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SCMP Reporter

Tom Group's publishing business in Taiwan is seeking a digital transformation through its newly acquired Pixnet Digital Media, a user-generated content portal, which may bring in more young writers to help sell content in both traditional and online channels.

Cite Publishing Holding, the island's largest book and magazine publisher, acquired 90 per cent of Pixnet for NT$100 million (HK$23.45 million) in March.

The portal would bear the responsibility of exploring the business case for convergence of new and old media, Cite vice-chairman Ho Fei-peng said.

Cite chairman Tommei Tong Mei-kuen, who is also chief executive of Tom, initially wanted to buy Pixnet's bigger rival, Wretch, Mr Ho said.

Cite was late in submitting a bid and Wretch, Taiwan's largest blog site with more than 1.5 million users, was acquired earlier this year by Yahoo Kimo.

The Pixnet website has more than 500,000 users of its blog service which allows them to post stories or pictures on the site.

Founded by a group of university students in October 2003, the portal aimed to be among the island's top 10 websites this year, Mr Ho said.

'We target Pixnet to break even within two years and become an important website on the island,' Mr Ho said.

The number of Pixnet registered users has surged 25 per cent since Cite bought the company. That makes it the 37th most-visited Taiwan website, according to monitoring firm Alexa Internet, up from 42 in March.

'Pixnet will play an important role in helping our traditional publishing business face the challenges of the digital age,' Mr Ho said.

Blog writers who generate large online traffic would also be popular authors if they published their content in printed form, he said.

'As blog writers can interact with readers immediately, the blog site can be our publishing platform,' Mr Ho said.

'The blog site is helping the new books as their pre-marketing and pre-research platform.'

Online writer Amarylliss, whose accounts of work, travel and dining have attracted a regular readership, has signed a contract with Cite to publish a book based on the online content, Mr Ho said. Other writers  might follow.

Pixnet is attracting other popular blog writers from Wretch to help stimulate Pixnet's traffic.

'We hope those popular writers could drive up our website traffic and then bring in more advertising revenue,' Mr Ho said.

Pixnet offered writers a much better service and a more stable system,  and also offered them an import and export function to move their sites from one host to another, he said.

Cite is also targeting its magazine content at Pixnet, with online games, consumer electronic products and indoor decoration featuring on related blog channels.

'We are cross-selling advertisements from both online and offline, and helping our clients to launch event marketing campaigns,' Pixnet managing director Ryan Lee said.

Pixnet's advertising business, which started earlier this year, is targeting NT$2 million to NT$3 million in monthly advertising income by the end of this year.

Online advertising accounted for 6 per cent to 7 per cent of the total NT$47.8 billion advertising revenue in Taiwan last year, according to Nielsen Media.



Pixnet to boost Cite's traditional publishing