Battle of blogs in China

Reuters
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 10, 2005


HONG KONG Blogging is blooming in China as the country's vast pool of Web users try to make their mark online and ambitious local start-ups battle foreign heavyweights for a piece of the market.

China now has a 14.2 million-site "blogosphere," with a new blog, or Web log, created every second, according to Technorati, a Web site that tracks blogs.

The growing stable of online scribes, still small by global standards, has attracted homegrown companies and foreign giants like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo offering blogging Web pages to outspoken Chinese Internet users.

The medium has already produced at least one celebrity of sorts, a woman who goes by the blog name Furong Jiejie, whose steamy online entries include passages like: "I have a physique that gives men nosebleeds."

"Users don't care too much if the blog company is foreign or local, but I think local companies have more understanding of the community," said Kevin Wen, a spokesman for a Beijing-based start-up, Bokee.com, whose name is the Chinese word for blog.

Bokee, formerly called BlogChina, has attracted 5 million yuan, or $616,500, in seed money as well as $10 million in venture capital funding from six U.S. and Chinese firms.

It aims to become the first Chinese blogging company to list on the Nasdaq, said its chief executive, Fang Xingdong, adding that the company expected its revenue to grow to five times its August level by the end of this year and its user base to reach 10 million.

Two rivals, Blogbus.com and BlogCN.com, have also said that they are in discussions with venture capital firms.

Initial public stock offerings from Chinese technology companies have proved popular so far, with the Web search company Baidu.com the latest to strike gold. Its shares more than quadrupled in value in their U.S. market debut last week.

China is the second-largest Internet market in the world after the United States, with 120 million users forecast by the end of the year. But the number of bloggers is still relatively small, about six million, according to various sources.

Microsoft says more than a million users in China have joined its MSN Spaces service, which is operated out of China and was started in the country just three months ago. That number is growing by an average of 30 percent per month, said Sally Ip, MSN Asia's regional trade marketing manager.

Bokee, which was set up in 2002, claims the biggest share of the Chinese blogging market, with about two million registered users, and it said it was adding 6,000 to 10,000 daily.

Since blogging services are usually free, companies make most of their revenue from advertising.

Wen, of Bokee, said he might begin to charge for blogging services at the end of this year, but still saw most of the company's revenue coming from advertising and wireless charges.

Bokee's site carries ads from companies including Dell, Nokia, Hewlett-Packard and International Business Machines. Bokee declined to say how much advertising revenue it generates.

But speaking one's mind online can be risky in a country where the media are tightly controlled and chat forums and online bulletin boards are routinely monitored for controversial political comments.

China has been cracking down on Internet content, from politics to pornography, but it has struggled to control the medium as more Chinese get Web access and use it to gain information from other than official sources.

By comparison, bloggers in the United States have come to hold considerable sway over public discourse, debunking news reports and influencing decision-makers.

Whether blogging will give rise to a comparable class of self-made political pundits in China may depend on the tradeoffs both foreign and domestic companies make to operate there.

Microsoft's blog venture in China recently came under fire for censoring words like "freedom," "democracy," "human rights" and "Taiwan independence" from the subject lines of its free online journals.

Microsoft rivals like Yahoo and Google and homegrown players Sina and Sohu.com have also been known to censor content in China.

"It's hard for us to avoid the censorship, but we have to protect the business," said Wen, of Bokee. "When you do business in China, you have to follow the rules."


HONG KONG Blogging is blooming in China as the country's vast pool of Web users try to make their mark online and ambitious local start-ups battle foreign heavyweights for a piece of the market.

China now has a 14.2 million-site "blogosphere," with a new blog, or Web log, created every second, according to Technorati, a Web site that tracks blogs.

The growing stable of online scribes, still small by global standards, has attracted homegrown companies and foreign giants like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo offering blogging Web pages to outspoken Chinese Internet users.

The medium has already produced at least one celebrity of sorts, a woman who goes by the blog name Furong Jiejie, whose steamy online entries include passages like: "I have a physique that gives men nosebleeds."

"Users don't care too much if the blog company is foreign or local, but I think local companies have more understanding of the community," said Kevin Wen, a spokesman for a Beijing-based start-up, Bokee.com, whose name is the Chinese word for blog.

Bokee, formerly called BlogChina, has attracted 5 million yuan, or $616,500, in seed money as well as $10 million in venture capital funding from six U.S. and Chinese firms.

It aims to become the first Chinese blogging company to list on the Nasdaq, said its chief executive, Fang Xingdong, adding that the company expected its revenue to grow to five times its August level by the end of this year and its user base to reach 10 million.

Two rivals, Blogbus.com and BlogCN.com, have also said that they are in discussions with venture capital firms.

Initial public stock offerings from Chinese technology companies have proved popular so far, with the Web search company Baidu.com the latest to strike gold. Its shares more than quadrupled in value in their U.S. market debut last week.

China is the second-largest Internet market in the world after the United States, with 120 million users forecast by the end of the year. But the number of bloggers is still relatively small, about six million, according to various sources.

Microsoft says more than a million users in China have joined its MSN Spaces service, which is operated out of China and was started in the country just three months ago. That number is growing by an average of 30 percent per month, said Sally Ip, MSN Asia's regional trade marketing manager.

Bokee, which was set up in 2002, claims the biggest share of the Chinese blogging market, with about two million registered users, and it said it was adding 6,000 to 10,000 daily.

Since blogging services are usually free, companies make most of their revenue from advertising.

Wen, of Bokee, said he might begin to charge for blogging services at the end of this year, but still saw most of the company's revenue coming from advertising and wireless charges.

Bokee's site carries ads from companies including Dell, Nokia, Hewlett-Packard and International Business Machines. Bokee declined to say how much advertising revenue it generates.

But speaking one's mind online can be risky in a country where the media are tightly controlled and chat forums and online bulletin boards are routinely monitored for controversial political comments.

China has been cracking down on Internet content, from politics to pornography, but it has struggled to control the medium as more Chinese get Web access and use it to gain information from other than official sources.

By comparison, bloggers in the United States have come to hold considerable sway over public discourse, debunking news reports and influencing decision-makers.

Whether blogging will give rise to a comparable class of self-made political pundits in China may depend on the tradeoffs both foreign and domestic companies make to operate there.

Microsoft's blog venture in China recently came under fire for censoring words like "freedom," "democracy," "human rights" and "Taiwan independence" from the subject lines of its free online journals.

Microsoft rivals like Yahoo and Google and homegrown players Sina and Sohu.com have also been known to censor content in China.

"It's hard for us to avoid the censorship, but we have to protect the business," said Wen, of Bokee. "When you do business in China, you have to follow the rules."