Yuewen is accelerating its transition from an online reading platform to a multi-form IP development powerhouse.

On August 11, Yuewen Group released its 2026 interim results. For the first half of the year, the company's revenue reached 3.531 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 10.7%. Its gross margin rose slightly from 50.5% in the same period last year to 50.7%.

Online business revenue decreased by 7.3% year-on-year to 1.84 billion yuan. In contrast, copyright operations and other business revenue surged by 40.3% to 1.691 billion yuan, boosting its share of total revenue by nearly 10 percentage points to 47.9%.

Short dramas and AI comics have become the fastest-growing segments within the copyright operations business.

Yuewen disclosed that revenue from these two segments exceeded 430 million yuan in the first half, a 2.3-fold increase year-on-year, accounting for approximately 12.2% of the group's total revenue for the period.

During the first half, Yuewen launched over 90 short dramas, claiming its hit rate for these productions was four times the market average. Among its AI comics, 46 titles surpassed 100 million views, with a million-view rate five times the industry average.

In specific projects, the short drama "The Invisible Bodyguard" garnered over 5 billion views across all platforms, while the AI comic "Three Thousand Protection" exceeded 3 billion views, propelling its original novel into the top ten of the Qidian bestseller list.

Yuewen also launched "Qidian Theater" domestically and "ToonScroll" internationally, attempting to establish independent distribution channels for comic content beyond short-video platforms.

From a revenue structure perspective, short dramas and AI comics are providing new avenues for Yuewen's IP visualization beyond traditional long-form videos, offering more non-core IPs opportunities for adaptation and market validation.

IP derivatives, another representative of emerging businesses, also maintained rapid growth.

In the first half, Yuewen's gross merchandise value (GMV) from derivatives reached 780 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of over 60%. The company continued to expand into categories such as plush toys, lifestyle merchandise, and precious metals, while strengthening its self-operated online channels and physical store presence.

In contrast, Yuewen's traditional online reading business continued to face pressure. In the first half, the average monthly active users (MAUs) on Yuewen's self-owned platforms and Tencent product channels fell by 5.1% to 134.1 million. The average monthly paying users dropped from 9.2 million to 8.2 million, a year-on-year decrease of 10.9%.

Yuewen attributed the decline in paying users to the increased proportion of free-to-read content on its self-owned platforms. The 20.5% year-on-year drop in MAUs from Tencent channels was linked to the company's ongoing strategy of shifting core content toward its own platforms.

AI is increasingly being deployed for content production and overseas distribution.

Yuewen has launched three specialized AI tools: NovelBuddy, DramaBuddy, and IPBuddy, serving online novel writing, comic production, and IP value assessment, respectively.

As of the end of June, the overseas platform WebNovel had accumulated over 30,000 AI-translated works. The company stated that these works contributed 40% of the platform's novel revenue in the first half, with revenue from minority-language titles increasing by 160% year-on-year.

In the first half, net profit attributable to equity holders of Yuewen was 135 million yuan, down 84.1% year-on-year. Adjusted net profit attributable to the parent company was 259 million yuan, a 49% decrease year-on-year.

During the reporting period, a subsidiary paid 166 million yuan in back taxes and incurred 134 million yuan in tax penalties, collectively reducing net profit attributable to the parent company by 300 million yuan. In the same period last year, Yuewen also recognized a net gain of approximately 598 million yuan from the deemed disposal of an investee company.

As the scale of copyright operations and other businesses approaches that of traditional online business, IP monetization is driving Yuewen's accelerated business transformation. However, whether this can be consistently converted into stable profits remains to be seen.