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Dec. 16 (NBD) -- TikTok owner ByteDance has invested in Mymind Culture, operator of literary websites, according to information revealed Saturday at enterprise intelligence platform qichacha.com. 

Beijing Quantum Jump Technology Co Ltd, which is wholly owned by ByteDance and has literary and artistic creation within its business scope, has bought a 13.04 percent stake in Mymind Culture. 

Founded in 2015, Mymind Culture is a pan-entertainment company that mainly engages in content creation, IP development, online reading, etc. It's worth noting that the company has operated six online reading platforms for original literary works and offers free online novels.

National Business Daily (NBD) observed that ByteDance already eyed the online reading market as early as March 2019, when it launched a free reading app dubbed as Tomato Novels which was suspended for rectification in July. Later in August, ByteDance promoted a similar free reading app Hongguo Novels. Currently the two apps are integrated into one with the name of "Tomato Novels".

As a matter of fact, the online reading field is now crowded with players that longed for a slice of the growing market.

Chinese tech moguls including Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), Alibaba (NYSE:BABA) and Tencent (00700.HK) already made deployment in the domain by respectively introducing free reading apps Qimao Novels, Shuqi Novels, and Feidu Novels. Contents providers like Qutoutiao (NASDAQ:QTT) also initiated its free reading app Midu Novels.

In recent years, China's online reading market showcased a rapid development. According to a report released by the Forward Industry Research Institute, the Chinese online reading market is expected to reach 28.62 billion yuan (4.1 billion U.S. dollars) by 2020 from 16.8 billion yuan in 2017. 

NBD noticed that compared with paid apps, free reading products, which combine free reading services and profitable advertising, contributed largely to the online reading market from 2018 to 2019 in terms of user increase. Research firm QuestMobile's data showed during the one-year period starting from September 2018, among the top ten online reading apps in terms of user increase, seven were for free.

Statistics from another research company MobTech indicated that as of June 2019, free online reading apps accounted for 46 percent of all online reading apps, compared to 24 percent a year ago, and the monthly downloads of free reading apps have outnumbered those of paid reading products.

Email: gaohan@nbd.com.cn