” starring Sydney Sweeney as a boxer, and “Die My Love,” with Jennifer Lawrence as a mother battling mental illness.

A different, more tech-savvy approach to the search for winners is emerging from China. So believes Tencent-backed China Literature Ltd., the country’s largest online literature platform and a leading global content company that has built success with a vast community of readers and writers to guide its content development. “We balance the art of storytelling and the science of crowdsourced insight to discover what resonates,” CEO Hou Xiaonan told Forbes China in a recent interview.

By embracing what he calls “a model of mass co-creation,” China Literature, also known as Yuewen, has cultivated one of the world’s largest digital fiction libraries with a community of 500,000 overseas writers and partnerships with Netflix and Disney+. Through that support, the company aims to build a “global IP universe—an ambitious vision to rewrite the future of global entertainment,” Hou said. Already, its intellectual property, or IPs, account for nearly half of China’s most successful dramas and animations, he added.

Hou describes Yuewen as “the YouTube of novels” or “an MCN (multichannel network) for authors.” His analogies capture what he describes as the platform’s essence: a lively ecosystem where hundreds of millions of writers and readers collectively shape stories, acting as a global editorial board and real-time focus group.

Yuewen’s history dates to 2015. Tencent, one of China’s most powerful social media companies, owns nearly 57% of the business, which has been publicly traded at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange since 2017. Hou first joined Tencent in 2003, and held management positions there for Mobile QQ, Qzone, Tencent Open Platform, YingYongBao and Penguin Media Content Platform before he joined Yuewen as president in 2020 and CEO in 2023. Hou still holds powerful positions in Tencent including vice president of the Platform and Content Group.

Younger Yuewen’s ecosystem is built on four pillars, according to Hou:

*An open platform provides a wide opportunity for story creation. Yuewen’s flagship portals—Qidian Reading and WebNovel—allow anyone to publish stories directly, bypassing traditional publishing gatekeepers, Hou said. Yuewen now manages over 10 million original novels, making it China’s largest web literature platform; in 2024 alone, 330,000 new writers produced 650,000 new works, he noted.

*Direct reader engagement creates real-time validation. Yuewen readers pay per chapter and provide instant feedback through payments and reviews. “This direct dialogue between creators and their audience provides unparalleled market insight, validating a story’s potential long before adaptation,” Hou noted.

*Shared revenue builds a sustainable “creator economy.” By linking author earnings directly to reader payments, Yuewen transforms writing from a hobby into a career, and has created one of the world’s largest professional author communities, Hou said.

*Data informs decision-making. Yuewen’s editorial teams act as “strategic guides, blending creative intuition with deep community insights,” Hou said. “They look beyond simple clicks to metrics that signal longer term potential, like reader loyalty, emotional investment, and genre adaptability,” he said. The result is what Hou calls an “IP funnel” that filters tens of millions of works down to those most viable for high-cost adaptation into films, series, games, or animation.

This “bottom-up” approach has led to Yuewen-originated hits such as Soul Land (Douluo Dalu) and Battle Through the Heavens (Doupo Cangqiong) and built loyal fanbases long before their screen adaptations, dramatically reducing production risk, Hou said.

In 2024, 16 of China’s 30 most popular TV dramas came from Yuewen IPs, the company says. According to Enlightent, a Chinese media analytics firm, six of the 10 most-watched long-form dramas across all online platforms in the first half of 2025 were adapted from Yuewen IPs. In animation, Yuewen IPs accounted for 80% of China’s top 10 most-watched titles in the first half of 2025, Enlightent says.

“The power of this model,” Hou said, “is that it builds a supportive platform for creativity. It doesn’t eliminate the innate unpredictability of art, but it provides a structure that helps us identify and nurture the most resonant stories, directly from our community.”

Yuewen’s vision doesn’t stop at content discovery; the company has created an IP value chain that takes root in incubation, and grows through amplification and commercialization, Hou said. “Our ecosystem works like a farm, a lab, and a playground. The farm nurtures story seeds, the lab then transforms them into powerful visual experiences, and the playground integrates them into people’s lives. This system is designed to maximize the potential of every story.”

Yuewen’s “farm” is built on its pioneering paid reading model, first introduced by its Qidian platform. Readers pay per chapter, and revenue is shared with writers. “This solves the biggest pain point for creators: income stability,” Hou said.

This system has cultivated a creative workforce of over 10 million writers, including 468 “platinum authors” such as Tang Jia San Shao, Mao Ni, and I Eat Tomatoes (Wo Chi Xi Hong Shi)—household names in Chinese popular fiction; flagship IPs like Joy of Life, Candle in the Tomb, Soul Land, The King’s Avatar, and Battle Through the Heavens all originated at Yuewen, validated by millions of paying readers long before becoming national hits, Hou said

Yuewen’s “laboratory” is its content adaptation and optimization engine. By integrating New Classics Media — one of China’s top film and drama series studios, Tencent Animation & Comics — China’s largest comic platform, and its fast-growing short drama division, Yuewen has built one of the industry’s most efficient IP adaptation pipelines, Hou said. This integrated matrix that draws on the strengths of parent company Tencent is the engine behind Yuewen’s hits in traditional film, drama series and animation, and has helped to grow its clout in emerging sectors like live-action short dramas and comic-style short dramas (“manju”).

Unlike in many other countries, live-action short drama is a big business in China. As of mid-2025, more than 576 million Chinese users—approximately half the country’s internet population—were watching live-action short dramas, Yuewen says. Yuewen’s adaptations held two of the top 10 slots on national leaderboards, with individual series surpassing three billion views and gross revenues exceeding 80 million yuan during the period. In the emerging “comic-style short drama” format—a hybrid between manga and motion—several Yuewen titles have already surpassed 100 million views on Douyin, the TikTok of China, Hou noted.

“The ultimate goal of IP is to become part of people’s lives,” he said. “At its core, IP is about emotional value—it should invite fans to play with it, live with it.”

In a year when China’s “Labubu dolls” have caught fire globally, Yuewen’s official merchandise brand, “Yuewen Goods,” have extended top IPs into a range of collectibles, blind boxes, figurines, and co-branded consumer goods. In the first half of 2025, its merchandise generated 480 million yuan in gross merchandise value, nearly matching the total for all of 2024.

Together, Yuewen’s “farm-lab-playground” model forms a self-reinforcing commercial loop: the farm cultivates and filters IPs through Qidian and WebNovel; the laboratory transforms them through films, long-form drama series, animation, and short dramas; and the playground monetizes emotional engagement through products and experiences—”creating a flywheel where creativity, fandom, and commerce breathe life into one another,” Hou said.

Yuewen’s ambitions extend beyond China. Hou’s goal is to “build another Yuewen overseas. Globalization isn’t simply about exporting Chinese stories. It’s been about co-building a shared creative ecosystem” through a three-part plan globally, he said.

Yuewen’s global journey first began by translating successful Chinese titles for international readers, Hou said. Through its global platform WebNovel, the company has released more than 10,000 translated Chinese works, reaching readers in markets such as the U.S., India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, Malaysia, the U.K., Brazil, Canada, and France, according to Yuewen.

Yuewen at the same time has partnered with Disney, Netflix, Sony Pictures, Webtoon, Piccoma, and other international publishers to expand its IPs into comics, animation, and screen adaptations. By mid-2025, 1,800 comics, 80 animations and more than 100 film and TV titles from Yuewen had entered overseas markets, the company said. Recent hits like Joy of Life 2, The Legend of Shen Li, The Tale of Rose, and The Double have found success on streaming charts across Asia; the animated adaptation of Lord of Mysteries premiered in over 190 countries and regions this past summer.

Hou said the next step in Yuewen’s globalization strategy is more ambitious—to incubate local creators. Through WebNovel, Yuewen has built an international author community of around 500,000 writers, producing 770,000 original works in English and other languages. Among them is JKSManga, a British creator whose series My Vampire System has accumulated more than 92 million reads on WebNovel, spawned an audiobook with 1.1 billion streams, and now has its own comic adaptation, Hou noted. “This marks a new stage. We’ve gone from exporting Chinese stories to cultivating global ones,” he said.

Yuewen’s most recent global ventures move beyond content to cultural integration. The company has engaged a diverse roster of partners—including the Swiss National Tourism Board, the British Library, the Singapore Tourism Board and Japan’s CCC Group—to explore new forms of global IP collaboration, Hou said.

In the U.K., 26 Chinese web novels from Yuewen’s catalog have been added to the British Library’s collection, while in Switzerland, Yuewen turned The King’s Avatar protagonist Ye Xiu into a virtual “Swiss Travel Explorer,” promoting customized tours inspired by the series. Meanwhile, the dark fantasy The Unruly Immortals (Dao Gui Yi Xian) became the first Chinese web novel to enter Universal Studios Singapore theme park, launching a hit Halloween attraction, Hou said.

Hou describes this evolution as “a clear three-step journey: from translating Chinese stories, to exporting the creation model, to co-building a global creative ecosystem.” In his view, Yuewen’s role is shifting “from being China’s Yuewen to becoming the world’s Yuewen—a co-builder of the global creative economy that connects creators and consumers across cultures.”

Yuewen embodies how big changes are unfolding in how stories are told and shared. “Gone are the days of betting everything on a single genius. In the digital age, lasting success in content may come from scalable ecosystems that continuously generate, validate and evolve new ideas,” said Hou, describing the process as “systematic creativity”—a framework that “blends community passion with strategic insight. The goal is not to mechanize art, but to build a sustainable pathway for it to thrive. “

“We don’t replace creativity with data,” he said. “We use data to empower creativity and find the stories that truly move people.”

As Yuewen’s stories travel from Chinese screens to global audiences, the company is championing its new model for global IP development. “The magic lies in its architecture, where creativity is cultivated on the farm, refined and scaled in the laboratory, and brought to life in the community playground,” Hou said, summarizing his model.

In the process, Yuewen is transcending its role as a storyteller to become an architect of culture, Hou said. That in turn, he continued, also poses an important question: “What if the best stories are not discovered by a privileged few, but grown by an empowered collective?”

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