Star virtual IP is on the rise.

It was learned that the star celebrity intellectual property operation platform “Sharing Times” has recently completed X round of financing, and this round has won the group, Sannuo Group, Huanrui Century, Beijing Jimei Home Furnishing and other enterprises and institutions combined with more than 100 million yuan investment. This round of financing will be mainly used for IP incubation, content production around Xingfan Universe, and online and offline channel expansion.

In addition, Sharing Times plans to launch an IPO plan within the year to promote the company’s business expansion.

Sharing Times was established in 2011, thanks to the early experience of the founding team in the field of mobile game App publishing and operation, the company used light mobile game publishing as its main business in the early days of its establishment, and successively published or operated “Finding Your Sister” , “Cutting the Rope” and more than 500 mobile games, many of which have become popular games.

In 2014, Sharing Times noticed that many European and American celebrities began to launch games, virtual images, and IP consumer brands based on their own IP, maximizing their influence in the entertainment industry. “At that time, our core business was still game publishing, but after referring to the development path of foreign celebrities, we reversed our own business, thinking that in the sharing era, we can also try to integrate the virtual IPs of celebrities and celebrities, so as to produce more content and make use of it. More value.” Wang Xin, the founder of Sharing Times, told.

The source of the adobe: Sharing Times

Identified the era of sharing the long-term development route, and started to complete the signing of virtual IP with a strategy of waist stars as the mainstay and head stars as the supplement. There are two reasons for this strategy: one is that this business model does not have suitable references and successful cases at home and abroad, and the other is that the sharing era hopes to prove that non-head celebrities still have the opportunity to display their virtual reality under appropriate content packaging. The value of IP.

Wang Xin said that around 2014, many traditional Chinese brands began to complete brand upgrades, and the younger generation of consumers has gradually become the mainstream of the market, and concepts such as national trends and new domestic products are emerging. Under such an opportunity, the era of sharing began to revolve around celebrities’ virtual IP, bringing different types of endorsement content to brands.

Image source: Sharing Times

Taking the promotion project customized for “Star Fan Card” by Sharing Times as an example, combining the characteristics of the brand business and the all-star IP lineup, Sharing Times is authorised and created by hundreds of celebrities in the five fields of Chinese music, film and television, sports, academics and commerce. The lineup of virtual celebrity cards has successfully created the virtual images of many celebrity IPs into “star fans blind cards”, and enhanced the brand influence for star fans blind cards.

Different from the celebrity “real person IP”, the virtual IP can be differentiated and customized according to the needs of different scenarios and different cooperative brands. Still taking the “Star Fan Blind Card” as an example, in the linkage with 11 mobile games, Sharing Times created the “Tao Tao Bear” series of avatars and implanted them into the game. At the same time, Tao Tao Xiong was made based on IP. Comics, card board games, emoticons and other products. In the end, this IP achieved a total of 470 million game downloads, 210 million cross-border brand cooperation views, and 7 million emoji skin downloads per month (WeChat).

“By continuously packaging and authorizing celebrity virtual IPs to various brands, we have gradually formed our own content production and incubation supply chain-just like Mijia in the Xiaomi ecological chain. This model can help celebrities Extend the life cycle of virtual IP, and at the same time continue to invest a lot of resources to bring more quality content to IP.” Wang Xin said.

So far, Sharing Times has signed contracts with more than 700 stars/celebrities, covering multiple fields such as film and television, sports, music, fashion, and science; among them, Ren Quan, Liu Tao, Chen He, Du Haitao, Lin Gengxin, and Liu Xuan Many entertainment and sports stars have become partners in the sharing era.

It is worth mentioning that the sharing era did not focus on the development of virtual IP in the pursuit of the head “traffic niche”. In Wang Xin’s view, the core of the brand upgrade is still the “enhancement of brand power.” Traffic stars may bring better drainage effects for brands in the short term, but more factors need to be considered to build a company’s long-term brand value, and high-quality virtual IP content and celebrity endorsements are a good way.

Based on the diversified content production capabilities and the virtual IP copyrights of hundreds of celebrities accumulated by the company over the years, Sharing Times has launched the Star Fan Universe series of comic works, and correspondingly produced the Star Fan Universe derivatives.

Xingfan Universe Offline Activities

Xingfan Universe’s comics include dozens of works from “Bear Man’s Biography,” “Tianba Academy”, and “Rhythmic Church”. Among them, “League of Order-Origin” has been launched on 17 comic platforms and integrated works on Tencent platforms. With a score of 9.9 points, the star fan universe brand has launched more than 11,000 derivatives of more than 300 virtual IPs, covering 23 categories such as life peripherals, trendy bags, boutique figures/toys, and digital 3C.

Wang Xin told that with the continuous increase of successful cooperation cases, the sharing era has begun to incubate non-well-known virtual IP and original IP as one of its main businesses. “At this stage, 70% of the company’s revenue is still authorized for virtual IP cooperation. In the future, we will also use this as the core competitiveness of the sharing era.”

Since the company was founded, Sharing Times has received investment from many investment institutions and companies, most of which are strategic investments. “We hope to be able to use capital and products to’two-wheel drive’, and in the future, the era of sharing will develop into a content creation platform around virtual IP, to better serve every content creator, and to serve every co-star and every partner. Cooperative brands bring more value.” Wang Xin said.