The China Web Market - Best Blogs Asia
What is the future of the internet in China and how it effects you.
I’ve written many posts on this subject, but this one combines my current thinking after years of experience of living and working in China.
Facebook Plans to Enter China Market
Facebook has huge impact around the world, everyone knows that…except in China. Sina reports Facebook is looking to enter the China market and looking at the stats below you can see why.
Recent stats from CNNIC (Dec 2009) show that:
- GDP – $4.3 trillion
- Population – 1.33 billion
- Internet Population – 338M
- Online Shoppers – 87.88M
- Online Spending – $1.25 trillion
However, here in China we’ve survived without Facebook by using similar sites like Xiaonei and Kaixin001 etc and new comers operated by the portals such as BaiShehui by Sohu, Pengyou by Sina, Taojianghui by Taobao.
On a personal level, I think all the marketing in the world won’t help Facebook due the censorship over here, the failed startups like Myspace China and that the China market doesn’t know about the site in the first place. Could be an expensive marketing disaster for them if they decide to enter the market. BTW: Their site is still blocked over here.
Chinese Social Media Landscape
The diagram below shows the link up of all the China based social media companies.
2010 Internet Growth in China
Tencent is growing (home of the QQ Penguin), I can see them developing further and further in China. Living in China isn’t just about browsing the web at home, but it’s about using social tools like QQ and Instant Message Sevrices. Tencent just invested $300m into DST, which is a Russian based Internet company which owns stakes in Facebook and Zynga.
Jack Ma from Alibaba is developing into a China Internet Superstar! He’s runs Taobao as his e-commerce setup, Alipay as his payment processor, Koubei as his online community and Aliwangwang as his Instant Messenger service. He is also involved with Yahoo in China too.
According to iResearch, internet advertising spend in China reached a value of 6.4bn yuan ($936.9m) in the first quarter of 2010 which is a huge level of growth whilst the number of phone users in China has to 1.094 billion.
Baidu is continuing to be a monopoly in the search market, where it’s forecast to be worth $4.9 billion in advertising revenue by 2015. By China exiting the market, they managed to extend its market share from 58.4% at the end of last year to an impressive 64% by the end of Q1 2010.
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