BEIJING, Jan. 20 (Xinhua) -- The revenue from live streaming reached 30.45 billion yuan (4.76 billion U.S. dollars) in China last year, an official from the Ministry of Culture has said at a live streaming forum.
According to Wu Jiangbo, head of the ministry's Cultural Market Department, revenue increased by 39 percent from 2016.
The department will continue to strengthen the supervision over and regulation of the live streaming market, in order to attach equal importance to supervision and service, and guide the business into healthy and rapid development, Wu said.
Live streaming emerged in 2005 in China, and made a significant breakthrough in 2016, while problems such as the streaming of obscenity, violence and other inappropriate content surfaced as the market gained prosperity.
Action has been taken, with a nationwide campaign to purify the online environment carried out from March to November last year. Some 73 live streaming platforms shut down, and 1,879 live streamers received lifetime bans in the first half of 2017.
