Mainland Chinese entertainment platform Youku has the world in its sights. Julia Song, Alibaba Digital Media & Entertainment Group/Youku’s head of scripted international drama acquisitions & BD, talks about the new generation of Chinese dramas and shifting audience trends and tastes.

Detective series Day and Night was your first drama for Netflix and was made with a global audience in mind. What impact has this worldwide access had on Youku?
“Day and Night was popular in China and through Netflix it reached beyond Chinese-speaking audiences. A lot of the new shows we’re doing this year are being created from the start with international standards and outlook. Netfl ix has picked up another of our shows, 30-episode Hong Kong cop thriller, OCTB, which has also done very well”.

What’s Youku’s programme strategy?
“We balance three categories of drama – at least one new prime-time acquisition a month, usually from satellite channels; high-value online superdrama, with the fi rst window on Youku; and online drama, small to medium budget productions that we develop in-house or with third party production companies.”

What’s your originals output?
“About 30 drama series a year are what we call Youku originals. Of those, 10 are 100% in-house original productions and 20 are with third-party producers. In total we have between 100 and 120 productions from China a year.”

What genres do you prefer?
“All kinds, because we aim to create something for every user on our platform. But generally speaking, our target demographic is 18 to 25 female and even younger these days actually. So we create young content for them. A lot of our shows have very strong female characters.”

This brings us to the scripted format you acquired from Japan, Tokyo Joshi Drama queen Zukan (Tokyo Girls Picture Book), which you made into Women in Beijing and Women in Shanghai...
“We aired these two in the first half of this year and they were the most talked-about shows in China at that time. We made two versions because the girls from Beijing are very different from the girls in Shanghai. We used different production companies, different characters and cast, different storytelling... but we kept the structure of the Japanese version for both. Chinese dramas are very long, at least 45 episodes of 70-90 minutes for historical series. Because these were for online and a younger demographic, we kept to 20 episodes of 30 minutes each. Both were very fast-paced, and while we acquired the Japanese IP, our versions were different. So it was very innovative for us.”

Is this a move away from costume or martial arts drama?
“Women in Beijing/Shanghai created this trend for drama that resonates with viewers’ everyday lives in modern cities. So that area is very crowded now. What we’ve added lately are subgenres of popular costume dramas, also for young audiences. The storytelling is more anime, fantasy, magical. Our new supernatural fantasy dramas are Guardian and Bloody Romance.”

Are you looking for co-production partners in Asia or elsewhere?
“Yes definitely. We’re starting to by working with scripted formats and remakes. We’re likely to do Asian co-productions fi rst because it’s just easier. We share similar cultures, similar language. And for us to fi nancially invest into an English-language drama, it really has to be the right project because Youku is still just a local service. In order for us to recoup all that investment and content wise for it to pass our censorship we need to be very careful what we select”.

Published in Issue Seven of ContentAsia's in-print + online 2018 (December 2018)