The pace of growth of China’s online gaming industry slowed in 2009, growing 30.2 percent to 27.1 billion yuan ($3.97 billion) over the previous year, according to data from research firm iResearch. Read More…

In a world of increasingly virtual human interactions, the idea of money is becoming more fluid than authorities find comfortable. China has officially outlawed the practice of exchanging virtual currency for real goods, and minors are no longer able to buy the virtual cash. These rules will help the government control trade in China, but they could also impact the huge gold-farming industry that exists in the country. Read More…

South Korea’s Internet searchers conducted an average of 104 searches in April/2008, nearly twice as many as Malaysians, who clocked in at 54 searches per searcher in April, according to Comscore’s latest findings. Perhaps the Malaysians should help the South Koreans find what they are looking for?

Asia’s largest number of searches, not surprisingly, came from the 82 million Chinese Internet users doing 6.2 billion searches in April. That is an average of 75 searches per Chinese searcher.

Search intensity get even more interesting with China vs Japan:

Japan’s 60 million Internet searchers conducted nearly the same number of searches (6.1 billion) as the 82 million Chinese searchers, a result of the heavier search volume per person in Japan (102.6 searches per searcher). Korea (104 searches per searcher) and Singapore (101 searches per searcher) also exhibited notably heavy search volume per person.

Another aspect of Asia’s Internet shown by the Comscore report is how local search sites challenge Google and Yahoo.

Across Asia, Google sites have a 39.1 percent share and Yahoo sites have a 24 percent share, but five of the region’s top ten search properties are local, including China’s Baidu.com (16.7 percent) and Korea’s NHN Corporation (5.3 percent), which owns search engine Naver.com.

The report adds:

Chinese properties Alibaba.com Corporation, Tencent Inc., and Sohu.com Inc., which host Internet-search functionality although they are not strictly search engines, rounded out the list of key local players.

Online Chinese shoppers spent 16.2 billion yuan (2.3 billion U.S. dollars) in 19 major cities in the first half of 2008, China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) said on recently.

The findings were based on a survey carried out in four municipalities directly under the central government — Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing — and 15 developed cities such as Changchun, Dalian, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Jinan and Guangzhou, among others.

About 8.4 billion yuan (around 1.2 billion U.S. dollars) — more than half of the total — came from male consumers, while 3.1 billion yuan (450 million U.S. dollars) were attributed to students.

The consumer-to-consumer (C2C) site Taobao.com, a subsidiary of online portal Alibaba.com in which Yahoo! invested 1 billion U.S. dollars in 2005, was the nation’s dominant Internet retailer. It had an online shopping penetration rate of 81.5 percent.

Dangdang.com was second with 16.6 percent, followed by Joyo, Amazon’s China subsidiary, with 13.6 percent. Eachnet, owned by Tom Online and eBay, had 8.4 percent, while Tencent’s C2C site Paipai.com was 7.2 percent.

According to the CNNIC, 91 percent of online shoppers who had heard of Taobao had made purchases at the site, while 61.4 percent of those familiar with Joyo had shopped there.

China’s Internet consumption hit 398.8 billion yuan (53.89 billion U.S. dollars) last year and is expected to reach 581.5 billion yuan in 2008, up 45.8 percent, according to a survey released recently.

The “Netguide 2008” survey, which provides a wrap-up of China’s2007 cyber world, polled more than 300 web sites and about 200 enterprises, with 50,786 interviewees around the country.

The Internet consumption includes all web-related expenses such as broadband installment expenses, payment for online game and shopping, and payment for IP phone services. according to Fu Zhihua, director of the Data Center of the China Internet (DCCI) research department that conducted the survey.

The DCCI survey also reports that Sina Corp., Netease.com Inc., Tencent and Sohu.com Inc., China’s four largest Internet portals, have gained most from the robust Internet industry, accounting for about 76 percent of total web portal revenue in China.

The market scale of financial web sites, fueled by bullish trends in China’s stock market, reached 920 million yuan, and online search engines saw 82.8 percent growth to 2.87 billion yuan in 2007, said the survey.

The Netguide 2008 shows that among Internet users, browsing daily news takes up 38.8 percent of their time, followed by dealing with e-mail, 11 percent, and writing and reading blogs, 9.2 percent.