Yi Yang: When I talk to friends from the West about podcasts in China, my sense is that the first concept that comes to mind is the “Pay for Knowledge” model. I suspect this mostly comes from last year’s Marketplace story, which introduced Westerners to a certain interpretation of the Chinese audio market, its market scale, and its social environment.

But I have to say that it would be a mistake to equate “Pay for Knowledge” with “podcasts” or to treat it as “popular podcasting” in China. In my opinion, “Pay for Knowledge” and “podcasts” are two very different things. I personally see the Pay for Knowledge model as part of online education — more similar to massive open online courses (MOOCs) than anything resembling “paid podcasting” or the “Netflix for podcasts” idea.

Of course, there are independent podcasts in China outside of the Pay for Knowledge ecosystem. I’ve seen some Western sources try to describe this, talking about how they are able to cover some “topics often revolving around those not covered by mainstream outlets” as “a result of the medium’s open nature.” To some extent, this phenomenon does exist, but it’s not the mainstream. It’s true that Chinese podcasts exhibit some “independent” nature, but I think it is different from the “independence” understood in Western values. It is not a “rebellion” in values, but of natural vitality due to the diversity of content and the amateur level of production.

I must also emphasize that language is often an obstacle to understanding the podcast world of other countries. So if you try to define “Chinese podcasting” after reading some English-language coverage — even if it reflects a panoramic view of Chinese podcasting — it would be obviously biased through the perspective of the English-language speaker. When the English media writes stories about Chinese podcasts, the people behind the story usually select the most special and interesting stories. These cases may be interesting, but they do not tell the entire story.

Yi Yang: If we see the article written by The Guardian’s Ben Hammersley in 2004 as some kind of starting point for a “podcast,” then its appearance in the Chinese world is quite early. The earliest batch of Chinese podcasts appeared around that time, and one of them, called Antiwave (反波), won the award for Best Podcasting Site of the 2005 Deutsche Welle International Weblog Awards. But there were very few people listening to podcasts back then. Nevertheless, it’s still interesting to note that Chinese podcasts started out at the same time as the English podcasts and that Chinese podcasters faced the same problems as English podcasters. They needed to find a server host themselves. They needed to make their own RSS feeds. Later, they also needed to submit to Apple in order to make their programs accessible on iTunes.

And then, around 2012, some big audio platforms like Ximalaya FM were established. In China, the role that audio platforms play is something that I don’t think is yet present in the Western world. In the U.S., hosting services, program distributors, and RSS subscriber applications for users are completely separated. But in China, audio platforms like Ximalaya FM have combined all the services together, which makes it more like an audio YouTube.

Of course, even in the presence of such a service, you can still choose to find your own server, make your own RSS feeds, and let your podcast appear online. But in practice, this still requires a certain technical knowledge. Not every podcaster can successfully complete this series of operations. More importantly, in China, one has to go through a cumbersome approval process in order to legally build websites and servers. It needs to be approved by the local public security organs and the Internet administration. If not, you have to use overseas servers, which always comes with the risk of being blocked by the Great Firewall, meaning that your audience can’t play any of your programs. So choosing an audio platform that is easy to use and provides a “one-stop” service is a good choice for most podcasters.

But a one-stop service still has unpleasantness. For example, these audio platforms will insert commercials in the programs you upload, but they may not share the profits with podcasters — like what YouTube does to their uploaders. And of course, your program may be deleted by the audio platforms due to censorship. Some podcasters endure all this for the sake of convenience, while some who are not able to compromise re-select their own server to host their own programs.

Chinese consumers are more used to listening to on-demand audio content on these big audio platforms, so if you don’t distribute through them, you are giving up an easy opportunity to reach a wider audience. Also, because the market is dominated by a few audio platforms, they naturally have a larger say in how the entire audio market is shaped. The most obvious example would be that audio platforms can decide what programs will be recommended. In fact, in China, the audio platforms also produce programs — and Pay for Knowledge content is one type of this — just like what Luminary is doing now.

Although there is a lot of third-party content on the app, most of the attention given by the platform will be on the exclusive content that it produces itself. The plight of Chinese podcasting is like what you might get if you’d had a successful Luminary since 2012. Which raises an interesting question: If Luminary has appeared then and Spotify has started to focus a lot on podcasting before Serial, what would the U.S. podcasting market look like today? In my opinion, many of the concerns from the U.S. podcast community on the power of the platform mentioned in Hot Pod have similarly plagued the Chinese podcast community for a long time. In this regard, U.S. podcasting at this moment may resonate with us.

In my understanding, the Western podcasting world has always inherited the spirit of “Web 2.0” — free, openness, shared cyberspace, etc. — which is often described as the “decentralization” of the Internet. That is to say, there is no powerful platform that controls the open podcasting environment. China’s audio market has been platform-centric since services like Ximalaya FM formed in 2012, meaning that the platforms’ preference decides what kind of programs can get recommended opportunities and their development strategy determines what kind of business model can get more support. Those development strategies have driven the market. A few years ago, these major audio platforms found that simply providing podcasters with hosting services — and then relying on user-generated content to draw traffic in exchange for advertising — would not work. (Generally speaking, audio is still far less popular than video here.) So they tried new business models, with the Pay for Knowledge model being one of the successes. But what is less well known is that, although Ximalaya FM is known for its Pay for Knowledge business built on subscriptions, it’s also China’s largest audiobook distributor. It has the authorization of 70 percent of China’s audiobook copyright holders and thus is close to a monopoly on audiobook sales. Which means that Ximalaya FM is not only the “YouTube of audio” here in China — it’s also China’s Audible.

In many people’s mind, the difference between “podcast” and “audio” is not clear. This is why when many people say “the Chinese audio market is booming,” they are likely to think of Pay for Knowledge, audiobook, or other kinds of audio content instead of podcasts. In the U.S., it has become a market consensus to treat “podcasts” alone as a medium. The mix-up in China, however, will also affect the development of podcasts. It will make the market here unable to see the value of podcasting.

Yi Yang: If I were to describe it using one phrase, I’d probably say “amateur production.”

You may have just heard about Gushi FM (Story FM) from a New York Times story about Chinese podcasting, but programs like Gushi FM that are actually produced by professional production teams are rare among Chinese podcasts. In fact, most Chinese podcasters don’t have any experience in media or audio production before starting their own podcasts, and producers or hosts also regard podcasts as sideline or hobby. Most of them have a full-time job and only make podcasts in their spare time, such as the weekends, because podcasts can’t bring them stable income. These limitations make many Chinese podcasts still sound like the very early audio-blogging, and regular updates and sustainable operations remain challenging.

I think you can describe most amateur productions in China as follows: They are homogeneous in format — most are in the “ChatCast” format, which is the one-man show or talk show — and they are often diversified based on subject matter. Although many podcast producers lack media experience, they are often experts in a field, so their shows will be built around that expertise. Take Museelogue (博物志), a program I really like, for example. The theme of this podcast is museums; Wan Ying, its host and producer, graduated from a Canadian college with a degree in museology. She has been running this podcast with her partners since 2016. In the past three years, their consistent production has attracted a group of very loyal fans and formed a community. Currently, the show is relying on donations from listeners to maintain operations. In addition, there are podcasts such as Anyway.FM (设计杂谈), which is about the field of user interface design, and The Unemployable (无业游民), which is about the freelance crowd. Both target niche markets, or specific content verticals (内容垂直).

I think the dominance of the homogeneous chat format has a lot to do with that lack of experienced audio producers in the Chinese podcasting. And I think that may be related to the historical development of radio in China.

After the Cultural Revolution, China’s radio stations began to undergo reforms in the mid-1980s. Radio stations in south China, which are close to Hong Kong, took the lead on this. They learned live broadcasting from Hong Kong’s radio stations. The hosts no longer need to record the programs in accordance with the pre-approved manuscripts as before. Instead, there was an opportunity to freely combine content in a two- to three-hour slot — to play music, news bulletins, traffic information and weather forecasts, and to talk more like ordinary people. They also allowed listeners to participate in call-in programs.

Although China’s radio stations are state-owned, they turned to commercial advertising for funding instead of government funds during the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. China has never built a public broadcasting system like the NPR or the BBC, so radio stations need to bear their own profits and losses. In that structure, commercial success is the top priority, and the talk show format has great commercial value for radio stations. It almost costs nothing on production, except the hosts’ salaries, but the income is very impressive. For example, a pop music radio channel in Shanghai, could earn over 100 million Renminbi yuan (about US$14 million) a year during early rush-hours.

In such an environment, radio stations have little incentive to make programs that cost more or require more manpower and time to produce. Of course, from a business perspective, there’s nothing wrong with this, but I think it’s led to where we are right now: producers from China’s radio stations have almost no experience in making storytelling programs at all.

Yi Yang: It’s hard to do comprehensive podcast market research here in China. As I mentioned earlier, podcasts and other audio content are mostly concentrated on a few major audio platforms, and the competition between them is fierce, which makes the data in their hands a very valuable asset. Plus none of them are listed companies, so these platforms are not obligated to disclose data to the public. If a consulting firm wants to do a survey, it has to work with the audio platforms to get the data they need. This will make the research itself show a certain bias that fails to capture the holistic picture of the market.

Podcasts in China are far from mainstream. Most remain small, and the limited scale of the existing audience makes it hard to catch advertisers’ attention. What caused this situation are the problems I mentioned in the previous answers. For example, most of the existing podcasts are amateur productions, which makes the frequency of the program unstable and the quality of the program not as sophisticated as other media such as video. This makes advertisers hesitate when weighing the medium in which the ad is placed. On the other hand, in the absence of advertising revenue, podcasters can’t treat podcasting as a profession, since it can’t bring stable incomes, which in turn keeps it as a sideline. In the end, it’s impossible to bring the level of podcast production from amateur to professional. This has also caused the podcast industry to fall into a downward circle.

From the view of audio platforms, they rely on the revenue generated by Pay for Knowledge or subscribers, so they will continue to invest in the production of their own contents. The audio platform doesn’t seem to have a reason to generously share these revenues with podcasters in order to improve the quality of podcasts. Objectively, it is harder for podcasts to compete against Pay for Knowledge.

The current Chinese podcasting market is more like the situation of the U.S. podcasting market before the emergence of Serial: Podcast fans existed, but the industry failed to either attract widespread public attention or have the market notice its potential commercial value. The commercialization of Chinese podcasting is still in chaos.

When will Chinese podcasting have its Serial moment? Or if there is no hit show as a trigger, then what other opportunities will bring money or even investor interest into this market? There is still no clear answer.

From my point of view, one action that can be taken right now is to prepare podcasts for high-quality production. I believe only production quality improvement will usher in China’s Serial moment as soon as possible.

My outlook is still quite optimistic. On the one hand, the potential comes from China’s huge market, as well as the continuous increase in per capita income and consumption power of residents, which creates great possibilities for consumption for entertainment purposes. And, of course, more and more of them have started to listen. On the other hand, I see that more and more people are paying attention to Chinese podcasting, which will encourage various forces to tap into the commercial potential; the podcast industry itself is also taking action to change itself, specialized and industrialized.