April 06, 2009, 10:03 AM — Interesting marketing analysis on the social networking market in China. The authors explore how Chinese social networks are pursuing different business models than their American counterparts, relying more on micropayments and the sale of virtual goods.
According to the TechCrunch article:
"Despite China’s massively growing internet market, international giants like Google and Facebook are having trouble making gains with the 300 million Chinese online users. China’s netizens are on average very young – 66.7 % of them are younger than 29 years old and 35.2 % of them are teenagers—with social networking and entertainment applications being the most popular.
While companies like Facebook struggle to conquer market share in China and to create viable business models everywhere, their Chinese clones have built lucrative cash machines literally earning billions of dollars a year. Unfortunately, adopting Chinese methods may not help American social networks due both to cultural differences in Chinese user behavior and industry practices. Below is our analysis of the Chinese social networking scene.
