Knowledge Sharing Apps
The Rise of a New Era of Applied Knowledge
By Anastasia Chapman
知识共享应用知识应用新时代的兴起
和中国数百万职业女性一样，位于北京的王女士乘坐地铁上下班，虽然很多人都使用手机聊天和浏览视频，但王女士喜欢用手机阅读小说练习英语。这是一个由成都超越教育技术开发的微信应用。使用这个应用王女士只花了149元（21.4美元），通过这个应用她随时可以阅读英文小说，提高英语技能，分享学习成果，获得朋友圈点赞。
而这样的情况只是中国快速增长的知识共享经济的很小一幕。
什么是知识共享应用，为什么会爆炸式增长？
知识共享应用成为一种高效且有益的工具帮助人们随时随地获取知识。互联网发明以来，用户只需要点击鼠标即可获得免费知识，但新一代中国用户正接受付费知识共享平台的概念，让我们来了解知识共享应用的一些主要优点：
1.知识共享应用中提供的内容不仅仅是数据，更是知识和智慧的共享。
2.这些应用帮助千禧一代职业生涯发展提供专业指导。
3.与面对面的讲座和演讲相比，在线分享知识可以更方便，更实惠。
4.无需培训中心或自学，知识共享应用为用户提供了更大的信息库。
这是从何时何地开始发展起来的？
根据新闻出版社2017年发布的报告，知识共享行业估计已经成长为五百多亿元人民币的市场。随着用户数量的不断增加和高质量知识共享服务的日益普及，中国的在线付费市场将在未来三年保持相对较高的增长。
业内专家表示，知识共享应用的活跃用户在平台的频道上平均花费一百二十八分钟。内容通常包括在线课程，相声，辩论以及外语学习。但最受欢迎的内容是金融，人文，育儿和语言学习。
Beijing-based Kim Wang takes the metro to commute to work, like millions of working women in China, but the time she spends on her ride back home is different. While the sight of people chatting on phones or browsing social media profiles is a common thing these days, Wang likes to hone her language skills reading classic English novels on Mint Reading, an English-reading program installed on the WeChat platform by Chengdu Chaoyouai Education Technology.
And to avail this application, Wang shells out a mere 149 Yuan ($21.4) that give full access to the Mint Reading app, typically allowing her to read three novels in a span of hundred days. Many would ask what is so unique about this interactive app? Firstly, it’s a brilliant on-the-go reading tool at the cost of peanuts. Secondly, the app offers readers an easy way to brush up their English language skills.
All you have to do is go through a daily vocabulary list, read a chapter and then answer questions based on the story. Lastly and the most interesting part is sharing your daily efforts on the platform with your peers, which in turn earns you a lot of likes on WeChat. Start-ups like Mint Reading and individuals like Kim Wang are just one of the millions striving to carve out a niche in the rapidly growing knowledge sharing economy of China, where content has been designated as the king!
What Are Knowledge-Sharing Apps? Why Are They Becoming Popular?
In this day and age of the most connected era, there hasn’t been a time like now where internet users have instant and constant access to a pool of information accessible at the tip of their fingers. Knowledge-sharing apps only facilitate the entire process by effectively delivering relevant content to the right set of people, at the right time and at the right place, helping them enable a function, while being an efficient and beneficial tool.
Welcome to the new era of digital innovation! Here knowledge isn’t power, but applied knowledge is. Ever since the invention of the internet, users have had access to the holy grail of free knowledge with a click of the mouse.
The new generation of China, though, is now embracing the concept of paid knowledge sharing platforms with both their minds and their wallets. Here are some of the top benefits of knowledge sharing applications:
1. Content presented on the knowledge-sharing apps are more than just data. And their increasing popularity shows just how keen Chinese users are for knowledge and they are even ready to pay for their share of wisdom. Technologically, demographically and economically, these communication tools provide content that is practical and professional with a sense of belonging to the end users.
2. These apps are hugely beneficial for the internet-savvy millennials, who are straight out of universities. As they start working, some among them seek more guidance to grow and perform better in their career. School and university students can reap full advantage from the knowledge-sharing tools.
3. Compared to face-to-face lectures and speeches, the online sharing of knowledge can be more convenient and affordable. With a wide variety of audio and video presentations, users of all age groups can attend interactive sessions, workshops, lectures and discussions from any place with internet access.
4. No need for training-centres or self-study, knowledge-sharing apps have offered access to a bigger pool of information to users. Providing a solid foundation for the paying-for-knowledge industry to grow rapidly, it also allows more professionals to spread their knowledge.
A child tries out an audio book at a Ximalaya booth during a book fair in Shenzhen, Guangdong province.
How It Started And Where Is It Heading?
This online trend comes amid the country’s explosive pay-for-knowledge industry and has been on the rise since 2016. According to a 2017 report issued by the Chinese Academy of Press and Publication, the knowledge-sharing industry was estimated to have grown into the fifty-billion-plus Yuan market. Sustained by the growing number of users and the increasing popularity of high-quality knowledge sharing services, the online paid knowledge market in China is set to maintain relatively high growth in the next three years and reach twenty three billion Yuan by 2020, says another recent report by the market consultancy firm, iResearch.
Classic English reading services, like Mint Reading, have reportedly earned hundreds of thousands of yuan from its booking-reading subscribers across China, although it’s just a small aspect of the bigger pool. Especially, if it’s compared with China’s Quora equivalent Q&A site Zhihu and mobile learning application iGet that have already garnered an annual revenue of 140 million Yuan. Joining the race is another industry biggie, Ximalaya FM, which is an audio sharing platform with four hundred and fifty million users and more than five million hosts, constituting seventy three percent of the total market share of this increasingly growing industry.
For instance- ‘Master Class’ is one of the most popular channels on the platform that invites famed professors from renowned universities to share knowledge with the users on relevant subjects. Industry experts say that active users of the knowledge sharing apps spend an average of one hundred and twenty eight minutes on the platform’s channels. The content usually range from online courses, crosstalk shows to debates and discussions and foreign language content. But the most popular ones are on finance, humanities, parenting and language studies.
