Current state of Blogging in China

Four out of ten Chinese claim to read blogs at least once a week. This is a higher percentage than is known for any Western country. Three out of ten people interviewed in China are likely to be motivated to take action after reading a blog, which is significantly higher than in Japan (18%) and South Korea (19%). Many of them prefer reviewing blogs instead of news portals. Actually, blogging only started in China in 2002 and became popular in 2004. It has now become an important part of life for Chinese internet users. There are dozens of blog service providers in the market such as Qzone, Sina Blog, Baidu Space, Blogbus and Hexun Blog, who are the top five (according to statistics from Chinalabs.com in July 2009).

Compared with the vigorous development of personal blogs (the number of blog users was 181 million by the end of June 2009), the use of corporate blogs is still in the warm-up phase in China. Only a small number of enterprises have set up their own corporate blogs.

Since there are not many cases to be learnt from, many companies have taken a wait-and-see attitude and some companies who have set up a corporate blog have adopted a more conservative approach. Take the Google China Blog (Chinese: 谷歌黑板报) for example, there is no function for leaving messages or comments for readers.

Since so many Chinese people like reading or writing blogs one could draw the quick conclusion that making a profit from writing blogs in China could be quite easy. But this is actually not the case. Take keso (the most famous IT blogger) as an example. He signed an agreement with Hexun, which is the biggest finance portal in China, to put some ads on his blog. After the expiration of the contract, keso decided to not extend the contract since he made razor-thin margins from it only. Keso is already a big shot in the Chinese blogosphere but even he can’t make a good profit from advertising, so one can imagine how difficult it is for Chinese bloggers to do so.