China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) recently released two reports on China’s mobile Internet, according to the reports, there are already over 640 million mobile users in China by the end of 2008, among them about 117.6 million users have used mobile devices to access Internet in last six months, more than doubled from a year ago. The report said that about 34% of China’s mobile Internet users are active mobile Internet users everyday. Read More…

China-based blogs total 107 million, with more than 42 percent of netizens running a blog, a senior information official said here on recently.

Cai Mingzhao, deputy director of the Chinese State Council Information Office, made the comment at the 2nd U.S.-China Internet Industry Forum.

The number of blogs was about 40 million just a year ago.

Cai noted Web 2.0 service, which makes writing and other sorts of participation of Internet users possible, has inspired many people to create content online.

There were 253 million people online in China as of June, up 56.2 percent year-on-year. E-commerce transactions amounted to 2 trillion yuan (about 300 billion U.S. dollars) in 2007, and 25 percent of netizens had bought something online as of June this year.

“China has the world’s largest online population and I believe the number is showing continuous growth,” said Hu Qiheng, director of the Internet Society of China.

Hu said online music and news are the most popular types of web content in China, and instant communication services, video streaming, search engines and online games also ranked high on the popularity list.

“The Internet is a strong driver of the reform and opening-up process of China and a new engine of the development of China’s economy and society,” said Cai.

On April 25th, 2008, China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) released the Research Report of China Youth Internet Behaviors. The report studies the online behaviors of 107 million China’s netizens under the age of 25. (Download the report in PDF format here)

According to the report, China’s youth netizens are more inclined to entertainment demand. The most used online serves for youth are IM(91.3%), online music(91.1%), online movie/video(82.9%), search engine(73.4%), online games(68.2%), online news(63.4%) and email(58%).

If compared with the average usage level of all Internet users, the usage rate of online games, online music and online movie/video among youth are much higher than average rate. For example, 68.2% China’s youth play online games, compared with that of 59.3% for all netizens. However, only 63.4% youth visit online news sites, 10.2 percentage lower than the average level of 73.6%.

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Young Internet users also have stronger desire to make friends and communicate with friends online, 55.9% of them have the experience of making friends through the Internet, and over 90% of them use IM tool, most likely QQ, to chat with friends online. One third of China’s youth have updated their blogs/spaces in last six months, higher than the average level of less than one fourth. For university students, even over half of them have updated blogs/spaces in last six months.

The report said, rural young users have some different online behaviors, they mainly use Internet for online chatting and online music, which have similar penetration rates as that of urban users. The usage of search engine, email and online news among rural young users are much lower than those of urban youth, ranging from 11 percentage to 19 percentage.

The report also proposed some suggestions to regulator, such as to strengthen the regulation on Internet cafe and to deal with the online game addiction problems among youth.

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.

Chinese Web users will spend 45.8 percent more this year on online games and booking hotel and flight tickets, among other services available online: total spending by Chinese Internet users will hit 581.5 billion yuan (US$77.53 billion), said an Internet Society of China report issued recently.

Of last year’s spending, the bulk was for Internet access fees and online shopping, while only a small percentage of users paid for services such as online music, video and anti-virus software, the report, titled Netguide 2008, showed. The spending figures don’t include online advertising.

The report’s findings are based on data collected from a survey of 50,786 mainland Internet users and 270 companies across the country, as well as from seminars and interviews with industry experts.

The monthly spend per Web user last year was 182.6 yuan, and ISC predicts a 8.8 percent growth for each Web user this year.

Online game, ranking third most paid-for service per Web user last year, is expected to bring the game companies a total of 13 billion yuan in sales this year, 39 percent more than last year, as the number of gamers expands by 11 million to 59 million.

Among other rapidly growing sectors, online travel registered a 65.4 percent growth over 2006 last year to reach 2.25 billion Yuan as more and more travelers are using the Internet to book hotels and air tickets.

Search-related ads in China generated sales in of 2.87 billion Yuan (a little over 380 Million US dollars) last year, a whopping 82.8 percent year-on-year growth. It should continue to grow at 81 percent this year, outpacing growth of online branding ads sales, and hit nine billion Yuan in 2009 (over 1.3 Billion US Dollars).