The Methodology: The report takes both user survey and industry interview approach for data. For the user survey part, the company displays survey link on 45 targeted websites and 324 smaller size SNS sites from July to August in 2009, asking users to fill in the survey voluntarily, ended up with 7462 samples. From the summary part, it did not analyze who took the survey, which raises the question if it has fair amount of diverse samples to illustrate the real situation. Therefore, when the reports says over 13.8% of people spend over 8 hours on BBS sites and 11.2% of people reply more than 15 posts every day, I tend to think that those who answer the survey are more likely to be heavy BBS users. With these findings, this report defines SNS as a BBS centered platform (threaded discussions), with functions such as announcements, group discussion, networking and value-added services.
Figure 1.0 How often do you reply a post everyday? 11.2% say they reply 15 posts everyday and 12.8% say between 10-15.
The findings: As a commercial report, the research goes to discuss how to effectively use BBS for viral marketing, branding and e-commerce in China market, etc. Currently, however, most SNS websites admit that advertising is still the major revenue. It could be the reason that forces BBS centered SNS system to embrace other services, like games, virtual goods, micro-blog in order to get various revenue sources.
Figure 2.0 2008-2009 China SNS Revenue Sources
One major finding of the reports is that these BBS centered SNS have the tendency to be more social: 53.3％ users saying they are using other social networking functions of the BBS, 30% say not yet but would like to try and only 10% are indifferent to new functions.
Actually, I think BBS should not be categorized as SNS if SNS are used for sites like Facebook, Twitter or RenRen (Chinese version of Facebook among university students, literally mean everybody), Kaixin (Facebook among white collar, literally mean happy). It probably is the same share culture, but for some reason that I have not figured out, the sharing concept is different in BBS context than in SNS context. Popular BBS system like Tianya.cn or Maopu cant nor be SNS, so does smaller specific BBS sites; and Kaixin, RenRen still need the links from these sites for content.
Then goes back to the essential question in the beginning, why BBS culture is so dominant, not only in China. Is it a cultural thing? That people would like to join an organized community and set the ranks, gain reputations and exchange opinions anonymously. Or is it a technical thing that it is just easy to use? Or, it is a GFW thing that people have no other option so BBS is a relatively safe harbor for information exchange (still some unfortunate guys were caught by Internet police for their posts). If I had sorted this question, I would have write a paper about it. I think it will be an interesting study to recognize the indispensable role of BBS in China's Internet culture.
For the report: Chinese English (China Internet Watch Blog)
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