Tianya Community App "Resumes" but With Accessibility Issues

(TMTPOST)—The Tianya Community App, which was taken down a month ago, has been relaunched on the Apple App Store and some Android app stores.

However, TMTPost found that, as of the press time, the Tianya Community App remains inaccessible, stuck on the splash screen.

On March 1, the operating entity of Tianya Community, "Tianya Community Network Technology Co., Ltd.", announced that the company was experiencing liquidity difficulties and was involved in a bankruptcy case due to unpaid employee wages.

The company said that the legal proceedings it faces due to financial difficulties will not have a substantial impact on Tianya's restart. The company is actively restructuring its debts and is confident in reducing the company's total debt to less than 100 million yuan (US$ 720 million).

Tianya Community emphasizes that it plans to raise no more than 10 million yuan in the next two months through market-based means to fund the "New Tianya Plan," which aims to restore Tianya Community access and ensure ongoing operations. While ensuring data security and compliance, the company expects to restore Tianya Community access by May 1 this year.

Founded in 1999 by Xing Ming, Tianya Community became synonymous with BBS during China's first wave of Internet development. Tianya witnessed the rise of many online celebrities and heated debates, including the phenomenon of Sister Furong, the dispute of Han Han, a Shanghai-based writer, versus Fang Zhouzi, an online science writer, and the emergence of phenomenal IPs such as "Those Years in the Ming Dynasty", "Grave Robbers' Chronicles", and "20 Years of Underworld."

In 2004, both Sina and Sohu sought to acquire Tianya Community, but Xing only accepted investments, rejecting acquisition offers.

From 2005 to 2006, Tianya received investments from IDG, Chingko, Lenovo, Google, and Jiangnanchun, planning for overseas listings. Google invested $1 million for a 6.67% stake in Tianya, becoming its largest overseas investor. Jointly developed by Tianya and Google, Tianya Answers and Tianya Let's Go aimed to compete with Baidu Zhidao and Post Bar.

In 2006, Tianya began commercial exploration through advertising, accelerating its IPO pace.

However, with the outbreak of the 2008 financial crisis, Tianya missed the opportunity for an overseas IPO. Subsequently, Tianya considered returning to the Chinese market and listing on the National Equities Exchange and Quotations (NEEQ), then dismantling the VIE structure and negotiating the repurchase of Google's shares.

By the time Tianya completed the repurchase of Google shares and completed the stock reform in 2011, the ChiNext had already listed several batches of companies, and the window for returning to the ChiNext had passed. It was not until 2015 that Tianya was finally listed on the NEEQ.

However, just six days after its listing, Tianya was suspended from trading because it failed to disclose its financial data for 2015. On April 17, 2019, after a two-year suspension, Tianya Community was delisted from the NEEQ.

Meanwhile, with the rise of mobile Internet, community forums such as Tianya, Mop, and Baidu Post Bar were all on the decline, replaced by social media such as Weibo and WeChat. Subsequently, attempts to sell advertisements, engage in e-commerce, and promote games consumed Tianya's users, while bets on blockchain and the metaverse failed to save Tianya.

According to an article published by Tianya Community, the liquidity crisis stemmed from the failed investment in building a mobile Internet headquarters base in Chengdu, severely hindering Tianya's transformation into the mobile Internet player and causing all of Tianya's assets to be frozen, further triggering a chain reaction of bank loan cuts and high compensation for employee departures, resulting in an overall liquidity crisis for Tianya.

In April 2023, Tianya Community announced that due to worsening liquidity difficulties over the past few years, telecommunications fee arrears led to the temporary denial of access to Tianya Community.

According to information from Tianyancha, Tianya Community's main business entity Tianya Online Network Technology Co., Ltd. has 7 items of information on executed persons and 18 counts of equity freeze information, with a cumulative execution target exceeding 450 million yuan. At the same time, the company and Xing also have faced dozens of orders on expensive consumption restrictions and hundreds of cases, including disputes over the right to reputation and infringement of the right to disseminate works on the Internet.

In order to obtain more data, Tianya Community App has been repeatedly named by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) for issues such as "collecting personal information without user authorization" and has faced delisting and rectification. In May 2021, MIIT announced that Tianya Community App repeatedly had similar issues in different versions, including illegal collection of personal information, mandatory user use of targeted push functions, frequent and excessive compulsory rights requests, and deceptive inducement of user downloads. The authority said that it would directly take it down from the app stores to prevent further violations.