WANG XIAOYING/CHINA DAILY

It is not every day that an English acronym coined in a non-English-speaking country catches on－at least in that territory.

I'm talking about "IP", which originally stands for "intellectual property" but has a very different connotation in China's booming showbiz. Hollywood insiders who have participated in China-related events must have been puzzled by the frequency these two letters have popped up in conversations with their Chinese peers.

For clarification, "IP" as used in the past year refers to not just any copyrighted material, but also to those hot "properties" that everyone is chasing in an attempt to turn into blockbuster movies, TV series and online games. Specifically, it refers to online fiction that has garnered a significant readership and is sold for adaptation rights－at increasingly eye-popping rates.

In the past two or three years, the adaptation prices for "big IP", as it's often called in Chinese, have shot up tenfold. You Are My Sunshine was sold for six digits a few years ago, and last year it was listed on the market for 10 times that figure.

Yu Zheng, a famous producer-writer who was convicted of plagiarism, revealed at a television forum early this year that the market price for a regular work of online fiction starts from 300,000 yuan ($47,600), and it goes up to half a million for one with some fame. If the writer has more reputation, the starting rate is 1 million for movie rights and another million for television rights. For "truly successful" scribes, it is 3-5 million for each of the adaptation rights.

Guo Jingming is reported to ask for 25 million yuan for some of his less-known works. He keeps the best, such as the Tiny Times franchise, for himself, according to press reports.

Hot titles

By the end of 2014, as many as 114 online novels have been sold for adaptation rights, 90 of which will be turned into television series and 24 into feature films. The slate of 24 new productions announced by China Film Group, the largest State-owned film company, includes 19 adaptations of online fiction. Enlight Media, a private company, reserves half of its new lineup for these tested-and-true works.

Qidian, an online platform for fiction, has seen its top 20 works sold for eight-digit figures, which include all rights. Seventy percent of these earnings come from games while the rest are from movies and television rights.

What fuels this craze is the handful of titles that performed spectacularly in the market. So Young started the so-called "youth genre" with 719 million yuan. The four-part Tiny Times films accumulated 1.8 billion yuan at the box office. You Are My Sunshine, following closely on the heels of a TV version of the same name, still racked up 356 million yuan. My Old Classmate, based on an old pop song, registered 457 million yuan when it hit the big screen. This fluke has enabled the trend to broaden to titles other than online fiction.