Word: shanda
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...with U.S. work experience, who are creating home-grown franchises catering to the burgeoning world of the web in China. Baidu, the rival search engine to Google, is most in the news lately; others include web portal and entertainment companies Sina and Netease; on-line, multi-user gaming company Shanda (which recently made an acquisition of an American gaming company and plans to expand to the United States); internet and mobile applications giant Tencent; and a host of others, some public, some still in start-up mode. (See the best business deals...
...robust 40% to 50%. That's partly because customers seem to prefer not being locked into playing just one or two online games by stiff up-front charges and subscriptions. And, freed from paying a set fee each month, some players actually end up spending more. Four years ago, Shanda Interactive Entertainment, China's biggest online-game developer, ditched subscriptions for the freemium model and turned around its sagging fortunes. Kristian Segerstrale, CEO of London-based social-gaming site Playfish, says micropayments work because online games aren't a product, they're an ongoing service. "It's nonsensical...
...Although most BBS-based online novels started out free of charge, Shanda Literature's users now have to pay for the pleasure of online reading. But for most subscribers, the cost is minimal: they can access up to 75% of a book for free and pay only about 0.04 yuan (less than one cent) per 1,000 words for the rest of the book. In other words, it costs about one-tenth of the paperback price to read a book online. Right now, the company takes half of the readers' payment, and the other half goes into the writers' pocket...
...growing trend in the business is to convert online postings into hard copies of books, plays, movies or even computer games. Ghost Blows Out the Light, whose book and online game versions both became best sellers, already has a movie and a play in the making. More recently, a Shanda fantasy novel called The Star Games just sold its online game rights for 1 million yuan in January. "A major part of our job now is to forage those online-novel websites for potential book ideas," says Xiang Zhuwei, the Beijing-based publisher of Ghost Blows Out the Light...
...Shanda also expects to tap into China's increasing trend of cell-phone reading and has a social-networking site in the pipeline to try to build a steady user base. Still, Hou realizes that to expand readership further in the long term, it may not be enough to rely solely on amateur writers and their largely similar tomb-raider or martial-arts novels. "We have been in talks with big-name writers like Yu Hua as well," says the CEO. "We will be much more comprehensive than...