Internet in China: What Do Chinese Internet Users Do Online?

China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) just released its latest semi-year report on development of Internet in China. According to the report, by the end of 2007, the number of Chinese Internet users has reached 210 million, an increase of 48 million compared to the first semester, or 73 million in last year. Among these 73 million new Internet users, 29.17 million, or about 40%, come from rural area. About 50.4 million users use mobile handsets to access Internet, just adding 6 million new mobile Internet users in last six months.

Besides Internet population data, we also need to pay attention on survey results on users online behavior in the report:

• 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, while the usage rate of online news decrease from 77.3% to 73.6%.
• 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 months.
• 35.4% users published posts in blogs or BBS. 12.7% people uploaded movies online while 10.4% uploaded short video clips online.

The full report in Chinese can be downloaded (PDF format) from CNNIC.

Read Also:

• Internet in China: Over 100 Million Youth Seek Fun Online
• Chinese People and Their Mobile Phones: Over 117 Million Mobile Internet Users in China
• Internet in China: blogs exceed 100 million
• Internet in China: Search engine users up 33.6% year-on-year, exceeding 200 million
• Internet in China: 47 million Bloggers