From one of the Chinese News Agency in North America
It seems Chinese internet users live in another WWW world which is parallel to the World Wide Web. In Chinese WWW world, Chinese people have cloned and used a completely different system for surfing and shopping. Take Facebook for example, everybody outside is crazy for the magic network while inside China, the internet users hang on a popular SNS community. It is called Kaixin( Be Happy). How about Youtube? Not many Chinese have heard or used it since they can do the same or more video stuff in web sites named “Youku”.”56.com” and “Tudou”. Paypal is so frequently used everywhere(I like it). Yet Chinese pay for their on-line shopping through ” AliPay System”. When millions people communicate/chat on ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, 90% of 300 million Chinese people or more are enjoying a different chatting tool - “QQ”.

“Welcome to China”s Parallel Cyber Universe” is an article written by Pei Shing Huei, a reporter from a Singapore ’s newspaper - “The Straight Times”. He wrote that it was true for Chinese people prefer those “Made in China” popular search engines/portals. “Baidu” is a synonym of ‘Google” in China. Baidu issues its stock at NASDAQ( BIDU). Its today’s price is US$208.33. It is the number 1 search engine in China, accounting for 60% of the market share while only 25% of the Chinese users sometimes use “Google”.

Several years ago, eBay took up 90% of China market. Several years later in 2006, they were forced to close one of their major web site in China. Now it is under-rank their Chinese competitor - “Taobao”
Facebook is ranked as the 55 in China for click rates and their cloned Chinese brother ” Kaixin” is the 15th on the list. Baidu is reported an annual profit about 450 million USD in 2008.
Why they failed in China? There are numerous reasons contributed. According the article, one of the critical reasons is that they were defeated in ” word-of mouth contest”. It is reported that 9 out of every 10 new users of search engine always recommend “Baidu” to their friends.

“Most of my friends in China are using Kaixin, so I have to register an account in Kaixin, too.” said Mr Wu from Beijing, who is working in Singapore. ” I told them about Facebook, they had no response. They barely heard of it.”

Another reason is the local language - Chinese. Most of Chinese web sites use Chinese Pinyin Spelling System(a new spelling system based the Roman Alphabets). It makes looking for sites easy and fast. On the other hand, most Chinese internet users are not really good at English so they don’t bother to remember how to spell ‘Facebook” and “Youtube”

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