Popular science industry development in China: Opportunity and challenges in the context of new information technology booming

摘要

Considering the great development opportunity for popular science industry brought by new information technology, the research team conducted an intensive study on China Popular Science Industry (PSI) to analysis on the opportunities and challenges in New Media age. This paper consists of five parts: the first part demonstrates the general development context and status for current popular science industry in China. The second part briefly introduced the methodology, and the third part presents the general development context and opportunities in China at present. The fourth part illustrated the main findings from a separate survey, such as popular science websites scale and content, quality of the popular science websites and user features. The author also listed three major problems and challenges faced the popular science development as follows: lack of original contents and high quality popular science resources, the target users of popular science are lack of subdivision and the popular science website requires the introduction of a deeper market mechanism. At last, suggestions are given on policy-making strategies for PSI.