Orchis Tower

Trying to come to grips with the all-important topic of Chinese portal brands and their strategies. I’m still crunching the available numbers and details, but here are some first observations:

Reading the 3rd quarter financial reports of the big players, one thing that becomes obvious is the overwhelming importance of (meaning also: dependence upon) a still tremendously growing advertising market. Car Industry, IT, and Finance are the most important customers.

QQ, Sina and Sohu have very popular blog services, providing roughly between 10 and 20 percent of their web traffic. But the business models are still unclear. QQ monetizes on its service by selling virtual items for blog decoration. Sina is doing some experiments with context ad revenue sharing, but is still in very early stages with some celebrity weblogs as playing ground.

Sohu’s most significant recent success is in the gaming sector, driving their gaming revenues up by several hundred percent. They’ve been following QQ’s success in online gaming with Tian Long Ba Bu 天龙八部, an inhouse-developed 3-D online game based on a popular novel and CCTV series. It earned them more than 10 million US-Dollars since its launch in May.

No report yet about the outcome of the new Sohu 3.0 blogging environment, launched on the day of my last arrival in Beijing in late July. (I’ve seen Sohu CEO Charles Zhang raise the Sohu 3.0 flag.)

The portals seem to be still suffering from the loss of one of their most important former cash-cows: mobile ‘value-added’ services. The pains are due to changed government policies in the last year and more competition from the mobile providers themselves.

As an aside, when I recently mentioned my fledgling Chinese media research in a conversation with some german colleague, he immediately talked about the recent spectacular Alibaba 阿里巴巴 IPO. Something like that would have been impossible even only a few months ago. It seems that China’s finally got some global brands after all (and it’s not necessarily the search engine giant Baidu 百度).

Corporate media are on the rise. In a country like Germany, where established journalistic standards like thorough research and independence are felt to be under attack by an ongoing commercialization, this fact is mostly met with suspicion and skepticism. In a country like China, where the times of a journalism dominated by government decree and formulaic propaganda are not long past, corporate publishing may even be a liberating force.

The Chinese business weekly “Economic Observer” has an interesting article (in english translation!) about The Evolution of Corporate Media, portraying among others a monthly magazine by the renowned real estate company Soho, the Soho XiaoBao 小报 (Soho Small Paper). The very excellent Danwei.org provides necessary background.

China is considered by many to be the wild Wild West of Intellectual Property. Not necessarily so, when there are reasonable standards, it seems. Thanks to the relentless work of Prof. Wang Chunyan, the Creative Commons movement is gaining ground in China. On November 4th, a Chinese CC Photo Award was celebrated in presence of Joichi Ito, chairman of the CC board, sponsored, among others, by portal giant sohu.com.

(Via China Vortex)

If I interpret this news correctly, Chinese portal provider Sina.com has registered 1.5 million entries as yet in its blogs related to Ang Lees movie “Lust, Caution”, making it the most commented-upon movie in the history of Sina.com.

God knows how many entries that would have been had the Chinese been allowed to see the unpurged, even more erotic original version of the movie.

(Via Pacific Epoch , though a little misleading)

I start this blog with an unspectacular pointer to the 3rd Annual Chinese Blogger Conference in Beijing. John Kennedy has an english language live blog from the event. Protocoling among other things a talk by Flypig (飞猪) about the very professional and interesting Podcast site “Antiwave (反波)” (produced by Flypig together with former radio journalist Ping Ke 平客). Wish I could understand more of Antiwave’s shows. Danwei.tv, in one of Jeremy Goldkorn’s famous Hard Hat Shows, has an interview with the makers. Antiwave received the Global Best Podcast Award of Deutsche Welle in 2005.

Postscript: Good summaries of the first and the second day of the conference (with pictures!) by David Feng at BlogNation, and by Rebecca McKinnon at her blog RConversation.

There are Starbucks cafés at nearly every corner of the new business areas of Beijing. In the one located in the Sohu office building I happen to meet Xu Zhiyuan, a friend of Q and renowned columnist. Zhiyuan is Beijing’s visionary-in-residence. Even though with his long hair and trademark fluttering white shirt, jeans and half-boots he looks like a 21st century urban hippie, his columns have a devoted followership among the new paragons of Chinese Wealth and Power. The titles of his two recent collections of articles are programmatic: “Born in the 1970s. Those Troubled Youngsters” and “I Want to be a Part of the World”.

Zhiyuan is a voracious reader. Wherever you meet him a book is in his hand or lying in front of him. His apartment is filled to the brim with historical and political literature written in Chinese or English. Still our conversation is usually somewhat limited because of the language barrier. Today we both show a little more patience. I ask him how he considers his role in contemporary Chinese culture. He says he’s not someone trying to give answers to the big questions. Mostly his ambition is to point to the complexity of issues, counter-balancing the simplified world view provided by the Chinese educational system.

He wants to know whether I am a follower of any philosophical or historical doctrine or theory. I reply that for me History and Society are nonlinear phenomena, resisting any attempt at satisfying theorizing. He tells me that recently he’s started to read more fiction, and asks me about Bernhard Schlink’s novel “The Reader” which seems to have made its way even to China. We talk a little about the impact of epochal guilt on the following generations, the fog it creates impeding the development of a historical perspective.

When I leave him, Zhiyuan again turns towards his book. Later he will write a blog entry about this afternoon, starting by explaining his sentimental bond with the neighbourhood (memories of girls passing by to the sound of high-heels on the concrete pavement, of late-night ramblings and the search for mysterious records,…), then reporting in full detail a moment of pure intellectual bliss encountered during the reading of his book. A true follower of Walter Benjamin in China’s capital.