From the Peak List to Film and Television Adaptation, How Does Tomato Novel Tell Good IP Stories?
The business of IP adaptation of online literature is accelerating.
On December 11, at the Tomato Novel Creator Conference, the 2024 Peak List was released. In this list that gathers the outstanding writers in the original field of Tomato, 15 works have embarked on the path of IP adaptation, and they are simultaneously advancing from literature to various content forms such as audiobooks, comics, animations, films, and television series.
Online literature is accelerating with all members and crossing boundaries for integration. It is worth noting that several highly popular IPs of Tomato, including "The End of Ten Days", "I Learn to Slay Gods in a Mental Hospital", "I'm Not a Drama God", and "Misty Rain Tower", have started dual adaptations into animations and film and television series this year. Whether you are a frequent novel reader, a social media surfer, a comics/animation enthusiast, or a film and television enthusiast, you may encounter these IP adaptation works through different channels in the information flow.
In 2024, the content industry has entered a new era with a blooming of a hundred flowers, and excellent top content IPs have a multiplier effect that can be applied in multiple fields. A large amount of high-quality content gathered by the Tomato Novel Peak List is shining brightly in multiple tracks.
Online Literature, a Rich Mine of IP Adaptations
The online literature front can be regarded as a treasure trove for IP adaptations.
The latest industry data shows that as of the beginning of November, the top 5 TV series with the highest positive film playback volume on the entire network in 2024 are all adapted from online literature IPs. Among the 2025 upcoming series lists of the three major platforms of iQIYI, Youku, and Tencent Video, IP adaptation series can account for 60%. Among them, series adapted from online literature IPs account for 60% again.
Not only long series, but also many short series that have been booming in recent years are derived from online literature IPs. At the Tomato Creator Conference, Yang Jie, the person in charge of the self-produced short series of Hongguo Short Video, said that in the past year and more, only the self-produced short series of Hongguo Short Video have 321 adapted from online literature.
Why is the film and television industry increasingly favoring gold mining in online literature IPs? For no other reason, IPs that can pass the test of the online literature market are high-quality content that has passed the most rigorous tests.
In the past two years, the short-video track has become increasingly competitive. Short series with low cost and rapid iteration have seized a large amount of user attention. All changes point to a conclusion - the industry has higher requirements for the quality and excellence of content. Many long-video practitioners have a hidden concern: Will content products with long production cycles and large production investments be unable to keep up with the changes of the times? Will users still purchase it?
But there is no doubt that successful online literature IPs must be the most cutting-edge and trendy things in the Internet era. Every online literature work is updated and changed in real time, and the content of each chapter can receive the most timely and direct feedback from netizens. It can be said that every online literature work is completed jointly by the writer and the readers.
In 2024, several hit TV series that broke the circle on multiple platforms are basically based on the original online literature IPs. In the second half of the year, "Eternal Night Galaxy", adapted from the online novel "Black Lotus Strategy Manual", became popular. It was able to break through a bloody path in the ancient puppet market flooded with homogeneous content. "Eternal Night Galaxy" won because of its novel and excellent content. And this year's dark horse suspense drama "Rebirth" is adapted from the online novel "Fico's Dinner", and it also wins with the new setting of "Gold Digger" and "Fraud Master".
Once in the upsurge of Chinese online literature going global, some users joked that "Chinese online literature is at least fifty years ahead of the world". Mining online literature IPs is to bring the latest things to the users of different tracks to achieve a "dimensionality reduction blow".
Currently, the industry is accelerating to seize the high ground of top online literature IPs. Taking the list of upcoming IP adaptations on the Tomato Novel platform as an example, many works on the Tomato Novel Peak List have started the IP adaptation progress this year, including film and television direction adaptation works such as "The End of Ten Days", "Slaying Gods", "I'm Not a Drama God", "Misty Rain Tower", "Binding Spring Love", "Holding the Pearl", "And Crossing the Unparalleled", and animation direction adaptation works such as "There Was Once a Town Monster Suppression Pass" and "Eternal Life Ashes", etc.
Undoubtedly, bringing online literature to the screen can maximize its IP potential. In March this year, Youku took the lead in officially announcing a cooperation with Tomato Novel. The two sides will deeply explore super IPs and jointly promote the implementation of high-quality content in film, television, and animation. At this Tomato Creator Conference, Youku and Tomato jointly released the "Super IP Co-creation Plan". This strategic cooperation is paving the way for high-quality creators and creating a clearer IP evolution path for writers to stimulate the potential of creators.
Tomato Novel, this young free reading platform, has hatched several super IPs in a very short period of time. Tomato IPs are "authorized and developed in the same year", and the adaptation speed of these super IPs in this potential pool is like riding a rocket.
It is necessary to mention that, first, "I Learn to Slay Gods in a Mental Hospital", a perennial top-ranking work on the Peak List that just ended in 2023, quickly launched the adapted animation work "Slaying Gods in the Mortal World and Divine Realm" in July 2024. Once it was broadcast, the heat value on Tencent Video exceeded 23,000, and more than 3.6 million people gave it a high score of 9.6, with a Douban score of 8.5. It has both popularity and reputation. During the broadcast, the original "Slaying Gods" frequently topped the Peak List TOP1, and the number of readers exceeded 7 million. Up to the end of the broadcast, the total exposure of the Slaying Gods IP exceeded 8 billion, achieving more than 130 times on the hot lists across the entire network.
The author of "Slaying Gods", Sanjiuyinyu - this young post-95s new writer, started the serialization in 2021. After the work ended in 2023, Sanjiu immediately upgraded to the 2023 Tomato Novel Hall of Fame & Golden Tomato Writer.紧接着 In 2024, the adapted animation was launched, and his new work "I'm Not a Drama God" also started dual adaptations into film and television and animation, which is expected to become his second super IP.
Secondly, another top-ranking work on the Tomato Peak List, "The End of Ten Days", by the author Pest Control Team Member. Since its serialization in 2022, in just two years, the name of "The End of Ten Days" has echoed on major social media platforms such as Bilibili, Xiaohongshu, and Zhihu. Users who can't wait to see the screen works have also spontaneously created secondary creation works such as audio comics, dubbed radio dramas, and mixed-cut videos of wonderful lines. Still in just two years, the work ended on October 31, 2024. At the same time, the IP of "The End of Ten Days" has also entered the parallel development stage of both animation and film and television series.
Behind the super IPs, Tomato has also hatched a group of super writers with a star aura. The enthusiasm of readers for an IP will eventually be transformed into the fan stickiness to the super writer.
For example, for the top IP "The End of Ten Days", after the work ended, the topic related to "#The End of Ten Days" had a playback volume of +500 million, and the topic related to the work's ending topped a total of 13 hot lists on multiple platforms. The live broadcast of the Pest Control Team Member's ending had 1.66 million viewers. The fan stickiness and topic-breaking degree brought by the super writer can be seen.
Obviously, the Tomato Novel Peak List has proved that it has the ability to hatch super writers. The grand occasion of the ending of "The End of Ten Days" and the successful adaptation of "Slaying Gods" as the first super top IP of Tomato Novel are making the market notice that Tomato Novel has become a new potential IP pool.
Seeing Resonance on the Peak List
At this year's Tomato Creator Conference, the author of "The End of Ten Days", Pest Control Team Member, shared such a passage: "The point that makes the Peak List stand out to me is its 'de-typing'. Whether it's for male or female audiences, regardless of the theme, word count, or the author's popularity and past works, no matter who you are, you may emerge from the sea of people and books as a newcomer and reach the peak list."
For authors, the Peak List is quite inclusive. Tomato Novel launched the Peak List in October 2023. The list is based on the reading experience of a large number of Tomato Novel readers. It comprehensively considers multiple data dimensions such as "work popularity, content quality, reputation score, reader interaction, communication value, and IP potential" to select the top-quality books on the platform. Since its launch one year ago, more than 80 works have been on the list.
When you open the Tomato Novel Peak List, you can see that the IP types are very diverse - in the male frequency section, such as suspense, urban martial arts, fantasy, and martial arts, and in the female frequency section, such as immortal and martial arts, modern romance, and ancient romance. There will not be a situation where the opened list is all homogeneous and similar themes.
It can be seen from the configuration of the Peak List that all the efforts of Tomato Novel are to provide equal opportunities for excellent writers and serve to create a good environment for hatching super IPs.
In the world of online literature, it is not judged by fame, status, or resources, but only requires that the works pass the test of enough users. Looking at the data performance of the top work "The End of Ten Days", the number of readers is nearly 5 million, 930,000 people participated in the scoring, giving a high score of 9.9, and the number of comments on the work exceeds 100 million. In the evaluation and interaction of a large number of users, the IP value of top online literature has been verified by the market, and they carry a huge amount of emotions of users.
Ten years ago, a young online writer had to write silently for at least 5 years in the "stand-alone" mode to accumulate word-of-mouth with his works before being discovered. But now, everything is changing faster, and the platform can make excellent writers be discovered by readers more quickly. The Peak List is a huge traffic exposure. Any reader may open the good books on the Peak List, click on one at random, and gradually find an IP that suits their taste.
In the end, the works that can stay on the Peak List and gain the long-term love of more readers must be those that understand human nature, are reasonable, and can cause widespread resonance. It can be seen that the award-winning IPs on the annual Peak List all have such characteristics - having a profound insight into social emotions and keeping pace with the times.
Take "The End of Ten Days" as an example. The novel constructs an eternal ten-day cycle world - a group of ordinary people are caught in the "End Land" and undergo a life-and-death cycle every ten days. To escape from this place, they must participate in a death game designed by the "Twelve Chinese Zodiac Signs". After one ten-day cycle after another, some people begin to awaken supernatural abilities.
In a basic infinite flow setting, "The End of Ten Days" can stand out, which can be attributed to the absurd atmosphere, the ingenious suspense design, the rich characters, the sophisticated writing style, and more importantly, its high conception - which makes readers unforgettable, the moral dilemma and the shining point of human nature shown in the extreme life-and-death cycle environment. In the novel, "I heard the echo of XX" is regarded as a sign of the awakening of supernatural abilities and a key node that changes the life and death fate of many characters. These awakening lines have been repeatedly recreated and spread by readers to express their resonance with the characters written in the book.
In "Slaying Gods", this line is expressed as "Within the territory of Great Xia, gods are prohibited". The worldview of this novel integrates the Chinese and Western mythological systems. The male protagonist, as the agent of the gods, together with other people with supernatural powers, guards Great Xia - the only pure land in the world that has not been swallowed by the fog. The teenagers shout to guard Great Xia, to protect the country, to dare to confront danger and gods. One can imagine how passionate this kind of patriotism is.
Let's talk about another female frequency literary work - the popular " （原文中此处未提供