Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on November 16, 2008 – 9:49 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
I’m touring around China with bloggers. I hope to give you as many updates as possible about this land of endless opportunities. Thanks to Spil Games for sponsoring me.
Lunch with Andrew Lih
Blogging is fighting for its image in the US, where one web influential after the other declares the medium dead. These statements by Calacanis and the likes seem rather odd, as blogging is the communication channel in thousands of niches. In China however, blogging might be really dead.
In the west, blogs ousted bulletin boards and forums from the market. This never happened in China, where the bulletin boards still flourish. Better yet, the discussion platforms keep growing. According to author Andrew Lih, there are two main reasons for this phenomenon.
- BBS are anonymous. Well, actually, semi-anonymous since people do have nicknames and build up reputations. For reasons well known, anonymity comes in handy in China.
- Users get more comments on their BBS writings, sometimes thousands. As for blogging, it can be lonely out there.
Impressive numbers
When Web2Asia’s George Godula gave a presentation about Chinese social networks, he mentioned the following numbers about BBS. There are three billion registered BBS users (users can be members of multiple BBS). More than 60 percent of the users log on to at least three different BBS more than three times a week. Every day, ten million posts are published which manage to attract a total of 1.6 billion page views.
Source for journalists
No wonder Chinese journalists use BBS to see what the public opinion is like. Especially in the occurrence of breaking news. When the disastrous earthquake rocked Sichuan in May this year, journalists scouted the BBS to see what the Chinese people were really thinking of the disaster and its implications. “Because,’ said Lih, “that’s where the honest conversations take place”.
Photo credit: CN Reviews
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Written on November 13, 2008 – 9:36 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
I’m touring around China with bloggers. I hope to give you as many updates as possible about this land of endless opportunities. Thanks to Spil Games for sponsoring me.
The China 2.0 train stopped at the HQ of 51.com this morning, one of China’s largest social networks. Last month, they counted 130 million users of whom 38 million paid the site a visit. The average users logs in eleven times a month and then surfs around for 41 minutes. On a daily basis, the 51.com adorers upload eleven million pictures, write three million blog posts, and watch 35 million music clips. These last numbers prove that entertainment is rather important at 51.com, hence the company launched an open applications platform.
Monetizing applications
VP Andy Yao told us that 51.com launched the platform last August. Since then, 149 applications have been developed. Third party developers are responsible for 130 of these nifty little apps. Every app gets used around 2 million times a day. So how do these third party developers profit from providing 51.com with their creations?
- Google Adsense - developers can place Google Adsense blocks on their pages. They can keep the revenue, as 51.com gets an introduction fee from Google for every developer that signs up.
- Via SMS premium payments, 51.com users can buy 51.com coins. These coins can also be spend on applications - revenue will be split.
Human trafficking
Beyond photoblogs and other native apps, most popular 51.com apps are entertainment-oriented. When Yao gave “Sell your friends” as an example - which obviously is a Facebook rip-off - some funny remarks about human trafficking were made. This example perfectly shows that copying Facebook really pays off in China.
Facebook-copying skills
51.com isn’t the only company who masters the Facebook-copying skills. Earlier this week, we met the founders of social network Kaixin001 - China’s hottest start-up. Their grow curve looks like a hockey stick. They went from 5 to 2000 servers in less than six months. Kaixin001 owes its success to smart copying. The founders noticed Facebook’s most popular element is the entertainment apps category. Thus they improved the top entertainment apps and launched a social network focused on white collar workers. Yao: “These visitors were shocked by all the funny little things they saw. Thanks to a smart emailing system (read: SPAM, EJP), their product spread rapidly.”
So yes folks, the copy-cat approach always pays off. Even in the rough Chinese market.
Written on November 13, 2008 – 8:04 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
I’m touring around China with bloggers. I hope to give you as many updates as possible about this land of endless opportunities. Thanks to Spil Games for sponsoring me.
During this China 2.0 week, a rather large group of Beijing bloggers gathered in the Blue Frog, an American haven in China’s capital with excellent wifi. During a square (as in not round) table discussion about business 2.0 and outsourcing, tweets were pumped onto the web. The hashtag “china20” even ranked no. 1 trending topic at some point. The part of this discussion which interested me the most was the annoyance of Chinese bloggers about us, the western ones. The issue: we don’t paint a gray picture of China.
“Bloggers who speak little or no Chinese do lousy research”, complained Brendan O’Kane. “They find one English-writing blogger from China and project his beliefs and writings on all Chinese bloggers. Hence our image of being online nationalists”.
Richard from Peking Duck agrees with Brendan, but also admits he used to do the same when he started blogging back in 2002. “My blog used to be a wealth of misconceptions, a mess full of prejudice. Now I know better.”
“When my favorite bloggers from abroad address China, even the most liberal ones paint a black and white picture,” said Richard, concerning reports about human rights and censorship.” It’s actually pervasive in all western media”.
Brendan O’Kane
After hearing these complaints, I asked the two gentleman how we could paint a gray picture of the country they reside in. “Read lots of blogs about China to broaden your view”, said Brendan. “Try Fool’s Mountain“. Richard added that Peter Hessler from The New Yorker also writes interesting pieces about China.
I’d like to add that Brendan’s and Richard’s blog are also worth reading. They both have a sharp pen and use it to publicize their refreshing thoughts.
Photo credits: CN Reviews
Written on November 11, 2008 – 7:48 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
I’m touring around China with bloggers. I hope to give you as many updates as possible about this land of endless opportunities. Thanks to Spil Games for sponsoring me.
In March I wrote a post about the fact that Facebook means “doomed to die” in Chinese. I also mentioned some other East Asian misunderstandings. While I’m touring China, I see tons of other cultural differences that make the interaction between China and the west even more interesting. To give you an idea, I’ll highlight some examples the coming days.
Blogger and writer Shel Israel experienced one of those cultural differences first hand. He now has two sets of business cards - of which one is for Chinese people, as his normal business cards have lead to some misunderstandings while meeting web professionals here in China.
The card I got says “Writer. Speaker. Nice Guy” as his title and has the following Hugh MacLeod cartoon on the back:
But that’s not the one Israel hands out to Chinese business relations, he told me. “They don’t have the same kind of humor”, Israel says. “I had to explain what lifestyle I referred to and then they still didn’t get why anyone would put that on his card.” Joking around with your job title also didn’t have the planned effect. Some people actually thought that being a nice guy was an actual role in the American corporate world.
So take this lesson from Israel. If you have an original business card, think about the effect it can have on people from a different culture. Same goes for your personal branding online, of course.
Written on November 11, 2008 – 2:51 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
I’m touring around China with bloggers. I hope to give you as many updates as possible about this land of endless opportunities. Thanks to Spil Games for sponsoring me.
After breaking with their “do no evil” principle, Google is running smoothly in China. But this wasn’t always the case. Here’s an interesting blast from the past.
There’s a story about Google which functions as a fun icebreaker when discussing censorship in China. It certainly caused some laughs here and there during lunch yesterday. Back in 2002, the Chinese government blocked Google in a rather original way. Instead of using, say - just a black page, the government linked to a search engine that did have their blessing.
That’s right, if you typed in google.com six years ago, you’d be redirected to Baidu. This is China’s largest search engine, better known as “the Google of China”. A few years ago, you could take this literally. Baidu indexed 740 million web pages, 80 million images, and 10 million multimedia files. The domain baidu.com attracted at least 5.5 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com study.
When we, the China 2.0 group, later visited a presentation of upcoming social network Kaixin001 - it turned out that the founders were proud of the high Google usage under their users. Why? Well, it proves their users have a good education, as Google is mainly used by students for English searches. When searching for info in Chinese, Baidu is the better option, author Andrew Lih told us.
He also mentioned that Baidu has a huge marketing machine rolling. When going to a James Bond movie, you can’t miss the message saying Baidu made this movie possible.
Written on November 10, 2008 – 6:00 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
I’m touring around China with bloggers. I hope to give you as many updates as possible about this land of endless opportunities. Thanks to Spil Games for sponsoring me.
The two killer features in the early times of the web were portals and email. Here in China, the first one is still very popular (While in the western world this is absolutely not the case). The latter however, never really quite made it in China.
As you can imagine, I was rather surprised when Andrew Lih - author of the upcoming book The Wikipedia Revolution - told me this. During a magnificent lunch in the Yunnan restaurant he gave us, bloggers from the west, a brief introduction on China and the web.
Influential portals
The largest sites in China are still portals. Lih mentioned that most Chinese Internet users hardly use the address bar while surfing. Instead, they click their way through the web. Not surprisingly, the main portals are huge. Sina for example, is so influential that even government officials put @sina email addresses on their business cards. Other big names are Sohu, 163, and 51.
As you’ll see, a lot of Chinese web services have a number as their name. When you speak out these numbers in Chinese, they sound like certain phrases. 51 sounds like “I want”. Put a word like jobs behind it and the numbers suddenly make sense.
Forget email, Chinese use IM
So what about email? Why isn’t that popular? A survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences showed that only 30 percent of the Chinese Internet users check their email on a daily basis. They would rather use IM. Particularly because their private conversations aren’t saved - or at least they have that impression.
China’s most popular IM service QQ counts a stunning amount of 341900000 active users. That’s actually more than the total number of Chinese Internet users (253 million), which means a lot of people have multiple identities.
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