Report Said Only 2.3% Chinese Internet Users Use Tags

Written by Tangos on March 3, 2007
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Tag, introduced by Flickr and del.icio.us, is becoming a standard feature of online services. Now you can tag almost anything online, you can tag people in social networking site, tag your online bookmarks, tag your blog post, photos and videos. And some new search engines also support search by tag, for example, technorati. How about the adoption rate of tagging by Chinese internet users? A report released by Baidu yesterday can help to answer this question.

According to the report, only 2.3% of internet users have ever used tag, they mainly use tags in social bookmarking and blogs. I don’t know the methods of data collection, but the report said about 15 million Chinese webpages were bookmarked by users, on average each user has saved 40 online bookmarks. Among them, over 90% users add less than two tags for a bookmark.

And based on the tags of user saved bookmarks, the most used tags are “software download”, “BBS”, “entertainment”, “game” and “learning”.

We don’t know which services are included for analysis in the report, so I have no idea to which extent I can trust it. But based on my observation, I agree with the basic finding of the report, even though more and more services have embodied tagging feature, only a very small part of early-adopters in China indeed use it.

9 Responses to “Report Said Only 2.3% Chinese Internet Users Use Tags”

  1. links for 2007-03-03 « Costi’s evansmemo on March 3rd, 2007 6:17 pm

    [...] Report Said Only 2.3% Chinese Internet Users Use Tags [...]

  2. Rebecca MacKinnon on March 4th, 2007 11:01 pm

    Thanks Tangos! What do you think are the most widely-used tagging systems by the small number of Chinese Internet users who *do* use tags?

  3. Tangos on March 5th, 2007 1:12 pm

    Hi, Rebecca, based on Baidu’s user base, I guess maybe the most widely-used tagging application is Baidu’s bookmarking service. But we cannot search or browse it by tags, so I have no idea which percentage of its users are using tags.

  4. Sean on March 5th, 2007 1:44 pm

    Tangos,

    Thanks for the post. What is your prediction for the use of tags in China going forward?

    In January 2007, a Pew Internet Study found that 28% of US Internet users have used tags to classify content such as photos, blog postings or news stories. They certainly represent the “classic early adopters of technology”, but it seems that mainstream sites like Amazon, Google, Yahoo, etc. are starting to emphasize tagging more and users are starting to use them more.

    I think Chinese users will also follow this trend as they become more familiar with the concept and its benefits for filtering content. I also think that part of the burden should be put on websites to better explain tagging.

    What’s your take?

    Thanks,

    Sean

    Here’s the link to the Pew Study:
    http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Tagging.pdf

  5. Floating Island » 4.1: Tagging on March 6th, 2007 2:34 pm

    [...] There also seems to be some debate as to what constitutes tagging. A recent Pew survey found that 28 percent of American internet users have engaged in tagging, but it fails to define what they counted as tagging. 28 percent seems like an improbably high result, especially compared to the reported 2.3 percent tagging rate among Chinese users (who generally tend to be younger and, in my view, more tech-savvy than American users). Again , there’s a lack of information on the methodology used in the China survey. [...]

  6. Tangos on March 7th, 2007 12:40 am

    Sean,

    in fact, now some big Chinese internet companies are also start to add tagging into some of their new services, such as Baidu’s Baike, and Sohu’s blog service. But it is still hard for tagging to be adopted by mainstream in short time. My gut feeling is that tagging still will not be widely used in this year, though we will follow the trend that more people will use it.

  7. China Web2.0 Review » » Interviewing Mister Wong: Social Bookmarking from Germany on March 8th, 2007 12:05 am

    [...] Related Posts Report Said Only 2.3% Chinese Internet Users Use TagsA Recap of Social BookmarkingIn-depth review of Baidu Bookmark serviceBaidu To Enter Social Bookmarking MarketCrowed Market of Social Bookmarking in China [...]

  8. SEO in China on September 22nd, 2007 12:09 pm

    I think most Chinese users just don’t see any use to tags…

  9. Jeams on October 16th, 2007 11:44 am

    tag的力量还未被中国网民认识到

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