But about two years ago China made its ccTLD a lot more affordable and easier to get. Since then, the country has been registering roughly 20,000 country codes a day. The country went from 2 million registrations to 10 million registrations in an amazing 12 months.

Within the past two months, China overtook Germany for the top spot, with approximately 11.4 million registrations. It’s safe to say that Germany isn’t going to take that lead back.

Below is the list of the leading countries overall:

The country that stands the best chance of one day giving China a run for its money is India. But I’m not holding my breath. India stands at only 1.2 million registrations currently and is growing at 46% annually. It’s an impressive growth rate — a rate that is bound to increase, but China is also adding registrations at a good clip.

Why isn’t .us higher on the list? Blame .com. Most Americans assume .com is synonymous with USA. Over time, I expect this to change, but that’s a topic for a future post…

This means that Facebook is available in Catalan, Cantonese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, and Taiwanese.

Facebook has adopted the same approach Google used to localise its interface for different markets by asking for volunteers to do the work. According to their translations community forum, 63 languages in total are currently open for translation with support coming soon for right-to-left languages including Arabic, Divehi, Persian, Syriac, Urdu and Yiddish.

But can the local ‘culture’ cope with the Facebook phenomenon? That is the big question. There are already a great many social networking sites in many countries which clearly respond to local culture as they are ‘home grown’. Do people need to network with people in other languages they don’t speak? And can the Facebook format - which is more complex than Google’s, truly respond to the challenges ahead? Watch this space.

Souce: Guardian Online

“Because Google and Yahoo! have a strong presence in many Asia-Pacific countries, they account for the majority of searches conducted in the overall region,” said Jack Flanagan, comScore executive vice president. “However, there are several strong, local country search engines that also play a significant role in the region. Most notably, the dominant search engine in China, Baidu.com, accounts for one out of every six searches in Asia-Pacific notwithstanding the fact that its users are primarily from China.”

What interesting is that 5 out of the Top 10 Search Properties in Asia-Pacific (April 2008) were the region based engines such as Korea’s Naver and China’s Alibaba.

comScore’s data also shows the country by country breakdown of Internet audience in the region. China ranks #1 with 82,814,000 unique searchers and Japan ranks #2 with 60,050,000 unique searchers. Korean searchers have most number of searches per searcher (103.5) followed by Japan’s 102.6 searches per searcher.

This isn’t the first time YouTube has been blocked in China. The last time was during the 17th Communist Party Congress in October of 2007 and was thought to be because the award of a US congressional gold medal to the Dalai Lama. Chinese police and soldiers clashed with Buddhist monks in several towns in Tibet during a crackdown on celebrations to mark that event.

The Shanghaist also reports that CNN and BBC are also getting routinely blacked out.

“A buoyant economy, massive investments in broadband infrastructure and strong consumer demand for applications including online games, instant messaging and online-music and online-video sharing are fuelling China’s rapid Internet growth,” said BDA chairman Duncan Clark.

Of course Google dominated the study, with 62% audience share, followed by Yahoo! with 12.8%. Microsoft came in 4th with 2.9%. Yandex the Russian search engine now appears on the statistics, with 0.9%.

Source: ComScore

International companies use Omniture to optimize their search marketing budgets and manage advertising spending. Baidu.com recently took the lead in the online advertisement market in China passing Sina.com.cn in 2007, according to iResearch, a Shanghai Internet research firm.

Source: comScore

In additon to the number of Internet users, the report looks at online behavior of Internet users in China. You can download the report but it is in Chinese. Thanks to Tangos at the China Web2.0 Review blog for highlighting these facts;

About 34% users access Internet in Internet cafe, most of them(74.8%) are users with high school education or below. Internet cafe is more popular in rural area, about 48% rural Internet users will use Internet cafe.

The most popular online service is online music, about 86.6% netizens use online music, followed by IM (81.4%), online movies (76.9%), online news (73.6%), search engine (72.4%), online gaming (59.3%) and email (56.5%). If compared with previous report, the usage rates of online music, IM, online movies and online gaming all increased significantly.

23.5% users have their own blogs or spaces, that is about 49.35 million bloggers.

As for the first thing people will do online, IM chatting is the first choice (39.7%), followed by reading news (20%), playing games (9.3%) and search engine (7.4%), as we said before many Chinese Internet users go online just for IM chatting or playing games.
In China, IM tools is much more important than email, esp. for users aged under 25.

Interestingly, the report said 48.3% people trust online news from portal sites, while only 31.4% will trust posts in blogs or BBS. For BBS, Gang Lu just published an excellent post on Chinese BBS phenomenon.

22.1% users, or 46.4 million made online shopping in last six month

35.4% users published posts in blogs or BBS. 12.7% people uploaded movies online while 10.4% uploaded short video clips online.

Good news for Youku but new regulations to be implemented on January 31, 2008 could put video sharing websites in a precarious position. The new regulation states that websites showing online videos inside China will need a license. State owned or controlled companies in China are the ony ones that will be eligible.

One way to get past the new rules would be for private sites inside China to partner with TV stations or newspapers, which in China all are state-owned, said Dick Wei, a Hong Kong-based technology analyst for investment bank J.P. Morgan. Wei said the state entity could own the content _ satisfying the new rules _ while splitting the profits with the private entity.

Other top video sharing websites in China include: 56.com, mofile.com, 5show.com, tudou.com, pomoho.com, uume.com and 6rooms.com.

Source: Reuters

The lawsuit was brought by label companies EMI, Universal Music Group, Warner Music, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and 7 other members of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). The court ruled that Yahoo! China will now has to pay $28,600 in damages, far less than the $750,000 the music group was seeking.

Meanwhile, Baidu.com successively won the first and second round of their trial. Seven label companies filed the lawsuit against Baidu.com for infringement of their music copyrights. Baidu.com, like Yahoo! China had been insisting that the responsibility lied in the third party websites that provided the illegal music downloads. The local court in Beijing ruled that the music download service offered by Baidu.com was in fact legal.

Early this year, Baidu and EMI signed a strategic partnership deal for online music streaming and download services. Baidu is now authorized to stream EMI Chinese music on its music search channel. EMI Music, the world’s largest independent music company, will share the revenues generated by the advertising.

Beijing Guge Sci-Tech wants Google to change its Chinese name and to pay legal costs although no sum was mentioned in the court documents. The name “Guge” is not a real word in Chinese but a transliteration.The characters mean “valley song”.

From China Search Daily

Baidu says that the decision process will be very simple, just pick up the hottest name / people among the search queries.

Source: China Search Daily

nl

Alibaba, a B2B website that is 40% owned by Yahoo is an export facilitator that connects Chinese exporters with global buyers. Its shares nearly tripled in debut trading in Hong Kong Tuesday raising $1.5 billion. This is second only to Google’s $1.7 billion in August of 2004 for initial public offerings of Internet companies.

Each report will also provide a snapshot of search engine usage and activity around the world, which can be compared against for the following year. This should help identify growth or decline for the search engines in each local market.

In the 2007 report we have covered the following 17 countries:

• Bulgaria - Georgi Georgiev (Investor BG PLC)
• China - David Temple (China Search Marketing Tour)
• Czech Republic | Slovakia - Katerina Rotterova (BenedaGroup.com)
• Denmark - Rasmus Sørensen (TLA Media)
• Estonia - Robin Gurney (Altex Marketing)
• Iceland - Kristjan Mar Hauksson (Nordic eMarketing)
• Israel - Gilad Sasson (Search Marketing)
• Italy - Sante Achille (Search Engine Consultant)
• Japan - Motoko Hunt (AJPR)
• Portugal - Nuno Hipólito (Search Marketing)
• Russia | Ukraine - Nick Wilsdon (e3internet)
• South Korea - Ebina Cho
• Spain - Oscar Carreras (WebCertain)
• The Netherlands - Peter Kersbergen (WebCertain)
• United Kingdom - Andy Atkins-Krüger (WebCertain)

The report can be downloaded free of charge by clicking the following link.

 Download Global Search Report 2007 21 Pages (1.3MB)

The Asia-Pacific region, which includes large markets such as China, Japan and India, saw 258 million unique searchers conduct 20.3 billion searches. Europe reported the second-most searchers (210 million) and searches (18 billion), followed by North America, with 206 million searchers and 16 billion searches. The Latin American region demonstrated the heaviest search activity per person, with more than 95 searches per searcher in August. The search market in the Middle East-Africa region is the most underdeveloped thus far, with the fewest searchers (30 million), searches (2 billion), and searches per searcher (70).

The report also found that in terms of worldwide search property, MSN has now lost third position to the Chinese engine Baidu. Korea’s Naver has also made a strong appearance at 5th place.

Google Sites ranked as the top worldwide search property in August with 37.1 billion searches conducted. Of that total number, 31 billion occurred at the Google search engine and 5 billion occurred at YouTube.com. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 8.5 billion searches, while Baidu.com, a Chinese language search engine, followed in third place with more than 3.2 billion searches. Microsoft Sites ranked in fourth place worldwide, while Korea’s NHN Corporation, which owns Naver.com, ranked fifth with 2 billion searches worldwide.

Source: ComScore

In July 2004, China Yahoo boosted the storage capacity for its free mail service from 100MB to 1GB to match Google’s offering. Google began offering free Gmail.com accounts in China early this year in order to promote its brand. The Chinese holder of the domain name “Gmail.cn”, ISM China, refused to relinquish the domain name although the logo and design of Gmail.cn is similar with Google’s Gmail.com.

Source: China Tech News