Ning Yan was interviewed by Minter Dial. They discussed the surprising state of podcasting and the audio market in China, the mission and success of her podcast, A Thousand Whys, how her podcast is helping to bring the Chinese culture to the world.

About the Chinese audio/podcasting market

China developed its own mode of online audio market, including the mode of monetization, we were talking about a market size of about 500 million users. And, if you're talking about the revenue, the knowledge e-commerce alone in this category, it's going to become a $3.4 billion business in 2020. 

It's basically stories for children, and they're just like maybe a hundred yuan tops, maybe $10. You can hear like more than a, a hundred episodes of this program, this children's stories product. So it's pretty, I would say, economical. To be able to subscribe to such an audio product. And then it's really convenient for us to pay for such audio content online, because as you said, there's this mobile payment. The Chinese people are very accustomed to using now.

Who are the players in China?

Talking about the biggest [Chinese] players, we have three of them. We have Ximalaya, Lizhi and Dragonfly.fm. And among them, Ximalaya has the biggest market share and a share started off by providing recordings of crosstalk performance, which is a traditional Chinese performance.

We have a third one, that's Lizhi. Well, Lizhi mainly focuses on user generated content, and then they have also developed  a brand new kind of audio product that's audio social networking… And Lizhi revenue  in 2019 was 1.1 billion yuan. … It has made an IPO debut in January this year, which is the first one among all the competitors here in China to go public.

About the trends in China

The trend I'm seeing with listeners would like to spend more on buying audio content online. Actually, a survey recently that I  came across says that 60% of its surveyed listeners would like to pay for on-demand audio, and they hope to be able to hear more or purchase more of the paying entertainment content online that has crosstalk performances and comedies, et cetera. 

Future plans for China Media Group

We will also love to be seen on the international arena because our shows also offer insights into the Chinese culture for overseas listeners to learn more about the Chinese people and the Chinese culture. Yeah. And that's why we are doing A Thousand Whys.

Lessons learned so far

We need to learn more about the technical nitty-gritties in order to make sense of everything. And we need to learn to analyze our own shows with the help of data and get audience-inspired improvements, but some. Something is still the same as a content creator. That is, you've got to have great content; that still doesn't change. And professional production, because content is still everything, 

The future of podcasting

We're thinking of publishing more podcasts each year. We're making plans to come up with a few more, including audio books, which is a very popular category of content. We're here in China as part of the podcasting content, but not in the overseas market. So that's a big difference. And, I would say of the future of podcasting for us, is that we are going to come up with even better produced and good content.

For the Chinese podcasting industry and the market, given the growth in increasing car ownership and an increasing number of smartphone users and smart devices such as loudspeakers. Oh, sorry. Smart speakers. The future of the online audio content market in China will still be promising.