The Chinese Internet: Why the “Copy Cats” Win

I think the copy-cat thing in China is overrated. Sure there are many copy-cats, which are somehow successful in domestic market. But there also many innovations are going on in China. Especially the innovation in monetization, micro-payment etc. There are a few examples:

1. Tencent in China is the first company that made their success solely based on the virtual good market (Same as Zynga's sales in Farmville etc.). They sell virtual costume for several cents and accumulated massive profit. And that is year 2003, for the note, online payment is very immature in China at that time. Tencent sold prepaid card from Internet cafe. That works, people bought prepaid card (usually for 5 RMB or 10 RMB) to pay the furnitures in their virtual home etc.

2. mop.com, back in 2004 (or 2005, I cannot recall correctly), developed the first web-based online game. It is a typical RPG game, but the innovation is that it requires no Flash, no plugins, no downloads. There is a reason for the development. The main visitor group of mop.com (a popular forum, like 4chan) is office worker, which have many spare time on computer but have no permission to download online games, this game just filled the hole. Another notable thing about mop.com is, it is also the company behind xiaonei.com, the largest copy-cat of facebook.com. Chinese companies are more realistic, and many have such hybrid gene of copy-cat and innovation.

3. China Mobile, the largest mobile service provider in China launched a product (actually a website for mobile phone) in 2003 called monternet which expect to provide all the applications/contents that needed for mobile phone users. It is so convenient in that time: you just need to click a link, and the payment will go to your next month phone bill (remember the situation I described about online-payment in 2003's China?). That is the model of iPhone's AppStore which get all the buzz recent years except it was launched by a ISP. The application sale part failed after one or two years because of the popular pirate software and wide adaption of symbian S60 OS in 2003 (made the universal compatibility is not necessary for most people).

Few months ago, my friend's words that online-casual game has no market in U.S. because "the market was dominated by game console" and the recent booming of Zynga/Playfish/Playdom made me think that there maybe no much difference between Chinese and U.S. market, some innovations in China may be suitable for U.S. market too. Some failures, like the monternet case may also have some indications for current U.S. mode (http://games.slashdot.org/story/09/10/24/0136250/App-Store-D...).

There are many innovations happened in China, and meeting true innovators in China are quite a pleasure thing for myself. Some innovations can even get global success from my perspective. but lacking of financial support, bad government policies against startup made the first-time-entrepreneur hard to succeed. But for copy-cat or serial-entrepreneur, they are simply much more capital friendly.

http://boingboing.net/2009/10/06/the-criticism-that-r.html

- it's in Chinese

- it's not blocked by the GFW

- it's faster (the GFW slows access to everything outside of it down)

- it's still accessible when China Telecom has been tweaking the routers and DNS servers (which they seem to do every week)

That is, practical reasons which lead to adoption and growth.

There are, of course, cultural specifics that have to be taken into account but those are pretty obvious if you're building a site in China for the the local market. And these local touches can only add to the site attractiveness together with being inside of the GFW. So, it's kind of obvious that a local site is going to do better than a foreign one.

Occassionally people will talk about designing the look of the site for the local market but I'm not convinced it's an issue. Good taste is good taste everywhere. For example, the iPod is just as popular here as everywhere else. A well designed and functional site in China is always going to win over the equivalent site that is outside of the GFW for the reasons above.

Just FYI: the GFW works in parallel, all backbone cross nation data are copied to GFW equipments, and GFW actively injects RST packets into backbone transmissions. I don't see how this slows the Internet down. It's just the total bandwidth is too small. There has to be more cross-pacific fiber optics.