Chinese blogers reach 17.5 million, Blog commercialization shows big potential

In the emerging Chinese Weblog (Blog) market, the number of blog websites is experiencing a dramatic rise, whilst the number of users are increasing like snow ball effect. To explore the nature of this market, on September 23, 2006, China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) released “China Weblog Market Survey Report (2006)” during the annual China Internet Conference.

This report provided an in-depth overview on the issues of market scale, growth potential, and problems encountered in current Chinese Blog market.

Blog users reach 17.5 million, active blogs reach 7.7 million, and blog readers reach 75 million

CNNIC’s research report highlights the noticeable blog volume in the marketplace. The report indicates “By the end of August, 2006, Chinese blog writers have reached 17.5 million, and in which active blog writers (update more than once monthly in average) reached near upon 7.7 million. Additionally, there are almost 34 million blog space registered, absorbing more than 75 million blog readers, and 54.7 million of them are active readers.

In terms of registration year of active blogs, the scale of blog market has been developing two or three times annually since 2002. Current size of market has grown more than 30 times compared with that in 2002. According to such growing speed, it can be predicted that the number of active blogs will exceed 10 million by the end of this year.

Blog advertising shows big potential

Blog advertising has become one of the most popular topics in current blog development. CNNIC’s 2006 survey report presented a comprehensive analysis regarding the feasibility of blog ad campaign, based on the attitude and behaviors of blog writers and readers. The result showed that more than 40% writers accept blog advertising, whilst 20% readers do not think blog ad will not affect their reading practices, besides one third of the readers hold neutral attitude towards blog ad. Positively anticipating, in terms of blog ad campaign, there might be little annoying effect on half of the readers.

However, advertising clients are still suspicious of the market, because marketers lack of material approaches to analyze ad audience and the measurement of the effectiveness of ad campaign in such field. In discussing this issue, Blog research team suggests that one of the effective methods of inspiriting ad clients to invest and make individual blog users commercialize their blog, is to have relevant institutions to provide traffic data of independent domains of blog users and to explore its sourcing.

Three issues faced in Chinese blog development

Although the blogsphere is developing significantly, there are a number of potential issues unveiled by CNNIC’s report. One of the most crucial issues is the huge waste of Blog space. There are over 70% “sleeping” blogs (updated less than once a month in average) among almost 34 million blog space. The existence of “sleeping blog space” makes an enormous waste of Internet resources. Moreover, another two unstable factors are the low customer satisfaction degree and the lapse of blog users caused by unideal service provided by BSP (blog service provider). It can be concluded that the constant development of blog market requires both positive efforts from BSP and administrative organizations.

《Chinese blog research report》