China seems to be at the center of social media news lately. One of the Mashable post titled “China Blocks Twitter (And Almost Everything Else)” States that “the Chinese authorities have blocked internet access to Twitter, Flickr, Bing, Live.com, Hotmail.com and several other sites. Wordpress, YouTube, Blogger are also blocked.” What is the future of the US social media in China market?
Myspace seems to be one of the few social media sites that have successfullylaunched in China (launched in April 2007). However, Myspace.cn only ranks #2,421, according to Alexa, a web traffic reporting company. This number is nowhere even close to its US counterpart myspace.com, the ranking for which is #11.
On the other hand, QQ, owned by Tencent, still has the lion’s share in the entire China social media market. QQ now claims to have over 300 million active users, versus the 200 million users for Facebook. QQ is the most popular instant messaging computer program in Mainland China. Not only known for its IM client, QQ also offers several other services such as QQ.com, QQ Game, QZone, QQ Show, Paipai.com, and QQ Xiaoyou.
QZone is the social networking service of QQ. A report (all in Chinese) released by Tencent back in January of 2009 allegedly said that QQ now has the biggest social network around the globe. Other than QZone, QQ has other social networking services such as QQ Xiaoyou, which targets students in high schools and universities. Although QQ Xiaoyou was only launched in January 2009, it already had over 20 million registered users by February. Quite impressive.
Finally, let’s come back to Facebook, the biggest social media networking site in the US, Europe, and South America. According to Nielsen Online’s June report on Internet usage, people spent most time on Facebook compared to all other popular website brands. To be more specific, a typical Facebook user spent, on average, about 4 ½ hours/per month on Facebook.
So, it seems like there’s really an uphill battle in China market for the US social media companies. What do you think is Facebook’s future in China ? How about Twitter? What do you think about the GFW in China? Your comments are always welcome.
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