I put this together for a talk today and thought I’d share it for those who haven’t read the latest CNNIC report (#21) or who don’t feel like combing through it for some of the basics. The data comes mostly from that report, but also a bit from ESWN and ars technica.
Number of Internet users, 12/2007: 210 million (compare with U.S. at 215 million…getting close)
Penetration: 5% rural/20% urban/45% Beijing, Shanghai
- 60% of population is rural; vast majority not online, mainly because of “not understanding how to use computer” but also because of lack of infrastructure
- 3 of every 100 rural households has computer; 47 of every 100 urban households has computer
- About 1/3 using commercial Internet cafés
- Rural migrant workers are paying highest monthly rates for Internet use: they value it highly and they will drive diffusion
Cost: 900 yuan a year for home broadband, compared with about 600 in Internet café;
- Average price of 100Kbps of broadband in China costs $10.85 per month, about 20x US costs
- Chinese users pay average 10% of monthly income
Mobile: About one-quarter have ever used mobile to go online in last 6 months, of those about half are between ages of 18-24, and two-thirds of total are men.
The New York Times has a wonderful interactive map on pollution in China.
Link: Mapping the Impact
Jared Braiterman, a principal at Giant Ant, recently showed me some of their work from their on-going research on youths and technology (dubbed "Mobile China China Mobile").
Here’s an excerpt from one of their visual reports, entitled "Chinese Students Rarely Use Their Own Photos As Avatars" (download):
The research result is that, of the profile pictures analyzed, only 4 of 200 Chinese students abroad used their own picture as their icon versus 58 of 200 Americans.
Yet the sample contains some bias: the data for the Chinese users came from a BBS called 未名空间 while the American sample was UC Berkeley students’ blogs on Livejournal. Additionally, UC Berkeley students are far from homogeneous: I would say that the Chinese-Americans occupy a middle space between the two and therefore dilute the results.
Regardless, the original statistic, 4 of 200, stands. Yet, it’s the remaining 196 that is interesting. For example: why do people like to use baby pictures, and is that actually them as a baby?
Here’s a Flickr stream of more Giant Ant research artifacts, or you can read my 15-minute analysis on MySpace CN vs US profile pictures (blogged back in April).
A very smart, balanced, readable report, "How Much Inequality can China Stand?" has just been issued by Nick Young at China Development Brief. The report relies on Chinese scholarly and government data to give a succinct summary of some of the key areas of inequality in China today: gender, income (including intra-rural inequality), access to basic services and social protections such as education and health care, exposure to "externalities" such as the effects of urban congestion and pollution, environment and proximity to pollution, and land use deals.
The report argues that market forces are unlikely to create greater income convergence in the short-term, that state involvement is necessary and that it does exist:
…the predominantly urban NGOs that have emerged over the last decade, the “public intellectuals” who have voiced their concerns and the more adventurous media that have reported those concerns, by no means constitute a coordinated, united or oppositional force. There are, to be sure, some angry individuals who denounce abuses in ways that invite confrontation with the authorities. But the characteristic form of civil society advocacy in China is to call on government leaders to “pay more attention” to this or that social issue, to “hear the voice” of this or that social group, and/or to consult more extensively with NGOs, intellectuals, and the general public….The central government has recently introduced a number of social, economic and fiscal policy measures to alleviate rural hardship. It is too soon to judge the effect of these palliatives but they do at least appear designed to address what was, by the turn of the century, beginning to look like a crisis in the countryside.
I see from Danwei that CNNIC has released its 19th China Internet report with data to the end of 2006. Chinese copies available here. It seems that the rate of Internet growth is increasing rather than leveling off this year. They have some good new stats on mobile Internet–now I wish they’d gather IPTV statistics as well.
Main points of interest in the press release:
- 137 million Internet users, a 23% growth rate in 2006, compared with just above 18% growth rate in both 2005 and 2004
- 10.5% Internet penetration rate
- over 30% of Beijing’s population is online
- the .CN domain name grew at a rate of over 64% compared to 2005 (probably still fewer in total than .COM, would be my guess). China is said to be entering "the .CN era"
- 75% of Internet users are using broadband connections (xDSL, cable modem, or leased line)
- a bit above 12% of Internet users, or 17 million, have accessed the Internet through their mobile phones (compared to 13 million in July 2006)
- mobile Internet users are primarily male, unmarried, aged 18-24, work in an enterprise, and live in cities and towns
- 72% of mobile Internet users are mainly going online to send and receive email, while 31% are browsing news
- biggest issues for mobile Internet users are the high price and slow connection speed
Looks like the big news is that Sohu is no longer in the top 3 portals in China, but has been knocked out by Tencent. 55% of Chinese Internet users used Sina last year; 51% hit Netease; 48% used Tencent, according to the Internet Guide 2007 China Internet Survey Report (in Chinese), put out by the Data Center of the Chinese Internet. The rest of the top three rankings as follows:
blog sites: Sina 33%; Qzone 19%; MSN 16%
IM: QQ 79%; MSN 34%; Sina UC 11%
search: Baidu 81%; Google 36%; Yahoo 26%
car sites: Sina Auto 17%; Sohu Auto 12%; Pacific Auto 11%
games: QQ 37%; Lianqun/Ourgame 20%; Shanda 20%
podcast/video sharing: Toodou 10%; Yoqoo 9%; Mofile 9%
C2C auctions: Taobao 55%; eBay 37%; Paipai 20%
mapping services: Baidu 33%; China e-Map 中国电子地图网 19%; Go2Map 图行天下 11%
Link to Chinese BBS post (via TOPChinaLabs).
You can find the top 100 Chinese websites, calculated daily, at China Internet Index System (CIIS) 中国互联网指数 . Today’s top 10 are: 1) Baidu.com; 2) QQ.com; 3) Sina.com.cn; 4) Netease 163.com; 5) Sohu.com; 6) cn.yahoo.com; 7) Taobao.com; 
TOM.com; 9) Vnet.cn (who knew?); 10) Soso.com.
CIIS is a joint effort by Internet research and incubator Chinalabs.com (directed by Bokee.com CEO Fang Xingdong) and the National Bureau of Statistics. It was born in 2004 as CISI, but was revamped and relaunched this year in October as CIIS. They use their own standard, "CIIS value," to evaluate the direction of change for any particular website, but I can’t find any information on what goes into creating that "CIIS value," beyond the fact that they are "monitoring web traffic." Here’s the CIIS value for IT community site Donews.com, for the last two months:
The site also runs down the top 100 blog services, auto sites, tech sites, and more.
CIIS also calculates the Google page rank, Google search results, and Baidu search results, all on the same page so you can compare them. Get this: Donews.com has around 1.1 million results on Google, and more than 8.3 million search results on Baidu.
Finally, another useful feature is the piechart that tells you how the traffic is divided on the site’s sublevel domains, so that we can see that QQ is getting the most traffic on its Qzone, entertainment, and news domains. You could track the growth of new domains with the CIIS.
Maps help non-technical people like me conceptualize the Internet (if you know of China-specific Internet maps, please do let me know and I’ll blog them). Geoffrey Mack has a great new graph posted on the blog at Alexa.com, done by Alexa’s Applications Engineer, Derrick Pallas. It shows the distribution of top level domains (TLDs) by traffic. Dot-com (medium blue) is by far the most trafficked of the TLDs, but you can see that .com.cn (orange) and even .cn (dark blue) are pretty well-represented. Mack notes that:
Some of the most interesting and somewhat surprising datapoints occur
in the ranks 5 through 50 range, where both China and Japan are well
represented. But, further down the ranks, both China and Japan begin to
fall off and represent relatively small portion of the top 65K sites. Conversely, Russia is underpresented in the top sites, but out at the farther reaches of the graph is fairly well represented.
…if we were to redraw the graph showing the reach [note: the "reach" means what percentage of net users visit the site in any given day] of the TLDs, is that
the TLDs shown on the left of the graph would have a much larger
influence on the right of the graph. Meaning the graph would become
mostly blue, with some orange for China, some pink for Japan, and not
much else.
Chinese sites like Sina.com and QQ.com will reach an increasingly large percentage of the global Internet user population as more Chinese get online.
For our coverage of netbars today, we visit iResearch for some statistics.
Our appetizer: there are a decreasing number of netbars.
(green = 10,000s of netbars)
For our main course: the 2nd-tier cities have the most netbars.
(left = # netbars, green = first-tier city, yellow = second-tier city, blue = third-tier city)
And finally, for our dessert: gamers actually support the mandatory 3-hour break!?
(Of the 4460 polled, how many were parents?)
Link to first graph, second graph, third graph @ iResearch.
iResearch has compiled the Alexa data for us: Sina has the greatest reach (defined as how many Alexa users per million are using it everyday. Alexa says that in the last 3 months of this year, Sina’s reach has grown by another 8%.
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