After Zhou Fangyuanzi was reborn, what he has been thinking about is to do an IP closed loop.

In his previous life, there were already many successful cases, and now he is nothing more than taking out some visible routines from his previous life, and then sitting back and enjoying the results.

One of the obvious examples of this is Marvel.

If there were no Marvel success stories, then no one would value the value of IP so much in the future. As a comic publishing company, Marvel in the early 90s of the last century was in its heyday, the comic fever was hyped, hoarded and sold at a high price, and after the bubble dissipated, Marvel suffered an unprecedented impact, and its market value shrank to only 10%, making a living by selling comic IP in its hands.

At that time, Marvel was not as good as later, basically no one could realize the value of those IPs, and Marvel couldn't call any price in the market. In the end, the market response of "X-men" and "Spider-Man", which were sold at low prices, only stayed in the impression of "well-made Hollywood blockbusters". After learning the hard way, Marvel decided to mortgage all IP copyrights to the bank and fight against the water. Marvel started with "Iron Man" in 2008 and launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The box office of nearly $600 million brought Marvel back to life and has since reached the pinnacle of its life. Disney then bought Marvel for $4.2 billion, which is 50 times the market value of Marvel at its trough.

After more than ten years of development, Marvel has not only won countless fans around the world, but also shaped a complete Marvel universe: each superhero is an independent IP, and then multiple IPs are connected in series through the cinematic universe to form a huge system. Such a model not only brings the characters together to add interest to the story, but also allows the ability to attract money to start developing horizontally.

Therefore, Marvel presents these IPs in a cultural system, not only the main comics and movies, but also a variety of derivative products, toys, games, co-branded fashion products, in short, a series of commercial activities centered on IP, so that the content produced by itself can interact with people in a variety of forms, and each form is staggered and symbiotic, jumping out of the radiation of a single product, forming a complete network to pounce on users.

With the success of Marvel, words such as IP, ecology, and system have become the keywords of the cultural and creative industry, and the world has begun to realize that building a system ecology can make the cultural and creative industry jump out of the shortcomings such as insufficient production capacity, strong volatility, and unstable yield rate, and the core of all this lies in the control of IP, which has begun to rise from the tactical level to the strategic level, and has become the core means of production of the cultural and creative industry.

coincides with the rise of Marvel for more than ten years, and it is also the exploration and growth period of the domestic cultural and creative industry in the previous life, this mode of operation with the core of operating IP has been re-recognized by the domestic capital market, which can theoretically eliminate the biggest constraint of the cultural and creative industry - lack of stability, which makes Marvel's methodology popular. Even, IP is seriously "overvalued" at some levels, and due to misunderstanding and the existence of a quick success mentality, IP has a serious "inflation". In 2013, popular IPs, which were originally generally around 1 million, generally rose to 300 to 5 million at the beginning of 2014, and climbed to 10 million at the peak.

Despite a certain degree of "deviation", the value and methodology of independent IP have been fully recognized.

In China, Marvel's methodology can be widely recognized, not only because its own characteristics are in line with the current situation of the domestic cultural and creative industry, but also because of Tencent's "promotion" role to a certain extent, the strategic adjustment of this Internet technology company has objectively played a role in the "localization" of this methodology.

In the previous life 04 years, at the imminent node of Tencent's listing, its future business direction ushered in a change from entertainment communication to user life optimization, which Xiao Ma Ge defined as "online life" at that time.

At this point, Tencent began to take user experience as the starting point, concentrate on optimizing software, expand its business line with communication as the cornerstone, and start the pace of entering the cultural and creative industry with games as a stepping stone. "Dazzling Dance", "DNF", "Crossfire" and many other games have become Tencent's masterpieces.

At the time, it was hard to understand that a company with instant messaging and social platforms as its core business would overcome the difficulties in the gaming industry. In other words, we are constantly optimizing the user experience, accumulating enough users on social platforms, and then starting to do subdivision research from the perspective of meeting users' entertainment needs. Respect for user experience happens to be the foundation for building an IP system.

After the game business was basically formed, Tencent started the pan-entertainment strategy, and successively entered the fields of animation, literature, film and television, e-sports, etc., forming five major content sections and professional teams including games, animation, literature, film and television, and e-sports, and "IP construction mode" and "pan-entertainment development mode" have become the core ideas of Tencent in expanding the cultural and creative industry. Somewhat similar to Marvel's operating ideas, the core methodology is to let the core content appear in different forms of carriers, and amplify the relevant IP value through the linkage of different carriers.

In fact, Tengxun finally embarked on the road of building IP in a clear form, in order to adapt to the changes in the future cultural and entertainment market, and began to consciously transition from making single-line products to building a cultural system. Although the domestic cultural and entertainment market has grown rapidly in those years, with the deepening of the aging of the population, the decrease in the number of new populations and the maturity of the entertainment market, it will be inevitable that the overall scale of the entertainment market will stabilize.

Subsequently, Tencent began to try the "localization" of IP construction.

In 2018, Tencent officially upgraded "pan-entertainment" to "neo-cultural creativity", and its upgrade points include two cores: focusing more systematically on the construction of the cultural value of IP, and upgrading the ways and methods of shaping IP. In this way, through the upgrading of neo-cultural creativity, Tencent's cultural system construction with IP operation as the core has a clearer goal, which will integrate the practical experience of the previous pan-entertainment system to formulate and provide IP standards that can better connect cultural value and commercial value.

There is another point to focus on here, and that is the esports industry.

As the last independent sector of Tencent in the cultural and creative industry, e-sports did not exist independently from the beginning, but was an ancillary business of game products and services.

Although it belongs to the same neo-cultural and creative digital content matrix as games, animation, literature, and film and television, e-sports is derived from games, and promoting the formation of independent output value of e-sports has become the key to shaping e-sports IP.

This determines that the IP operation mode of e-sports will focus more on the construction of the entire industry ecology, rather than the IP of a single work, such as a movie character, a game character, or a specific one. In other words, Tencent is to directly and indirectly participate in the construction of the whole industry chain for e-sports.

The shaping of sports attributes and cultural attributes is the key to the development of e-sports business. After getting rid of the shackles of game products, the essence of e-sports is sports, theoretically, e-sports is no different from football and basketball, and the leading head event is equivalent to the Premier League and NBA.

Only by jumping out of the original barriers and barriers of the game industry can e-sports IP develop independently, and then link with games, animation, literature, film and television after the independent output value can be stabilized, and the value of IP operation can be truly seen. Otherwise, it will be difficult for e-sports to get out of the reincarnation that restricts the life of a certain game. StarCraft fell, and Warcraft took over, and after Warcraft retired from history, DOTA continued to carry the flag. Although the form of e-sports has been continuing, the ecological construction has not been continued and developed, but the construction, development, and death of the cycle have been repeated, and the same fate has been interpreted in different products.

If the e-sports culture cannot be shaped from the perspective of the independent output value of e-sports, then the e-sports event system built by the popular "League of Legends" and "Honor of Kings" at that time will also repeat the mistakes of its predecessors, even if it is much ahead of its predecessors in terms of basic settings.

Once the habits of e-sports viewing and related sports culture are profoundly established, games such as "League of Legends" and "Honor of Kings" are just the existence of competition items, and the audience and fans are nothing more than going to change projects to experience, just like watching "Avengers 4" last month and "X-Men" this month, the consumption is the process of watching movies.

Therefore, "sports" is the key to Tencent's e-sports breakthrough, and injecting e-sports into urban life is the main channel.

Before Zhou Fangyuan's rebirth, there were already head events such as LPL and KPL in hand, and in the initial stage of establishing e-sports culture, this kind of head event will play a role in breaking the gap and bringing the rhythm of e-sports into urban life as a daily habit. With the home-and-away system and urban development plans of e-sports beginning to be implemented one by one, cities such as Shanghai and Chang'an have begun to embrace e-sports.

At that stage, e-sports needed the support of local governments to integrate into urban life, just like traditional sports such as football and basketball, not only the clubs stationed in the local area needed the support of local core enterprises, but also some companies with sports popularity also needed to mobilize resources from all parties to complete, and the government could play the role of communicating and connecting multiple resources. However, compared with the large-scale introduction of game companies and event execution agencies to support the façade of e-sports in the city to temporarily stimulate GDP, the in-depth operation of e-sports IP in "sports" is a long process, which requires all parties to clarify the core goals and specific concepts to pursue a more long-tail comprehensive effect.

For the development of the city itself, it is also necessary for e-sports to enter the emerging sport, young people need new things to stimulate cultural consumption, e-sports halls, Internet cafes exist in the same way as cinemas, gymnasiums, are cultural consumption experience scenes, the introduction of online e-sports offline, is a way to enrich the cultural consumption of young people, is to promote the long-term stable development of the city.

In this way, the proposition of e-sports in urban development is how to build a sports ecological IP in the city, not only in Shanghai, a city with an e-sports foundation, but also in Chang'an, Rongcheng and other rising stars, in fact, a more systematic planning is needed, and this is the success of Tencent.

In addition, in addition to Tengxun, Zhou Fangyuan also knows a company that has also done a relatively successful job in IP closed-loop.

Its name is Wenyuan.

Since 2015, the pan-entertainment industry, with "IP" as the core, has developed into one of the "Eight Trends of Internet Development" recognized by the industry, and the speed of development is staggering.

During the three-day meeting, a total of 3,485 business negotiations were carried out, 1,368 cooperation intentions were initially reached, and 29 projects were directly traded. The 192 overseas businessmen present reached a total of 402 international cooperation intentions, accounting for one-third of the total cooperation intentions. It can be seen that with the continuous development of the Internet pan-entertainment industry such as animation and games, more and more eyes have begun to pay attention to this field.

Among the many participating institutions, Wenyuan Culture, which focuses on comic production and IP development, also brought many new works such as "Shuling Ji" and "Qiankun Volume" to the conference. Its latest projects, best works, and most complete introductions were displayed and exchanged on the spot for three days, and its booths and business booths attracted many participants and organizations, and there was an endless stream of interested partners.

As a company committed to the precipitation of top IP and the development of pan-entertainment, grasping the content of IP for development is a key step at the beginning of all links. Starting from the source of IP, Wenyuan Culture has created the "Great God Studio" model, and has built a high-quality IP pool through in-depth IP cooperation with well-known online gods and famous writers, and carried out all-round and multi-angle IP development work on the IP of the signed "Great God" according to market demand and its own style. This model not only improves the monetization value of IP, but also adds brand effect to the author himself, ensuring the supply of high-quality content in the market.

In addition, Wenyuan is also continuously bringing together potential domestic original networks and famous IPs with global influence at home and abroad, gradually forming a content resource matrix situation, providing the foundation for casting a professional content IP pool platform - "Handheld IP Supermarket". By connecting "creators, IP pool platforms, and enterprises", the handheld IP supermarket forms an ecological closed loop of "content provision, exquisite launch, and market distribution". A steady stream of IP will be carefully selected by a professional editorial team, refined content, and clear copyrights before being put on the shelves of the "Handheld IP Supermarket".

How to break out of the shackles of the traditional monetization model and further improve the monetization space of the huge content library is what Wenyuan has been thinking about and exploring.

In fact, when Zhou Fangyuan was up to the relevant information, Wenyuan Culture had opened up a multi-dimensional monetization channel, successfully opened up the distribution capacity of Wenman, Film and Television and other content on more than 100 domestic platforms, and at the same time achieved "overseas travel", achieved the basis of content payment, and gathered industry resources and offline fans through professional exhibitions to precipitate fan communities, which can not only achieve direct profits from the peripheral sales of IP products, but also obtain first-hand user data to feed back to the IP front-end, forming a virtuous circle.

This is a kind of closed-loop success, of course, compared with Tengxun, Wenyuan is a small company, the volume is completely incomparable, but it is undeniable that Wenyuan's own behavior is a successful model, Zhou Fangyuan does not need any innovation, as long as it is used according to the big and small, it is not difficult to achieve success.