China Internet Watch

100 Million Simultaneous Users on QQ

Rocky Fu — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 06:03:35 +0000

At 19:52:05 on March 5, the number of simultaneous online QQ users for the first time exceeded 100 million, which is also the world’s first online application having exceeded simultaneous 100 million users.

Tencent’s market capital is over USD 37 billion.

Baidu to Launch Video Portal QiYi.com in March

Rocky Fu — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:30:41 +0000

Baidu is to launch its HD video portal site QiYi.com in March. It announced its ambition in HD video in early January this year and hired former 12580 COO Gong Yu to be its CEO.

QiYi.com aims to provide FREE and legal high definition video to Internet netizens and try to duplicate Hulu’s business model in China.

China’s President Hu on People’s Daily Twitter Clone

Rocky Fu — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 06:00:02 +0000

The People’s Daily, the organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CCP), recently launched its own Twitter clone to compete in Chinese microblogging.

It’s clearly a different microblogging provider to me (probably because of its link with the government) as most “Tweets” are about matters vital to national well-being and the people’s livelihood.

Surprisingly to many Chinese netizens, People’s Daily Microblogging has got China’s President Hu Jintao as a certified user:

President Hu’s got 13,671 followers so far without a single “tweet”:

About The People’s Daily

The People’s Daily is a daily newspaper, the organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CCP), published worldwide with a circulation of 3 to 4 million.

As the CCP’s mouthpiece, the newspaper generally provides direct information on the policies and viewpoints of the Party.

Tencent Launched English Portal imqq.com for Expats

Rocky Fu — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 01:38:38 +0000

Tencent launched English version instant messenger some time ago and it has recently launched an English portal for expat netizens – imqq.com.

Unlike its Chinese portal qq.com, imqq.com currently seems to focus on local content. Right now, it has included Shanghai and Beijing.It also promotes its English version instant messenger – QQ International (in English, French, and Japanese) which includes a light Mac version as well.

The content covers local events, listings, group, and video.

Baidu Map Integrates Real Time Search

Rocky Fu — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 09:22:10 +0000

Click on the image above for Complete Screenshot with Annotations

Baidu Map has launched a very interesting section to show real time search results on the map.

Called “Post Bar Map”, it’s hosted on say.map.baidu.com, latest posts from i Post Bar (Baidu’s twitter like product) related to the search keyword will keep popping up on different locations of the map (user locations).

5 Tips on Sourcing Chinese Social Media Monitoring Tools

Rocky Fu — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 11:48:16 +0000

I’ve been testing a few social media monitoring software for Chinese market (mainland China) lately and found very few good ones. Let me share some tips on sourcing social media monitoring software or online applications for mainland Chinese market.

Language capabilities. If an application does a good job of monitoring online conversations on English keywords, it’s not hard to add in support of double byte characters like Chinese characters. But, it’s important the tool can tell the difference between traditional Chinese (official language in Taiwan, Hong Kong) and simplified Chinese (used by mainland Chinese).

If your English brand name (or your competitors) is very well known in China such as BMW and LV, you do want to monitor English brand keywords as well while no content from English content are returned at the same time.

BBS online forums. I came across a tool this morning that did a good job of monitoring online content according to the specified keyword; however, no forum results are included at all. Social networking sites and microblogging sites are popular; no doubt. But, online BBS forums are still the place where most online conversations take place.

Do a search in Google and Baidu and identify some popular forums where your brand is mentioned. See whether they are included in the returned results from the social monitoring tool.

Filtering function. Whether you like it or not, people in China copy articles from other sources including the top portal sites. You can expect news content appearing across news sites, blogs, and forums. If the social media monitoring tool can filter out news content from blogs and online forums, it will definitely be very helpful.

Advanced aggregation and summary feature. If a piece of news gets published across different sites, and many people leave comments on these sites, you want to have aggregated comments in one place instead of having to click into each matched item and view the comments separately.

Last tip: ask yourself what actionable results the social media monitoring tool can generate for your China marketing / PR team.

China Internet Statistics 2009 Summary

Rocky Fu — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 05:12:42 +0000

The following statistics are based on data released by CNNIC for 2009.

China Internet users: 384 million, with a penetration rate of 28.9%
Broadband Internet users: 346 million
China mobile internet users: 233 million (60.8% of total internet users)
Internet users in rural areas: 106.81 million
Registered domain names: 16.82 million (80% are .cn domains)
Top 3 Internet applications
- online music
- online news
- search engines.
Top 3 fast growing online applications
- Online payment
- Travel booking
- Online stock trading
Male Internet users v.s. Female: 54.2% v.s. 45.8%
10% of China internet users don’t have income; 30.3% have a monthly income of over 2000 yuan.
An average, an China internet user spends 18.7 hours per week online.
Total search engine users: 280 million, up 38.6% from previous year
Total bloggers: 221 million
Social networking sites users: 176 million
Online shopping users: 108 million, up 45.9%

Baidu to Launch AdWords Editor like PPC Editor Next Tuesday

Rocky Fu — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 05:13:26 +0000

Baidu is going to launch its paid search desktop editor on Jan 26, 2010. Its official name for the editor is “Baidu Promote Assistant“.

The Baidu PPC Editor looks a lot like the Google AdWords Editor including the following features:

Multiple accounts management
Quick navigations with filter and advanced search abilities
Mass create, edit, and copy keywords and ad copies
Identify duplicate keywords
Detailed information about keywords and ad copies status
Auto updates

Take a closer look at the window of “adding a new campaign” as an example how similar it looks like AdWords Editor:

Add New Campaign in Baidu PPC Editor

Baidu PPC Editor allows users to update campaign settings including campaign name, campaign status, daily budget, ad copy display option, day parting setting, geo-targeting, negative keywords, and IP address filtering.

According to my source at Baidu, the software was developed by AdSage, a software product and service company specialized in online advertising business based in Beijing. It requires .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.

Baidu Editor

Baidu Added Two More Links on Homepage

Rocky Fu — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 01:42:45 +0000

Yesterday evening, Baidu homepage was found updated with two more links.

Baidu Old Homepage

The new homepage has two links added, one link to “baidu map” above the search box and one link to “baidu baike (wikipedia)” below the search box:

Baidu New Homepage

Are more links coming to the homepage? What if Google does pull out of China?

Taobao Expands into Offline Retail Business

Rocky Fu — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 01:53:32 +0000

Taobao Offline Store

Last week, Taobao announced its entry into the off-line business, authorizing supermarkets, chain stores, and school shops to become Taobao’s official shopping service stores.

The first line of 150 off-line authorized stores opened on January 16, 2010. Taobao plans to open over 30,000 authorized Taobao stores.

It is reported that Hangzhou Taobao off-line stores are co-operated by Taobao and Hangzhou Buy Bar who invested 100 million yuan. Taobao will likely to work with other parties in other cities to build more Taobao offline stores.

It is understood that authorized community stores will be able to display “Taobao Community Shopping Service Store” signs, where consumers pay only a small amount of agency fees to enjoy many Taobao services including mobile phone card top-up, delivery service, electricity bill payment, airtickets booking, and etc.

In addition, each authorized offline store needs to pay a certain amount of deposit to Taobao so that consumers can get compensated if their interests are damaged.

The offline extension strategy is a smart move as it will likely expand Taobao’s presence into Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities; in addition, it will be helpful to reach those who are not comfortable making online purchases.