The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) report said the nation’s online population had risen to a massive 253 million users, up by 56 per cent since the end of June last year. This makes China the biggest internet user, overtaking the U.S.
This just goes to show the power of the Asian region as far as the internet is concerned. China’s internet users as a percentage are 19.1% compared to the U.S with 223.1 million internet users representing 71% of the population. China has a lot more room to grow compared to the U.S.
All this growth is despite the Chinese Government putting many restrictions on Chinese internet users and dissident web sites. The Chinese also restricted access to web sites like YouTube during the uprising in Nepal and also restricts access to sites ruled to be pornagraphic or a threat to national security. Many of the sites that have thrived in the Chinese Market are Tencent.com and search engine Baidu.com which are both both large Chinese run web sites.
With this continued growth, which is predicted to continue at 18% per year, Chinese internet users will grow to 490 million by 2012. Keep an eye on the Asian region, I think it will surprise a lot of people, especially those that remain U.S. centric.
As Google moves into differnet aspects of the Internet you have to ask yourself whether it is a considered diversification of its Internet business or a doomed experiment to move away from search based advertising, which has been Googles core until now, to content production. Google has already struggled to monetise its youtube purchase which makes you wonder why they dont concentrate on the search based advertising that has seen them do so well.
One of Google’s forays into content production has been Google news. This could be seen as a move on Yahoo news, which has done well for Yahoo. Google’s move could be seen as a way to capitalise on its advertising business by keeping it in house, but it hasn’t even put its ads on this site. It seems like a lot of effort for no return, not relly good business.
Google has recently announce that it will be dropping its AdSense Referral ads from its advertising offerings and will be concentrating on its AdSense for Content ads. It sites the reason for this change as seeking to continually improve its products and perhaps Googles other moves are an attempt to improve its business, but seeing how other companies have struggled to be successful at this, notably Yahoo, one would hope that google can capitalise on these moves.
What ever Google does do, a move away from its very successful core business could spell disaster, which would be a shame for Google. Hopefully they can keep their focus as they test the waters in these other markets.
One of the .Asia auctions has recently ended with a big result. The auction for export.asia ended at $18011. Obviously this was always going to be a popular auction considering the opportunity in using it to target export opportunities either to or from the Asian region. With what was a fairly busy auction with 94 bids in all and with the time for auction bids being extended many times according to the auction rules.
This shows the value of the .asia extension both worldwide and in the Asian region. According to the site www.keywo.com the top ten sales so far are sex.asia US$83,334, sexshop.asia US$53,607, business.asia US$29,000, promotion.asia US$26,000, resorts.asia US$22,501, sushi.asia US$22,500, cooking.asia US$21500, ace.asia US$20501, pos.asia US$20500, water.asia US$19388.
Obviously sex.asia is not a surprise, it was always going to be a popular domain name. but there are some surprises that are at the top over some of the names that went for a low value. This may be explained by the number of people involved in an auction, as only the people who registered their interest in the domain in the sunrise or landrush period of this domain release were allowed to bid in these auctions. So there may be some auctions with only two or three parties involved and there may be others with many more involved. There may also have been auctions where other parties involved didn’t have tens of thousands of dollars to spend at these auctions so competition may have been very low in some and very high in others. I do think that the results in so far do show the interest in the .asia extention and the very real value to be found in this regionally targeted extension. As the recognition of the .asia name gains pace I think many people will see the value and we will continue to see some interesting sales happening in the near future.
