4.5 billion person-times pour into county towns, but people have no idea where to eat or where to seek entertainment? Youdongjing uses the "Fan-Exclusive Privilege Card" to connect non-standard resources in county-level regions.
Stock Saturation and Mismatch Between Supply and Demand: The Real Bottleneck of County-level Cultural and Tourism Development
China's cultural and tourism infrastructure expanded rapidly from the 13th Five-Year Plan period to the 14th Five-Year Plan period, with a large number of scenic spots, homestays, intangible cultural heritage workshops and rural experience sites fully completed at the county level. However, as supply continues to expand, poor inventory digestion and inefficient operation have become widespread dilemmas: on the one hand, cultural and tourism assets held by local governments and state-owned enterprises are facing problems such as low overnight stay rate, weak secondary consumption and unstable merchant revenue; on the other hand, traditional OTA platforms, which take traffic algorithms and standardized products as the core, only facilitate transactions of "known demands", but cannot answer tourists' non-standard decision-making questions such as "which local restaurant, craft workshop and old-house-renovated homestay I should choose when visiting a county".
Relevant data from the National Report on the Integrated Development of County-level Cultural and Tourism shows that in 2025, the total number of county-level tourist receptions reached 4.56 billion, accounting for 54.3% of the total national tourist arrivals, with a total revenue of 3.9 trillion yuan and a year-on-year growth rate of 28.1% — counties have become the main battlefield of cultural and tourism consumption. However, a considerable proportion of the increment stays at the "passing-by sightseeing" stage, and has not been converted into sustainable revenue for local small and medium-sized businesses. Due to the dispersion of non-standard resources, the lack of a unified entry and digital packaging, the industry has long been stuck in the mismatch that "tourists want to buy but cannot find the products, and merchants want to sell but have no access to customers".
Against this market trend, the You Dongjing digital cultural and tourism project accurately solves core demands at three levels: first, it addresses the pain points of county-level cultural and tourism promotion and tourist attraction — local governments hold stock assets but lack effective digital distribution means, and the project provides an asset-light implementation plan through the government-enterprise joint operation mode; second, it meets the transformation demand of tourism intermediate service and circulation sectors — traditional channels rely on traffic allocation logic, while You Dongjing realizes industrial connection and natural closed-loop operation with self-developed digital models, replacing traffic distribution with supply chain integration; third, cultural and tourism merchants in offline consumption scenarios get a third option outside media platforms and OTA platforms on the inevitable path of digital transformation. For users, the project solves the consumption problem after tourists arrive in an unfamiliar county: what to eat, where to stay, what to experience and what travel route to take, compressing fragmented actions such as checking travel guides, comparing prices and reviewing comments into "getting local travel routes immediately after activating the card".
Self-developed Digital Cultural and Tourism Supply Chain and Insurance Technology: Digital Integration of the Whole Link
The core competence of You Dongjing is built on two self-developed patented technology systems: the digital cultural and tourism supply chain and insurance technology. Its technical barrier does not lie in traffic algorithms or recommendation engines, but in the digital integration and implementation model of the entire supply chain system covering multi-type cultural and tourism content supply ends, diversified circulation links and user ends.
Specifically, the project takes two data structures of "county-level industrial map" and "consumption route" as the base: the industrial map records merchant qualifications, production capacity, maximum reception volume and equity cost, realizing digital packaging of scattered non-standard experience resources; the consumption route restores the real travel sequence according to the logic of "arrival - accommodation - dining - experience - souvenir purchase", connecting discrete POIs into an executable county-level travel itinerary. On this basis, the self-developed system realizes multi-end alignment within the same county unit: order receiving and verification on the merchant end, equity freezing and releasing on the card end, subscription by B-end enterprises, and consumption data dashboard on the government end.
Different from the common platform traffic allocation mode in the industry, You Dongjing realizes industrial connection and natural closed-loop operation to improve efficiency through self-developed digital models, rather than distributing traffic via algorithms. The project also has scenario access capability for non-tourism third-party rights, a typical example of which is the insurance technology module — embedding destination customized protection into the cultural and tourism consumption link, making the cultural and tourism card not only a voucher of rights, but also a digital entry for cross-category services. This technical architecture makes You Dongjing essentially an innovative breakthrough in the industrial Internet model: it does not act as a traffic intermediary, but serves as a supply chain operating system.
From Single-county Profit Model to Three-year Plan of Covering 100 Counties
In terms of business model, You Dongjing takes the "Cultural and Tourism Fan Welfare Card" as both physical and digital carriers, focusing not on online shopping transactions, but on offline consumption after tourists arrive in the county — integrating, packaging and issuing scattered local experience resources in sequence, replacing simple paid traffic selling with the closed loop of product circulation and operation. For merchants, the project promotes products in the form of "county souvenir package", solving the pain points of small merchants who lack funds for promotion and have no ability to operate online; for tourists, the fan welfare card has the functions of recommending attractive rights and guiding travel routes, providing definite exclusive discounts without dynamic price gouging. The revenue sources are clear: the first is card sales revenue, the second is merchant operation service fee generated when cardholders verify consumption at stores. Considering that the digital model of You Dongjing has possessed the attributes of local cultural and tourism industry digital entry and operating system, more revenue sources such as government data services and merchant digital upgrading subscription can be expanded in the future.
The single-user economic model disclosed by the team shows that the LTV (life time value) of a single user is 83.2 yuan, with a marginal contribution of 28.1 yuan after deducting customer acquisition cost; if 100,000 cards are issued in a single county with an activation rate of 60%, the annual net profit will be about 874,000 yuan; under the same activation rate when 300,000 cards are issued, the annual net profit will reach about 4.808 million yuan. This model has been verified in pilot areas including Huizhou, Guangdong and Dali, Yunnan.
Many early tourists participating in the pilot said that before, when they traveled to counties, they could not find the truly authentic local gameplay even after checking all travel guides on various platforms, while the fan welfare card of You Dongjing sorts out the niche and characteristic local content worth visiting, with exclusive discounts, bringing a much better experience than searching for guides by themselves. Cooperative county merchants also mentioned that the cost of online customer acquisition was too high for small merchants to afford in the past. After settling in You Dongjing, there is no threshold fee, and they can get a steady flow of customers with the support of the project, which significantly boosts their revenue.
The founder He Lun, graduated from Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, used to work in insurance companies and real estate companies, and was once awarded the title of National Outstanding Commercial Real Estate Manager. In recent years, after deepening into the field of digital cultural and tourism, he took the lead in founding the You Dongjing brand. From conception to implementation, the team has been advancing around the direction of "integration of county-level non-standard cultural and tourism resources", successively overcoming multiple core challenges such as regional supply chain integration, digital link construction and government-enterprise cooperation mode polishing, and finally realized the replicable profit model for a single county, forming a complete service closed loop covering resource integration, digital packaging, distribution and circulation, and offline operation. According to the current plan, You Dongjing aims to land its business in more than 100 counties (cities) in the next three years. After the model for a single county matures, the expected annual net profit of each county will exceed 2 million yuan, and the overall annual net profit target will be more than 200 million yuan.
Looking back on the entrepreneurial process, He Lun said that the cultural and tourism industry is deeply bound to real estate carriers, and the operation problems in the stock era are unavoidable challenges for the whole industry. Meanwhile, consumer demands are constantly changing, from visiting large scenic spots to experiencing the local daily life atmosphere, and real demands are hidden in this transformation. The purpose of creating You Dongjing is not to make up a new traffic concept, but to truly help counties sell their high-quality resources, and help tourists find really fun experiences. Even if the pace of progress in this direction is a little slow, its long-term value will definitely be highlighted in the future.