About Dongqiudi

Dongqiudi

Dongqiudi, published at dongqiudi.com and based in Beijing, China, is a football news app and website that became China's biggest football media platform and online football community. Its name is known to English-language readers through its international sister app, All Football. Launched in December 2013, Dongqiudi built its position by delivering the latest international and Chinese football news, videos and league data to fans on mobile phones, at a moment when China's football audience was moving away from general sports portals and onto dedicated apps. Within a few years it could claim the largest fan base and the biggest influencers among Chinese football media, tens of millions of registered users, and a roster of venture investors that included Sequoia Capital and the retail and sports group Suning. It later added live streaming rights for the Chinese Super League and the German Bundesliga to a product that had begun purely with news, data and community discussion.

Launch in December 2013

Dongqiudi was launched on 5 December 2013. The timing placed it in the first wave of Chinese mobile-first sports products: smartphones were becoming the main way fans followed matches, and a dedicated football app could offer live information, data and discussion in one place in a way that desktop portals could not. Its founder was Chen Cong, who remained the public face of the company as it expanded at home and abroad. Since its launch, Dongqiudi is described by its partners and by technology reporting as having dominated the sports information scene in the face of fierce competition from traditional sports portals such as Sina and NetEase, and from popular vertical media such as Hupu and Zhibo8. Its rise was therefore not into an empty market but against some of the best-established names in Chinese online sport.

What the app offers

Dongqiudi's product combines several kinds of football content. It broadcasts streamlined information, concise reports, in-depth topics and comprehensive data through highly interactive community channels, an approach its partners describe as short, direct and comprehensive coverage. In practice that means live match information — goals, scores and substitutions as they happen — alongside news about international and Chinese football, video, league data and fan discussion. The community element is central rather than decorative: Dongqiudi presents itself as an online community as much as a news service, and its forums and comment channels are where its large fan base gathers around matches. The company says the app gained popularity among fans because of this combination of comprehensive and in-depth content and a seamless user experience, which stood out from the competition.

Early funding: angel, Series A and Series B

Investors backed Dongqiudi almost immediately. In February 2014, only two months after launch, K2VC invested several million yuan as angel investment. In May of the same year Sequoia Capital invested US$4 million in the company's Series A round. In September 2015 Arena Capital invested US$10 million in a Series B round that valued the company in total at about US$50 million. The sequence is a compact record of the app's early momentum: an angel round within weeks of launch, a top-tier venture firm within six months, and a fifty-million-dollar valuation inside two years. The backers recorded across its funding history also include Tianxing Capital and HSG among its institutional investors.

The Suning-led Series C and the 2016 user figures

Dongqiudi's next round was its largest. In its Series C financing, Suning became the lead investor, while Tianxing Capital and Sequoia Capital also invested, with RMB 350 million committed in the round and the possibility of further institutional investment to follow. Suning's involvement was strategic as well as financial: in June of that year Suning had spent 270 million euros acquiring a 70 percent stake in Inter Milan, and it also owned the Chinese Super League club Jiangsu Suning, making its investment in Dongqiudi another move into the sports business. The user figures Dongqiudi released at the time show the scale it had reached. The app had 28.6 million registered users; users aged 18 to 35 accounted for 66.15 percent of them; and its revenue came mainly from advertising, with companies such as Hengda and Suning among its main customers. Total funding across its rounds is recorded at about US$52.4 million.

All Football: the international expansion

Dongqiudi's most distinctive move was to take its model abroad. As reported by the Chinese technology site 36Kr, the idea for an international version came from an overseas business trip taken by founder Chen Cong, during which he noticed that there were no aggregated football information products similar to Dongqiudi in the global market. Dongqiudi therefore launched its international app, All Football, in November 2016. According to Dongqiudi's official website, All Football attracted over 10 million registered fans from over 100 countries, and the company later announced that All Football's daily active users had surpassed the 1 million mark. All Football describes its community in even larger terms, as more than 50 million football fans worldwide gathering on the platform. The expansion made Dongqiudi unusual among Chinese sports apps: rather than only importing international football content for Chinese fans, it exported a Chinese-built football product to fans in more than a hundred countries.

Technology partnerships and peak-traffic events

Running a live football service means handling extreme spikes in demand when major tournaments are played, and Dongqiudi's technology partnerships reflect that. On 7 July 2021 Aurora Mobile, a Nasdaq-listed mobile developer service provider, announced a partnership agreement with Dongqiudi under which Aurora would use its AI-driven technology to help the app deliver timely and accurate information on live football matches. During the UEFA Euro 2020 tournament, then under way, Dongqiudi had become a major channel for fans seeking real-time information about goals, scores and substitutions. Dongqiudi's technology head said the company had worked with Aurora since its establishment, that Aurora had helped it scale its user fanbase from tens of thousands to millions of users, and that the services had proved especially important during major football events such as the World Cup and the UEFA European Championship, when the platform had to handle huge peak traffic.

Moving into live rights: the Super League and the Bundesliga

For most of its life Dongqiudi's content consisted of news, blogs and user-generated content rather than video coverage of matches. That changed in 2021. In April 2021 the app made its first major live streaming rights acquisition, with a non-exclusive deal for Chinese Super League rights. Later the same year Dongqiudi was one of three Chinese digital platforms — alongside Migu, the video streaming platform run by China Mobile, and Huya — to acquire rights for the Bundesliga in a deal brokered by the China Sports Media agency, after the league's previous five-year agreement with PP Sports, which had run from the 2018-19 season, was terminated. Under the new arrangement Dongqiudi held live rights for all Bundesliga matches each season, in a partnership intended to support and grow the league's fanbase in China. The rights deals marked a step change: the former news-and-community app was now also a live broadcaster of top-flight domestic and German football.

Position among Chinese football media

Dongqiudi's own description of its standing — the biggest football media and online community in China, with the largest fan base and the biggest influencers among Chinese football media — is a company claim, but it is consistent with how partners and competitors describe the market. Aurora Mobile called it a leading sports media company and the leading sports information platform in China, and industry material on Chinese football fandom treats Dongqiudi, Hupu and Zhibo8 as the app-based, sports-focused communities to which fans migrated from older forum platforms such as Baidu Tieba. Its forum activity has been measured in the hundreds of thousands of posts for individual major clubs in a single year. Dedicated solely to football rather than to sport in general, it built a depth in one game that general portals struggled to match.

Dongqiudi today

More than a decade after its December 2013 launch, Dongqiudi remains the reference point for football information in China: a Beijing-based app and website at dongqiudi.com that combines live scores and match data, news and in-depth reporting, video, live streaming rights and a large interactive fan community, with the All Football app carrying the same model to an international audience. Its history traces the arc of Chinese mobile sport media in miniature — a fast venture-funded start, growth to tens of millions of registered users, an early move overseas that most Chinese apps never attempted, and a later expansion from information into live rights. For Chinese football fans, and through All Football for fans in over 100 countries, it became the place where the football day is followed in real time.