Author’s Blurb: I’ve always known that my professional future would most likely be concerned with the creative writing industry one way or another. I was lucky enough to snag this job, especially after seeing the major retrenchments that went on in late 2019 within Malaysia’s traditional publishing industry.
There hasn’t been much research done on why the traditional media industry appears to be in decline, but one thing’s for sure: journalists and writers will have to foray into the digital sphere sooner or later.
One platform that’s helping them do that is MOPress, which was designed to ease the digital publishing process from creating to publishing content.
Sean Teoh, its CEO and founder, told Vulcan Post that content creators struggle to remain relevant in the market, since consumer attitudes are ever-changing, and maintaining a traditional media platform runs high costs.
“The unfortunate truth is that some within the industry are still not participating or upgrading to match or compete with the new age of creators,” he commented.
This has led to retrenchments in the industry, which he added do not bode well for the future of Malaysian publishing.
His experience comes from having co-founded and built a Chinese language news portal called TanTanNews in 2012 which later was acquired by Media Prima Berhad in early 2019.
“That’s why at MOPress, we are working to combine the modern creator style with digital publishers to enhance the overall publishing industry,” Sean said.
An AI Powered Matchmaker
Sean believes that MOPress can help publishers save operation costs while getting quality content on-demand from the creators through their marketplace, which has over 3,000 content creators to date.
What MOPress essentially does is allow publishers to discover and engage a wide range of creators covering various topics.
It’s similar to a freelancing platform, where content creators can work remotely to accomplish missions by publishers without being tied to them, thus alleviating the publishers from several overhead costs.
The platform has an AI matching algorithm that curates and harvests relevant data from its partners’ sites and social media to find trending keywords and stories.
This information helps them match the content creator to meet the specific requirements of publishers, which improves relevance and ensures better quality content.
He gave the example of how his other company, TanTanNews had launched up-to-date coverage on Malaysia’s COVID-19 situation with the help of MOPress’ network.
“We were able to get full coverage and timely updates during the COVID-19 issue when it was first announced by leveraging the network of content creators who covered the evolving stories in real-time.”
“Not to mention, TanTanNews was able to reduce their overhead cost and grow to 7 million pageviews in a month,” he added.
Experienced Journalists Aren’t The Only Writers Around
MOPress’ network of writers isn’t just limited to established journalists—it can include people who simply aspire to write too.
But then how do they vet the legitimacy of their writers for quality control? How do they verify that a writer has the right background and knowledge to execute a draft according to a publisher’s specific needs?
Sean replied that they do it by gamifying the whole experience. “There are a few tiers that you will need to climb to become professionals. It starts from being a newbie and progresses to silver, gold, platinum, and professional if you are a certified journalist, lawyer, doctor, etc.”
“With your certification, you can actually apply to jump from newbie to professional status. The higher your rank, the higher the fee for your content costs.”
On the other hand, publishers are vetted through an application to MOPress before they can join the platform as a media site or corporation.
MOPress takes a commission from each piece of content purchased through its platform on a variable scale, but Sean declined to give a range, simply saying that the higher the quality and ranking of a creator, the lower the commission they take.
At the moment, the only content categories available on the platform are tech and F&B, but Sean shared that they’re doing R&D to ensure they cover every category across all industries.
“These categories can be seen in the near future as we officially launch our second batch of publishers in Q2 of 2020.”
Bottom Line: Personally, I don’t see a platform like MOPress working out for Vulcan Post, as we have a rather strong (and niche) brand image that we train our writers to stick to as part of quality control. Therefore, I believe that MOPress is suited for much larger media publications that produce a big output of diverse content on the daily.
- You can read about other Malaysian startups here.
Featured Image Credit: MOPress
