More young people are reading and publishing web novels, according to a report published by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences that looks at China’s online literature market in 2019. The report was jointly published with China Literature, the country’s leading online publisher owned by Tencent.
In 2019, 74% of all authors who joined China Literature were born after 1995, according to the report. So the vast majority of new authors on the platform last year were under 25 years old. More than half of the country’s active users of internet literature platforms are in the same age group, the report says. And more than 66% of paying users were born after 1990. As of June 2019, China had 454 million online literature readers, according to CNNIC.
In a push to help China’s online literature go overseas and “tell Chinese stories well,” as the report says, China Literature has been boosting its overseas efforts. More than 52,000 foreign authors have published nearly 90,000 novels on China Literature’s English platform Webnovel, the company says.