VS Media to team up with Beautiful Destinations on China travel content

VS Media and Beautiful Destinations, a New York creative agency creating travel and lifestyle content on Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat, will start a high-end travel video series titled Beautiful China.

Beautiful China's first stop will be in Sichuan. The series will be centred more on unique content and rely less on individual personalities, a business model that caused bottlenecks to profitability during what VS Media termed the 'MCN (short for multi-channel network) 1.0' era.

Since its establishment in June 2013, VS has positioned itself as the first and largest MCN that focuses on creators of Chinese (including Cantonese) video content, but in an imperfect influencer-marketing environment, most of its creators were supported only by their own enthusiasm and not profit.

The Beautiful Destinations collaboration embodies the start of a 'MCN 2.0' era, which builds on the "basis of the UGC-PGC-IP model" (referring to combining user-generated content and professionally-generated content to create intellectual propety), which previously worked well, according to VS Media CEO Ivy Wong.

This collaboration with Beautiful Destinations is the second overseas content partnership for Hong Kong-based VS Media.

The first was when Discovery Communications took a minority stake in VS Media in August last year in a bid to build deeper traction in the Greater China market. The outcome was a series of five-minute videos exploring popular science content from Discovery and re-created by the VS Media team to meet the needs of Chinese viewers.