The Chinese Internet: Why the “Copy Cats” Win | Hacker News Reader

The Chinese Internet: Why the “Copy Cats” Win

techcrunch.com

63 pointsvaksel39 comments

That was a really good article

  Put another way: Sure the Chinese can learn a 
  thing or two about original Web ideas from the
  Valley, but the Web 2.0 generation can learn a 
  lot about monetization from China.

and it goes to explain with an example with a Chinese version of match.com

That's true. The virtual good actually made Tencent, the largest IM provider became the most profitable company in China. And few months ago, one of my friends still argued that online-casual game has no market in U.S. because "the market was dominated by game console". The first widely-adapted webgame invented in China (www.mop.com), the company behind renren.com(largest facebook.com copycat in China). Those randomness (copycat vs. innovation) just amazed me how dynamic Chinese market is. There are too many innovations, but just too many are failed too early.

If you had a point I missed it or you need to reword what you said. It just reads like a bunch of information to me. This isn't a put-down, you seem to have a bunch of interesting information, but I'm not sure what you're getting at.

> The virtual good actually made Tencent, the largest IM provider became the most profitable company in China.

What 'virtual good?'

> And few months ago, one of my friends still argued that online-casual game has no market in U.S. because "the market was dominated by game console".

What does this have to do with the Chinese or innovation?

> The first widely-adapted webgame invented in China (www.mop.com), the company behind renren.com(largest facebook.com copycat in China).

What about these? You've listed them off, but are you relating these to the previous statement about 'online-casual games' having no market in the US? If so how does renren.com related to that? Are they the creators of mop.com? Even if this statement relates to the US having no market for casual online games, what point are you making? That the US is innovation-less because there are no popular/profitable online casual games?

> Those randomness (copycat vs. innovation) just amazed me how dynamic Chinese market is.

You didn't explain why the Chinese market is dynamic. Because of 'randomness?' How do you mean?

> There are too many innovations, but just too many are failed too early.

Too many innovative Chinese companies are failing before they 'make it big?'

sorry, I wrote these down in a math class in rush.

I think the copy-cat thing in China is overrated. Sure there are many copy-cats, which are somehow successful in domestic market. But there also many innovations are going on in China. Especially the innovation in monetization, micro-payment etc. There are a few examples:

1. Tencent in China is the first company that made their success solely based on the virtual good market (Same as Zynga's sales in Farmville etc.). They sell virtual costume for several cents and accumulated massive profit. And that is year 2003, for the note, online payment is very immature in China at that time. Tencent sold prepaid card from Internet cafe. That works, people bought prepaid card (usually for 5 RMB or 10 RMB) to pay the furnitures in their virtual home etc.

2. mop.com, back in 2004 (or 2005, I cannot recall correctly), developed the first web-based online game. It is a typical RPG game, but the innovation is that it requires no Flash, no plugins, no downloads. There is a reason for the development. The main visitor group of mop.com (a popular forum, like 4chan) is office worker, which have many spare time on computer but have no permission to download online games, this game just filled the hole. Another notable thing about mop.com is, it is also the company behind xiaonei.com, the largest copy-cat of facebook.com. Chinese companies are more realistic, and many have such hybrid gene of copy-cat and innovation.

3. China Mobile, the largest mobile service provider in China launched a product (actually a website for mobile phone) in 2003 called monternet which expect to provide all the applications/contents that needed for mobile phone users. It is so convenient in that time: you just need to click a link, and the payment will go to your next month phone bill (remember the situation I described about online-payment in 2003's China?). That is the model of iPhone's AppStore which get all the buzz recent years except it was launched by a ISP. The application sale part failed after one or two years because of the popular pirate software and wide adaption of symbian S60 OS in 2003 (made the universal compatibility is not necessary for most people).

Few months ago, my friend's words that online-casual game has no market in U.S. because "the market was dominated by game console" and the recent booming of Zynga/Playfish/Playdom made me think that there maybe no much difference between Chinese and U.S. market, some innovations in China may be suitable for U.S. market too. Some failures, like the monternet case may also have some indications for current U.S. mode (http://games.slashdot.org/story/09/10/24/0136250/App-Store-D...).

There are many innovations happened in China, and meeting true innovators in China are quite a pleasure thing for myself. Some innovations can even get global success from my perspective. but lacking of financial support, bad government policies against startup made the first-time-entrepreneur hard to succeed. But for copy-cat or serial-entrepreneur, they are simply much more capital friendly.

> The first widely-adapted webgame invented in China (www.mop.com), the company behind renren.com(largest facebook.com copycat in China).

mop.com was the most popular personal website in 2003-2005 then it was aquired by Oak Pacific Interactive. Then mop goes down fail ever since. Oak Pacific Interactive also aquired XiaoNei from WangXing. WangXing operates FanFou, a twitter copycat.

I think Chinese people will just relate better to homegrown stuff.

Good thing I'm Chinese. Hopefully I will have a cultural advantage if I decide to operate there one day.

Have you lived in Asia for a long period of time? There are clear cultural differences between people who have lived in China their entire life as opposed to someone who can speak Chinese and watches Asian music videos.

Just saying that a so-called "cultural advantage" vanishes if you, well, aren't of that culture.

(I was born in Taiwan, but... not so cultured.)

"... I think Chinese people will just relate better to homegrown stuff ..."

There are possible explanations to this idea in an article I read yesterday ~ "Welcome to China's millennium", Martin Jacques ~ http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/23/china-ma...

> I think Chinese people will just relate better to homegrown stuff.

Under proper localization foreign brand can dominate the market as well. Like P&G.

Localizations is not as simple as just hiring some guy translate the UI language. But that's what most Web companies are doing.

I think McDonalds, Starbucks, KFC, Coke, Pepsi, etc etc may disagree with you. Software has a thing or two to learn from those guys wrt China.

Agreed. And while the article characterizes the matchmaking service as "a Chinese version of match.com", that doesn't really do it justice -- their methods are actually quite different, even if the end goal (finding a mate) is the same. In this respect, it's something like comparing eBay and Craigslist.

It was a really interesting article but it draws a very general conclusion, that we can learn from the copy-cats "look how much they changed the business model" and listed a few examples, from a very specific example.

I mean, it what way were the job board and twitter clone different if we're drawing this out past a single example of successful dating website building in China

"men are universally attracted to women with a .7 hip-to-waist ratio"?

I suspect that this ratio has been reported backwards.

The number is correct, the wording is backwards. Studies have shown that waist-to-hip ratios (WHR) for women considered attractive within their cultures hover around average of 0.7. Interestingly enough, variation in attractive frontal WHR across cultures dissapears when using circumference as a measurement; in that case it collapsed down pretty reliably to 0.7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waist-hip_ratio

I clicked your link, and I have to say that their idea of a really attractive WHR is really spot on (the example at the top).

The last section is also very interesting. I'd like to see a study done on the people who find smaller hips more attractive, whether this correlates to less intelligence.

"...whether this correlates to less intelligence."

I laughed out loud when I read that line. Maybe it is correlated with poor eye-sight!

It's probably correlated with working in fashion.

http://boingboing.net/2009/10/06/the-criticism-that-r.html

The main reasons local versions are more popular are a combination of:

- it's in Chinese

- it's not blocked by the GFW

- it's faster (the GFW slows access to everything outside of it down)

- it's still accessible when China Telecom has been tweaking the routers and DNS servers (which they seem to do every week)

That is, practical reasons which lead to adoption and growth.

There are, of course, cultural specifics that have to be taken into account but those are pretty obvious if you're building a site in China for the the local market. And these local touches can only add to the site attractiveness together with being inside of the GFW. So, it's kind of obvious that a local site is going to do better than a foreign one.

Occassionally people will talk about designing the look of the site for the local market but I'm not convinced it's an issue. Good taste is good taste everywhere. For example, the iPod is just as popular here as everywhere else. A well designed and functional site in China is always going to win over the equivalent site that is outside of the GFW for the reasons above.

> the GFW slows access to everything outside of it down

Just FYI: the GFW works in parallel, all backbone cross nation data are copied to GFW equipments, and GFW actively injects RST packets into backbone transmissions. I don't see how this slows the Internet down. It's just the total bandwidth is too small. There has to be more cross-pacific fiber optics.

Yes the GFW is regional - i.e. there's more than one filter across the country. But the GFW actively monitors and blocks on content. This filtering and inspection takes finite time and hence slows everything down.

There is plenty of bandwidth. Accessing the same sites from Hong Kong is orders of magnitude faster. And BTW less prone to random errors introduced by clueless monopoly operators.

> blocks on content

Perhaps you didn't understand how GFW works. The content is delivered to you after the RST signal, it's just the standard TCP stack ignored it. You browser may loading a page in half then suddenly Page-Not-Found, but if you have sniffer like tcpdump you can see the rest of the packets were still sent to you correctly.

Another phenomenon to help you understand the mechanism is that GFW fails from time to time. Why? Because the RST packets arrives too late.

HK has its own Internet infrastructure, it has nothing to do with mainland Internet. In fact lots of inner-China Internet connections are routed to HK then to the rest of the world.

The fact that RST is sent mid stream in no way lessens the point that the content monitoring leads to a narrowing of bandwidth which slows things down.

HK's Internet Infrastructure maybe its own but it is still this side of the Pacific and it is a lot faster to access US sites from HK than it is from China. And if, as you said, China traffic is routed through HK then the only difference is the GFW which is slowing things down.

So what's your point? I don't see how GFW slows the Internet down in any way. Except RST packets bandwidth which is too tiny.

Just because you don't see how it slows things down does not mean that it does not slow things down. The web in China is slower than the web in HK. Why? I don't know precisely because I don't have access to the GFW of course. Think of it as a funnel, the communication has to pass through the funnel so that the RST (or whatever) can be inserted. There's only so much BW in to and out of the funnel - so the traffic slows. The very fact the filtering happens must insert some delay.

Have you tried the web in China?

I am sorry but I don't see any reasonable facts or explanation of how GFW slows the Internet down. HK is fast because your ISP is fast, it has nothing to do with GFW. I can download from ThePirateBay with the speed of 37MB/s in Chinese CERNET, and I can watch Youtube HD/HQ videos in ChinaTeleCom's 1Mb ADSL smoothly in midnight when the Internet is not busy.

I am a native Chinese living in China. And the tool I am using to visit youtube does not require any 3rd-party servers, it hacks into GFW and establish connections to blocked sites directly. :)

Wow, that matchmaking service sounds pretty intense. They literally ask women out for you.

And it clearly works; otherwise, there wouldn't be so many women using the site.

The thing that impressed me the most was the discussion of the quantitative work they have done. Song Li has generated an enormous database of pragmatic, mathematically proven advice about how to be successful with the opposite gender...somehow, using it for nothing more than a matchmaking service restricted to China seems small potatoes. Granted, it was gathered from a Chinese-only audience, so some of it is probably locale-specific. I'd be interested to see the same thing done on a more global scale and then adapted for other uses.

Yeah. It'd be awesome if they published it the way okcupid was.

I think author misses that the Chinese market isn't free and most of the western sites are blocked by the great Firewall. I think their market would look at lot differently if their market was free and anyone could compete on it.

So basically the Govt blocks free western sites so that these entrepreneurs can make money. Nice.

Match.com isn't blocked.

And if I'm a Chinese (I am) in China visiting a western website the first thing I'd think is "OMG it's not in Chinese", after which I'd go look for a native version. Some sites do localization, but it's rarely done correctly. For example search results are still polluted with foreign information and some pages are only available in English.

Not saying that your points aren't valid, but you should know that I've found western sites generally load far slower than Chinese ones in China. I completely gave up trying to use facebook without turning off images.

Your comment is probably misinformed. But even if it was a free market and nothing was blocked, it's still unlikely a foreign company will win out over a local homegrown equivalent. Like google/baidu, or cyworld trying to take on the US market etc.

You're ridiculously uninformed. The chinese market is very free, and very very few sites are blocked compared to the size of the internet. Don't comment when you have no idea.

Am I the only one that's getting 403'd when I try to access this page?

It looks like every article on techcrunch.com is down. Probably some apache rewrite issue.

You're not. I am as well. not sure why though

I don't think the 'copycats' win, it's just the originals didn't do their best.

ChinaHR sucks balls

http://www.google.com/search?q=chinahr+%E7%83%82

any first year college students can write better .asp pages than that, it's just many hiring companies are using ChinaHR exclusively and you have to apply on it.

Digu.com & Zhenai.com has a terrible reputation for spamming and selling private user data.

The real secret for winning in Chinese market? Marketing and PR. Especially good relationship with the right Communist party leader.

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