“Hi, little friends! Do you still remember me? That’s right I’m the voice actor for Blue Cat, Ge Ping!”
As one of the representative works of early local animation, 3000 Whys of Blue Cat and its various derivative works held cherished memories for many people born in the 80s and 90s. Its main feature was the clever integration of scientific knowledge into storytelling, covering various fields such as military, animals, and everyday life.
However, with the development of the internet, netizens became active on various forums, and there was a continuous stream of praise for the Blue Cat series as the best local animation. Naturally, this also brought forth opposing voices. Coupled with the declining reputation of recent sequels and ongoing controversies, Ge Ping, as the voice actor for the popular character Blue Cat, also became the target of many parodies.
This particular parody video uploaded on C Site was only 3 minutes long, but it had already been viewed over 3,000 times in just one week.
In the future internet era where millions of views are common, 3,000 views may seem insignificant in the future, but for Mei Fang and Lin Youxi, the operators of the small C Site, it felt like a massive blow. They had spent several nights urgently dealing with server overload and crashes caused by the increased traffic.
“Why is everyone so interested in this kind of video?” Lin Youxi also watched the parody video titled Ge Pao herself and didn’t like it very much. “This kind of crude editing, the content is simply attacking Ge Ping, why are people so happy in the bullet comments?”
“I think it’s a matter of different perspectives,” Mei Fang explained. “For example, heavy metal or deathpunk music, many people don’t like it and think it’s noise, but many others enjoy it. You may find parody videos offensive, and that’s normal, but some people just find it funny. After all, everyone has a lot of stress in their lives, and watching normally serious characters act crazy in these parody videos can help relax their mood to some extent.”
“However, personal attacks are indeed not good. That point is true. But if the person involved doesn’t mind, then it should be fine…”
Mei Fang himself wasn’t a fan of parody content with a mocking tone. He only occasionally watched some less offensive and humorous parody videos. However, he vividly remembered that this event from his past life was a significant turning point event, although it seemed to have happened on A Site back then, but this time, it coincidentally appeared on C Site.
Mei Fang noticed that the number of registered members on the platform was skyrocketing in the backend. From the previous two or three per day, it had now reached 40 or 50 new registrations per day.
After becoming official members, they also have the right to post bullet comments and upload videos. But… come to think of it, is this bandwidth cost for real?
Video streaming websites often had to pay for two parts of server fees. One part was the storage resource cost, which referred to the resources stored on the website, such as the uploaded videos and account data.
The other cost was the bandwidth cost. Whether the users on the website could smoothly play your videos online depended on the capacity of your bandwidth.
If your bandwidth was small but there were many users playing videos online at the same time, there might be insufficient bandwidth, resulting in buffering.
Previously, Mei Fang had a 20 Mbps server bandwidth, which supported up to 100 people watching online videos without buffering, with a monthly cost of 1200 yuan. Now, he wanted to upgrade to 100 Mbps, and the cost suddenly jumped to 100,000 yuan per year, which was 8000 yuan per month.
No wonder many people say that running a video site is like burning money. Where did sites like AcFun and Bilibili get so much money in their early days?
They really just relied on financing to get by, huh!
After seeing the exaggerated cost of bandwidth, Mei Fang now felt like he made a wrong move. On one hand, C Site was indeed replicating the prosperous path of Bilibili in his previous life, but it didn’t have a stable cash flow. C Site itself would take several more years for it to start making money.
Because he was eager to occupy Bilibili’s path from his previous life, he created C Site. As a result, he couldn’t devote much energy to game development. It was still too early for Bitcoin to play a role, and although his savings were already quite impressive, with the way video websites burned money on bandwidth, he didn’t have that much to spare.
Mei Fang didn’t let Lin Youxi worry too much about money matters. He just wanted her to focus on studying web technology. At the end of June 2010, Lin Youxi, who was maintaining the website’s operation, brought Mei Fang a piece of news. She said that she received a private message from a network company called Manhattan Technology. Mei Fang had never heard of this company in his previous life, but they expressed their willingness to buy the domain name of C Site along with its development source code for 100,000 yuan.
Receiving this, Mei Fang remained calm, not showing too much excitement on his face, and he looked at Lin Youxi, who was staring at the private message.
“If they really want to buy it, would you be willing to sell the website to them?”
Lin Youxi shook her head, “The website was developed by you, Ah Fang, so you should decide on it.”
“How could it be me?”
Mei Fang smiled, “I only worked with you on the initial development of the basic modules, and you were the one who spent time and effort on the subsequent maintenance.”
“But the money spent on the website all came from Ah Fang…”
“But I haven’t paid you a salary, have I?”
Lin Youxi remained silent.
Mei Fang continued, “You should know that the name of this site is C Site, it’s Youxi’s website, and it’s up to you whether to sell it or not.”
Letting Lin Youxi, a child, make this decision was indeed a bit difficult and cruel for her. After all, for a child to earn 100,000 yuan was already an incredible feat.
But selling it also meant that all her efforts over the years would be reduced to just that sum of money.
Lin Youxi had been studying streaming video website technology for a long time and had a general understanding of her position.
If her level of dedication to this website was only this much, Mei Fang couldn’t expect her to lead C Site further on her own. It would be better to focus on game development together and there were many well-known game developers waiting for Mei Fang’s investment.
“Ah Fang… I still don’t want to sell it.”
Lin Youxi shook her head. “I think our C Site can still go further. If we don’t have enough money right now, the current bandwidth is still manageable. I can continue doing game boosting and save some money from my meal card… As long as C Site continues to gain popularity, we’ll eventually attract investments, don’t you think?”
Mei Fang shook his head this time.
“The wheels of time are moving forward. It’s already the era of 3G technology. If C Site experiences buffering even when playing 360p videos, it will lose its competitiveness in the market. If we continue like this, the reputation of C Site will only get worse and it won’t attract any investments.”
“So… do you think we should sell the website?”
Lin Youxi looked a bit dejected, “Since Ah Fang also thinks so, then there’s no other way…”
“Ah, no, you misunderstand.”
Mei Fang explained, “What I mean is, C Site must improve its bandwidth. Otherwise, it won’t be able to expand further and won’t attract capital investment.”
“But… just upgrading to 100 Mbps bandwidth will cost nearly 10,000 yuan a month?”
“It’s okay… although I also think it’s outrageously expensive, maybe we won’t need to persist for a year before attracting investment, right?”
“Ah Fang… do you really have that much money?” Lin Youxi’s gaze was filled with astonishment. “Is it…earned from games?”
Mei Fang nodded and smiled, “If you trust me, it is.”
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