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The Hollywood Reporter has entered into a multiyear content deal with Tencent. The partnership will see THR‘s news, features and videos syndicated across platforms of the China-based web giant.
“With American entertainment growing globally, The Hollywood Reporter has taken on a central role as the most comprehensive, in-depth outlet covering the industry,” read a statement from John Amato, co-president of Guggenheim Media’s Entertainment Group, which owns THR.
“We realized that keeping up with this growth meant finding a partner with both the scale of audience to match the global nature of our coverage and a commitment to quality content and proper intellectual property protections,” Amato said. “Partnering with Tencent, The Hollywood Reporter not only gets exposure to a massive audience of engaged consumers but a responsible, respected and incredibly successful global partner.”
THR content will appear across Tencent’s platforms, including its online portal QQ.com for a section entitled “THR on Tencent.”
“For Tencent, this partnership will allow us to provide top-quality global entertainment coverage to hundreds of millions of our active users,” said Caitlyn Chen, Tencent’s corporate vp.
Tencent is one of the three Chinese tech giants known as “BAT,” which also includes search engine Baidu and e-commerce group Alibaba. All of the BAT companies have been expanding more and more into the entertainment business.
At the end of 2014, Tencent had 500 million monthly users for its WeChat social media service, while it had 815 million users on QQ, including 576 million active user accounts on smart devices. Tencent news on mobile reached 250 million daily active user accounts.
Also last year, the group signed a major deal with HBO to make its TV shows and movies available on a broad basis in China for the first time.
Tencent also launched a film unit, Tencent Movie Plus, which will aim to make four or five films a year. The first project it is working on will be Nobel Prize-winner Mo Yan‘s novel The Treasure Map, which the company said will be made with input from Hollywood.
The focus of Tencent Movie Plus will be on projects based on Tencent’s intellectual property including cartoons, novels and games such as QQ Race Car, an online race game that has more than three million users.
Other deals include one with Warner Music to distribute stars such as Linkin Park, Bruno Mars and Michael Buble online, and it also pacted with Sony Music to exclusively distribute its global roster of stars in China, and has forged strong links with the National Basketball Association (NBA).
In February, THR was awarded a National Magazine Award for General Excellence by the American Society of Magazine Editors. In the same month, THR marked a record for online traffic, with 19.78 million worldwide monthly unique visitors, according to comScore.
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