The price of knowledge

Beidao, one of the most notable representatives of the Misty Poets. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Paid service

The Beijing internet company Douban, known to Chinese as a website of user-generated reviews on books, movies and music, launched a paid content section called Douban Time in March.

It invited 17 contemporary poets to give talks on poetry on its mobile app.

The poets are all well known, including Beidao, Xichuan, and Ouyang Jianghe.

An audio podcast called A Poetry Class with Beidao and Friends costs 128 yuan, which gives the subscriber 102 episodes about 51 poems, some Chinese and some foreign.

"Over the years we have gathered a very large and loyal user base who like books, music and movies," says Yao Wentan, vice president of the company.

"Many of them are willing to pay for good stuff, and what we do is to serve them with the right content."

Subscriptions to the poetry class are said to have exceeded a million in a week after it was launched in March, and since then the Douban Time section has opened four other classes.

Yao says the section is called Douban Time because by providing high-quality content, the section can help users save time, and she hopes users can spend more time on those refined cultural products.

One of the latest classes is about cult movies, curated by a team of 12 scholars led by Chang Jiang, an associate professor of communication studies at Tsinghua University.

Chang is a film aficionado and has been a film and TV critic for several years.

The class gives in-depth analysis of the cultural phenomenon of cult movies, such as A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Pulp Fiction (1994).

"I'm doing this more as a cultural scientist than a film lover or communications scholar," Chang says of the choice of the class topic.

"I want to create something that is both interesting and meaningful to people whose cultural needs and aesthetics the so-called mainstream have long disdained."

This is also his first venture with the knowledge economy, and sales have been good, according to Douban's public relations, without elaborating.

It is fashionable to talk about the knowledge economy at the moment, Chang says, but content producers have to tread carefully and respectfully, working in a professional way.

"The knowledge economy is very different to other types of economy. You can't just make up knowledge, throw a price tag on it and then market it."

Paid content does not run counter to the idea of the free spirit of the internet, he says.

Since people are more than willing to pay for a can of Coca-Cola made by an industrial machinery, they should not grudge paying for professional knowledge created and made available thanks to human effort.

"Knowledge is priceless, but never free. Paying for knowledge is the future, no matter whether it is in China or elsewhere."