RIP Empson-writer at TechCrunch. He did not find friends here, he is here to win and you don't forget it. You can contact him at rip [at] techcrunch [dot] com ? more
China currently has the most Internet users of any country in the world, with approximately 420 million people connected to the Internet. Some more recent statistics even hung this number reaches 485 million. Of course, China has a population of just over 1.3 billion, which means that only 32 per cent of the population uses the Web, the percentage is much lower than in the United States and Japan (77 per cent and 78 per cent, respectively).
Of course, Web activities, continues to grow rapidly in China, the Asian power represents a huge digital market, even now, when the so-called "great firewall of China" has become difficult (or impossible) to complete the delivery of international digital technology and enterprise at the Chinese market.
Strict rules of web of China (and IP blocking, among other things) business United States not made a significant impact on the whole, even in spite of the fact that China Web users began the adoption of social networking, microblogging, gaming and much more with pleasure.
Twitter has been blocked in China in 2009, for example, but this did not prevent Chinese companies from adopting Twitter like microblogging platforms for their domestic market. Use the weibo (Chinese translation of "microblogging") exploded in China in the past few years, and the two companies began to dominate the market: Tencent and Sina.
Of course, the question of which company wins weibo race in China is open for discussion. The reason is that Tencent has essentially as iChinaStock.com puts it, objective, Myspace, Facebook and Twitter if they were combined into one, giant Joint venture. Tencent in IM applications, QQ Messenger (a.k.a. QQ), claims that 674 million active users (although it is very likely that the score is high in several hundred million).
QQ is a service that Tencent sequence its users in its products and services, including games, Tencent Weibo, to name a few. According to the iChinaStock microblogging in China really took off with the growing popularity of Sina Weibo in 2009 and 2010; Today, the popular microblogging service has nearly 140 million users.
However, since Tencent became Tencent Weibo in 2010, the service also grew at a breakneck pace, claiming more than 200 million registered users. But iChinaStock estimated that only about 93 million of these users are active on the service, and, although this number is still open for discussion, it is likely, as 40 per cent of users of Tencent QQ, Weibo registration through making registered statistics run high, whereas in fact many of these users are not active.
As always the question of the definition of "registered" against the "active" users was a delicate one, and when it comes to these Chinese microblogging service, much of the data is either unpublished, unreliable, or score.
Nevertheless, in respect of which the company wins the race, Digimind, solution provider that offers the competitive intelligence, and e-reputation, data mining and monitoring social media whipped up a nifty little infographic that gives us a peek into Weibo war, and both leaders stack against Twitter. (See below)
When Digimind Weibo Sina, the undisputed leader in the space of microblogging China, Tencent this is of course not be dismissed, as he grows exponentially, is an integrated, multi-tier platform from which users link in the Weibo and spends millions on marketing to attract new users to its service.
That being said, I said at the Digmind, along with sources in China (iChinaStock) all agree that Sina Weibo probably from Tencent in terms of number of active users, as well as quality. With Sina ownership 57 per cent of the Chinese market and find high microblogging adoption among Chinese celebrities (not mentioned have relatively stable platform without much downtime), Sina look like a leader. Not to mention, that the company had purchased "weibo.com" and "cn", weibo. two very important domain names for the company to dominate the market, not to stay weibo that they're just easier to remember.
While Sina Weibo compares favorably to Twitter in terms of adoption in China, the fact of the matter is Twitter is much more broad in scope, is now being translated into 11 languages, while Sina and Tencent remain localized to the Chinese market. (Although Sina Weibo plans to soon start in English.) Of course it may be that the market is so huge that no company effectively becomes "Twitter China", though of course, Sina Weibo seems at the moment have a competitive advantage.
However, in a broader platform for Tencent and patent property rights, achievements in the fields, including instant messaging, e-commerce, online payment services, search, information security and games, Tencent has diversified to say the least. And the massive adoption of QQ, Tencent, which is probably the first chips on a bigger prize: the social graph of China.
Let us know what you think.
Further reading: for the truly excellent compare Sina Weibo and Tencent (and Tencent Weibo), check out iChinaStock.com in the analysis here and Bill Bishop DigiCha in the analysis here.
Without further ADO, an infographic:
Extract image courtesy Technode
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