[Updated]YY’s Interactive Live Show Business to Expand to Reading, Partnering with Cloudary

YY and Clouday, the online literature business under Shanda, announced today to jointly launch a platform for online live reading shows in the near future (Update: the channel is launched on June 25 2013).

The same with the YY Music model, the reading platform will have performers reading books to audiences. It sounds sweet if you picture a storybook lady living on the Web reading you stories. And it’s also perceivable to Chinese as China has a long history of oral storytelling performance.

But, sorry to tell you, you can only see beauties selected from existing YY Music performers reading novels from Cloudary, at least at the near future. It will even be called something like “beauties read you stories”.

Unsurprisingly, it will adopt the YY Music model in terms of monetization. What’s different is one more party, the novel writer, will take a revenue share too, apart from the performer/agencies and the platform. The synergy between YY and Cloudary is the latter also allows readers tip writers they like.

The two parties have experimented with a popular work from Cloudary. They held a storyteller contest that attracted more than ten thousand participants with more than forty thousand clips uploaded, according to Cloudary.

The live show business of YY’s has already expanded to live game streams. While there are a plenty of services in China that offer live or recorded game streams, YY is one of the few that make money from audiences. Apart from virtual gift sales and premium services, it is said game betting is another revenue source — there might be regulatory risks.