China’s Campus Social Networking Market

Written by Tangos on October 27, 2006
Tags:, , , ,

Campus Networking Sites Logos
With Facebook’s billion-dollar potential acquisition value, campus social networking is also a hot web 2.0 field in China. The history of alumni community in China can be traced back to 1999, when Joseph Chen, CEO of Oak Pacific Interactive, and others founded ChinaRen. ChinaRen was acquired by Sohu one year later by Sohu in 2000 September in the cost of Sohu’s 30 million-dollar shares. After acquisition, ChinaRen and 5460, a site of China Telecom Hunan, are still two most popular alumni communities in China, attracting million of users.

But both ChinaRen and 5460 missed the first wave of web 2.0, they have not noticed the change in collegiate community market. When Facebook gradually became hot in US, younger enterpreneurs, like Wang Xing of Xiaonei, realized there are opportunities for them. Wang Xing launched Xiaonei, an obvious copycat of Facebook, in late 2005.

When Facebook got more exposure in Chinese media and blogs, more and more campus networking startups launched to copy its model. “There are still 20 smaller players out there,” Joseph Chen told Red Herring. Here is an incomplete list I collected:

These campus social networks also follow the policy of Facebook to build a walled garden among collegiate students, users have to sign up from IP of campus network or using a valid campus email, and these sites encourage real name registration. Most of them have similar features, such as personal profile page, blogs, adding friends, photo hosting, groups, event sharing and etc. Therefore, they have to face fierce competion from others.

Though Alexa is far from an ideal benchmark to evaluate these social networking sites, because of low penetration rate of alexa toolbar in Chinese college students’ PC, Alexa data can still be useful to compare their relative popularity. From the data (the chart below illustrated the top 5 campus social networks), Zhanzuo, founded in this April and raised funding from Sequoia China in July, and Xiaonei are most popular. It is a little surprising to me that the third place belongs to Yeejee not 5Q. In fact, Yeejee owns the domain name of Xiaonei.net to steal users who mis-spell the domain name of Xianei.com.

campus networking

However, according to Alexa data, ChinaRen still ranks No. 75 in the world, it enjoys better brand name and broader user base than all its competitors. Will ChinaRen’s Xiaonei change the landscape in this market? Or will Joseph Chen successfully integrated the power of Xiaonei and 5Q to beat ChinaRen?

5 Responses to “China’s Campus Social Networking Market”

  1. 网摘2006-10-28-- 自说自划 on October 28th, 2006 11:37 pm

    [...] China’s Campus Social Networking Market [...]

  2. Luyi Chen on October 28th, 2006 11:41 pm

    Here is another one

    http://www.taoxue.com/

  3. edn on November 30th, 2006 8:17 am

    Looks like someone should register xianei.com as well ;-)

  4. China Web2.0 Review » » Waiting To The End: Myspace.cn Launches on April 27th, 2007 11:27 am

    [...] Myspace.cn is not only a localized language interface. It keeps the style of the website, but it had some modifications with the channels. The school channel is only available in China. I think it makes sense, because there is not an outstanding leader like Facebook in China at this point. It may still have a chance. Some channels like Comedy, Video and Film are not available in Chinese version. [...]

  5. Linking Corner » Li Ka-Shing thinks Facebook is cool on December 2nd, 2007 10:34 pm

    [...] This pattern seems to repeat itself with the majority of all gweilo-companies trying to enter the Mainland market: foreign company can’t ignore market in China — company then buys into Chinese joint venture — utter ignorance of cultural differences and ill communication take their toll — foreign company fails utterly a few months or years later — needs to write off or sell assets. Frankly, I don’t see why this should be any different with Facebook, especially with a lot of native competitors and copycats already in place (at least their newest monetizing-bruhaha should be in full compliance with China’s whistleblowing-requirements). My guessing would be that their future Chinese venture will be up for grabs cheap for Tom Online later on. Tom themselves are in need to strengthen and consolidate their online portfolio, after suffering from losses incurred by their mobile side. According to paidContent, Tom Online was laying off 100 Editors some days ago. [...]

Post a comment