The popular online novel Yun Shen Ji (The Fall of Gods) will be adapted into online series, an online game and merchandise. It's one of the examples of the cooperation between internet companies and the film industry. [Photo provided to China Daily]

In addition to 17K.com, which boasts 600,000 online writers and 106 fiction works surpassing the benchmark of being read more than 100 million times, ChineseAll has another two digital platforms to lure investors.

They are Itangyuan.com－tailored for college students to create novels through a smartphone app－and Siyuetian－an upcoming site mainly for women readers. The firm also plans to create a subsidiary in the United States to introduce Chinese online novels to the West.

"Digital content will overtake print to become mainstream," says Xie Guangcai, executive vice-president of ChineseAll.

"The trend is also revolutionizing the film and television industries, pushing them to consider internet's influence first."

An example reflecting this change is Yun Shen Ji (The Fall of Gods), a fantasy novel revolving around the secrets of gods and demons.

Typically, a literary work first gains reputation online and is then sold to studios to be adapted for screen productions. But Yun Shen Ji is completely different. The leading studio Le Vision Pictures originally conceived the characters and then asked 17K.com to recruit a young writer to author a novel built around the roles.