Renren Meiju Wants to Build a Community Business. Nostalgia Won't Take It Far

Any community that draws users with content runs into a chicken-and-egg problem.

If you have ever followed American TV shows, you almost certainly know Renren Yingshi (YYeTs). It no longer goes by that name, though. The name was retired in November 2014, and its official Weibo account posted a single line: "The era that needed us has passed."

Renren Yingshi grew out of the YYeTs subtitle group, founded on June 1, 2006, one of the earliest and most influential fansub groups in China. At its peak it gathered more than 2,000 part-time subtitle translators, who organized themselves and kept this "public-interest" work going. Free subtitles and free downloads won it a huge following of US-drama fans, and a huge amount of risk along with them.

The copyright disaster struck in October 2014, when the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) published a global report on audiovisual piracy that put Renren Yingshi and Xunlei on its blacklist. A month later, media reported that some servers belonging to the organization, then still called the "Renren Yingshi Subtitle Site," had been seized. The site officially shut down on December 20.

More than a year later, Miao Haolin, COO of Renren Meiju, summed it up this way: "A subtitle group can never exist as a company."

Renren Meiju is what Renren Yingshi became after it was "rectified." Search the name on Baidu and the first link is the download page for the app of the same name; after that come plenty of copycat sites with similar names, fishing in muddy water. The makeover was thorough: the organization did not keep even a website.

Most people who once whiled away their hours on Renren Yingshi know that "Renren Meiju" exists, and know that "Kai-Fu Lee invested in it." As a foundation to build on, that is probably its biggest asset. At the end of 2014, Renren Yingshi received angel funding from Sinovation Ventures. On February 6, 2015, it came back as "Renren Meiju," declaring it would build "China's largest US-drama community." The app launched in October 2015.

Shutdown, funding, a new name, a relaunch: all of this happened more than a year ago. How is it doing now?

"The team had always been troubled by copyright. Building a community was the only way out. You can't just run a file-sharing site," Chen Yuetian, the Sinovation Ventures investor in charge of the deal, told QDaily. Renren Yingshi was one of a kind, he said; there will never be another. Growing from a grassroots, volunteer effort to the scale it reached over more than a decade was no small feat, and investing in the team "was a way of helping it move up to the next level."

Renren Meiju's CEO goes by Xiaoming. Born in 1988, his real name is Zhou Weimin. He spoke with QDaily in the company's office on the second floor of Sinovation Ventures in Shanghai's Yangpu District. He hopes users who come to Renren Meiju will do more than follow shows: they will join discussions and recapture the feel of the old BBS days. He pictures the app as something like a mobile Douban, offering one-stop services for following shows on top of news, reviews and discussion zones for each show.

The idea drew more investors. On September 24, 2015, Renren Meiju raised a Series A of tens of millions of yuan from Yingdong Capital. According to the press release at the time, the company would use the money to connect and launch several content formats to broaden what the app offers, and, beyond US dramas, would produce its own content.

Open Renren Meiju and you find that its strengths are news and show-tracking. Its release schedule, in particular, makes it easy to check which episodes came out each day. Miao Haolin says the app has 4 million users since launch and up to 300,000 daily active users. If those figures are true, the community attached to the app looks rather quiet: the week's top posts have fewer than 4,000 views and fewer than 2,500 participants, and those are the hot ones. Ordinary posts with single-digit participation are everywhere.

All this may point to a gap between what Renren Meiju is, a tool, and what its management (and, of course, its investors) expect it to be. Most people use it to follow shows, but a phone is a poor place to write long reviews, and the community has not yet developed a lively culture of discussion.

Renren Meiju cannot go back to ignoring copyright. Against that background, it finds itself in an awkward spot.

So far, Renren Meiju's management has raised money on the order of 10 million yuan. Mainstream video sites such as Youku Tudou and iQiyi often spend hundreds of millions, even billions, of yuan on content; next to that, this sum would buy almost no licenses. In fact, Zhou Weimin does not plan to spend it that way. He says much of the money went into developing the app, but if that is all, the sum looks larger than the job needs. Clearly he has not yet settled on a solid plan.

The opening Renren Meiju has found lies in how scattered US dramas are across platforms, and in the time lag. The mainstream video sites have more or less carved up the popular US shows, while newer shows are held up by censorship: they reach China at least three months to half a year late, and must be reviewed before they air. Put plainly, video sites that buy rights through legitimate channels and go through official review cannot release new shows as fast as users want to watch them. Xiaoming answered some sensitive questions about copyright tactfully: "User demand has always been there. They'll find a way."

Wang Yang was never a Renren Yingshi user. She used to follow shows on video sites, then found that some shows had vanished (video sites generally hold US-drama rights for one to three years and take shows down when the rights expire) and that few newer shows were added, so she lost interest in watching there. She happened across Renren Meiju on Weibo and found that the app let her stream newer US shows. Lately she has been watching 《暗黑侩子手》 (The Dark Executioner), Allegiance, 《律师兄弟》 (Lawyer Brothers) and 《邪恶之城》 (City of Evil).

Rather than how fast shows appear on the platform, Miao Haolin prefers to stress how convenient it is to watch there: "Just as gamers moved from browser games to client games, viewing habits are changing too: people watch more shows in spare moments. It's true that most people still go to video sites, even paying for memberships. But some want a smoother experience, without switching platforms for different shows. In the past, if you wanted to watch The Big Bang Theory you went to Sohu, and for Game of Thrones you had to move over to Tencent. Younger users find a mobile aggregator more appealing. Otherwise we wouldn't see aggregators for more specialized content like comics, novels and films."

To build on this, Renren Meiju first wants to win users, especially new ones, with streaming. The app does not offer downloads, but users can now cache videos.

That forces Renren Meiju to line up more video partners. It needs to close the gap in catalog size with other video sites. Zhou Weimin says Renren Meiju's content comes mainly from three sources: licensing deals with video sites including Sohu, LeTV and PPTV, under which Renren Meiju sends them traffic in exchange for their video content; and, for newer US shows, user-uploaded content from AcFun, the danmaku (scrolling-comment) video site known as "A-site."

Working with video sites has been harder than expected. The big platforms are all moving to paid exclusives, and on some of them non-members can preview only about five minutes, so licensing deals for hit shows are hard to sign. And Renren Meiju is just starting out: its user base is still small, and the traffic it can send the big platforms is not much of a draw.

On licensing, Miao Haolin said, Youku really does have deep pockets these days, while Tencent would rather cooperate on content, such as Renren Meiju's reviews and show news. "There really isn't much Tencent content on the platform; we've never seriously negotiated that deal. As for Youku, its US shows lean toward teen dramas, and most of those have ended, so we take content from A-site and B-site instead, which also spares users annoyances like pre-roll ads."

Renren Meiju's catalog holds fewer than 2,000 titles so far, and some shows that were once popular but now draw few viewers have been taken down one after another, such as Growing Pains and The X-Files. "These 'niche US shows' we took down aren't worth that much to us now. Some people still look for them, but they aren't aimed at current and future users."

Then there is buying niche US shows, a long-tail market. "Some shows that aren't big abroad won't necessarily flop in China. They still have fans, and they're cheap. A season might cost a few hundred thousand yuan," Zhou Weimin said. But how many shows are cheap, good and not yet snapped up by the video sites? "There are some questions we can't answer directly, because we're still very young and feeling our way," he replied.

To attract more new users, Renren Meiju also plans original content: its own programs and remakes of US shows. These include talk shows built on trailers and celebrity gossip, film-related programs in the vein of 《暴走大事件》 (Baozou Dashijian), and foreign-language versions of comedy shorts such as 《万万没想到》 (Never Expected) (clips under five minutes do not raise copyright issues and can be used for exchange and study). Programs already released include 《八卦行尸》 (Gossip Walkers), 《遇贱美剧》 (Meeting Jerks in US Shows) and 《童言无忌》 (Kids Say the Darndest Things).

This business is unlikely to be done with big companies, because they tend to treat Renren Meiju as a supplier, and if its own content grows large, they may take it over and run it themselves. That leaves Renren Meiju as something like a distributor, in the business of sending traffic. Zhou Weimin explained: "We still have close to 1,200 QQ groups of US-drama fans, ranging from 200 to 2,000 members. The large ones are fewer, about 20 or so, and at least two-thirds of them are still very active." These channels are an asset Renren Yingshi built up over more than a decade.

Here is the chicken-and-egg problem. Whether to keep existing users active or to attract new ones, Renren Meiju needs more content. But content is hard to get, so it can only produce more news and discussion to achieve the same effect. Only then can it send traffic to the big sites and win more content in return.

That material comes in two kinds: news updates and user discussion.

From early on, Renren Meiju declared it would build China's largest US-drama community, and even set up a BBS-style "General Community" section in the app. Building a community proved harder than expected. Miao Haolin, who has moderated a Baidu Tieba forum for 11 years, admits the team probably underestimated the difficulty when it first laid out the product's features.

In the previous version, the app had four main sections: news, US-drama circle, show-tracking and community. Each had its own way of interacting. The team saw the community as the section where users interacted most often; it was divided into discussion zones by show, and each zone had anywhere from several hundred thousand to several million users. But the team has decided to cut the community feature in the next version. Miao found that users were harder to rouse than he had imagined.

"At first we thought we just had to mark off a patch of ground for people to talk, without interfering much in what they said. But in reality, few people start discussions on their own. They need someone to lead them," Miao Haolin said. After people finish judging whether a show is any good, he wants to see them take up more specific topics, such as: "Is Jon Snow really dead?" (Jon Snow is a character killed off in Season 5 of Game of Thrones; the poster for the new season hints he may return.)

Plenty of platforms, like Renren Meiju, offer US-drama streaming, subtitles and similar services, on PC and in apps: Tiantian Meiju, iKan Meiju, Meiju Paradise, Meijumi and Jiujiu Meiju among them. Some have tried to build forum-style communities, with little success; people mostly treat them as places to find videos.

Subtitle-group forums, US-drama forums and Tieba boards are not very lively either. On Baidu's US-drama Tieba board, threads typically get a few dozen to about a hundred replies. A few threads about hit shows, or posts that invite participation such as polls and shared watchlists, do somewhat better, yet still draw only 200 to 500 replies.

For most US-drama fans, older, established communities such as Douban and Mtime still handle most of the watching, rating and discussing. On other platforms, users' need to follow shows probably outweighs their need to socialize, at least for now.

Most of the US-drama news and hot topics on Renren Meiju are produced by editors. Planned topics like these take heavy steering and are slow to make users more active. "In fact, the steady decline of communities like Baidu Tieba, Douban and even Tianya in recent years shows that fewer and fewer users can produce high-quality content in a community," Zhou Weimin told QDaily.

Among the users we interviewed, whether or not they had known Renren Yingshi, attitudes toward today's Renren Meiju app were similar: it makes shows easy to find; it is a pity there are no downloads, though at least caching now works. But there is little interaction, and even less active commenting, because "typing on a phone is too much trouble."

Still, for the vast majority of fans, the fact that the revived Renren Meiju offers streaming at all is a blessing. What they care about most is whether there are ads, whether the subtitles are good, and whether the newest shows get added. One remark from the interviews was a little poignant: "I don't care about anything else. As long as there's something to watch, I'm grateful."

As for how far the reinvented Renren Meiju can go, most investors are still on the sidelines, and even those who invested were fairly cautious. "One of the investors we approached asked us to reach 12 million users by around April 2016," Zhou Weimin said. He found such performance-based valuation terms too harsh to consider, and in the end chose Yingdong Capital, with whom he had personal ties.

Seen this way, what investors value is less the so-called community than the discerning US-drama audience built up in the Renren Yingshi days, along with the room for user growth after the transformation. On that count, it does start from a higher position than other US-drama communities built from scratch. Yet users come to it mainly as a tool, and building a truly healthy "China's largest US-drama community" on nostalgia alone is easier said than done.

Image source: Douban