More than 117 million people in China used online forums in 2009, according to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Since the 1990s, online forums have become an increasingly important gateway for expression of public opinion. Internet usage in rural areas, such as western China, has increased at a quicker rate than in more developed urban areas. China had 384 million internet users by the end of 2009.

Source: Xinhua News Agency via @AdAgeChina

Also read::China Internet Statistics 2009 Summary

According to a report released by iResearch last week, China search engine market Q2 sales increased to 2.64 billion yuan (US$389m). Baidu’s market share increased by 3% to 70.8%.

Search queries on Baidu also increased by 2.1% to 78.2% while search queries on Google dropped by 2.3% to 14.4%.

In China, the second quarter is the time when holiday is over and students go back to school; also with growing acceptance of Baidu’s phoenix nest system, it makes sense to see the Baidu’s market share has exceeded seventy percent.

Also read::China Search Engine Market Report 2009

In a recent report released by comScore, in terms of engagement among the top 20 most-visited properties in Asia Pacific, Tencent ranked as the most-engaging property with visitors averaging 6.5 hours on the site during the month, consuming 716 pages of content and visiting the property an average of 39 times.

Also read::Nearly 9 out of 10 Internet Users in Hong Kong View Online Video

Research from Fleishman-Hillard found that while internet users in China overwhelmingly felt more comfortable with companies that microblog, those in North America and the UK were largely unmoved.

China Internet users also show very positive attitude toward companies monitoring microblogs:

Edison Research found that while 87% of US consumers had heard of Twitter, only 7% used it. How many people have heard of microblogs? Still not many. Not to mention the number of users who frequently use it.

Also read::Consumer Confidence in China Back to Pre-Recession Levels

Tencent last week launched a new social networking website in China called “Peng You” which means “Friends” in English.

Pengyou clearly targets two groups of audience, “students” and “white collar workers”. At first login, users will be asked to select which group they belong to:

The “students” SNS features come from Tencent’s previous product called “QQ alumni”, which was launched last August and claimed to have 10 million registered users this January and 20 million in Feb.

After selecting “I’m studying” at first login, the user will be asked to register via one of two ways:

1. Get invitations from friends who’s already in qq alumni network (initially users can log in using their QQ instant messaging id and password at pengyou.qq.com)
2. Submit invitation code if any

For those who are working, they will be asked to register using their company email address. However, not all companies emails can be used to register at the moment. I tried a few; none worked. Got a tip from a friend, right now only Tencent’s company emails are accepted. It’s still in internal testing stage.

Social networking site is not new to Tencent as they have a very large social networking site called “Q Zone” which has over 428 million users by this March. The difference between qzone and pengyou is clear: qzone is a social network of qq instant messaging friends while pengyou is a network of friends in real life.

Also read::China social networking sites statistics 2009 (updated)

As Google’s Internet Content Provider (ICP) license is up for renewal on June 30 in China, Google now has a new approach to handle Google.cn visitors.

Since Google’s January announcement this year that Google was no longer willing to censor results on Google.cn, Google had automatically redirected everyone using Google.cn to Google.com.hk, which offers unfiltered search in simplified Chinese.

Google has started taking a small percentage of Google.cn users to a landing page on Google.cn that links to Google.com.hk (as shown in the above image). It’s a bit deceptive as it looks like a normal Google search box which in fact is an image that links to Google.com.hk.

Google has announced that over the next few days they’ll end the redirect entirely, taking all their Chinese users to the new landing page.

Also read::Google Search Dropped by Tencent

In a Youku poll to see what made the biggest impression on viewers of World Cup 2010, the vuvuzela takes the first place, with 22.5% of respondents (2,355 votes) voting for “The ear-splitting vuvuzelas” as the most striking feature of the matches so far.

You can check out the voting results here (Chinese).

Also read::Explore Shanghai World Expo on Google

China’s central bank on Monday said it would allow non-financial companies such as Alibaba, the country’s leading e-commerce company, to offer online payment services.

The move comes after months of uncertainty over whether the People’s Bank of China might severely curtail the business of AliPay, an affiliate of Alibaba. The central bank has been pushing Chinese banks to set up a common online payment settlement platform themselves that would compete with AliPay.

via FT.com

Also read::China Q1 Online Payment Exceeded 212 Billion Yuan

Baidu launched handwriting input on Baidu search not long ago this month. Searchers can use mouse to “hand write” search queries. The technology is obviously provided by Hanwang, a company specializing in handwriting recognition technology.

Also read::Baidu Adds Handwriting Support for The Senior

As little as 10 cents, you can “grow” your fan base in China social media such as Baidu Post Bar, blogs, micro-blogging platforms, etc.

With less than 3,000 yuan (USD 440), you can get tens of thousands of fans for your social media channels. And guess what? You can find many such sellers easily on Taobao.

Most sellers are quite “transparent” about their services; you don’t get true fans but you can very “real” fans with photos, locations, and profiles information. Of course, most of these fans have either one or no fans at all.

A few sellers seem very advanced. They provide huge number of fans (such as 30K) each of which has 5 to 300 fans, complete profile, and certain number of blog posts.

Where are those fans from? Team work. Some utilize the collective efforts from a team; some use software; and, some use both techniques.

Should you buy fans?

I don’t recommend you buy fans. If you do, you not only lie to others but also to yourself. What’s the point of building a business and making it look like attractive only to yourself?

If the number of fans increase too rapidly within a short time frame, it might trigger red flag and the administrator could shut down your account.

One thing you should have learned is, there are many people in China whose mind can be only in love with short term goals – quick money.

Also read::Baidu Post Bar Updated with Twitter Features

Chanced upon Sina’s smart “assassin” embedded in the feeds. Take a look at a normal blog post (above) first.

Atom OR RSS feeds are not popular in China; not at all though blog platforms like Sina Blog does provide RSS feeds (you can get it from firefox address bar for example) though it’s not obvious on the interface. Social networking sites like RenRen offers blog like function which also allows users to import blog posts by providing blog URL into its platform.

Sina inserts one line of texts with link to a special landing page promoting Sina Blog service:

I asked friends previously when I was importing self-hosted wordpress blog and no one actually realize I have a self-hosted blog, not to mention which platform I was using. The above imported blog post is in my current renren account and it’s a pretty good tactic from Sina to promote its blog service and win more users.

However, from usability perspective, it could confuse normal users and some may think blog author inserted it. On the other hand, Sina seems not ready to monetize the feeds yet.

Also read::Rumor: Microsoft to Acquire Sina

Baidu Zhidao, similar to Yahoo Answers, launched API platform. There are so far nine partners including abang.com (about.com in China) who have implemented Baidu Zhidao API.

Users can ask and answer questions across different websites directly or indirectly via its powerful APIs.

Baidu Zhidao APIs allows two types of partnership: one for high traffic volume, called channel partnership, provides not only APIs, but also free web space and data transfer. Channel partner websites users can log in with their own id and password to ask and answer questions, which will be synchronized with Baidu Zhidao.

The other partnership is for small to medium websites with similar features; but no free webspace or data transfer will be provided.

Baidu Zhidao Open

Also read::Baidu Launched Discovery Channel

comScore last week released its March 2010 rankings of the top video properties in Hong Kong based on data from its comScore Video Metrix service.

The report found that 88.5% of Hong Kong’s Internet population viewed video online in March, with visitors averaging more than 10 hours of video viewing per person during the month.

In March, Internet users in Hong Kong (age 15 and older) watched 447 million videos, with Google Sites ranking as the top video property with 234.2 million videos, representing 52.4 percent of all videos viewed online. YouTube.com accounted for more than 99% of all videos viewed at the Google property.

Tudou Sites ranked second with 16.3 million videos viewed, representing 3.6 percent of the market, followed closely by Youku with 16.2 million videos, also at 3.6 percent. Facebook.com (12.3 million videos, 2.8 percent share) and Oriental Press Group (6.4 million videos, 1.4 percent share) rounded out the top five.

More than 3.6 million viewers in Hong Kong watched an average of 123 videos per viewer during the month of March. Google Sites attracted the largest video audience with 2.4 million unique viewers during the month (97.5 videos per viewer), followed by Facebook.com with 1.3 million viewers (9.6 videos per viewer) and Youku with 786, 000 viewers (20.6 videos per viewer).

Source: comScore

Also read::Hong Kong Internet user spends over 25 hours online per month

Google recently released a list of 1000 most visited websites and these Chinese sites below are in top 100 in April 2010:

8. Baidu
9. qq.com
11. sina.com.cn
15. 163.com
16. taobao.com
17. soso.com
19. youku.com
21. sohu
28. tudou.com
33. tianya.cn
36. hao123.com
38. xunlei.com
46. sogou.com
47. 56.com
52. ku6.com
55. ifeng.com
62. alibaba.com
68. gougou.com
70. renren.com
82. alipay.com
98. mop.com

Also read::Top Video Sites in China & Market Statistics

Chinese consumers’ confidence has reached levels not seen since 2007, according to the China Economic Monitoring and Analysis Center (CEMAC), jointly run by China’s National Bureau of Statistics and the Nielsen Company.

For the survey, they interviewed over 3,500 Chinese shoppers in ities, towns and rural villages, and concluded that the consumer confidence index has risen 19 points, to 108, over the last twelve months. This significant jump is largely driven by growing confidence felt by consumers from central and rural areas, as well as big improvements in consumers’ perception of their local job market and personal finances.

via adage.com

Also read::China’s Consumer Confidence Reaches Highest Level Since 2007

China’s Q1 online advertising spend in 2010 showed strong growth, with an increase of 85.4% to 6.36 billion yuan (USD 931 million) compared to Q1 spend in 2009. Baidu leads China’s online advertising market in quarter one in 2010 with total sales of 1.293 billion yuan. The next five are:

• Taobao: 590m yuan
• Google China: 563m yuan
• Sina: 380m yuan
• Sohu: 290m yuan
• Tencent: 210m yuan

Web portals and search engines are the major source of online advertising. Mobile advertising spend increased by 30% to 250 million yuan, compared to Q4 2009.

Search Engine Spend in Q1 2010

Total spend on Baidu and Google together increased slightly to 97.3%; however, spend on baidu has gone up almost 4% to 67.8% while spend on Google dropped over 3% to 29.5%.

30% out of the total online advertising, 1.91 billion yuan were spent on search engine marketing, up 1.7%. Total 49.18 billion search queries were conducted in Q1 2010; queries on Baidu and Google combined represent 93.7%, followed by SoSo (3.5%) and Sogou (2%).

Visits to Baidu and Google in Q1 dropped by about 10%; but, visits to soso has gone up over 20%?

Also read::China Online Display Advertising Reached 18 Billion in 2009

China Online Payment Market - Q1 2009 to Q1 2010: green line indicates the growth compared to the previous quarter; blue line the year on year growth

According to iResearch, the first quarter of china’s online payment market in 2010 totaled to $212.1 billion yuan (US$31 billion) with an increase of 17.8% compared to Q4 2009.

iResearch estimated online payment industry will continue to maintain the momentum of rapid growth in the field.

Market Leader in China Online Payment

Alibaba Group’s Alibaba has a market share of 47.1% followed by Tenpay from Tencent with 20.4% market share. The other online service providers each has a market share of below 10%.

Also read::China’s Online Game Market to Reach $9.2 Billion in 2014

Yahoo has enhanced search suggestion in Web search for Yahoo! Taiwan (Yahoo! Kimo) and Yahoo! Hong Kong. This feature helps users easily enter queries in traditional Chinese in the search box using Changjie and Cantonese Pinyin, which are language input systems used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, respectively.

For example, to search for “Shanghai World’s Fair,” searchers can start typing the Cantonese spelling of the query while in English mode and see search suggestion in traditional Chinese.

Source: Yahoo Search Blog

Also read::Active Facebook Users in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong

Chinese consumer confidence continues to strengthen, up four points in the latest survey and reaching highs not seen since 2007, according to the latest Chinese Consumer Confidence Report, which is jointly released by China Economic Monitoring & Analysis Centre (CEMAC) of the National Bureau of Statistics and The Nielsen Company.

With the economy improving and the government ‘s subsidies program , consumers with Low Incomes who used to have lower confidence in the economy are now closer to the National average- reaching 102 with an increase (+12 points) viruses last quarter.

Results from the China Consumer Confident Report suggest that consumers have continued to regain their optimism about their economic future; however their willingness to spend has not increased, in fact it has decreased across different regions and city tiers. 43 percent of Chinese consumers think now is a good time to spend, which is a decrease of three percent vs the prior quarter. Willingness to spend is higher among consumers in East and Tier 1 cities.

Nielsen

Also read::Consumer Confidence in China Back to Pre-Recession Levels

Google Maps aggregated Shanghai Expo data and you can explore different pavilions, activities (not available in English version), and World Expo history.

Check out Expo on Google in Chinese or English.

Also read::Tencent Launched English Portal imqq.com for Expats