节选写作an excerpt of graduate thesis
TRANSCRIPT
PROJECT YL BY
YANG LIN
SRPING 2015
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
Of the requirements for the
Masters of Science Media Management Program
THE NEW SCHOOL
DATE OF SUBMISSION: MAY 1st 2015
Contents
I. About “Project YL” ........................................................................................................................... 3
1. Name and Logo .................................................................................................................... 4 2. Vision and Mission ............................................................................................................. 5
II. Research ............................................................................................................................................. 6
1. General Market .................................................................................................................... 6 2. Weibo and WeChat ............................................................................................................. 8 3. Trending Content? ........................................................................................................... 10 4. Outcomes and Guidance ............................................................................................... 12
III. Operating ...................................................................................................................................... 12
1. SWOT Analysis .................................................................................................................. 12 2. Soft Launch Operational Overview .......................................................................... 13 3. New Insights ...................................................................................................... 14 4. Censorship Factor ............................................................................................ 18
IV. Future Phases .............................................................................................................................. 20
1. From Online to Offline ................................................................................................... 20 2. Advertising ......................................................................................................................... 21 3. Career advantage ............................................................................................................. 22
V. Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................... 22
3. New Insights
Page view (PV) was the most important measurement for my project. On my
Weibo blog, most of the articles got 300 to 500 page views. Considering my
previous job as a TV presenter provided many followers on Weibo, this was quite
a satisfied result. The top five most viewed articles are:
Top 5 Page Views
1 Do You Know the Director of Furious 7 Is Chinese? (23k PV)
2 Game of Throne And Ed Sheeran (6310 PV)
3 2015 Corgi Beach Party (3724 PV)
4 A Marriage Proposal in Boston Marathon (1423 PV)
5 GIFs From the New Avengers 2 Trailer (1210 PV)
Exhibit 3. Top 5 Page Views
By classified the Top 5, I also confirmed the outcome from research:
entertainment and emotional content were more appealing to readers.
My WeChat blog was newly established, which means unlike my Weibo blog,
it had zero followers at the beginning. I was not sure how this would influence
page views, so I did two experiments to explore 1) whether the number of
followers would impact PV, and 2) whether the promotion would impact PV.
On March 3rd, I posted an article called “13 Pun Names From House of Cards”
on my WeChat blog. Then I contributed the same article to another WeChat blog
called Digger. The major topic on Digger was related to politics and news; though
my article about House of Cards did not fit its topic completely, it was relevant. A
few days later on March 12th, Digger posted my article with minor changes.
Since WeChat provided a measurement tool for blogs, I asked Digger to send
me the information of my article, and then compared it with the information I
acquired from my blog. The contrast was startling.
On my WeChat blog, my article was only successfully pushed to thirteen
readers (readers could decide whether to accept the pushed content). In the first
seven days, only 26 people read and three people shared.
Push to users 13
Page views 26
Reposts 3
Chart 5. My article on my WeChat blog
Meanwhile on Digger, my article was successfully pushed to 5,477 people,
got 1,809 page views and was shared 141 times.
Push to users 5447
Page views 1809
Reposts 141
Chart 6. My article on Digger’s WeChat blog
Apparently, my article had more influence on Digger instead of on my blog.
Digger’s abundant reader base helped a lot with the page views. However, it is
worth noticing that out of 5447 users, only 1809 users clicked the page after saw
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the title. The ratio is about one third. The reason for that is either the title was
not appealing, or the topic was not readers’ preferences—in another word,
readers on digger are not my targeting audience.
Although that ratio on my blog seems better than on Digger, it cannot
conclude that I successfully reach my audience, because the sampling numbers
were too few to make a judgment. The probability is uncertain, so the ratio is
meaningless.
A few days later, I did the second experiment. On March 16th, I posted an
article called “Meet Your Ancestors (All of Them)1”. It was a science-‐topic article
translated and edited from the same title content. I kept the writer’s name, Tim
Urban, under the title, and put a link to original website in the end.
Not surprisingly, it also had a bad performance on the first day. But on
second day, I started to promote it. I sent it directly to people, asked them to
repost it if they liked the article. I shared it on my WeChat Moment so all my
friends could see it. Then I checked the statistics tool—the result was amazing.
1 Meet Your Ancestors (All of Them), Tim Urban, Wait But Why, Dec. 2013, http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/12/your-‐ancestor-‐is-‐jellyfish.html 2 Travels With My Censors, Peter Hassler, the New Yorker, Mar. 2015,
Push to users 14
Page views 664
Reposts 50
Chart 7. Another article on my WeChat blog with promotion
Like last time, only fourteen users decided to receive my pushed article,
which means my followers were few. But when I started promotion, page views
increased rapidly. Eventually, 664 people read my article—47.4 times the
number of my followers.
These two experiments have provided illustrative examples to my
presumption. First, the quantity of followers is the basis for spreading the
content. More followers a blog has, the more exposure the content will get.
Second, the promotion is the catalyst. A good promotion will impact spreading
process dramatically, and vice versa. Most importantly, the content is the king.
People want to be informed, touched or entertained not by the promotion, but by
the content. If operating a blog is like driving a car, followers and promotion may
lead to a fast lane, yet the content decides how far the car will get. These insights
not only apply to my Weibo blog, but to other social business models as well.
4. Censorship Factor
When talking about Chinese media, the censorship factor is inevitable. In
fact many my friends’ expectations about my project were my point of view and
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solution dealing with censorship, either in clever ways, or in not clever but
fearless ways. But my preference and advantages were inclining to produce
entertainment content. The research also supported that entertainment topics
are more popular on social media. So I knew censorship would probably not be a
tricky issue for my project.
Unexpectedly, I did encounter a related situation.
On March 5th, I saw a post on Weibo recommending Peter Hassler’s new
article, Travels With My Censors2. I clicked the link in the post, which lead me to
the New Yorker’s website to read the original one. It was quite long, almost
seven thousands words, but I didn’t stop reading until finished it. It was a very
insightful article. I really liked it. Then I decided to translate it literally to let
more Chinese readers read. I spent three days to finish the work. In order to
accurately translate the article, I did research and added annotations. In the end,
the translated article was more than ten thousands Chinese characters. Because
it was much longer than I expected, I was not sure if there were any errors.
Instead of putting it on my blogs, I posted it on a translating BBS in order to ask
for revisions. To my surprise, a half day later, someone took my translation and
posted on his WeChat blog.
I didn’t expect it happen, yet I was not angry at all. Peter Hassler was the
author and the New Yorker posted it online for free reading, while I only
removed the language barrier for those Chinese readers. If Mr. Hassler and the
2 Travels With My Censors, Peter Hassler, the New Yorker, Mar. 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/09/travels-‐with-‐my-‐censor
New Yorker would not oppose this behavior, what right did I have to be jealous
and upset? Besides Peter’s name, the New Yorker, my name and the source links
were all completely showing on that blog. In fact, all reposts kept those credits
too. Moreover, my purpose was letting more Chinese people be able to read it,
and now more people were reading it, so it did help me.
The page views increased exponentially. Within one day, it got more than
10,000 page views. Like I said before, it was the content, Peter’s writing, that
made it so popular. Before I had a chance to screenshot the PV number, that
article was gone. After one day, the BBS where I posted the translation delete
related page as well. The page views on BBS stopped at 6,562.
An article about China’s censorship, got censored after translated into
Chinese—that was not surprising at all. Only Peter’s article was focusing more
on book editors and readers, not the system, and the tone of the article was to
show misunderstood facts, rather than to criticize. That’s also why I want to
translate.
I had some revelations after this. First of all, Chinese people are eager for
good English content with translation. Comparing with ten thousand PVs on
WeChat and six thousand PVs on BBS, the original post on Weibo only has about
50 reposts, roughly equal to five hundreds PVs. Ironically, it didn’t even get
censored till this day, so didn’t the New Yorker’s webpage.
Moreover, political content is a two-‐edged sword. A political content can be
fast spread under certain circumstance. For example, scandals are always
eye-‐catching, not only in China, but all over the world. For content providers, this
would be a good chance to attract more audience. Yet political content is also
risky, especially in China. When my translation got censored, I only wasted
several days’ working. But if a business, a marketing campaign or publishing a
foreign book got influenced by censorship, the loss would be much more severe.
Running a business needs to consider the risks and consequences. It is always
like a dilemma, and there won’t be a perfect, easy answer. I agree with what
Peter Hassler wrote in his article, quoting from his Chinese editor Zhang—“it's
not about the things you can't do but concentrating on the things you can.”3
3 Travels With My Censors, Peter Hassler, the New Yorker, Mar. 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/09/travels-‐with-‐my-‐censor