iQIYI Literature Signs Top Online Novelists to Lead Development of Original Content

BEIJING, May 28, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- iQIYI, Inc. (NASDAQ:IQ) ("iQIYI" or the "Company"), an innovative market-leading online entertainment service in China, announced that iQIYI Literature has signed exclusive agreements with four of China's top online novelists -- Tang Shao, Nan Pai San Shu, Fresh Guoguo, and Shui Qian Cheng -- to become iQIYI Literature "Chief Structure Officers", leading a team of star writers to guide the development of iQIYI Literature.

Tang Shao has been called "China's Number One Internet Novelist", having set a Guinness World Record in 2012 for 86 months of uninterrupted daily online publishing. For six years in a row from 2012 to 2018, he topped the wealth list of online writers in China, becoming known as "China's most profitable internet novelist". Tang Shao has also gained popularity overseas: his novel "Dou Luo Continent" has been translated into English, winning him a large number of foreign readers. In 2014 and 2015, Tang Shao was named to Forbes' list of Chinese celebrities.

With this agreement, iQIYI Literature will gain exclusive rights to Tang Shao's new work "Fantastic Ocean, Amazing Land". Tang Shao will also work with iQIYI to create more high quality content.

"As the online literature industry develops rapidly, iQIYI Literature has taken advantage of our incentive mechanisms and the massive user base to attract original content writers," said Geng Danhao, senior vice president of iQIYI. "With a strategy of original content plus licensed content, iQIYI Literature has opened up the industry supply chain from the very beginning and helped to revolutionize the entertainment industry."

Since 2016, iQIYI Literature has been devoted to incubating high quality IP and supporting outstanding authors. It established the "iQIYI Literature Prize" with the aim of encouraging excellent writers, while investing in developing literature resources. At present, iQIYI Literature has already introduced more than 60,000 registered writers who have produced over 1,000 high-quality original works for the platform. iQIYI recently also announced the results of the 2^nd Annual iQIYI Literature Prize, which awarded 16 works, twice the number of awarded works compared to the previous year.

In January, 2018, iQIYI officially launched iQIYI Reading App, which covers published literature, original books from which TV and films have been produced, online novels, and more. In April, the iQIYI Reading App led the field with 96.41% month-on-month growth of monthly active users and was the top ranked app in Mobile App Top 1000 Rankings issued by Analysys, a third-party data analysis firm, in terms of monthly active users, clearly showing the strength of its vast user base.

As an important part of iQIYI's entertainment ecosystem, iQIYI Literature has successfully enriched the company's original content library with high-quality IP works, providing a strong driving force for the development of more popular original content and other related business sectors on iQIYI's platform.

SOURCE iQIYI, Inc.