创意产业作品的价值

China’s copyright administration said that the number of registered works has jumped more than 50 percent since last November. They expect this to encourage creative industries to make IDEAS more profitable. A few cartoon companies are taking the lead exploring inventive business models to make intellectual property worth more.

Thrills and puzzles. You don’t often find those elements in comics. Nor would you expect its author to be a former government official.

Cheng Xiang is known by this pseudonym “Bishuiyu” on the Internet. He worked at a social security bureau in northern China’s Tianjin for seven years. Without ever receiving any formal art training, Cheng began to publish comic thrillers online for free four years ago.

"First and foremost, a cartoonist is almost always introverted. He likes to keep things to himself. If he otherwise had an ordinary way of thinking, he wouldn’t be able to come up with anything special," Cartoonist Bishuyu said.

For weeks, the author received the most votes from readers on one of China’s largest comic websites, U17.com. The site talked him into becoming a contract author who could share in its revenues. Bishuiyu’s comic strip was then turned into an Internet video series and is now being considered for a film adaptation.

Industry insiders estimate that at least 100 million Chinese read or watch comics one to three times a year. This huge market craves for good stories and creativity, so intellectual property, or the author’s ideas, become the driving force behind a whole series of comics-related products.

One example is online comic strip “One Hundred Thousand Bad Jokes.” Created by a former computer programmer in 2010. The story first gained tremendous popularity on U17 and was later transformed by the website into a video series, stage drama, smartphone game and various toys. Chinese motion picture giant Wanda turned it into a film in January.

"Intellectual property used to be something that wasn't worth much. When we were about to adapt Ten Hundred Thousand Bad Jokes into a movie, the adaptation rights were really cheap. An excellent work would cost no more than 300,000 yuan. The copyright owner was in fact in a weak and vulnerable position. However, we believe that intellectual properties are valuable. They should be worth, for example, 20 percent in a 10-million-yuan production. This would make intellectual properties worth a lot more than before," Dong Zhiling, vice president of U17.com, said.

Guangdong-based cartoon company Alpha has realized potential of intellectual property to generate profit. The company started out as a toy manufacturer and later produced one of China’s most popular cartoon programs, “Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf.”

Alpha acquired U17 this August for 900 million yuan, or 142 million US dollars. It was the largest acquisition in the history of China’s cartoon industry.

"Previously, there were many good Chinese cartoon companies who had great stories and wanted to create good products. But once they produced the cartoon programs, they had no means to expand the market. It was really difficult for them to continue creative production. Because of that many had to become outsourcing factories for foreign cartoon brands in order to keep going," Zeng Weibin, director of Investors & PR, Guangdong ALpha Animation & Culture, said.

Industry insiders believe that only by developing an intellectual property-centered value chain, can the cartoon industry generate continued creativity and profit.