UFC and Qutoutiao reach 2-year short video clips collaboration

UFC China announced on their Chinese website on March 21 that they had reached a two-year short video content collaboration with the Chinese digital content platform, Qutoutiao. 

The UFC have opened an official account on Qutoutiao and will publish hundreds of short videos and fight content, such as highlights and behind-the-scenes contents of UFC fights around the world and training courses offered at the UFC Performance Training Institute Shanghai. 

Qutoutiao is an emerging mobile digital content platform in China which focuses on entertainment and lifestyle content with its target audience being Chinese people living in lower-tier (third, fourth and fifth tiers) Chinese cities, towns and rural areas. Since its set up in June 2016, Qutoutiao has demonstrated significant growth in users and has been listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market since September 2018. The latest financial report shows that in 2018 the average monthly active users of Qutoutiao was 93.8 million, the total daily users time spent on Qutoutiao and Midu combined was around 40 million hours (1.3% of the total time Chinese people spent on mobile internet everyday). 

Qutoutiao shares some similarities with the famous Chinese content platform Toutiao which is owned by ByteDance. However, Qutoutiao differentiates itself from Toutiao by targeting Chinese people in less developed cities and towns where the market scale and potential is now commonly considered to be very good. 

It is also the exact target audience group that attracts UFC’s interest as UFC wants to expand its user group to lower-tier cities and towns in China, according to the announcement. 

This is the first time that Qutoutiao has stepped into sports content rights. 

Reference: UFC

Proofread by Raymond Fitzpatrick