The Reality of Mobile User Generated Content in China

Written by Luyi Chen on November 14, 2006
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Yesterday night, I attended the second session of Mobile Monday Shanghai. It was great to meet some new people there. I met Fons Tuinstra, who has lived in Shanghai for more than twelve years, the author of China Herald (he has a summary of yesterday’s session).

I also met Ye ling, CEO of Wangyou. He told me that Robert Scoble just misunderstood their service. He said they are quite different from Youtube. Video sharing is just one of their feature. But their core business is community building. Their tagline is Here’re Lots Of Interesting People.

Topic covered yesterday was Mobile User Generated Content – The Chinese Way. This is a good topic. The main consideration in my mind is the difference between mobile and Internet user generated content (UGC). Speaking of Mobile UGC, the first scenario that I can think of is to take a photo with my camera phone and upload to Flickr with Shozu. There’s not much difference here, just a bit more convenient.

MU Rong (Founder/CEO of PepTalk) made a point here. He told us that in some high WAP traffic generation area like Guangdong province, lots of people don’t have a PC. Mobile phone is their only way to access Internet. So when we talk about mobile UGC in China, we are looking at a much larger market than only thinking of Internet UGC.

Here’s a quick rundown of the three presentations:

WAP Tianxia is a WAP portal. Fred Y Ju (CEO of Wap Tianxia) said they have two main parts on their website. One is news. The other is user interactive service like blog, bbs, gaming and download. Their core business is the second part. The company was founded in May 2005. Currently they have more than 18 million registered users, 620,000 daily visitors, 70 million page views.

Peptalk is a company specializing in mobile IM. Their software also has features like push-to-talk (half-duplex service for casual talking), photo and video sharing and blogs. MU Rong showed us a sample day of a teenage girl’s mobile life. He concluded with the benefits from using their software to share photos is no size limits like Multimedia Message Service. Some stats from them: Photo generates the largest traffic on their sharing network; Most of their users’ mobile phones use S60 operating system.

Sam Flemming’s company CIC Data is not related to mobile, but they base their business on UGC. He firstly said that BBS like Baidu Postbar has become net cultural force in China. Then he pointed out some facts: QQ has more traffic than Myspace; Chinese users are generating more UGC than American users. Sam listed some sample BBSes like the popular gadget community Younet. He showed us how much posts generated by an automobile BBS around the clock. We saw that lots of posts generated in working hour. He also mentioned Tianya BBS, and said it’s responsible for generating net stars as well as company crisis. The main point he made is that E-influencers on bbs have the same effect as popular bloggers. And it’s easy and necessary to identify them.

After three presentations, there was a panel discussion moderated by Bruno Bensaid. Since Fred Y Ju of WAP Tianxia had to leave early. Marc van der Chijs (co-founder of Tudou) joined the panel (read his summary of the event). Tudou is not with mobile business now, but a typical company of UGC.

Some of the questions discussed:

After recalling these discussions, one question just entered my mind. Is WAP real mobile Internet? Currently Monternet is such an isolated area. If Mobile UGC is not accessible from Internet, how much real value is there? Currently the biggest reason that WAP still exists probably is its centralized structure as a unique business model of carrier vendor.

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5 Responses to “The Reality of Mobile User Generated Content in China”

  1. Alex on November 15th, 2006 10:38 pm

    I chatted with Mu Rong before the meeting. My UGC classification is like this:

    Browser-based UGC = static content
    IM-based UGC = dynamic content

    At www.bbqun.com, we also have a lot of UGC from the chat rooms. We save all of them in the database. They can be viewed from a browser under certain permission. How to make money from there? It’s a challenge.

  2. kevin on November 16th, 2006 11:57 pm

    Looks like current mobile content are still mainly of text.

    We are expecting more rich content showing on the mobile internet.

    & Monternet is totally not like internet. Mobile operator don’t want to loose the control.

    When will the real flat-rate subscription mode to open the monternet?

    I am interested in attending the Mobile Monday Shanghai, is it ok to attend next time?

  3. R. Boersma on March 26th, 2007 9:46 pm

    http://www.chinasuccessstories.com/success-stories/ This link will bring you to an interview with Marc, he’s an inspiring man!

  4. Henry Siling Li on November 20th, 2007 11:11 pm

    if you are interested, there is a book on mobiile media which discusses extensively the cross-media strategy and innovation policy of media companies as well as telecom carrier.

    Leveraging Mobile Media
    by Valerie Feldmann
    available here, very expensive though.

    http://www.amazon.com/Leveraging-Mobile-Media-Cross-Media-Communication/dp/3790815756/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195571370&sr=8-1

  5. Race for Chinese eyeballs : TheThunderbird.ca on February 1st, 2008 3:44 pm

    […] The CWR guys write: “MU Rong (Founder/CEO of PepTalk) told us that in some high WAP traffic generation area like Guangdong province, lots of people don’t have a PC. Mobile phone is their only way to access Internet. So when we talk about mobile UGC in China, we are looking at a much larger market than only thinking of Internet UGC.” […]

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