Blogging Wave Sweeping China

Over the past four years, the blogosphere has been expanding at such a torrid pace that Technorati now estimates that about 120,000 new weblogs are created every day — roughly one and a half each second.

But the great majority of that growth has been limited to just two languages, Japanese (with 37 percent of the world’s blogs) and English (33 percent).

That’s about to change. There’s a new blogging market on fire — China. Since only 8 percent of current blogs, globally, are in Chinese, the world’s most spoken language has plenty of ceiling room. By the end of last year, China already had the second-largest number of Internet users (205 million), trailing only the U.S. (211 million), yet only an estimated 15.5 percent of China’s population has Internet access so far.

So, today I decided to visit some of the leading Chinese bloggers, and see what they had to say.

One popular Chinese audio blog, antiwave.net, is in the form a podcast created by Pingke and Flypig, out of their apartment in Beijing. They have gathered a cult following for their sarcastic style of audio programming, which includes news analysis and humorous deconstructions of mainstream magazines.

According to a recent survey of its users, antiwave mainly attracts young (80 percent in their Twenties), male (73 percent) students (39 percent). Of course it’s hard to make money from podcasting, so Jiang Hong (Pingke) and Lin Jiashu (Flypig) haven’t quit their day jobs yet. They both work for print publications.

A number of other bloggers have built up followings rivaling those of mainstream media brands. Probably the most successful is the actress Xu Jinglei, who, although not well-known outside of China, had by-mid 2006 the most incoming links to her Chinese language blog of any blog in any language on the Internet, according to Technorati.

Others I enjoyed included Wang Xiaofeng’s Massage Milk, which provides sharp cultural and social commentary; Hong Bo’s Keso, the requisite IT blogging leader; and Roland Soong’s ESWN, which aggregates and translates China-related news and analysis. ESWN is probably is the most influential Chinese blog among foreign journalists, with one example being its remarkable photo documentaries of The Real China that are very popular on Digg.

At the end of the day, of course, business models will have to be sorted out to support the explosion of blogging in China, as is the case everywhere. China’s online advertising market grew by 75 percent last year, according to a new report by iResearch Inc. The surge was driven by a boom in keyword search advertising, with an annual growth rate of 108.6 percent.That still leaves a lot of room for new growth. The United States, with barely more people online than in China, reported more than $22.5 billion in online advertising last year — 15 times more than that in China.