THE GOOGLE OF CHINA= YELP= Dianping dianping.com EBAY =Taobao taobao.com Baidu baidu.com If there's one thing Chinese people like to do as much as eat, it's talk about food. Taobao has become so popular among younger Baidu, China's dominant search Dianping has afanatical following. It is China's biggest consumer-reviews Chinese that many consumer-product manufactur engine, has a home page and website, originally focused on restaurants but increasingly covering other ers, including giants like P&G, haveopenedTaobao ad-revenue model very similar to services and stores. The user community ensures that phone numbers and stores, finding it easier to sell there than to drive Google's, and like its U.S. addresses are accurate for most of the nearly 1million locations listed, and are traffic to their own online stores. It's part of counterpart, it's moving into unshy in both their criticism and their praise. This is especially important given Alibaba, the online giant started by the charismatic, other services, including the that most Chinese readers assume that food reviews in magazines and enter elfin former schoolteacher Jack Ma as a huge online popular discussion forum Post tainment websites are essentially paid advertorials. bazaar of companies selling goods for export. Bar (tieba.baidu.com) and the O&A site Baidu Knows (zhidao .baidu.com). Baidu's stock price and traffic grew when Google YOUTUBE=Tudou, Youku TWITIER =Sina Weibo halted China-based searches tudou.com, youku.com t.sina .com.cn after its mid-2010 spat with the YouTube has been blocked in China for nearly two Fanfou.com, originally China's most hudong.com, Chinese government over years. Its two main copycats also host TV shows popular microblog platform, was shut censorship. and films licensed from copyright holders, because down with afew other Twitter-like baike.baidu.com the Chinese appetite for user-generated video startups in 2009, after ethnic riots in the Baidu operates a popular content still isn't strong. Youku raised $203 million restive western region of Xinjiang. Twit Wikipedia clone called Balke in its December NYSE IPO; Tudou has also filed for ter was blocked by China's Great Fire that leverages its massive a U.S. offering. wall at around the same time. Shortly traffic, but the independent afterward, Sina, one of China's mam community hudong.com is moth portals, launched the microblog probably closer in spirit to service Weibo, which has 50 million Wikipedia. Both sites censor AMAZON =Dangdang dangdang.com users. Its influence in China is akin to controversial or "sensitive" Dangdang, one of China's earliest VC-funded sites, has, like Amazon, sought to and possibly greater than-Twitter's content about history and become ageneral retailer but is still best known for its books. Dangdang, which elsewhere, and it could challenge the politics. recently filed for its IPO, does face threats from joyo.com, which was pur social networks' popularity. Weibo chased by Amazon in 2004 and rebranded as Amazon China. Both face tens of incorporates some Tumblr-like features, thousands of competitors who sell their wares on Taobao (see top right). making it easy to post video and photos. And you can say so much more in 140 Chinese characters than in English. professional networking done offline. Several variants have CHINESE-ONLY: Tencent QQ.com sprung up, including wealink It's impossible to understand the Chinese Internet .com, hengzhi.cc and ushi.cn, without knowing about Tencent, the biggest online GROUPON =A thousand EXPEDIA.COM =Ctrip but none of them has man player by market cap, traffic, and registered users. tuangou websites ctrip.com aged to build significant traffic Tencent started as the instant-messaging platform Dozens of clones have copied With annual revenues for 2010 esti or community. Invite-only 00-the name is acorruption of ICO-and IM is still Groupon's design and business mated at well over $500 million, Ctrip ushi.cn, the newest, has a Tencent's hallmark. But it also has a massive news model, but no single one has is the biggest online travel merchant In minuscule but active group of portal, myriad online games, forums, blogs, micro broken out. That's in part because China, selling domestic and interna members, many of them blogs, and just about any web-based service that many Chinese were already used tional air tickets. hotel bookings, and venture capitalists who Invest users want. It makes more money from the sale of to adifferent online model for package tours. Known for excellent in Internet properties. virtual goods and online services than from advertising. discount shopping called tuangou customer service-for clients lacking HengZhi, also invite-only, ("group buy"). It started with credit cards or online payment seems to be headed in the groups of Internet users living in capability, Ctrip will send a courier to direction of an exclusive club the same city who wanted to buy collect cash-the site does have to with lots of offline activities, reckon with legal restrictions on selling while Wealink might as well be HULU =Qiyi qiyi.com the same product; they banded together online to pressure travel abroad and visa complications Weaklink-it's a bland, In early 2010, Baidu took in a $50 million investment retailers into offering discounts for for Chinese passport holders. low-traffic Linkedln clone. from Providence Equity Partners-perhaps not coinci bulk purchases. This is still com dentally also a Hulu investor-to launch the Hulu clone mon, as are websites that do deals Oiyi. Access to Baidu's search data gives Oiyi acrystal with retailers for bulk discounts clear picture of what Chinese Internet users want to and then try to find buyers online. watch, so the site is on track to become a powerful WORDPRESS, BLOGGER =Sin a blogs blog.sina.com .cn player in online video. But lurking quietly is state In 2005, Sina recruited a horde of celebrities to blog on its new self-publishing broadcaster China Central TV's cntv.cn. If Oiyi, Youku, platform, quickly sending previously popular blogging platforms into relative and Tudou begin eroding its market share and viewer obscurity. Today, all of China's major portals-Tencent, NetEase, and Sohu-boast numbers, expect some official action to crush them. blogging platforms, but Sina's ad-revenue-driven offering remains the most popular.
Illustration by ARNO GHELFI February 2011 FASTCOMPANY.CO tag">M 73