Wu Xiaobo's WeChat Posts Have Topped a Million Reads, but Even He Doesn't Know Why Some Took Off

"I definitely want to be a bystander and stay independent and free. But if I don't get involved, it seems hard to observe well, too."

Last year Wu Xiaobo made a big decision: he dropped the columns he wrote for various media outlets. He had worked with some of them for years and was on good terms with their editors-in-chief. This time, though, anxiety beat personal loyalty.

"I can't find my readers anymore." That is the stock answer Wu gives everyone who asks him why.

Counting from 1994, when he started his first column in Hangzhou Daily, Wu had been a newspaper and magazine columnist for 20 years. Bestsellers such as The Great Failures and Thirty Years of Upheaval, which examine China's economic reforms and corporate governance, made his name and turned him into the country's most popular finance writer. Even so, columns remained his main way of keeping in touch with the outside world and making his voice heard.

Twenty years on, in what Wu considers "the golden period of my creative life," his voice had dropped to its quietest. Fewer and fewer readers wrote to him, and he rarely saw friends sharing his articles in their WeChat Moments. It was as if the words he had spent so long writing stopped having anything to do with him the moment they left his outbox.

Meanwhile, his good friend Luo Zhenyu had launched the WeChat official account "Luoji Siwei" in 2012. Within a little over a year it had passed 1.5 million subscribers, and its videos had been played nearly 200 million times. More and more young people knew "Lao Luo," and fans had built a community around "Luoji Siwei." That interaction, and the influence it brought, gave Wu quite a jolt.

On May 8, 2014, "Wu Xiaobo Channel" went live on the WeChat public platform. In one of its first articles, Wu explained why he was starting a personal account: "The world is changing faster than I imagined. Print media and traditional news portals are fading fast, and the platforms I relied on to reach readers are collapsing." As he saw it, the "new world, represented by official accounts, has bared its sharp teeth. You either get devoured by it, or you ride on its back." That article was read 643 times.

Over the following year, Wu put most of his time into running the channel, handling every problem down to the smallest detail, like a startup founder. Each week he wrote two columns and made one video. Each day he reviewed the articles his team had finished and suggested changes. He negotiated partnerships for the channel and prepared for the talks and training courses it held...

"I hadn't thought about any business model. When I started, I figured I'd go back to writing two columns a week and making one video. A month later we had over 100,000 followers," Wu told QDaily. "Followers grew very fast, so we needed an article every day, and later that turned into working on topics. Then book clubs sprang up across the country, holding events every week, and the events needed material to present and people to recruit. The content we added after that was driven by subscribers."

Wu also tried the marketing tricks other official accounts use, such as accounts recommending one another, but they did little. Growth came mostly from "hit articles." On May 19 this year, for example, he published a piece on China's stock market called "Crazy." Its readership quickly passed 1 million. On its first day it brought the channel 18,000 new users, and nearly 10,000 more in the days after.

Wu still hasn't worked out how some of these hits took off, but they convinced him of something else: good content can still be the core competitive advantage.

This May, "Wu Xiaobo Channel" turned one. Its WeChat subscribers topped 700,000, and its videos, made with iQiyi, had been played more than 100 million times. Nearly 2,000 new users arrive every day to look around, most of them stay, and the subscriber count on the back end keeps ticking up.

More than 60% of them were born in the 1980s or 1990s. They are the people Wu most wants to reach and influence. Even if they have never read one of his books, he hopes the channel will interest them in the business stories around them, and get them talking with him about those stories.

"It's like a room with a nameplate on the door and an owner inside. People gather there because they share interests and hobbies. I speak quietly and everyone listens quietly. If you raise your hand, I can see it. If you speak, I can hear you. If you cause trouble, I can throw you out. And if I fail to satisfy you, you can turn around and leave. Everyone who comes here can also find one another, say hello and talk," Wu wrote in one of the channel's first articles.

QDaily recently sat down with Wu Xiaobo. He talked about what he did over the past year and how it changed him.

Q = QDaily

B = Wu Xiaobo

Q: You've said you started "Wu Xiaobo Channel" because you found that "my original readers were gone." Roughly when did you start to feel that, and did anything in particular make the feeling stronger?

B: I first wrote for newspapers, then for magazines. As I recall, the only place I wrote for online was FT Chinese. In the last few years you could clearly feel these platforms losing influence. You could see it in the number of letters readers sent me. Another important reason is that my own reading habits had changed. Now I get information mostly through Moments and official accounts. I have more than 2,000 friends on Moments, and I felt that if my work didn't even show up there, something was definitely wrong.

Q: So you decided to start an official account?

B: Yes. I hadn't thought about any business model. When I started, I figured I'd go back to two columns a week and one video, things connected to me, and to this day the content is still like that. A month later we had over 100,000 followers. Followers grew very fast, so we needed an article every day, and later that turned into working on topics. Then book clubs sprang up across the country, holding events every week, and the events needed material to present and people to recruit. The content we added after that was driven by subscribers.

Q: Many of the outlets you used to write for also run official accounts, which could also put your articles into Moments. Why build your own from scratch?

B: Luo Zhenyu, the founder of Luoji Siwei, had been encouraging me to do it. Two things he told me struck me. First, he asked: do you know the Wu Xiaobo brand is bigger than Blue Lion (a finance publishing company Wu Xiaobo owns)? I said, how could that be? I had never thought about it, but later I felt it might really be true. Second, he told me not to build an app, because he had built one himself and found fighting on two fronts very hard.

Q: This "little thing" now has 700,000 followers, and you mentioned that users drive much of the content. Do you still think of it as "a one-person finance channel," as your slogan put it at the start?

B: When we picked that slogan, and the name "Wu Xiaobo Channel," the point, as I said, was to build a personal brand. I think an official account with a person behind it is worth more. It uses my brand as an endorsement, and the content is mainly what I write or recommend. That's still true today. As for my own writing, I haven't changed it or dumbed it down for this account. I've always written for a general audience, and that hasn't changed.

Q: So what has changed compared with before?

B: The best thing about the mobile internet is that whether an article is good shows up right away in the click numbers and on the back end. I've been at it for a year, and my young colleagues keep changing things. Topics that do badly get cut; topics that do well get more space. We keep changing. So much of what Wu Xiaobo Channel puts out is a team responding to the market. That's a big difference.

Q: Can I take that to mean readers' preferences decide how you choose topics and what you emphasize? Where do your topics come from?

B: We have several teams, and each team pitches its own topics. I stay out of that; they make the calls themselves. I only review articles once they're written, and if one isn't suitable, it doesn't run. We also have some fixed content. The book clubs get their own posts, for example, and on giveaway day there's a giveaway-day article. That's roughly the process.

Every week we have a click ranking, so we can see clearly which articles and topics are more popular and which get fewer clicks, and my colleagues adjust accordingly. Personal finance, for example, is a bit more popular than entrepreneurship, so I publish a bit more personal finance and less entrepreneurship. We're always adjusting.

Q: Do you worry that judging content by clicks, like judging a TV news program by its ratings, will make it pander to the lowest taste?

B: I'm not worried about that, because "Wu Xiaobo Channel" already has a settled style. We won't make anything low-grade. Personally, I'm against diaosi ("loser") culture.

Q: How do you define diaosi culture?

B: Diaosi culture means dragging everything down, whether status or values, and thinking of yourself as a loser. What we encourage is this: even if you have no money, you should still see yourself as middle class. That is the message we give readers, and those are the people we want to attract. If you think being a diaosi is just fine, you don't need to come and read our stuff.

Q: Have you analyzed your 700,000 readers, for example by age, education or occupation?

B: Of our followers, 60% were born in the 1980s and 1990s, and 40% are older.

Q: Which group matters more to you?

B: Most of the 40% are my original readers. Those who were going to come are here, and those who weren't won't. So when I started Wu Xiaobo Channel, the aim was to attract people born in the 1980s and 1990s and influence them. I actually worry that finance content isn't appealing enough to them, and that includes the way I express myself.

Q: So how do you attract these young people?

B: We keep trying things. When we make videos, for example, there's a doll beside me called "Ba Jiu Ling" (a play on "eight-nine-zero," for the post-1980s and post-1990s generations), meant to add a fresher, younger voice after I speak. I know a bit about the 1980s generation, because when I ran Blue Lion quite a few colleagues were born in the 1980s. I really don't understand the 1990s generation. I only know that some of them read my books.

Q: After watching for a year, what have you learned about these young readers?

B: First, they don't resist my way of writing or the content of Wu Xiaobo Channel. You can see that in the back-end clicks and user growth. Second, they care more about things that relate to themselves. Once at an event, someone born in the 1990s ran up to me and said, "Mr. Wu, I've read your Thirty Years of Upheaval, but I started from the 1991 chapter, because I was born in 1991." I think they're interested in business and finance knowledge that relates to them. Third, they're very active and take the initiative. We now have more than 80 book clubs across the country, and nearly everyone who comes was born after 1985. They're very keen to organize and join these events.

Q: Are the book clubs, and later the Cafe Renovation Plan, attempts to interact more with these readers and make them stick with the Wu Xiaobo platform?

B: I'm not very involved in that. It's mainly between readers themselves. It started quite simply: last June a reader in Beijing said they wanted to do it, and we said fine, go ahead. Then we put out a call, and people in all sorts of places were quite active. I think there have been more than 300 events, a bike ride one day, a visit to some company the next. We just provide some organization and support.

Q: And the Cafe Renovation Plan?

B: Luoji Siwei had done this before, too. At first we planned to find someone to supply bookshelves and publishers to supply books, so readers and book club members could hold events and read in the cafes. Then we found the publishers gave very little. Many of them think in marketing terms: 5 or 10 books is fine, but ask for 50 and they won't. So in the end we simply said readers should bring their own books, and every place in the Cafe Renovation Plan must have a book club. If we ask 50 people to spend money at a cafe once and each brings a book, we have 50 books right away. We give some subsidies, like the first 20 cups free and half price after that. Readers are happy, and the cafe is happy too, because we bring them business and spread the word for them.

Q: That's certainly good publicity for the cafes. But for Wu Xiaobo Channel itself, you do very little marketing and promotion, and you seem to rarely recommend other accounts in exchange. Is that deliberate?

B: We do that too, the kind where five or ten accounts get together and recommend each other, right? We do it, but it doesn't seem to help. (Laughs.)

Q: So what does work? How did those 700,000 followers find you?

B: Content, still, especially hit articles. Take "Crazy," which I wrote not long ago: it brought 18,000 people that day, more than 8,000 the second day and still more than 6,000 the third. Every so often we have articles like that, such as the one on Factory Director Liao and the one about going to Japan to buy toilet seats. Those all passed a million reads. Once an article takes off, it can bring in ten thousand or several thousand people a day for a while. It still comes down to content.

Q: When you plan these articles, do you know they'll take off?

B: Some, yes, like the recent "Crazy." But mostly I don't, and for some I still don't know why they got so popular.

Q: At the start of this interview you said you hadn't thought about a business model at first. Now you have 700,000 users and these hit articles. Do you have plans to make money from Wu Xiaobo Channel?

B: It's true that when media people run official accounts, they often hit the same problem: it looks busy but doesn't make much money. Which brings us to how an official account turns its audience into cash. Our current thinking is still offline training, and we're already doing it. In May, for example, we held a session in Shenzhen on how e-commerce businesses can transform, and there will be another in Shanghai.

Q: Is that aimed at business owners?

B: Yes, because many of my official account readers are business owners. Like people born in the 1980s and 1990s, they also need to rethink, at this stage of life, how they talk to the business world and to the world at large. They also need to share knowledge and ideas, and they need close-knit groups like the book clubs.

So we help them through some courses. What's different from before is that half our students sign up online, and the business owners taking the classes are in two WeChat groups of more than 700 people each, where they talk to each other. It's nothing new. I used to teach EMBA classes; now it's just a different format.

Q: On May 26 you launched a product called M Weekly, billed as "the first WeChat magazine." Is that also about making money from the channel?

B: It's a new attempt to turn Wu Xiaobo Channel into products. I used to run a management magazine called Blue Lion Manager, and I shut it down after it lost too much money. The old magazine model doesn't really work anymore. Readers think your content is pretty good and will read it if you give it to them free, but ask them to pay and they won't. Then advertisers stop buying ads, too.

M Weekly takes earlier cover stories, so the content is all ready-made, and tries a new format. Each issue covers a single theme, for example, which keeps it clear. Then we use HTML5 or some other format to make it look better. If this works, we're also considering other things, like condensing a 100,000-character book into 10,000 characters and letting you read it free first. If you like it, we can send you to Amazon or Dangdang to buy the print book or e-book. Before, there was no platform and no payment system. Now all of that is possible.

Q: Two columns a week, a video, book clubs, training courses and your own writing, all at once. How do you split your time?

B: About half my time still goes to "Wu Xiaobo Channel." What I do myself is two columns a week and one video. I basically leave the book clubs alone; my colleagues handle the preparation. But I still personally review the official account's articles every day.

Q: Are there times when you can't keep up?

B: It's fine for now. For me it's still a work in progress. I actually still enjoy having time to read and write. So if it gets to be too much, I'll subtract. I've noticed I've always worked this way over the years: first I add, then I subtract.

Q: You used to have a very clear identity: Wu Xiaobo, the finance writer. Over the past year you've picked up many new labels: entrepreneur, product manager, self-media, businessman. How do you see this shift and these labels?

B: I really like Drucker's Adventures of a Bystander. I definitely want to be a bystander and stay independent and free. But in this era I think I need to be involved. If I don't take part, it seems hard to observe well, too. There's a balance to strike between the two, and I don't think I've got it right yet.