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The story
Founded by Yang Bo on Mar 6, 2005.1
Founder
Douban (Beijing Douwang Technology Co. Ltd.) was founded by Yang Bo (杨勃). He majored in physics at Tsinghua University before he attended University of California, San Diego as a PhD student. After receiving his PhD in computational physics, he worked as a research scientist at IBM. Later, he returned to China, becoming the CTO of a software company founded by one of his friends.
In 2005, Yang started to create a website for travelling named Lüzong (驴宗), initially a one-person project at a Starbucks in Beijing. In a couple of months, however, the site was transformed into what is now known as Douban.com.
The name "Douban" originated from the fact that its founder, Yang Bo, wrote the website's source code in a café near Douban Hutong in Beijing when creating the site. Therefore, it was named Douban.com
Unlike Rotten Tomatoes, where professional film critics provide ratings, platforms such as Douban and Mtime allow anyone to rate films (even before they are released). As a result, there have been instances of users maliciously inflating or deflating scores for personal interests and purposes.
In the article "Eight Questions About Douban Movie Ratings" published on the "Daily Douban" WeChat account, founder Ah Bei publicly explained Douban's anti-cheating and anti-manipulation mechanisms, and stated that there is no backend function to "modify movie scores," ensuring the fairness of its rating system.
According to a Southern Weekly report in 2018, although Douban has not eliminated the phenomenon of paid review groups manipulating scores, its platform structure and anti-manipulation measures make it so that score manipulation can only be done manually, resulting in costs several times higher than on many other platforms.
Timeline
2005
March 6, account registration opened to the public
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March 8, Group (小组) was released
March 9, the first topic appeared in the Group
July 6, the traditional Chinese version of the website published
August 23, Douban Location (豆瓣同城) was released to allow users to share and discover local events and activities
December 8, English version of the website opened for public testing
2013
Douban announced that Douban covered 200 million monthly independent users in the second and third quarters of 2013, double the same period last year.
As of September 2013, Douban has 16.7 million book entries, 320 million movie reviews, 1.06 million music entries, 27,000 independent musicians, and 380,000 various interest groups.
September 17, 2013, "Douban Dongxi" (豆瓣东西) was released
Until September 2013, Douban had more than 75 million registered users, mainly from first- and second-tier cities across the country, with an average daily PV of 210 million.
2016
Until the end of 2016, Douban had 150 million registered users and 300 million monthly active users
2017
Douban launches content-paid product "Douban Time" (豆瓣时间)
Douban's CEO YangBo announced a restructuring of the company's business lines to achieve a balance between costs and revenue, laying the groundwork for a potential overseas listing.
2020
Beijing Douban Technology Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Douban.com, had a significant business information change on July 8. The shareholders and business scope changed.
The company's business scope has expanded from "Internet dissemination of officially published book content" to "publishing literary original digital works, digital works consistent with the content of published publications in China," Beijing Douwang Technology Co., Ltd.
Douban achieved the permission to publish original literary e-books.
From Wikipedia’s article on Douban, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4