A conference looks back at how online literature became popular in China, Wang Ru reports.

When First Intimate Contact was serialized on the internet in 1998, it soon gained popularity among young people. Twenty years later, many still regard it among their "unforgettable memories" of youth. Looking back at the book in 2018, people realize that it marks more than the memory of a generation, but the start of an era-the era of online literature.

"From my perspective, online literature has moved into a 2.0 era from the original 1.0 over the past 20 years," says Yu Qian, CEO of Alibaba Literature, at the China Online Literature Conference held in Beijing over Sept 14-16.

At the beginning of the first era, people wrote on the internet only to satisfy their own emotional needs. In many cases, they chose to remain anonymous and seldom expected to make money from it. Later, literature websites started to promote a charging mode for reading. Basically, readers paid for reading and writers shared the money with the websites.

The amount of money they got depended on the number of words they wrote.

At that time, there were plenty of writers, work and readers.

Writers tried their best to produce in order to make more money, some even wrote nearly 10,000 words a day. The industry boomed in an unregulated way.