About Pear Video

Pear Video

Pear Video, published at pearvideo.com, is a Beijing short-video news platform launched on 3 November 2016 by Qiu Bing, the former chief executive of The Paper. It was built on a decentralised production model unusual in Chinese media: instead of employing an army of staff reporters, Pear recruited a nationwide network of contributing videographers — known in Chinese as paike — who shoot short news and feature clips in their own localities, which Pear's editors select, verify, edit and distribute. At its peak the model produced around 1,500 videos a day and reported more than a billion daily views, backed by investors including Tencent, Baidu and People.cn. A licensing dispute with regulators only months after launch forced Pear to pivot away from hard news toward lifestyle and "informative" clips, a turn that makes its history a compact case study in both the possibilities and the limits of independent video journalism in China.

Founding and the team from The Paper

Pear Video's founders came from one of China's most admired digital newsrooms. Qiu Bing had been chief executive of The Paper (Pengpai), the Shanghai United Media Group outlet launched in 2014 that won a reputation for serious reporting, and colleagues from The Paper spent about six months in 2016 building Pear from scratch before its November launch. One of them, Wei Xing — who had also worked on the English-language Sixth Tone — later explained the logic to Splice Media: traditional media circulation and advertising were declining, audiences, especially younger ones, were moving to smartphones, and video was the format that movement demanded. The launch made an immediate splash: Pear's livestream coverage of the United States presidential election in November 2016 garnered 850 million views, according to Caixin. Seed funding came from China Media Capital — reported at more than $15 million — giving the startup institutional backing from the start.

The paike model: journalism without staff journalists

Pear's defining innovation was its supply chain for footage. The company employed around 500 staff in technology, marketing, administration and editing, but its pictures came from a network of paike — literally "shooting guests" — freelance videographers spread across every Chinese province, small city and rural area. In interviews, the company put the network at around 30,000 contributors, with two full-time local representatives in each province whose job was to build and maintain the local network. The workflow was a funnel: videographers pitched clips to their provincial representatives each day, the representatives made the first selection — choosing perhaps 30 from 200 pitches — and the survivors went to the central editing team for verification, editing and publication. Splice Media characterised the result as a platform with "all the basic tenets of journalism in place — without the journalists": decentralised gathering, layered editorial judgement and an exhaustive fact-checking system, applied to short, highly shareable clips. A later cooperation announcement described the mature network as more than 18,000 core paike and a reservoir of over 3 million contributors across 525 cities — figures the company cited when it signed a strategic partnership with Zoomin.TV, the international short-video producer, to build a joint global videographer alliance sharing content, copyright and creator resources.

The 2017 licensing dispute and the pivot

Pear's news ambitions collided with China's licensing regime almost immediately. Just three months into its operation, regulators said the company had failed to obtain a licence for news dissemination, and Pear was required to rectify its business. Its response reshaped the company: it shifted its focus from news to "informative video clips" for young Chinese audiences, with topics covering lifestyle, social issues, finance, technology and entertainment. The pivot did not end its capacity for consequential storytelling — in August 2017 Pear attracted wide public attention with footage of two 14-year-olds in a bruising commercial cage fight, reporting that resulted in 17 underage boys recruited by a private martial arts club in Sichuan province being sent home under police directive — but the editorial centre of gravity had moved, permanently, from breaking news toward softer, licensable content. The episode is routinely cited in accounts of China's short-video boom as the moment the boundary for independent news video was drawn.

Funding: People.cn, then Tencent and Baidu

Investors kept faith through the pivot. In November 2017 Pear raised 167 million yuan from People.cn, the online arm of People's Daily — an investment by the Communist Party's flagship newspaper company in a startup founded by market-oriented journalists, and a signal of official acceptability after the licensing dispute. Then, in April 2018, Pear closed a Series A round of 616 million yuan (about $98 million), led by Tencent with Baidu participating, which valued the company at around 3 billion yuan according to Caixin's sources. The plan for the money was scale: more video bloggers and better platform technology, with an ambition — stated without a timeline — of 100,000 content producers and 2 billion daily views. The round also had a distribution logic: Pear would supply content to its investors, whose platforms needed professionally made short video as Chinese users shifted to mobile news and entertainment, and its clips were distributed through Weibo, Tencent and Baidu channels. At the time of the round Pear said it produced 1,500 news videos daily and generated 1 billion views a day across its portal and app, describing itself as China's largest news-centred short-video producer. PitchBook's later profile put its total raised at about $212 million, with investors including Xinhuanet, Baidu Ventures, Tencent Investment, People.cn and CMC Capital.

Content and audience

Pear's catalogue, as its company profiles describe it, spans music, entertainment, technology, tourism and wealth alongside live video, much of it user-generated through the paike system, and accounts from established media — People's Daily among them — also published on the platform. Its audience skewed young and urban but was not confined to it: distributors and executives noted that the clips also reached older users and people in rural areas, precisely because the paike network shot stories where traditional newsrooms had no presence. In format terms Pear helped define the Chinese "informative short video" category — clips of a few minutes, professionally edited, designed to be understood without sound-heavy narration and to travel across social platforms — distinct both from television news packages and from the entertainment-first content of Douyin or Kuaishou.

Market context

Pear's rise coincided with the fastest growth period in Chinese short video. Industry research cited at the time of its Series A put the short-video market at 5.74 billion yuan in 2017, forecast to reach 30 billion yuan by 2020, with monthly active users of short-video apps reaching 310 million in August 2017 and average daily use of 42.1 minutes. Tencent's strategic interest in Pear was read by analysts as a move to secure a vertical specialist — news and information video — against ByteDance's Toutiao video matrix of Xigua, Huoshan and Douyin, while Tencent simultaneously subsidised its own revived Weishi app by a reported $478 million to compete for creators. Pear's niche was the point: in a market of entertainment giants, it offered investors and distribution partners a supply of credible, edited, information-led clips that entertainment platforms did not produce.

Distribution through investor platforms

Pear's business depended as much on distribution as on production. Its clips travelled through Weibo and through the platforms of its two largest strategic investors, Tencent and Baidu, which had a direct interest in a supply of professionally edited short video for their own news and entertainment feeds; the 2018 Series A was explicitly structured so that Pear would supply content to those investors. Established media organisations also published through Pear — People's Daily maintained an account on the platform — making Pear simultaneously a producer of original paike footage and a distribution channel for institutional media moving into short video. That two-sided position, owning neither the largest audience nor the largest platform but supplying edited video to both, was the commercial logic that sustained its valuations.

Legacy

Based in Beijing and published at pearvideo.com, Pear Video matters to Chinese media history for three reasons. It proved that a decentralised network of local videographers, filtered through professional editing and fact-checking, could supply national-scale news video without a traditional newsroom — a model studied well beyond China. It demonstrated, through its 2016 election livestream and billion-view days, how large the audience for short news video had already become within months of the format's emergence. And its 2017 licensing rectification and subsequent pivot to lifestyle and informative content mark one of the clearest documented boundaries between what Chinese commercial platforms could do in entertainment video and what they were permitted to do in news. Few startups illustrate both sides of that line in a single, short history.