In my daily RSS reads, I came across this recent article on Tech Crunch which mentions that theoretically, Chinese social networking sites have the chance to monetize their sites to a greater degree that their Western counterparts. If you’re interested in reading it, it does offer some interesting points and really demonstrates another reason why despite the fact that China is such a massive market, the barriers or difficulties to entry are often un-calculated and largely unforeseen. Not too many people know this but for the better half of a year, we were in the soft-launch stages of a Hypebeast China version. We sort of had similar plans to everybody else who wanted to enter the China market but as well, ultimately we wanted to build something for the future. We had hopes that we could help provide some foundation or cornerstone to education and open some people up to what was going on globally. Unfortunately, things didn’t really pan out as we had hoped for the reasons I outlined. China is in itself a tough nut to crack, even between Hong Kong and Mainland China there are some marked differences in culture and society. If you read the Tech Crunch article (which focuses on how the Chinese social networking sites make money via apps/gifts etc), you can’t take a successful Western business model to war with the Chinese market and expect to come out on top. If I apply this to “blogging”, our inability to become effective started off with one of the fundamentals of blogging which is the sharing/linking of information and providing credit where credit is due. Lack of intellectual property is an extremely well-documented downfall of China, in fact most successful sites are probably a copy of a Western counterpart. You can’t go on forever if your work is getting blatantly ripped off within seconds of posting it up. Some went as far as erasing watermarks haha, we definitely didn’t want to degrade to posting up imagery with massive watermarks either. When confronted, the answer from the people who jacked our shit was simple “everybody else does it”. While this was the biggest difficulty, there are some other little matters as well. Sites that do well in China seem to be all encompassing, that offer a variety of services from food and gossip to porn leaving lesser interest in niche topics. But I must proceed with caution, frankly I’m not even all that down and knowledgeable with Mainland China culture and its Internet Culture. I can’t read Chinese and am pretty much the whitest Asian around. But regardless, the differences do exist. As people look to diversify themselves and lick their chops at the heaps of money the Mainland Chinese are in possession off, you really have to throw out your Western ideals in favor of a new train of thought. Probably hire a local to sort you out, but he’ll probably rip you off cause you’re not a local. Might be a bit racist, but it seems like a tactic some will practice without batting an eye to. All in all, this is a topic that is probably much more vast and requires knowledge that I don’t possess, but it is a topic that will only continue to proliferate itself.
>Tech Crunch: Chinese Social Networks Virtually Out-Earn Facebook and MySpace: A Market Analysis